How greatly are prophets and prophetesses needed in these days, days in which the air is filled with a confusion of voices—some of them mocking voices, some of them wailing and sorrowful voices—when false prophets abound, lying spirits, demon worshippers and materialists. The promise stands in the Scriptures of God that He will send true prophets and prophetesses in the latter days. Where are they? Why is that promise not abundantly fulfilled? It will be fulfilled if we, who believe His word, combine to ask its fulfilment. The word, to prophesy, is best translated by the learned as “to show forth the mind of God” on any matter. What a high gift! What a holy endowment this, to be enabled to show or set forth to man the mind or thought of God! In order to attain to that gift, the soul must live habitually in the closest union with God, in Christ, so as to realise the prayer of the saint who cried, “Henceforth, O Lord, let me think Thy thought and speak Thy speech.” Many even of our holiest men and women live too active, too hurried a life, to be able to enter deeply into the thought of God, and thence to speak that thought to the thirsty multitudes who are dimly seeking after Him, and in their hearts crying, “Who will show us any good?”
That women as well as men were destined by God to be prophets was fully acknowledged by St. Paul, by his acts as well as his words. He gave careful directions as to how women were to appear as prophetesses, so as to avoid the malicious criticism of the enemies of the new-born faith, ever on the watch for some ground of accusation against the Christians. It is an astonishing and a melancholy thing that the churches and their ministers, and the Christian world in general through all these generations, should apparently have ignored or made light of the following blessed fact, the fact that on the day of Pentecost, the great day when the Holy Spirit was poured forth on that multitude of all peoples and nations gathered in Jerusalem, when the New Dispensation was inaugurated in which we now live, the Apostle Peter, in his magnificent first Pentecostal sermon, proclaimed the actual fulfilment on that day, and for all the days to come, of the promise of the prophet Joel, “I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; and on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out of my Spirit.”“This has come unto you,” said St. Peter, “which was spoken by the Prophet Joel.” Is it possible that the Church has ever fully believed this, has ever truly heard or understood this mighty utterance from heaven, recorded first in the Hebrew Scripture, and again at the great inauguration of the Dispensation under which we are now living, a Dispensation of Liberty, Life, Impartiality, Equality, and Justice, in which there is, or should be,“neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek”?
When Kepler, the great astronomer, was congratulated on the wonderful discovery he had made—in what are now called Kepler’s Laws, on which Newton based his own still greater discoveries—he (Kepler), full of Christian humility, replied, “I have only thought God’s thoughts after Him.” We need, and we ask of God, prophets and prophetesses, seers, who will see as God sees, and who will judge of all things in the light of God. They will be very unpopular, these seers, if they are faithful. Many of the humbler people will hear them gladly, but the world will not love them. Quite the contrary. Conventional morality does not like to be disturbed; the respectable as well as the disreputable prejudices of ages are hard to root up.
Never did the world and the Church need seers more than at the present time. Looking at any of the great questions before us now—the relations of nation to nation, and of the Anglo-Saxon race to the heathen populations of conquered countries; questions of gold-seeking, of industry, of capital and labour, of the influence of wealth, now so great a power in our country and its dependencies; questions of legal enactments, of the action of Governments, and innumerable social and economic problems—we may ask, How much of the light of heaven is permitted to fall on those questions? How many or how few are there among us who ask, and seek, and knock and wait, to know God’s thought on these matters? The few, who do so, cease to accept as a guide a daily newspaper, or the opinion of the Press generally, or the verdict of any class, theological, social, or political; nor even are they satisfied to set their minds at rest by an appeal to the best and wisest of the servants of God. But in their measure they follow in the steps of the prophets of old. It is in the solitude of the soul, alone with God, that His thoughts are revealed. It is in great humility, in separation from the spirit of the world, in asking and receiving His spirit, “the spirit of truth,” which “shall guide us into all truth,” that we learn to think His thoughts.
It requires much courage to be alone with God, to elect to retire for a time, and even for long times, and to listen to His voice only. It requires more courage than is needed to meet human opposition or to battle with an outward enemy, and is altogether different from worship in the congregation with others around us. Let anyone who doubts this make the trial, in humble determination, “I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me,” until Thou admittest me to the inner sanctuary of Thy presence, and speakest to me. For it is then that the keen searchlight of His presence reveals the innermost recesses of the soul, so that the creature who has been bold enough to seek such a solitary interview with the Creator shall fall on his face, as Daniel did, in self-abasement: “I Daniel fainted, and was sick certain days.” It is then that all which is of self, all subtle egotism—the egotism which takes such a multitude of forms—is searched and hunted out of the soul. It cannot live in His presence. The praise of man becomes as dust beneath the feet, and the soul trembles even to receive any honour of men, or to be recognised in this world as of any worth.
It is then also, that the great enemy of souls essays to draw near, bringing all his forces to bear on that divinely bold but humbled creature, and seeking to wreck the blessing which he knows must come of such an interview between Christ and a human soul. It is then that he disputes every inch of the ground sought to be won on that day by the Saviour, and by the disciple whom His spirit has stirred up to draw thus awfully near to Him. Jesus was “led of the Spirit” into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil. It is in the very heart of this great dispute between our God and Satan, and in such a solitude, that some of the deepest truths are learned, and that God speaks. Then the enemy is defeated, and only the light is left, the light which was sought and which reveals God’s thought. And what is the sequel of such an encounter? There are many who can bear witness that the enemy, discouraged by the courage of the humble and determined soul, departs never to return, and then it pleases the Lord sometimes, in His great love and pity, to grant to His child, in a measure, that communion which the Hebrew saint had, with whom God spoke face to face as a man speaks with his friend.
We are not all called to be teachers, or to declare aloud the mind of God; not all called to prophesy. But all are invited to draw near to Him, to come nearer and nearer, and the humblest, the least gifted or least intelligent, who will elect to receive ever at first hand and from the fountain-head, and not only from secondary sources, light, life and knowledge, becomes, whether he knows it or not, a medium of spiritual life and true thoughts to others, in proportion to the grace given to him.
“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” These words are frequently understood to be spoken of the other life beyond the grave, and of the beauties and glories of our heavenly home, which, as yet, no eye of those living on earth has ever seen. This limited interpretation is not warranted by the latter half of the announcement, “But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit.” The illumination of the Spirit is not a promise of the future only; it is given here on earth to all who seek and wait for it in truth and singleness of heart. We are living to-day under the dispensation of the Spirit, and there is no limit to the fulness of the promise to those who ask.
Those things therefore, those hidden and deep things of God which we cannot apprehend by the natural eye or ear, and which cannot be conceived by the highest and purest flights of imagination of one whose thoughts do not yet flow in unison with God’s thoughts—those things may be revealed to us by His Spirit; and they are so revealed to those whom from time to time He draws aside for solitary communion with Him, and whom He may, if He wills, appoint to speak His speech to all who will hear. One needful condition for attaining to the seeing eye and the hearing ear in the things of God is soul-leisure, quietness, calm and concentration of spirit. Earth’s voices must be silenced for a time, that the voice of God—the“still small voice”—may be heard by the waiting soul. “In returning and rest shall ye be saved. In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.”