Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

The mass of the people constantly forgot that sense of a lofty destiny; they constantly tired of that great ideal; they chose to prefer present gain and advantage; they disregarded that predicted end of their history in determining their contemporary policy in relation to other nations; they were dumb, and blind, and deaf to that feeling of God's movement in history and His purpose for the future. Nevertheless, in every age down through that nation's story there existed in their midst men who were possessed by a supreme conviction of this presence, and power, and purpose of God, men who sacrificed bread, profession, home, happiness, and life itself, that they might seek to carry out that intention and desire of God. In every age they declared what God wanted Israel to be and to do. In every age they recommended a policy founded on that destiny of Israel and that design of God. The darker the national history grew, the more decided was their certainty of the fulfilment of God's purpose. But this singular change took place in the form in which they conceived that fulfilment: In the earlier times Israel—the whole nation—was to be the minister of God's intention; but as age after age exhibited the depravity, the unholiness, and the jealousy of the nation, the thought of the coming kingdom of promise, and of gladness and goodness, concentrated itself not so much about the people, but about the King. More and more, it was not the chosen people of Israel, but it was the chosen Son of Israel, the chosen Heir of David, the coming Deliverer, the King, that was to bring it in. It is a strange spectacle to behold how God, by His external dealings with the people of Israel, and by the development of their conduct, led His servants the prophets to see that if ever this grand purpose of God for mankind was to be accomplished, it could not be done by the whole people, or any number of them, but must be done by one single individual, who should combine in his character all the goodness, and all the truth, and all the knowledge, and all the power of God that were necessary to make a kingdom of God on earth. So it came to pass that inside the progress of Israel's history, as a wall down the long march of that history, there was a line of men first of all foreseeing a grand future, mainly connected with Israel in the government of the nation, and gradually defining more brightly the covenant, and the establishment, and the maintenance of that kingdom as contained in the person, in the character, in the work, in the heart, in the sufferings, in the triumph of a great coming Messenger of God, a Man of God, a Son of God, yet so stamped with Divinity that He gets names which set Him on a level with God. It is the long procession of prophets, the line of foreseers, who, in succession to the patriarchs, touch, ages in advance, the coming of Christ, and make the world expect it, and preserve faith in mankind till Christ does come.

The history of these men within their own nation is striking. As a rule, they stood in a small minority, were despised and disbelieved, had to maintain the truth of their Divine conviction in the face of almost universal denial, were ill-treated and persecuted, were declared to be impostors or traitors to the national cause, were cast out, and an immense number of them were killed. But as time rolled on the development of events proved that those men had seen the calamities and vengeances of God which had been foretold as about to fall on Israel, because of Israel's sin. The people were cast out of their own native land; they were driven into captivity, and in captivity they remembered what the prophets had spoken; and then, with humble hearts and penitent spirits, they said to themselves "Those men were right; they spoke true; they anticipated what has come to pass; God was with them; they were His messengers; we were in the wrong; it was a true word from heaven that they uttered amongst us;" and so the old contempt and disbelief vanished away, and there came a reverence and a faith for those prophets that almost reached the verge of superstition; they gathered together their writings; they treasured them, and made the books of those prophets into their Bible. It is in that fashion that our own Old Testament of the prophets was formed. The prophets were first rejected, derided, put to death, and, then with repentance and humility, accepted as the true messengers of God, taken as authoritative interpreters of God's mind and will; their writings were treasured and preserved, and made into the national Bible.

It is these prophets that the Apostle James bids us take as an example. He means that every Christian man and every Christian woman is, in a measure, to be a prophet; He means especially that every Christian man and every Christian woman in the battle of life stands in some measure between God and others, and is to be a prophet. He means further that every father is to do for his children what those prophets did for Israel—he is to make them know God. He means that every mother is to be the very channel of making her children come into contact with God's character, and comprehend God's intentions for them. He means especially that every Sunday-school teacher is to be just what those old prophets were in Israel—to make others who are more ignorant than he is sensible of the presence, and purpose, and progression of God's designs through life in his own present age and time. He means that every preacher, and every teacher, and every man who speaks about religion is, in his conduct and character, and what he teaches and what he preaches, to be a prophet. And above all, he means that one and all of us of this age shall, even down to the humblest Christian, who hardly has any influence, act as a mediator or interpreter between other men and God, as did many of the prophets, with an unswerving belief of the truth, and with a patience and perseverance of spirit in every unenlightened time, and amidst the most adverse circumstances, founded upon the certainty of the fulfilment of God's promise that Christ should come, and shall come again.

Now I want to say a few things to you about the character and the office of those prophets in the world, that we may see some respects in which we may and certainly ought to imitate them. What was a prophet? I imagine that many of us are content with a very superficial notion of the part played in actual life by those men. I imagine, because of the class of books that has been written in great profusion in our present century, and is still written, that we are apt to think of a prophet simply and only as a man who predicted things that were going to happen—incidents and events that were to fall out in the unfolding of history. The prophets did a vast deal more than that, and the very essence, and life, and grandeur of their character and conduct appear only in a small fragment in that portion of their office. Their real movement and meaning are in quite another department.

If we wish to know what a prophet is, we may, first of all, take the names given to the prophets in the Bible. Then, again, we may remember who were the prophets. And then we may take their writings, the records of their deeds, the history that tells of their fortunes. What are the names given to a prophet in the Old Testament? The first and holiest is "a man of God"—"the man of God." All that that tells us is that in a peculiar sense the prophet belonged to God. The next name is "the servant of God." That tells us that he belonged to God in the sense of serving God, doing things for God. Then he is called "the ambassador, or the messenger, of God." That tells you that he served God by bringing messages from God. Then he is called an interpreter. That tells you that it was to men he took God's message, and that he had to make it understood by them. The next thing that we come to is a "seer," connected with the word "watchman," a spier or seer. It means one who saw what other men could not see, who saw into God's mind, who saw God, who saw what God was about. It tells us how he got to know his message, how he learnt it; it was by insight, seeing into the hidden, underlying purposes of God. Then the last name of all is what we translate "prophet," and it literally means a man who bubbles up and runs over, whose heart gushes out, in the sense of being poured into, that what is poured in comes out of him. It tells us that he pours out what he has learnt, to other men; and it adds this shade of meaning (the very form of the Hebrew word does so), that he is, as it were, spoken through; it does not end with himself, nor does it take its rise with himself, but it comes into him like a flood, and it overflows; he cannot help himself; he is possessed, he is pressed; he is compelled to utter what his God tells him.

The names of a prophet, therefore, tell us this; this is his function; he, beyond other men, has to do with God, belongs to God; he belongs to God in being God's servant; he is God's servant in being God's messenger; he is God's messenger in bringing things to men that God wants men to know; he learns what he has to tell men by seeing it himself, by knowing it, understanding it, feeling it, and then he utters it by a resistless compulsion and impulse, the fire burning in his heart, a pressure being put on him to tell what God has taught him. Already you have got the thought of a man with a grandeur, a greatness, a significance, and a meaning immensely above what you think of when you think of a man who can tell you where an axe which has been lost is to be found, or whether a sick person will die or live, or whether a town is going to be destroyed or not. What you have is a living, breathing, warming channel of communication between the great God in heaven and the human hearts of men on earth.

Then, who were the prophets? Moses was a prophet, the greatest of all the Old Testament prophets. He was a prophet because of his whole life work, not because once or twice he predicted a thing which was going to happen. Because he was Moses, the moulder and the maker of Israel, and the giver to them of all their knowledge about God which is contained in God's law, therefore Moses was a prophet. Samuel was a prophet; Saul the king was a prophet for one night, when he lay on the ground in an ecstasy, and uttered strange sayings. There were all kinds of prophets; I cannot deal with them all. Isaiah was a prophet; Daniel was a prophet supremely. Christ was the Prophet, and the complete Prophet. How? Because He foretold the doom of Jerusalem? Because He foretold His own death? Undoubtedly because He did those things; but that was not why He was called the Prophet. Why was it? A very excellent book, the Shorter Catechism, puts it better than I can: "Jesus Christ is a Prophet in making known to us the mind and will of God for our salvation."

I put this deliberately and very strongly, almost unduly depreciating the idea of foretelling future events, just because I know from my own experience, and certainly from the experience of others, that one thinks that the latter is the whole meaning of the word. It is startling and intensely interesting when you can pick out a prediction which was uttered ages before, and which was afterwards fulfilled. By all means take that; but never forget that, just like Christ's miracles, it was, as it were, only the accompaniment of the prophet's main work as a prophet, and that the real work of a prophet is making known unto us the whole character, and heart, and mind, and will of God, as these are revealed in working out the world's salvation.

If you turn to the writings of the prophets in the Old Testament you instantly discover that that is the true idea of a prophet. Take Isaiah, take Micah, take Jeremiah, take any prophet you please; every here and there you come upon a prediction—"Babylon shall be destroyed;" "Nineveh shall be destroyed." Yes, but it is one prediction, as an impassioned declaration of God's ways to men, showing how He must punish their wickedness, and must visit the impenitent. But the story of God's character and dealings for the world's redemption is, after all, the grand substance of Old Testament prophecy; it is a record of God's pity for mankind, and His determination to make them holy and happy, and of the fact that it is all to be done by the great coming Christ, the world's Sacrifice and the world's Saviour.