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

by William Gray Elmslie

And when you are told to take the prophets as your example do not go away saying, "I cannot predict future events, and astonish people, and make them feel that I have some supernatural power." No, they could not be that example to you. A prophet was a man who knew the character of the true and living God; and because he knew and loved Him, and was living with Him, he made other men know Him, and feel Him, and understand Him too.

I have no time to enter into all the questions concerning the precise manner in which the prophet got to know God's mind and will—by dream, in ecstasy, in lofty rapt thought, in wonderful insight into the Spirit of God, and sometimes by a vision like that of Isaiah, where he "saw the Lord, high and lifted up," on His throne. Or, the prophet got to know God in a similar way to that which we read of in the case of the child Samuel, when the voice of God in the lonely Temple struck upon the child's ear so that there was nothing startling, and he thought it was his master's voice calling him; but he lived to see the terrible fulfilment of the first teaching which God gave to the child, in that which befell the master. I have no time to go into all that, nor to enter largely into the place and purpose of the prophets in working out that history which shows, when properly understood, nothing else but the growth of the Spirit of Jesus Christ through the ages, till that Spirit came in its completion in Jesus the Son of Mary; for there is the whole meaning of the prophets in Israel; they were an incarnation of the very same heart, and mind, and will of the Divine dispensation and of God for the world's redemption which were in Jesus; it was the Spirit of Jesus. And do not put away the words as a mere figure unless you put away the words as a mere figure when you read that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God. It was the very Spirit of God. The same Spirit as was consummate in Jesus, the perfect Prophet because the perfect Revelation of God, in its measure was present in every prophet who made the people believe God as they had never done before, and recognise His presence in the history of their time. The prophets taught them to repent of their sin, to live for God, to take their share in the great conflicts for righteousness that God was fighting in their age. In a measure the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, was present in every age of it. There is scarcely any occurrence, any story, any Psalm, in the prophecies of the Old Testament, which has not an application to Jesus Christ, and a meaning showing that He is in it. It is made a specimen, as it were, of all that is practically to be found in Him. The history of Israel in prophecy, which was the rising and the beginning of the future history of Israel, was just the growing of Jesus through the ages, till at length He culminated in the Son of Mary.

I want to-day rather to tell you some of the qualifications of a prophet—some of the elements of character that a man must have if he is to play the part of a prophet to the people he lives among, bidding myself and you take the prophets as an example. One thing is remarkable—the office of a prophet was not hereditary. The great departments of God's government, and teaching, and dealings with Israel were the kingship, the priesthood, and the prophethood—the rule, the fellowship, and the teaching and guidance. Now, all these culminated in Jesus; He is Prophet, Priest, and King. In Israel no mere man or body of men was fit in unity to fill those offices; they were distributed. The burden was too great, the power was too grand, for any single man, except the perfect Son of Man, to combine them in their fulness, and so they were divided in Israel, to be reunited in the perfect embodiment of Israel, God, Prophet, Priest, and King to the people. God's meaning was that all Israel in its completeness should be king, and prophet, and priest, without any active, separated, divided government; that it should be a theocracy, as God's kingdom, ruling themselves, every one of them being a king to God, every one of them being a priest, every one of them being able to come direct to God for himself, and to bring his prayers to God without any intervention of man; in the same way every man, as a prophet, hearing God's voice direct to his heart, and being taught the truth that God revealed. God wanted them all to be prophets; God wanted them all to be priests; God wanted them all to be kings: but they were not fit for it, and so among them special men had to be cultivated to fill those offices. Now, there is this distinction between those divided offices or faculties of God's rule and guidance in Israel: the kingship was hereditary; the priesthood was hereditary: the prophethood was never hereditary. A priest's son was born a priest; a king's son was born a king: a prophet's son was not born a prophet. The prophets were selected, not born. Why? Because it was the supreme and grandest office, the most difficult, the most responsible, the most sacred. Any man was fit to be a priest, to conduct the ritual and external ordinances of worship, through which men's hearts were brought to God. And any man, comparatively, might be a king, so long as he devoted to his office that amount of thought and time which was necessary. It needed no special moral qualifications and no special insight. A man was the better who had these, but he could be a good enough king without them. But a prophet could not be born a prophet; a prophet had to be chosen, a prophet had to be made by God. And the reason was this: the prophethood was a creative office and function. God's dealings with Israel were not done when He had given the ancient economy of a religious priesthood and kingdom. God had to reshape, and remodel, and adopt His laws, and teaching, and meaning, and the outward ordinances of religion to every age. As the nation both externally and internally altered, new teaching had to come to it at the hands of the prophets.

Were the priests the channel by which God could do it? Their duty was fixed, and in the law, as well as in the form of government, men could not err; they could follow the Divine precepts exactly in administering them. But when an addition has to be made, and a remoulding to take place, it wants a man capable of entering with strange, grand insight into God's purposes, a man with eyes, with soul; it needs a man lifted up. And so the prophets' office was never hereditary; they were always selected; God chose them; why? Why did God choose one man, and not another? I think that He chose a man, first of all, who had a natural adaptation, who had rare powers of mind, who had rare genius and sympathetic feeling, and not a mere presentiment of the movements of the world and its destiny as it went on round about him. I think that, as a rule, God selected a man with a natural adaptation, and prepared him for all that he had to do and tell. It transformed a man's life; it took him clean out of the common world in which men lived. We presume that it was so from what is recorded, and from the facts which we know concerning the prophets' characters and lives. God caused something to happen to a man that made God appear to him what He was not to common men. An awful vision was presented to Isaiah of the great, grand God, and thenceforth all earthly considerations were nothing to Isaiah. He had seen God, and the future was God's making. In the face of empires, however mighty in name and in armies, it is the will of God that settles the future, and such a man disregards all earthly advantages; he knows that God means to do His deed; he says, "It shall be done; and if you set yourselves against it there is no other end than destruction, which is sure to fall upon you, for God will do the deed which He means to do." It was a revelation of God which made the man a prophet; it made him a man who felt God to be supreme; it made him to be certain of God's sovereignty, and absoluteness, and the goodness of God's authority; so that nothing could induce him to swerve from the path that God appointed for him. He was a man who stood like a rock amidst the earthly, selfish, planning, scheming men of his time, and declared the future truly, because he had seen God's meaning, and held men to it; and when they would not be so held he was content to die, declaring the truth of his message, and looking forward to the time when the future would manifest its truth. He was a fit prophet, a living teacher, who spoke of the future—a grand man, with a grand office and a grand destiny to play in the world.

The man, the father, the mother, the teacher, the preacher, who takes the prophets as examples, who will play his destined part in his own little home, in his own Sunday-school class, in his own congregation, in his own neighbourhood, in the great world round about him, must be a prophet; he must be a man who knows God; he must be a man who feels God to be all about him; he must be a man who is not merely orthodox in theology, and believes all that is written about God's dealings in the past; but he must be a man that will make you know that God is living, and moving, and loving in the events of his own time; he must be a man who recognises God in the providences of his own life; he must be a man who does not shape his conduct for earthly gain or for social advantage; he must be a man despising all these things, and paying heed to his own high destiny, yet whose character and conduct move on the lines which I have indicated; who says, "God is making me great, but He bids me live as He lives—but He bids me sacrifice friends and home; I must do it; I must tell this truth, though all good men should be against me, for I have learnt it of God, at my risk of having mistaken its meaning; yet I must speak it." Ay, even if such a man makes mistakes in learning this new lesson of God, and does not read it quite right, even if he goes wrong, nevertheless he has life in him, Divine life; he has honesty; he is a true man; he is a man who is not of the world; he is a man who is not a mere ecclesiastic; he is a man who is not a mere self-seeker. That man does God's work on earth. And I venture to say that in the Church's story you will find that there has been a succession of men who have done what was the work of the priest in the old time, and there has been a succession of men who have done the work of the prophet. You need both; you need the priest, to keep alive, as it were, the ordinary level of religion, to preserve some sort of uniformity; and in the Church's story you will find that God has raised up prophets, men who sometimes broke loose, who were not always true, who sometimes mistook God's meaning, who had but little of the character of the old prophets, and yet who taught truth, and adapted the old ecclesiastical doctrines to the new necessities, suiting their work to the age; and though disbelieved and openly denounced in their own day, they have become our teachers since. What of the Reformers? what of Wesley? what of Whitefield? what of many another name, much nearer our own time, but which does not diminish the effect of the general principle? Ay, and what of men not so good and great as these, but who had life in them; who broke up the stagnation of ecclesiastical life, and brought new faith to men; who by their dazzling earnestness, and spiritual insight, and their teaching brought up the ordinary level of God's presence? Thank God it is so. It is the lot of the human prophet and priest, and of similar teachers, in our day, to make men know that there is a God, and a Christ, and a soul to be saved, and that they are men, and not mere machines. Thank God for it; but pray God to make you and me true prophets; pray God to give us the passion of prophets, to give us sympathy with all the wants of the age, to give us to know that He is moving, to give us to know what new teachings come from Him; pray God to give us generosity, and self-sacrifice, and liberality, and largeness of heart, with our means, with our abilities, with our whole soul, with our prayers and spirits, and all that we have, to play our part as faithful prophets in the world's story, showing men God, and winning them to follow Him.

XI.
THE MAKING OF A PROPHET.[2]

"In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train overspreading the temple floor. Seraphs were poised above, each with six wings, with twain veiling his face, with twain veiling his feet, and with twain hovering. And those on one side sang in responsive chorus with those on the other side, saying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.' 'The fulness of the whole earth is His glory.' And the foundations of the threshold trembled at the sound of that singing, and the house was filled with incense smoke. Then cried I, 'Woe is me! for I am a dead man; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.' Then flew one of the seraphs unto me, having in his hand a burning ember, which with a tongs he had taken from off the incense altar; and he touched my mouth with it, and said, 'Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.' Thereupon I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' Then I cried, 'See me; send me.'"—Isaiah vi. 1-8 (annotated).

ISAIAH was a prophet. A prophet, we say, was a man who foretold future events. It is not an apt description. He did that, and much more besides. He interpreted past, present, and future alike in the light of eternal truth. But his supreme concern was with the present, and he cared for the past and the future only as they threw light on the problems of instant, pressing duty. The prophet was no dealer in futurities, no dreamer babbling to an age unborn. He was a potent actor in history, living and working amid the actual sins, and sorrows, and struggles of his day and generation.

Read the memoirs of Isaiah, and you will see how intense and intimate was the part he played in the life and movement of his age. One day you will find him at the Temple, scathing with scornful reprobation the hypocrisy and hollowness of the established ritual of religion. Another time he has taken his stand over against the fashionable promenade of Jerusalem, and as he watches the passing procession of pomp and opulence, built up on the misery and degradation of defenceless poverty, his heart grows hot with honest indignation, and he breaks into impassioned invective against the stream of selfish luxury, as it rolls by with a smiling face and a cruel heart. Again, he forces his way into a meeting of the Privy Council, fearlessly confronts the King and his advisers, denounces the iniquity of a faithless foreign policy and sternly demands its abandonment. In every department of national life, in every section of social and religious existence, his voice was heard and his personality felt. Yet nobody ever mistook him for a mere politician, philanthropist, or reformer. He was ever, and was ever felt to be, a prophet. For he did not speak like other men, he did not act like other men, he did not reason like other men. He spoke not for himself, but for God. He claimed for his speech, not the persuasiveness of human probability, but the imperativeness of Divine certainty. He relied solely on the coercive power of truth. He did not touch the tools of political partisanship or scheming statecraft. He cared nothing for the suggestions of expediency; he defied the most certain conclusions of earthly wisdom, and followed absolutely the bidding of an unseen guidance. He was a man taken possession of by an irresistible perception of the will of God, and an all-absorbing passion to have that will done on earth. He held in the commonwealth the place that is held by that inexorable voice which, deaf to all balancings of earthly gain or loss, unflinchingly proclaims the antithesis of right and wrong, and imperatively demands that right shall be obeyed. The prophet was the conscience of the nation. Preachers and teachers of religion, that is what England asks of us. It is a high calling.