Scripture: Amos 3:3-8; John 1:1-5

“The lion roars: who can help feel afraid? The Lord God speaks: who can refuse to prophesy?”

-- Amos 3:8

Today we come to the end of our summer study of the prophets of the 9th and 8th centuries BC. We studied Elijah and Elisha in the 9th century and the quartet, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah of Jerusalem and Michah in the 8th century. Our associate minister opened the series with two sermons on Ezekiel, which were in the nature of a foretaste of next summer’s series on the 6th century prophets, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah. Today I want to conclude the current series with a consideration of the central category of prophetic faith, the Word of God, and to use this category as a bridge to the next series, which is on the Gospel of John. John’s Gospel is the gospel of the “Word made Flesh” and so it is appropriate to ask what this Word was before it became flesh in Jesus. It was several things, the Word of Creation, the Word of Revelation and the Word of Judgment; it was also the Word of the Prophets. 

Through the words of the prophet sounded the creative, judging and revealing Word of God. I have returned to Amos to find a text that summarizes this situation, probably because Amos is the earliest of the writing prophets. Amos the prophet, like all the other prophets, is compelled to speak because God has spoken to him and he cannot refuse to pass on the message. This is a constant and central theme in the literature and experience of the prophets. Our passage from Amos says that as there is no effect without a cause and no cause without an effect.  When he says, “This is what God says” he attests that his utterances are not his own but God’s. The divine Word has a Divine Cause and a Divine  Effect.

It is worth registering here that if God had not spoken through the prophets we would not have known anything but the vaguest outline of His being, chiefly that God is and that we should acknowledge our dependence on Him by giving him gifts, i.e. sacrifices, to say thanks and to secure his continued good will. That is to say that if God had not spoken, we would know of Him only what we can infer from the world.  There would be no such thing as revelation, only inference. We would not know what sin is, or that we are guilty of it and imprisoned by it, and thus need a savior; we would not know that God loves each one of us and all of us together so much that to save us he is prepared to give his life for ours in the mysterious and costly work of his prophets and his Son. We would not know that God saves us, because we would not know that there is anything to be saved from. We would live like the pagans.

I think that the category of sin has virtually disappeared from our interpretation of life, that not even the church takes it seriously any more; but that’s another sermon. Here we take note of the centrality of the prophetic word in the process by which we believe we come to know not only that there is a God but also who God is and what God requires of us and promises to us. There are three major categories in the information that God gives us through biblical prophecy: monotheism, morality, and messianism, the three m’s.

Monotheism means not only that we have our one God and other groups have their other gods, but rather that there is only one God. The prophets introduced this monotheistic faith in terms of the judgment they passed on Israel and Judah. The judgment of God, they said, will fall not only upon the enemies of our people but also and especially on us, because God is above tribalism and deals equally with all human beings. Whoever is deceitful, lying, corrupt and unfaithful will experience the wrath of God, because God is not on the side of this group or that but rather on the side of truth, justice and mercy as such.

This leads logically to a vision of morality that has the equal worth of every human being, regardless of ethnic identity, at its core. Our prophets are especially remarkable in the universality of their moral scope, including every human being within the orbit of God’s love. They are also remarkable in the concreteness of their moral expectation. To do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God outranks the most lavish ritual sacrifices imaginable (Micah 6:8). They wanted justice to flow like water and integrity like an unfailing stream (Amos 5:24). Justice, covenant faithfulness, mercy, generosity, humility and truth, these unfashionable attributes are what the prophets said God wanted from us. Not lavish gifts so much as simple honesty, a word to be relied on and a generous heart.

We have, however, plunged ourselves so deeply into idolatry and immorality that we cannot simply turn and by our own efforts reform ourselves. We are too sick to heal ourselves, too bound to free ourselves, and too self-deceived to discover the truth of our own accord. We need someone to save us and so the prophets promise the Messiah. He will set us free from bondage, heal the wounds our chains have worn in our flesh, teach us the truth, and restore us to relationship with God, with one another and with ourselves. “Then the remnant of his brothers will come back to the sons of Israel, He will stand and feed his flock with the power of the Lord, with the majesty of the name of his God. They will live secure…He himself will be peace…(Micah 5:3-4).”   

Monotheism, Morality and Messiah, these three are the precious gifts of prophecy that God has made known to us through His Word, and more than just made known, has made potentially effective. Potentially effective because we must believe this Word if we are to be reconciled with God and with one another. How can we believe a message given so long ago in such an alien historical context? We must know how to hear it, that is, how to interpret it, and here too the prophets are helpful. One of their most powerful procedures is the judgment that criticizes themselves and their own religion. They are always rejecting their present religion in the name of a future purer form of it. They make the Bible into the only major religious text that is about fifty percent a criticism of itself. This fact is a clue to how to read them, and how to read the whole Bible, that is, critically. The prophets remain embedded in their history but at the same time they foretell a better future history. As we follow the history of biblical religion to its climax in Jesus we see the gradual and eventually sudden fulfillment these prophetic hopes.

Last Sunday, for instance, we saw how Micah, while he prophesies a future of peace still locates its center in Zion. Against this we put the theme from all the prophets, that Zion will be punished just like Egypt or Assyria, that it is not a privileged place in the providence of God. These hints point beforehand to the coming of a new work of God that will not be centered on Zion, and then suddenly we hear Jesus announce that the new work has been done when he says to the Samaritan woman, whose Zion was the mountain in her home town called Gerizim, “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know; for salvation comes from the Jews. But the hour will come – in fact it is here already – when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. That is the kind of worshiper the Father wants. God is spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:21-24). “

This Jesus is the Messiah who fulfils the words of the prophets and the Word of God. Indeed, he is the Word of God finally revealed as a human being. This is the faith I want to study during the ten Sundays between now and Advent. John’s Gospel is amazingly direct in identifying Jesus as both the revealer and the revelation of the one, true God. Jesus is the one, the perfect prophet, the Messiah and the Eternal Word.  In him God says No and Yes to the OT prophets, as He says No and Yes to the Church and to each of us Christians.

Only to Jesus does God say, not No and Yes, but Yes, Yes and Amen, and that is who we are now privileged to explore and understand more and more through the witness of the Johannine prophet. This amazing identification of the eternal Word of God with a man named Jesus is the pons asinorum (the bridge of donkeys) of our faith. If we can cross it we find fabulous riches of the spirit, if we cannot we suffer the fate of all hangers about the door. So with great joy and anticipation I invite you to move on now from the vestibule into the house itself, to join in the marriage feast of the Lamb.