The Old Testament prophets were an interesting bunch. God recruited them often kicking and screaming to speak His hard words to an ungrateful people. He didn’t wait until they had completed prophet school, or taken a class in rhetoric. He didn’t offer a masters program in God speak, or an in-service on workplace violence. Yet God used them in a powerful way. Can you imagine how their throats must have burned as God’s Holy words passed over their unholy human vocal cords? Can you imagine how high their emotional blood pressure must have been with God’s grieving heart pumping deep inside of them? But it got even worse, they were also mocked, stoned, and killed by a people that were so obsessed with having their ears scratched that they ignored the fact that they had become divinely deaf.
How then did these hard prophetic words make it into the Bible? Egyptian pharaohs would try and erase the existence of the less than well-liked kings of the past by destroying and defacing any writings that mentioned their names. Why then did the Chosen People, the very people called out by their God, include such indicting testimony into their Bible, and then, to top it off, affix it with the scriptural seal of approval? It appears that when the real God speaks people find it very difficult to erase His words.
We Christians read the words of the prophets, nod our heads in righteous indignation, and then mutter to ourselves that those stiff-necked people had it coming to them. We ask ourselves how anyone could have such blatant disregard for the words of God? We conveniently side with the prophets as we read the text, but then fail to ask ourselves if we could hear these same difficult words spoken to us? Would we invite them over for a barbecue knowing that it wasn’t just the steak that would be on the hot seat? Or would we offer the NIMBY defense (Not In My BackYard) and instead invite over a kinder, gentler prophet? Have these prophetic words become too conveniently historical? It’s easy to adopt a dead prophet as your own, but it is much harder to live in his presence. It is easy to wear a crucifix, but much harder to walk the Via Dolorosa. It’s great to have a Holy Book that calls out sinners, but difficult to acknowledge that you must also drop the stone and walk away.
The prophets came to save God’s house, because without it, a broken world would have no place to be fixed. While many may call it intolerant, there is no other religious trauma center capable of handling such an overwhelming number of hemorrhaging souls. What will we do as the body of Christ in the 21st century? Will we continue to upgrade our infirmary for sinners, or triage them into the outer darkness where they weep and gnash their teeth? Are we a hospital on a hill treating those who are dying from wounds inflicted by the salvoes of sin, or a rickety bunker where we hunker down pretending were dead until the cultural assault passes us by? The unfortunate thing about a bunker mentality is that there is only enough room for us inside and we have to helplessly watch as those without an armor of faith die on the battlefield outside. We not only weep over our casualties but also over those damaged by the “friendly fire” of their own self-destructive worldviews. While we must carefully protect ourselves, we must also minister to the other side and warn their soldiers that they are in danger of becoming collateral damage in somebody else’s power play.
And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2: 17)
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