Prophets Unheeded and Rejected – But Needed More Than Ever
True prophets of God are always very lonely and melancholic people. They deliver a word from the Lord, knowing it will mostly be rejected. Their hearts break as they carry the burden of the Lord, and realise that their words will be rejected and scorned by the very ones who most need them.
I am reading the prophets again, being back in Jeremiah at the moment. What an incredible book. Every chapter is absolutely filled with spiritual riches which are fully appropriate to where we are at today. And of course there is plenty of divine judgment spoken of in this book.
While there is judgment pronounced upon pagan nations, most of it is directed to sinful and hard-hearted Israel. Just today I read about why this judgment must come. As we find in Jeremiah 23:8-11:
My heart is broken within me;
all my bones tremble.
I am like a drunken man,
like a strong man overcome by wine,
because of the Lord
and his holy words.
The land is full of adulterers;
because of the curse the land lies parched
and the pastures in the wilderness are withered.
The prophets follow an evil course
and use their power unjustly.
“Both prophet and priest are godless;
even in my temple I find their wickedness,”
declares the Lord.
False prophets offering words of peace, comfort and ease are a big part of the problem. They are telling the people lies, and they love it so. As we read in 5:31: “The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way. But what will you do in the end?”
Jeremiah clearly warns about why all this disaster is happening. Yahweh’s covenant people have become faithless, idolatrous and rebellious, so they are paying the price. As we read in these two passages:
-“When you tell these people all this and they ask you, ‘Why has the Lord decreed such a great disaster against us? What wrong have we done? What sin have we committed against the Lord our God?’ then say to them, ‘It is because your fathers forsook me,’ declares the LORD, ‘and followed other gods and served and worshiped them. They forsook me and did not keep my law.” (Jeremiah 16:10-11)
-“All this happened because you people sinned against the LORD and did not obey him.” (Jeremiah 40:3)
Modern day prophets have said exactly the same thing, and they too have been rejected and despised. The Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent over a decade in the Soviet Gulag, was one such prophetic voice who was rejected by the West.
Consider his speech, “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”. It was his Templeton Prize Lecture, delivered in London on May 10, 1983. It opens this way:
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
That last line comes straight out of Jeremiah of course. He concludes his important address as follows:
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
See his full address here: http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/47643.htm
This was not the first time he denounced the godless West and warned them that their fate would be the same as Russia’s. He had been giving such prophetic words for years already. One of the most significant of these prophetic talks was the commencement address he gave at Harvard University on June 8, 1978.
Some 20,000 people heard him deliver this speech in Russian, with English translation, on the occasion of the 327th commencement at Harvard. Hopes were high when he began, but the audience soon turned on the speaker. The prophet gave a word they did not want to hear.
He told them their secularism and hedonism would destroy America and the West just as godless communism had destroyed Russia. He warned in the strongest of words that they could avoid this fate only if God was brought back into the picture. For this he was roundly booed by the Harvard intelligentsia.
The speech was printed as A World Split Apart (Harper & Row, 1978). It is a slim paperback of 60 pages (half in Russian and half in English). I pulled this off my shelves today and here offer a few select quotes. He spoke, for example, about the difference between “freedom for good” and “freedom for evil”:
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom.
He also spoke of the loss of will in the West:
No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal.
He tells us how and why the West has declined so rapidly and so profoundly:
In early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.
As mentioned, the elites at Harvard were not interested in such talk. His speech caused a huge controversy, and it became clear that this was another prophet being rejected by the people. But of course he has been found to be proven right.
The West is on its last legs, and this is because we have vainly thought we could progress, be free, and be strong, while telling God to get lost. That cannot work. Now we are paying the price big time. As Jeremiah and Solzhenitsyn both said:
Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolzhenitsynHarvard.php
[1432 words]
Don’t grieve for me – I’m old.
I hear the train whistle blowing round the bend. The coal smoke rises on the horizon as I look down the train tracks. Won’t be long now and I’ll be on my way to glory land.
But, as I look about me I see so much that is yet to be done, so much that could have been done, and so much we haven’t done. Still, there’s time. There’s time to teach, there’s time to preach, there’s time to exhort, there’s time to write, there’s time to lead, there’s time to share, there’s time to seek the lost – the choice is ours.
Retire!? The gospel call is a marathon and retiring is not an option – expiring in the King’s service is though!
Sure I’ve stumbled. Sure I’ve been overwhelmed. Sure I’ve needed to rest at times. Sure I’ve thought of giving up. Sure I’ve been hindered. Sure I’ve been tempted to cast away the hope of a heavenly crown and grasp an earthly one. Sure I could have stopped to enjoy the accolades of the earthly crowds, but this race is a marathon not a sprint to worldly fame at “vanity fair” gatherings once a week. It truly is what he who ran well said, “But none of these things move me; nor do I count my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy, and the ministry I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God”, Acts 20:24.
Still, as I meditate on the pitch of the train whistle and watch the coal smoke whisk away and disappear as my body will soon do; I grieve. Not for myself but for the many who’ve heard me teach, who’ve heard me preach, who’ve sat in my seminars, who’ve walked the streets with me, who’ve read my books, and who’ve come close to living in the powers of the age to come and yet never even began the race, let alone continued in it.
But beyond this – my grief is heavy for the current generation of kingdom runners whose race has just begun. Runners who must soon face an onslaught from Satan, the like of which has never been seen before and which is fast descending on the world. And how will they fare? Poorly I suggest unless they put away the “vanity fair churches” they believe portray God’s kingdom on earth and return to consuming the word of God, to sincere fellowship, to communing in the Spirit, and to praying while the freedom to do so remains, “And they continued steadfastly in the apostle’s doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers,” Acts 2:40-47.
And finally said the old man to the young man, “But you, O man of God, flee these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on the eternal life, to which you were also called and have confessed the good confession in the presence of many witnesses,” 1 Tim. 6:11-12.
Blessings
Dr. Bob Chapman
I’m also reading Jeremiah again at the moment. He is for real. In the early chapters, I read how Jeremiah prophesises that the Lord will give to each according to his ways.
As a missionary in SE Asia with a growing church, I have both great joy & unceasing sadness. I’ve been rejected by most of my family. May the Lord reveal to me if there has been anything in my life other than the Gospel that has caused this division.
Mark 3:31-35
Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”
33 “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.
34 Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
Just this last week I was told I talked too much about abortion, Planned Parenthood and the use of aborted foetal tissue in the vaccines. I was formally asked to stop by a church leader. What had I done? Sent some links and had a few private conversations describing the atrocities. I know this person well. It was not a stranger.
My first response was to examine myself to see if I was in the wrong speaking about this. “Too negative” I’ve been told.
But then, on sitting back and spending time with the Lord, I personally can not see a greater tragedy taking place in our society than millions of babies being murdered, their ‘bits’ trafficked and used to make food additives and ‘medicine” and the church ignoring it.
So I will continue to speak out, though it hurts.
Jeremiah is one such book that speaks much about where the faith has come to today. We seem to only be heading into darker times these days, and a quickening is occurring more and more.
So true – when growing up, we were bullied and laughed at for reading the Bible but now it’s declined to the point where you may be arrested/sued/imprisoned for hate speech for doing so.
Another powerful piece! Thanks as always Bill.
Thanks Bill another powerful piece.
Sharon- well done good and faithful servant.
Shalom
Yes! The error of communism. ‘Godlessness’.
Thank you Bill and thank you Bob.
Increased wickedness and godlessness is a sign of the end times. And Christ did say that prior to His return: “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold”. I have no doubt that the Lord is referring to godly love here and those who are expected to demonstrate such love are His followers.
And yet I see so many fellow believers around me who do things and say things with all sorts of motives other than love. Love should always be the driving force behind everything we do or say. Should we expose the lies and the sin? Absolutely! But let’s do so in the right spirit – not to judge or with hostility but with humility and love.
Sometimes we feel angry and frustrated but we need to let that subside before we speak out or ‘post’ anything about same sex marriage, abortion or any other issues we have to face in this depraved society. Show love to the sinner – sounds cliché but that’s the godly way.
And finally, let the Peace of God reign in our hearts by turning our eyes upon the Prince of Peace. Bring the Light into the world, the Light that shines in the darkness. The world needs Jesus. Our society needs Jesus. Our families need Jesus. Our churches need Jesus. Shine like bright stars in the universe and spread the aroma of Christ and when you do so, be prepared to be rejected and to drink from His cup.
Peace and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
I too have been rejected by my family – even the professing “Christians” – because of my stand for the truth, done in love. Jesus did not mince words; He said to expect this here. He my Savior is worth it all.
Christine Wright
Same here Christine.