Chapter 7. The Prophets: The Voice at the Gate

(Part III, The Witness of the Whole Bible, continued. This chapter follows the Torah chapter and prepares the ground for the Gospels chapter. It reads the prophets on their own terms and asks what they would say to a movement that quotes them on Sundays and ignores them the rest of the week.)

If the Torah is the constitution, the prophets are the audit.

That is the simplest way to say what these books are. The Torah lays out what the community was supposed to be. The prophets show up, generations later, to tell the community what it has actually become. They do not do it gently. They do not do it in polite institutional language. They do it in the street, at the gate, in the temple courts, in the throne room, at the king's dinner table, on the road out of town in chains, from the belly of a fish, from a valley of dry bones, from a burning coal on the lips, from a wife bought back out of prostitution as a living sermon. They do it in ways that make the priests uncomfortable and the kings furious and the ordinary people, some of them, wake up.

And they do it with a consistency that, once you notice it, is impossible to un-notice. From Amos in the eighth century BC to Malachi four hundred years later, from Isaiah in Jerusalem to Ezekiel in Babylonian exile, from the majors to the minors, the prophets keep saying the same short list of things. Justice at the gate. Care for the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the poor. Refusal to worship the idols of the surrounding empires, whether those idols are made of gold or of political power. Contempt for a religion that is loud in the sanctuary and cruel in the marketplace. Warning, always warning, that a nation which builds itself on the backs of its most vulnerable people will, sooner or later, be undone by the God whose eye is on those people.

A movement that quotes the prophets on the size of its Bible study attendance while ignoring what the prophets actually said has not read the prophets. It has read a highlight reel. This chapter is going to turn the highlight reel off and let the prophets speak in their own voices, at their own length, on their own terms.

What a prophet actually was

Before we get to any single prophet, it helps to fix in mind what a prophet, in the Old Testament, was, and what a prophet was not.

A prophet was not, primarily, a predictor of the future. That is the modern usage of the word, and it has been imported back into the biblical text in ways that distort it. Some prophets did make predictions. Isaiah predicted the fall of Assyria and, in the long view, the coming of a servant who would suffer for many. Jeremiah predicted the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon. Daniel had visions of empires yet to rise. But those predictions were, in every case, secondary. They were consequences drawn from a more basic function. The basic function of a prophet was to stand inside the covenant, holding the Torah in one hand and the nation's actual behavior in the other, and to say, out loud, what the gap between them meant.

A prophet was not, either, a chaplain to the king. This is the point Conservative American Christianity has, on the whole, forgotten. The court prophets, the ones on the palace payroll, the ones who told Ahab what Ahab wanted to hear, are treated in the Old Testament as villains. The prophets God actually sends are the ones who show up uninvited, who are usually poor, who are frequently threatened, who are sometimes killed. When Amos was told by the priest Amaziah to go prophesy somewhere else, somewhere that would not embarrass the king, Amos answered, "I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel.'" Amos 7:14 to 15. That is the biblical picture of a prophet. Not a man with a comfortable ministry and a mailing list. A man pulled out of an ordinary job and sent, against his own preference, to say the hard thing to the people who did not want to hear it.

Hold that picture in mind, because most of the people the movement now calls prophets, the popular ones, the ones on television, the ones being flown to prayer breakfasts, would not have passed the audition. They would have been the Amaziahs. They would have been the men telling Amos to take his shepherd's coat and go bother someone else.

Amos: justice as a river

Start with Amos, because he is the plainest of them all.

He preached in the eighth century BC, in the northern kingdom of Israel, during a time of unusual prosperity. The economy was expanding. The borders were secure. The temple was full on the appointed days. The religious festivals were well attended. The wealthy had summer houses and winter houses, ivory beds, imported wine, the fat cuts of the lambs from the flock. Read Amos 6. It is all there. The picture Amos paints of Israel in his day looks, in many respects, like the picture the movement paints of a nation blessed. Full sanctuaries. Growing wealth. Strong borders. Ceremonial worship.

Amos's problem with that picture is that under the sanctuary and under the wealth and under the strong borders, the poor of the same nation are being crushed. "They sell the innocent for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed." Amos 2:6 to 7. "You levy a straw tax on the poor and impose a tax on their grain. Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine. For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins. There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts." Amos 5:11 to 12.

Then, at the center of the book, comes the sentence God tells Amos to deliver about the nation's religious life. It is one of the most terrifying sentences in Scripture, and it should keep any honest movement leader awake at night.

"I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs. I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream." Amos 5:21 to 24.

Read that again. God, through Amos, tells a nation whose worship services are full and whose music is loud and whose offerings are generous that he hates it. That the noise of the songs is unwelcome. That the sacrifices will not be accepted. Not because the songs are theologically off, and not because the sacrifices are the wrong species. Because the same community that is singing on the seventh day is, on the other six, taking bribes in court and grinding the poor.

There is no way to make that sentence into a comfort to a modern movement that has built its identity around the fullness of its sanctuaries and the size of its offerings while cheering the erosion of every legal protection its own poor neighbors have ever won. There is no way. Amos closes that exit. If your worship is loud and your courts are corrupt, God, through Amos, would rather you shut the worship down until the courts are fixed.

That is not a fringe reading. That is the text.

Isaiah: the fast God chose

If Amos is the plainest, Isaiah is the largest. Sixty-six chapters. Roughly two centuries of material collected under one prophetic name. Isaiah has the visions of the Servant that Christians read, rightly, as pointing to Jesus. Isaiah has the "Comfort, comfort my people" that Handel set to music. Isaiah has the wolf and the lamb and the child leading them. But Isaiah, before all of that, has a sustained, book-length argument with the religious establishment of his own day about what worship is for.

Isaiah 1, the opening chapter of the book, reads like Amos 5 with the volume turned up. "The multitude of your sacrifices, what are they to me?" says the Lord. "I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals. I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing meaningless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths, and convocations, I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood." Isaiah 1:11 to 15.

Full of blood. That is not a metaphor for personal sin in the abstract. Isaiah is talking about a legal system that has abandoned the widow and the orphan. He is talking about a court system that lets bribes decide the outcome. He is talking about landowners who have "joined house to house" and "added field to field" until there is no room left for the poor. And he closes the section, in verse 17, with the sentence Conservative American Christianity has, again, learned how to quote and forgotten how to obey. "Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow."

Later in the book, in Isaiah 58, the same argument comes back in one of the most searching passages in the whole Old Testament. The community is fasting. It is practicing spiritual discipline. It is going through the outward motions of piety. And it is asking God why he does not seem to notice. "Why have we fasted," they say, "and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?" God's answer, through Isaiah, is worth quoting at length, because it is the answer to almost every question a modern movement asks about why its prayers do not seem to move heaven.

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter, when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear. Then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard." Isaiah 58:6 to 8.

That is the fast God chose. Not the empty stomach. Not the long face. Not the loud prayer. The loosing of the chains. The breaking of the yoke. The bread on the table of the hungry man. The roof over the head of the wanderer. The clothes on the back of the naked. A community that fasts without doing those things, Isaiah says, is a community whose fast God will not notice, no matter how sincerely it is kept. A community that does those things is a community whose light will break forth like the dawn, even if it never fasts at all.

Set that against a movement whose spiritual disciplines are considerable and whose posture toward the poor wanderer at the border is what it is. Isaiah 58 was written for that movement. It just does not know it yet.

Micah: what the Lord requires

Micah is short. Seven chapters. He preached at roughly the same time as Isaiah, to roughly the same nation, about roughly the same set of problems. He gets quoted, all the time, for a single line, and the line is worth slowing down on, because it has been so worn smooth by pulpit use that its meaning has almost dropped out.

"He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." Micah 6:8.

Notice, first, what Micah is doing in that verse. He is answering a question the previous verses have set up. The people have been asking what they should bring to God. Should they bring thousands of rams? Ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Should they, in the ultimate act of desperate piety, offer their firstborn children? Micah's answer is that God does not want any of that. God has already shown them what he wants. And what he wants is not a bigger offering. It is a different life.

Notice, second, the three verbs. Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. The first is a legal and social term. It is the same word cluster the rest of the prophets use for how a court works, how a landlord treats a tenant, how a merchant weighs his scales. The second is chesed, the great Old Testament word for covenant loyalty, for the kind of love that stays when it is expensive to stay. The third is the posture of a creature before its Creator, and of a citizen before a King who is not the human king down the road. All three, together, describe a whole life. There is no room, in any of the three, for a religion that is loud in the sanctuary and hard in the marketplace. There is no room, in any of the three, for a Christian movement whose public voice is contempt for the vulnerable and whose private posture is pride.

Micah, put next to the movement, is a mirror. That is why the movement loves the verse and does not preach the rest of the book. The rest of the book is what makes the verse mean something.

Jeremiah: the temple sermon and the cost of telling the truth

Jeremiah preached in Jerusalem in the last decades before the city fell to Babylon in 587 BC. The nation, at the time, was in the grip of a particular delusion. It believed that because the temple of the Lord stood in the middle of the city, the city could not fall. God would not, they told themselves, allow his own house to be destroyed. The prophets on the palace payroll agreed. Peace, peace, they said. Everything is fine.

Jeremiah, sent by God into that atmosphere, went and stood at the gate of the temple and preached what has come to be called the Temple Sermon. Read it in Jeremiah 7. It is one of the most important sermons in the Old Testament, and it is almost never preached in Conservative American Christianity, for reasons that will become obvious as soon as you read it.

"Do not trust in deceptive words and say, 'This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.' If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless. Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, 'We are safe,' safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you?" Jeremiah 7:4 to 11.

Read the sentence one more time. Will you steal and murder and commit adultery and perjury, and burn incense to other gods, and then come stand before me in this house and say, "We are safe"? That is Jeremiah's charge against the religious nationalism of his own day. The temple, in that nationalism, had stopped being a place where the people met the God who commanded justice. It had become a talisman. A national symbol. A guarantee that whatever else the nation did, God was on its side because his building was in the middle of it.

Jesus, seven hundred years later, would walk into the same temple and quote Jeremiah 7 by name as he overturned the tables. "It is written," he said, "'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it 'a den of robbers.'" Mark 11:17. He was not, at that moment, condemning the sale of doves. He was condemning a religious system that had, again, become a talisman for the empire it lived inside.

Set that alongside a modern movement that treats the flag and the cross as interchangeable, that treats the country as God's specially chosen nation regardless of what the country actually does, that assures itself, week after week, that it is safe with God because its buildings are large and its choirs are good and its politicians say the right words. That movement has, without knowing it, wandered onto the porch of the temple Jeremiah was standing on. He has already preached the sermon. It is in the Book. All that is missing is anyone in the movement willing to read it out loud on a Sunday.

Note what happens to Jeremiah, for reading it out loud. He is beaten. He is put in stocks. He is lowered into a cistern to die. He is called a traitor to his own people for saying that the enemy at the gate is God's own instrument of judgment. Every generation of true prophets pays that price, in one form or another. Every generation of court prophets, the ones who tell the king what the king wants to hear, gets the honors and the lands and the seat at the table. The Book warns us, at every turn, which of those two we are listening to. We tend not to look.

Ezekiel and Daniel: prophets in exile

Two more, briefly, and then we can gather the thread.

Ezekiel preached from exile, to the community of Jews carried off to Babylon after Jerusalem fell. He preached in visions. Wheels within wheels. A valley of dry bones brought back to life. A river flowing out of a new temple that healed everything it touched. But underneath the visions, the same argument runs. In Ezekiel 34, God turns on the shepherds of Israel, meaning the leaders of the people, and pronounces a judgment on them that any modern leader in any modern movement should read on his knees. "Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves. Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally." Ezekiel 34:2 to 4. God, in that chapter, promises that he himself will come and be the shepherd the false shepherds refused to be. The New Testament will pick that image up in John 10, when Jesus calls himself the good shepherd.

Daniel preached, in a different way, from another exile. His book is the one Conservative American Christianity mines for end-times charts. That is a shame, because Daniel, read on its own terms, is not primarily about a distant future. It is about how a small community of faithful people lives, prays, works, and refuses to bow, inside an empire that demands their allegiance. Daniel and his friends will serve the empire's bureaucracy competently. They will not eat its unclean food. They will not bow to its statues. They will not stop praying to their God when the law says they must. They will accept the lions' den and the fiery furnace as the price of that refusal. That is the pattern the book is teaching, and it is a pattern that condemns any Christian tradition that has forgotten how to refuse the empire it lives inside because the empire has become comfortable.

The pattern, gathered

Take all of them together. Amos in the fields. Isaiah in the temple. Micah in the villages. Jeremiah at the gate. Ezekiel in exile. Daniel in the palace. Hosea in a broken marriage. Habakkuk on the watchtower. Zephaniah under the shadow of Nineveh. Zechariah rebuilding the ruined walls. Malachi at the closing of the Old Testament, warning that the day is coming when God himself will settle the accounts.

The pattern is not hard to see. The prophets do not congratulate the religious establishment of their day. They accuse it. They do not tell the poor to be patient with the wealthy. They tell the wealthy that the God of the poor has heard the cry. They do not treat the nation's sanctuaries as a guarantee of God's favor. They treat them as evidence, when justice is absent from the streets, of God's coming judgment. They do not flatter kings. They confront kings. Nathan tells David he is the man. Elijah tells Ahab he is the troubler of Israel. John the Baptist, standing at the end of the prophetic line and pointing to Jesus, will tell Herod, to his face, that his marriage is unlawful, and lose his head for it.

Now measure the movement against that pattern.

The movement has, on the whole, congratulated its religious establishment. It has told the poor to be patient with the wealthy, whom it has taught the poor to see as blessed by God. It has treated the fullness of its sanctuaries as proof of God's approval. It has flattered kings. It has, when a president said and did things any prophet from Amos to John would have named as evil, invited him to prayer breakfasts and laid hands on him and blessed him from the platform. It has been, in every measurable way, on the wrong side of the pattern the prophets set. Not on one issue. On the whole shape of the thing.

That is not a small charge. It is not an unfair one. It is what the text, read honestly, says.

What the prophets ask of a reader today

I want to end this chapter the way the prophets themselves would. Not with a summary. With a question.

The prophets, taken together, do not ask their readers to admire them. They ask their readers to choose. Whose voice, they ask, are you actually listening to? The court prophets are still available. They are still on the airwaves. They will still tell you that the nation is blessed, that the king is anointed, that the sanctuaries are full because God is pleased, and that the widow at the gate is not your concern. They are cheaper to follow. They ask nothing that will cost you anything. They cost the prophets who tell the truth their comfort, their reputation, and sometimes their lives, but they cost the ones who follow them nothing but a little discomfort at a Christmas dinner and a little strain at a men's group.

Or you can listen to the shepherd from Tekoa, and the singer from Jerusalem, and the mourner from Anathoth, and the exile by the river Chebar, and every other man and woman God pulled out of an ordinary life to say the hard thing at the gate. They are still speaking. Their words are still in the Book. They are not gentle. They will not flatter you. They will not tell you what your movement has told you. They will tell you what your God told them.

Turn the page. The one they were all pointing toward is next.