Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. (The Book of Common Prayer, The Prayer for the Second Sunday of Advent)
What image pops into your mind when you think of a prophet? An old man with a long beard, wearing strange clothes and eating weird food (looking at you, John the Baptizer)? Someone who seems angry all the time? Someone who has ecstatic dreams and visions that often seem to us more drug-induced than Spirit-inspired? Or maybe someone who tells the future?
A traditional prayer for the second week of Advent (see above) gives us a much clearer picture of the nature of a prophet. In it we see:
- The prophets as God’s grace. Notice the opening address to God. The emphasis is on His mercy. While prophets often do come speaking of judgment, they are sent by God as a gracious act so that people might not undergo that wrath but receive mercy instead.
- The prophets as God’s preachers. Prophets make the word of God known and at the heart of their message is a plea for and call to repentance. Repentance is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, does, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it to God, with full purpose of, and endeavor after, new obedience (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q.87). The prophets do speak of sin and the resulting consequences. But it is for the purpose that people would truly understand their dire straits and turn to the only refuge, which is God Himself. The God who will judge sin is the same God who extends mercy to those who repent.
- The prophets as God’s preparers. Someone might think having a prophet on the scene would be a real downer. That would be true if you simply wanted to remain unchanged. But for those looking for a work of God, the coming of a prophet was the signal that God was about to do something redemptively. The giving of Christmas gifts, the melting of the ice and snow, and the other signs of spring are evidence that Aslan is on the move (Note: If you have not read C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, please stop reading this blog post and go read that instead)
And the words of the prophets from first to last were not simply for the people of their own time and place. The prayer asks that the same grace which led to the sending of the prophets might be at work in us. To what end? First, that we might heed the prophets’ warnings. Paul writes, Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come (1 Corinthians 10:11). And second, that we would respond to the warnings by forsaking our sins.
And what is the end of such heeding and forsaking? That the Advent we long for, the return of our King, will be a day of joy. The world of sin and brokenness and death will be no more and all things will be made new. Or in the words from The Last Battle (Note: Just go read the whole series):
The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’ And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at least they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
