Prophets Not of Doom

Shalom Class!

As you prepare your reports about your specific prophet, you may find it helpful to read this short article that I have prepared to give you a general background about the life and mission of the prophets.

Prophets Not of Doom
Leo R. Ocampo

After the Division, Israel and Judah began to live separate lives. Although they remained connected by their common Patriarchal origins and Covenant with Yahweh, they were now ruled by separate, sometimes warring monarchies. Unfortunately, another thing that remained common to them was the kind of kings they continued to have. Those who followed David, both in Israel and in Judah, were mostly unlike him (except for three: Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah) and were more like Solomon and his son Rehoboam—leading the people not in fidelity to God and the Covenant but in immorality, corruption, and idolatry that worsened with the passing of years.

It was in these difficult moments in the life of God's chosen people that the prophets were raised and sent. They themselves experienced the negative effects of this widespread moral degeneration and infidelity to the Covenant. With righteous and untarnished eyes, they also saw that it will lead to their society’s eventual downfall. But many of them remained reluctant and unwilling to accept their mission because the message they had to preach was not easy to sell but counter-cultural, provocative and largely unwelcome.

As prophets, they were sent with judgment to challenge popular but false values and exhort the people and their leaders to abandon their accustomed but evil ways. They had to preach of hard repentance, calling people to make difficult choices in favor of the Covenant-relationship to be able to return to God, while at the same time warning them of the imminent destruction that loomed closely, if they chose not to listen and act.

The words they were given were bittersweet to preach: strongly-worded judgment and very stern warnings that, although intended to save the people, were often too hard to swallow and almost always fell on deaf ears. Yet nevertheless, these messengers of God were never “prophets of doom” and “prophets of despair” as some would like to call them. Instead, these brave men continued to prophecy despite rejection and persecution because they continued to believe that Israel had hope if they repented and changed their evil ways. Despite the fact that majority of the message they proclaimed was often comprised of severe condemnations and gory images of punishment, no authentic prophecy ever ends without some promise of salvation, no matter how short and bleak, trusting in God’s enduring love and fidelity.

However, despite the efforts of the prophets, the people and their leaders did not listen. The Northern Kingdom of Israel would eventually fall to the Assyrians while the Southern Kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonians soon after. But even in this time of terrible suffering and hopelessness, the prophets continued to call the people to repent and return, and to arouse their hope even when it seemed, to eyes that saw only the present and not the future, they had nothing more to return to.

Thus, the prophets had to preach the Word entrusted to them at the cost of great sacrifice, sometimes even of their own lives, in their struggle to get an unwelcome message across and even more difficultly, the struggle to keep hope alive against their own despair. Yet even though the prophets may have ultimately failed to convert the people and so change the fate of the nation, their message continues to be a source of wisdom and inspiration for us even now. Like ancient grains of pollen, they remain valid, potent and ready to sprout in any welcoming soil because although they may have been harsh and often violent, they are indestructibly true.

Prophets are unpopular, then and even now. And I guess that is the way things will continue to be for those who choose to see, accept and proclaim the difficult truth with its even more difficult challenges. But what is even more difficult to see, accept and proclaim is the small but thriving core of the prophetic vision: that although the present may seem stubborn and hard to change and the future, dark and without any promise, hope survives even as a scanty remnant. God's faithful love, even when unnoticed, slowly flowers from the stump, capable of raising dead bones to life with new Spirit, always rising again from the despair of death.