The Prophet’s Disease

But if I say, “I will not remember Him or speak anymore in His name,” then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones; and I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot endure it. Jeremiah 20:9 NASB

Holding it in – Once I met a man whose business card carried the title, “Prophet.” He seemed confident. He was polite, well-dressed and charismatic. It struck me that he was just the opposite of the biblical prophets of the Tanakh. Those men were distraught, disheveled and in agony. They were abused, rejected and tortured by their calling. In fact, as Jeremiah demonstrates, they would gladly have given up the role. It was not what they wanted. It was something they couldn’t help despite efforts to stop it. The prophets carried a spiritual disease that attacked them to the point of despair. They experienced the heartache of God without filters. As Heschel notes, these are “some of the most disturbing men who have ever lived.”[1]

Somehow in the process of constructing systems of belief we have abandoned the human emotional impact on God’s messengers. We imagine that revelatory contact with the divine is nothing more than transmission technology. We have forgotten that God’s words sear those who carry them. “By insisting on the absolutely objective and supernatural nature of prophecy, dogmatic theology has disregarded the prophet’s part in the prophetic art. Stressing revelation, it has ignored the response; isolating inspiration, it has lost sight of the human situation.”[2] What is the prophet’s human situation? It is to be privy to the agony of the broken world and be helpless to do anything about it. It is to have one’s consciousness attuned to the horror of humanity’s self-imposed nightmare while knowing the God who desires to redeem a resistant race. It is, quite simply, to lose one’s mind. The prophet is the Bible’s mentally disturbed man, caught in an insane world while delivering the Creator’s evaluation.

How do suppose you would react to such a call? What would happen to your psychological grip on reality if you actually felt how God feels about this world? How would you cope with the knowledge that God is willing but Man is defiantly recalcitrant? Would you cry out with Jeremiah, “I determined not to speak of Him any more, but it was like a fire within me, consuming my very bones and I just couldn’t endure Him any more”?

“The prophet . . . experiences his prophecy from within—there is no real distinction between his logic or emotions and his prophetic inner voice.”[3] The terror, the agony, the throes of the divine consciousness are the prophet.

Perhaps you desire to be a prophet, thinking that this is some laudable role commanding great spiritual insight. Perhaps you haven’t yet come to terms with the human side of spiritual psychosis. As for me, Lord, rescue me from the calling of the navim. I know I could not endure it either.

Topical Index: prophet, navim, holding it in, Jeremiah 20:9

[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, p. vii.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Benyamin Lau, Jeremiah: The Fate of a Prophet, p. 147.