Fainting
A lion has roared! Who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken! Who can but prophesy? Amos 3:8 NASB
Prophesy – At age twenty-one I graduated from my first university and moved to Switzerland. “Why?” you might ask. It was my desire and intention to sit at the feet of Francis Schaeffer. A missions group I knew promised that Schaffer would be teaching at their location, so I went to Château-d’Oex. A few days after arrival, I discovered that there was no arrangement with Schaeffer. Actually, the arrangement was “God will provide.” There were other issues as well, important to me and a few other married couples who had arrived. I took it upon myself to confront the leader. It is a day I will never forget. After voicing my concerns, I was suddenly informed that I was completely out of line. “Who do you think you are to challenge my authority?” was about the size of it. This was a man I respected, a spiritual giant in my circles, who now verbally attacked me over something he promised but did not deliver. What was my reaction?
I fainted.
The emotional trauma of being accused of insubordination and spiritual apostasy by this particularly important figure completely overwhelmed my psyche. I remember feeling suddenly hot, then dizzy, and then opening my eyes at floor level. A week later I was gone—on my way to Lausanne and eventually to L’Abri where I fulfilled the dream of sitting with Schaffer. But the impact of those words has never left me to this day, some fifty years later.
Why do you need to know this little episode in my past? Because I think that’s the kind of reaction the audiences of the prophets must have had. BANG! Face on the floor, knocked off their feet by words delivered with an intensity they could not handle. “Prophecy is more than knowledge acquired by inspiration. It is not a quiet insight, a simple act of apperception. It is a startling event: a thunder in the world and a lightning in the soul.”[1]
We have a tendency to think of the prophets like the one in this photo, Scripture in hand, standing literally statuesque among the crowds, expounding great words of challenge and wisdom.
But I suspect the prophets were far less majestic in stature or visage. They were radical, vocal firebrands, delivering words that penetrated the heart and left their hearers either faint, fixated or furious. Believe me when I tell you they wouldn’t make it on television. The camera lens would crack.
The Hebrew word is nābāʾ. There’s a good deal of controversy about where the word comes from, but there is no doubt about the role these men (and women) played in the social life of Israel. They were feared. “When the lion roars . . .” I don’t know if you’ve ever been near a lion when it roars (CLICK THIS) but I can tell you the sound goes right through you. It does nothing but create instant fear. I wonder if we have ever read the words of the prophets as the words of a lion roaring. I wonder if we could.
Topical Index: prophet, prophecy, nābāʾ, faint, Amos 3:8
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 224.
