When God Speaks
Psalm 63, 1 Samuel 3:1 – 20, 1 Corinthians 6:11-20, John 1:43-51
It was interesting for me to survey how other preachers have treated the passages in today’s lectionary, particularly the Old Testament and Gospel lessons for today. There are a number of sites on the internet where pastors archive their sermons. And, I regularly consult these sites. They give me a way to CHECK my own pastoral instincts against the instincts of a great number of other men who are striving to do what I strive to do here each Sunday.
And, so, this week, as I looked over what other pastors have done with this passage, I found a bewildering number of different, unrelated topics and applications. If you were to read the first paragraphs of all these sermons (and, in fact, I DID skim the first paragraphs of more than 100 such sermons), you’d never think that all these sermons were taken from the gospel appointed for today! What seems to have happened, as near as I can tell, is that each of those 100 pastors selected one or two details from the gospel narrative and built his sermon around THAT, rather than around the subject matter of the passage as a whole. And, this might NOT be a bad thing to do. I’m NOT criticizing these pastors’ choices.
But, the bewildering diversity of their choices wasn’t any help to me at all. You see, a short while ago, in the Old Testament reading, we heard about the time when God called his servant Samuel into service as his prophet. The Gospel reading is similar in subject matter – it recounts the calling of the first of Jesus’ disciples. At John chapter 1 and verse 35, Jesus has no disciples; by verse 51 he has at least five disciples, perhaps six. So, you can see that the Old Testament and the Gospel lessons both treat the calling of those who will serve as God’s ministers to God’s people. So, a sermon about this kind of thing seems appropriate. But, in all those 100 sermons, there none of them that really engaged what entire subject matter of the passage, much less the Gospel lesson paired with the Old Testament lesson.
I suspect, that most of those pastors recognized the same problem that comes with preaching a passage like this. In the case of Samuel’s case, and in the case of Jesus’ disciples, their call to ministry takes the form of a direct, verbal, audible summons from God himself. To put it in the bluntest terms, God spoke to them, as plainly as I am speaking to you right now.
So, if God speaks to us today as he spoke to Samuel, or if Jesus speaks to you and to me today – in an audible voice, as he spoke to Andrew, or Peter, or Philip, or Nathaniel – then I might draw from these passages some principles and applications. On the other hand, if God does NOT speak to us today as he spoke to Samuel, if Jesus does not speak today in an audible voice as I am speaking to you right this moment – then, what am I supposed to do with passages like this, beyond providing you commentary that might illuminate some of the more obscure details?
For the record, I do not believe God speaks to us today as he spoke to Samuel during the night. And, I do not believe the Jesus speaks to us in an audible voice as he spoke to Andrew, or as he spoke to Simon Peter, or as he spoke to the multitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, or as he spoke his dying words as he hung on the cross. It is always conceivable that God MIGHT speak in an audible voice or that Jesus can speak in these ways. I’m not referring to absolute possibilities or impossibilities here. But, the Jesus’ own apostles in the New Testament are clear that God’s words and Christ’s words are ours in the pages of the Bible and in no other way, until the Lord returns to the earth.
If I am correct in this, does that mean that passages such as the Old Testament lesson or the gospel lesson for today are simply curiosities for us? Does it mean that there is nothing in such passages to inform our own day to day life as Christians? Not at all. There are, in fact, a critically important principle in Samuel’s experience and in the calling of the disciples which apply as much to us today as they did to Samuel or to the Apostles. And, it is this critically important principle that we will examine now.
That principle is simply this: We do not understand God’s word to us apart from his word to others.
Consider Samuel again. Three times God called to Samuel in an audible voice. God called to him by name – “Samuel! Samuel!!” And the first two times, Samuel heard the voice, and he misidentified. He ran to the high priest Eli, and said, “Here I am! You called.”
This might have gone on all night, I suppose, except for one thing. Eli – who was much older in the ways of the Lord than Samuel – finally understood that it was the Lord who was calling to Samuel. And, because Eli rightly discerned what was happening, he gave Samuel an instruction: “The next time you hear your name called, say this: ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant hears.”
That word LORD in Eli’s instruction to Samuel, is the Hebrew tetragrammaton, God’s proper name. Eli was that certain that it was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who was calling to Samuel. The OT text tells us, interestingly, that when Samuel responded, he said “Speak, for your servant hears.” Samuel, evidently, did not address the mysterious voice with the name YHWH as Eli had told him. Whether this was caution on his part, or forgetfulness, we do not know. But we do know this – Samuel’s ability to even receive the verbal audible communication he had from the Lord depended not on his own sense of hearing, nor on his own discernment, but on the discernment of someone older and wiser in the LORD.
We see the same thing in the case of Jesus’ first disciples. In some of the films of Jesus’ life that have been made in the past 50 years, we get these scenes of a glassy-eyed Jesus, who looks suspiciously as if he’s had one too many doses of tranquilizers, walking dreamily along the beach. And, then he says “Follow me,” and the fishermen he comes across get kind of glassy-eyed themselves and drop their nets and wander down the beach in his wake.
The gospel for today, however, shows us what actually happened. John the Baptist had been preaching out in the wilderness. All Judea had been coming out of the cities and villages, out into the wilderness, to hear him. He had been preaching about the coming Messiah. John had his own disciples – men who remained with him, who heard him preach, who believed his message, and who made their own contributions to the ministry of John the Baptist.
And, this is where the Gospel lesson for today picks up in verse 35 of John chapter 1: “Again, the next day, John stood with two of his disciples. 36 And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’ ” The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus.”
Here is the point you must not overlook. These first two disciples of Jesus – Andrew and probably the Apostle John himself – did not encounter Jesus in a vacuum. These two men had already been the disciples of John the Baptist for many months at a minimum. And, then John the Baptist points to this man walking along and he hails exclaims “Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.”
Are John and Andrew correct to follow Jesus? Of course. Are they correct to recognize him as the promised Messiah? Absolutely. Did they come up with this recognition on their own? Not a chance. They responded to Jesus correctly, just as Samuel responded to God correctly, BECAUSE they accepted the testimony, the discernment, the instruction of others who knew God before they did.
The same is true of the other disciples whom Jesus calls in this passage from John’s gospel. John tells us that Jesus said to Philip, “Follow me,” and that Philip did so. However, John also tells us that Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Indeed, in a village such as Bethsaida, it is impossible that Andrew did not already know Andrew and Peter, and their families. Philip isn’t assessing his call from Jesus in pristine isolation from any other knowledge, or testimony, or reputation.
In fact, when Philip goes to tell Nathaniel, he says to him, “We have found Him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote!” Again, Jesus is not some personality who bursts upon the scene in the first century in utter novelty. Philip presents Jesus in a context, the context of centuries of Old Testament prophecies, going all the way back to Moses – 1500 years into the past. Philip has already embraced, accepted, believed a mountain of religious and cultural testimony concerning a coming Messiah. He too knows of the preaching of John the Baptist. And, when that Messiah summons him, he responds because his understanding is well informed by the powerful current of the preaching of God’s prophets from the centuries past.
In our own day, we hear a lot about God calling people, depending on what channels your TV set is tuned to. When I was a boy in the Southern Baptist churches of my youth, we’d sometimes hear sermons or testimonies about God’s calling this person or that person to full-time Christian ministry. Those testimonies always made me uncomfortable, and they still do. And, here’s why …
When someone says to you, “God called me to preach the gospel in Chad,” the meaning of this statement has only a few possibilities.
First of all, a statement like this might be a claim that God spoke to the person, just as he spoke to Samuel, or as Jesus spoke to Andrew or Peter or Nathaniel. It’s not common (at least in my experience) to find that people mean something like this when they say that God called them to preach the gospel in Chad. But, in that case, why express an idea in this form, if this is not what you mean?
On the other hand, some people actually do claim God spoke to them and told them to do this or that. If you press them, they’ll say “He spoke in my heart.” And, by this, of course, they remove any possibility of someone verifying that such a revelation actually came from God to them.
And, this immediately provokes an issue for those to whom such a statement is made. Either the person claiming a commission from God is telling the truth, in which case any resistance to it is a resistance to God Himself; or the person claiming a commission from God is telling a lie, or he is deceived about himself; and neither of these possibilities are apt to make you feel very comfortable about placing such a person in a position of spiritual responsibility.
These kinds of problems vanish if we heed the principle that informs God’s calling of Samuel and Jesus’ calling of his own disciples. These things do not take place in a vacuum; they take place in a context of prior revelation from God, prior dealings between God and his people. And, because of that principle, I have a way to evaluate claims that others make about God’s leading in their lives.
For example, there are a great many women in the church today who will tell you candidly that God called them to positions of ministry as pastors, or elders, or priest, or bishops in Christ’s church. I’m perfectly willing to accept their report at face value – in other words, if they tell me that they think God called them to these ministries, I’ll believe them as far as this is a report of what they think. But, I do not believe they are correct. Why? Because the Scriptures are clear, and the testimony of godly men and women supports it for the past 20 centuries – the responsibility for the ruling of Christ’s church is laid upon the soldiers of godly men, that is males, in accordance with specific and direct commandment of Christ’s Apostles.
We’re going to be hearing a lot about the Da Vinci code this year, and a lot about the so-called “lost gospels.” Those gospels were not lost. They were rejected by the Church. Why? Because they were touted by the Gnostics, who showed both by their teaching and their lives that they rejected the authority of Christ’s Apostles.
Consider, for example, Paul’s instructions about sexual immorality in the second lesson appointed for today. That is quite straightforward and clear. But, many of the Gnostics were sexual libertines. And, that is why early bishops in the church rejected their writings – they manifestly had rejected the writings of the Apostles when it came to sexual behavior.
When we look over the entire history of God’s dealings with his people, the times when men and women heard God’s words audibly – as Samuel did, as the people who saw and heard Jesus did – in the scope of history, those times are quite few and very brief. What God’s people have mostly relied on, to assess God’s will for their lives, is the written record of God’s words when he did speak through the Prophets of the Old Testament and through Jesus Apostles in the New Testament. This record is not a trifling thing. Indeed, it is the source of our own salvation and our own knowledge and fellowship with Jesus Christ.
At the end of the era in which the New Testament was being completed, the Apostle John, opened a general epistle to the congregations under his direct supervision with these words:
1 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life— 2 the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. 4 And these things we write to you that your joy may be full. [1 John 1:1-4]
God grant us grace to receive the abundant word of life left for us by Jesus himself through the ministry of his servants the Apostles. And may God continue to guide us, as He has guided his flock for thousands of years, through his written word of truth.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
