Reading:
Isaiah 22:1
The word "burden" here
just does mean a load or weight, as much as a man can
carry. Thus the Prophets felt what the Lord had shown
them to be something that weighed heavily upon them and
often overwhelmed them.
The prophetic function
is brought into operation at a time when things are not
well with the people and work of God, when declension has
set in; when things have lost their distinctive Divine
character; when there is a falling short or an accretion
of features which were never intended by God. The Prophet
in principle is one who represents – in himself and his
vision – God's reaction to either a dangerous tendency or
a positive deviation. He stands on God's full ground and
the trend breaks on him. That which constitutes this
prophetic function is spiritual perception, discernment,
and insight. The Prophet sees, and he sees what
others are not seeing. It is vision, and this
vision is not just of an enterprise, a "work", a
venture; it is a state, a condition. It is not for the
work as such that he is concerned, but for the spiritual
state that dishonors and grieves the Lord.
This faculty of
spiritual discernment makes the Prophet a very lonely
man, and brings upon him all the charges of being
singular, extreme, idealistic, unbalanced, spiritually
proud, and even schismatic. He makes many enemies for
himself. Sometimes he is not vindicated until after he
has left the earthly scene of his testimony.
Nevertheless, the Prophet is the instrument of keeping
the Lord's full thought alive, and of maintaining vision
without which the people are doomed to disintegration.
While it has so often
been an individual with whom the Lord has deposited His
fuller thought and made His prophetic vessel, it has also
very frequently been a company of His people in which He
has been more utterly represented. Such companies are
seen scattered down the ages. They were the Lord's
reactionary vessels. Such, surely, are the "Overcomers"
of every "end-time". The mass of Christians may be too
taken up with the externals and accepted ways of
Christianity; too spiritually satisfied with the lesser;
too bound by tradition and fettered by the established
order. The Lord cannot do His full thing with them
because He does not put His new wine into old wineskins;
the skins would burst and the life be wasted – not
conserved to definite purpose. He finds Himself limited
by an order which – while it may have been right at a
certain time and for a certain period to carry His
testimony up to a certain point – yet now remains as the
fixed bound, and for want of an essential adjustableness
His fuller purposes are impossible of realization. So it
was with Judaism, so it has become with Christianity, and
so it is with many an instrumentality which has been
greatly used by Him. There is no finality with us here,
and it is dangerous to the Lord's interest to conclude
that, because the Lord led and gave a pattern at a
certain time, that was full and final and must remain.
Every bit of new revelation will call for adjustment, but
revelation waits for such a sense of need as to – at least –
make for willingness to adjust.
The Lord needs that
which really does represent His fullest possible thought,
and not those who are just doing a good work. But it
costs; and this is the "burden of the valley of
vision".
First published in "A Witness and A Testimony"
magazine, May-June 1945, Vol. 23-3