ALLAN B. CLARK came from Queensland to The College of the Bible in 1933, graduating in 1936. He has served the Churches in Mackay, Kingaroy, Bundaberg and Boonah in Queensland; the Churches in Taree and Rockdale in New South Wales. For a few months he was associate minister at Chatswood. After completing a ministry at Hamilton he is now serving with the Church at Malvern Caulfield. He has served the Brotherhood as editor of "The Christian Echo" and "The Christian Messenger," was a member of The Home Missions Committee in Queensland, and of The College Board in N.S.W.

      The material in this pamphlet is based on three Bible studies under this general heading that were presented to the annual seminar of Ministers of The Churches of Christ in Victoria. In these three studies we thought about The Ministry of the Prophets, The Ministry of Jesus with the Apostles, and The Ministry of the Apostles. In presenting the three as one paper it is hoped that the unity of the theme may be more apparent than it was then. I am primarily concerned here, not to distinguish the differences between these ministries, so much as to emphasise some things they have in common. The essential quality of the prophetic ministry is something that never dates, but is a challenge to men and women of God in every age and every race.

      We begin with . . .

I. THE MINISTRY OF THE PROPHETS.

      In 1 Kings 22:14 we have the words of a little known prophet named Micaiah who said, "As the Lord lives, what the Lord says to me, that I will speak." (R.S.V. and so throughout this pamphlet.) In this simple statement Micaiah has given us a description of a prophet and his ministry.

      It assumes an authentic relationship with the Lord. This relationship was very real and personal. The Old Testament prophets were men for whom God was the most real and relevant Person whom they knew; and to remain rightly related to Him was their most urgent imperative. Their message always carries the imprint of this imperative. It was for Micaiah a message addressed to the immediate situation. In 1 Kings 22 we are told that the two kings, Ahab, King of Israel, and Jehoshaphat, King of Judah, wanted to know whether

      or not they should attack Ramoth-gilead that very day; and it was the assumption of all concerned that the prophet would be able to tell them there and then. This emphasises a very largely forgotten aspect of the prophetic ministry that was indeed its primary function: namely, that the prophet was the messenger of God to the living present. They brought the message of the moment from their living Lord. They often introduced what they were about to say with the words, "Thus says the Lord . . ." They spoke in the present tense, and what they said was usually addressed to the present. They were not especially messengers of tomorrow, nor messengers of yesterday, but they brought the message of their day from their living Lord.

      This does not mean, of course, that they did not foretell, or bring a message of the future. In any relationship with God time loses some of its significance because God is eternal, timeless, and the message of the prophets has eternity in it. They uttered truth that is always true, and they were permitted to speak of events that were hidden by time from their contemporaries; but this is inherent in their relationship with God, and is not essential to the prophetic function. Micaiah was concerned with events no more future than this afternoon. He was the messenger of God to his own day. This authentic direct relationship with God is the quality that is essential to the prophet and his work.

      This assumes also a recognition of the being of God, and of His message. Micaiah had no doubt that he would know what the Lord would say to him. There is the note of complete certainty in the prophet's, "Thus says the Lord . According to 1 Samuel 9:9, "He who

is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer." This description of him emphasises the prophet's ability to see, or recognise, the being and voice of God. Several of the prophets present their message as the thing they saw. Examples of this are in Isaiah 1:1, "The vision of Isaiah . . .", Ezekiel 1:1, "I saw visions of God . . .", Obad. 1:1, "The vision of Obadiah."

      Hab. 1:1, "The oracle of God which Habakkuk the prophet saw . . ." This involved on the one hand a revelation by God, and a recognition by the prophet. The prophets saw the relevant truth that God was communicating to the men of their time. We accept the messages of Biblical prophets as infallible so that their words have become the Word of God to us. In the sense of special revelation and infallibility the canon is closed, and modern prophets must be placed in a different category; but faith demands that we believe that God has living truth to communicate to men of every generation. Men of truth will be too humble to claim infallibility but they will be seeking in deep sincerity to know the mind of God and the message of God to their own time. This is ever the duty of the minister of the Word of God. If the Minister has not a message from God he has no right to preach. Unfortunately a very low view of preaching is commonly held. It is thought of as a man giving his own ideas, but this is not preaching. As W. E. Sangster says, "The work of the preacher, as he expounds the written word in the face of his congregation, must ever be the supreme method of God's communication with men." (The Craft of the Sermon.) It is a conviction that this is so that keeps us at the task of preaching. We are certainly not infallible prophets; but we are prophetic when we speak out of a contemporary experience of God to our own time.

      It is disturbing to remember the results of the ministry of the prophets. We would like to believe that the results of a prophetic ministry are assured. We discover an almost universal underlying assumption that if the preacher lives as he ought to live and brings the true message of God then the results are certain to be good. A preacher to an interdenominational meeting was heard to say, "All we need are men of the simple Gospel and prayer, and we would have a revival in no time." Statements like this sound fine, but the facts do not support this neat little formula. Micaiah said, "As the Lord lives, what the Lord says to me, that I will speak." Nothing could be more right than that, but the result was that the two kings went into battle that day in spite of Micaiah's message, and Micaiah went to prison for uttering it. 1 Kings 22:27 gives us the result of Micaiah's sermon: "Thus says the king. "Put this fellow in prison, and feed him with scant fare of bread and water, until I come in peace." The message was true. The prophet was right. But the result was bad. Why was this? The violence and heat of Ahab's reactions are astonishing. Why the sudden outburst of fury? Why put the prophet in prison? With four hundred prophets on the other side surely Ahab should have laughed at the lone Micaiah! Ahab did not laugh because Micaiah spoke the truth, and in spite of himself, Ahab knew it! There was still enough of the truth within him to feel the ring of truth in the message, and it order to have his own way lit needed to resist the truth. The king hardened his heart, and the hardened heart behaves violently. The truth challenged his enthroned self, and to yield to it meant death to his pride. The prophetic ministry that gives Truth a voice is continually showing men and women to be wrong. It exposes the self upon the throne of Cod and challenges that self to surrender the throne to the Divine King to whom it belongs. Pride

will not permit this, so the prophet is the victim of violence. The prophets were lonely, persecuted men because they were God's messengers, (I Kings 22:27; II Chron. 16:10; Jer. 32:2; Dan. 3:18-19).

      Some of these same principle emerge when we think of

II. THE MINISTRY OF JESUS AND THE APOSTLES.

      The keynote of this ministry was struck in John 14:17, when Jesus said, "He dwells with you." He was Promising the coming of "the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him." Then Jesus went on to say, "You know him, for he dwells with you, and shall be in you." In that relationship the Spirit of Truth was dwelling with them in the person of Jesus himself, and their ministry was significant because they were with Him.

      The authentic relationship to which Jesus referred was dependent upon the recognition of His Deity. Apart from this it was merely a human relationship. A new dimension was added the moment they recognised God in Jesus. For some this recognition stands right at the beginning, and they were never in doubt about who He was. This was true of John and Andrew, John 1:39; of Philip, John 1:43-44; and of Nathanael, John 1:49. Peter's complete recognition seems to have come a little later as in Luke 5:8. For Thomas it did not come until near the end, after the resurrection of Jesus, when in a dramatic moment, recorded in John 20:28, he cried, "My Lord and my God!" The tragedy of Judas seems to have risen from the fact that he never did recognise the Deity of Jesus. He was probably attracted to Jesus personally and his real hopes concerning Him were political. It is not hard to believe that Judas was involved in the move to take Jesus by force and make Him king, nor that he was bitterly disappointed when Jesus thwarted this intention. Because Judas never recognised Jesus he never became one of that enduring, authentic apostleship. Nothing less than the recognition of the Deity of Jesus was sufficient to stand the shocks of a relationship with Him. Like that of the prophets the apostolic relationship was dependent upon a recognition of the Person of God in Jesus and of the voice of God in Hi; message. With this recognition they stepped into an eternal relationship, and for them Jesus was the One who had the words of eternal life.

      The ministry of Jesus in which they became involved with Him, was primarily a ministry of preaching. Jesus came to herald or proclaim the Kingdom of God (Mk. 1:14; Matt. 4:17; Luke 4:15). Other aspects of His ministry were incidental and subordinate to this. It is clear, for example, that Jesus did not come to heal. The ministry of healing was forced upon Him by His compassionate response to the present needs of people. The primacy of preaching is dramatically demonstrated in Mark 1:38, 39. Jesus had healed a great many people, working late into the night. Early the next morning He went off alone to pray. The apostles found Him later and told Him that everyone was searching for Him. He could have gone on healing them; but Jesus said, "Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out." He left sick people in the street to go away preaching. Healing them met their immediate needs, but proclaiming the Kingdom of God to them was directed toward meeting their ultimate, eternal needs. Jesus was neither a healer nor a philosopher. He was a messenger.

      Jesus repeatedly emphasised His function as a messenger. He was not the author of what He uttered,

      but, as He said in John 5:30, "I can do nothing on my own authority; as I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me." In John 7:16 He says, "My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me." "I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the Father taught me" (John 8:28) . This is the same sort of claim as that made by Micaiah: "As the Lord lives, what the Lord says to me, that I will speak." What he uttered was what He received directly from God.

      This was the source of His authority. It is striking that Jesus held no office that was recognised by men. He derived no authority from any official status, but we have striking examples of His authority. He called men with authority, Mark 1:17-20; He taught with authority, Mark 1:21-22; He acted with authority, commanding unclean spirits and they obeyed Him, Mark 1:23-27. This authority was derived from what He was in Himself, and what His message was in itself. He spoke with the authority of self-evident truth, because it was the voice of the Spirit of Truth it was felt to be true. He acted with the authority of Goodness constrained by love. He had the authority of God, partly, it is true, because of His unique relationship to God, but primarily in a relationship that He shared with the prophets, and that the apostles shared with Him. This is the authority that every minister of the Word of God should seek, for there is no ultimate reality or value in any other.

      No ministry could be more right than the ministry of Jesus, but the results were often disappointing, and sometimes extremely bad. Their involvement with Him meant that the apostles needed to leave all to follow Him. Jesus needed to warn would-be disciples, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head." They spent their last evening together in a borrowed room, and slept in the public gardens. When He did the obviously right thing in the synagogue, healing a man who had a withered hand, "The Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians, how to destroy him." The message was right, the work was good, but the results were bad. Again and again He experienced the violence of hardened hearts and the cruelty of wounded pride, until at length His insistence upon truth and goodness resulted in the crime and tragedy of Calvary. He suffered because He was right, because He was good, because He was the messenger of God.

      We may see these same principles in

III. THE MINISTRY OF THE APOSTLES.

      Luke wrote a second book that is called "Acts of Apostles", but, as often remarked, it could have been called, "Acts of the Holy Spirit." Jesus had said of the Spirit of Truth, "He dwells with you, and will be in you." After Pentecost the ministry of apostles was the expression of the Spirit of Truth in them.

      We ought to distinguish between three different expressions of the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts.

      The first of these was the baptism with the Holy Spirit which describes the coming of the Holy Spirit as Jesus had promised. This was an event in history. Throughout the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, Jesus promised that this event would take place. In Acts 1:5, He promised that it would take place in a few days--"Before many days you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit." This was ten days before Pentecost. There was a duplication of Pentecost in the house of Cornelius to show that Gentiles, as such,

were to be accepted along with Jews, and when Peter was explaining what had happened there he identified the experience with Pentecost. "As I began to speak the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as on us at the beginning" (Acts 11:15). There was something unique in these two occasions that made them different from all others. It was the coming of the Holy Spirit to establish a new kind of relationship. He came at a particular moment in time. It was an event in history.

      There is also in Acts the occurrence of spiritual gifts, or miraculous gifts of the Spirit. The context of these occurrences makes it clear that these were associated with the laying on of the hands of the apostles (Acts 8:17, 18, 19; Acts 19:6; 2 Tim. 1:6). Some have seen this as the endowment of the Christian ministry, and have sought some line of succession from the apostles so that special gifts may be imparted by the laying on of hands. There is no evidence of this succession in the New Testament, nor is there evidence of the imparting of real spiritual gifts in the history of the episcopate. Abilities that were immediately apparent followed the laying on of the apostles' hands, but no such abilities apparently follow the laying on of hands in the "apostolic succession." These miraculous gifts were given as signs of Divine authority upon the establishment of the New Covenant.

      There is a different use of the laying on of hands in Acts 13:2-3 and perhaps Acts 6:6, when the first missionaries were set apart for the special work to which the Holy Spirit had called them, and the seven were set apart to the work for which they were appointed. This act of setting apart has permanent value and meaning, but to regard the laying on hands as the means of bestowing spiritual gifts seems little less than resorting to magic.

      The worst aspect of ordination that is regarded as bestowing spiritual gifts is that it sees the Divine element in the ministry as superimposed whereas in truth its authentic authority is derived from a relationship in which the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit, is within a person. As Jesus had promised, the Spirit of Truth who was with them then was in them now. This is what is meant by the gift of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2:38. On three occasions Ezekiel repeats the Divine promise that He would put a new spirit in His people (Ezek. 11:19, 18:31, 36:26). The New Testament regards this as the only authentic Christian relationship. Later writers seldom quoted Jesus because the Spirit of Truth who was with them then was in them now. Paul thought every child of God should be personally led by the Spirit of God, Romans 8:14. He claimed, "We have the mind of Christ," 1 Cor. 2:16, and "that things that no eye has seen nor ear heard nor the heart of man conceived God had revealed to them through the Spirit" (1 Cor. 2:9-10) . "And we impart this," he wrote, "in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truth to those who possess the Spirit" (1 Cor. 2:13) .

      We believe that by virtue of their special, miraculous powers, the apostles were unique and spoke with infallible authority. We accept their writings as the Word of God; but the difference between their experience and that of other Christians is in degree rather than kind. They expected the Christians in Corinth, for example, to possess spiritual discernment, and to be taught and guided by the indwelling Spirit of Christ. That some of them were not showing their ability to recognise things of the Spirit was something to be deplored. It is assumed that the authentic messenger of God will recognise the voice of the Spirit of Truth. This recognition cannot be confined to an office, but is the basis of the true priesthood

of all believers. Moved by the Spirit of Truth deacons became evangelists, elders became preachers and teachers of the Word, while some apostles are never mentioned except in lists of names. Perhaps this means that they had not the clarity of spiritual recognition possessed by some others in "lower" ranks of the ministry. The apostle Paul seemed to be concerned with a constant care of this relationship. He suffered the loss of all things in order to know Christ and to keep the clarity of his vision.

      When New Testament people allowed the indwelling Spirit of Truth to find expression in their lives they were brought into that fellowship of suffering experienced by old Testament prophets and by Jesus Himself with the apostles. However, a new meaning is given to it. A new dimension is added. They did not simply endure persecution, but they used it. They embraced it as a means of spiritual discipline. It may never be necessary to accept persecution in fact, though it is difficult to see how it can be avoided with honour; but it is essential that every servant of the Spirit of Truth should accept it in principle. Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests and ministers have manses, but in order to belong to this succession of messengers of truth we need to be willing to have no place to lay our head. Without this sort of willingness we are all in danger of becoming false prophets like Ahab's four hundred. They knew exactly what Ahab wanted them to say, and because they were tactful men and valued their jobs they said just that. "Go up for the Lord will deliver it into the hand of the king." It was not hard for them to believe that what they said was true. Though it involved a deep inward dishonesty it was not a deliberate, conscious twisting of the known truth. Such men have not accepted persecution in principle and have become used to listening to the cautious voices of tact and diplomacy and self-seeking so that they mistake these for the voice of Truth itself.

      At the heart of any life that is prophetic, and every Christian is involved in the prophetic ministry, there is a great renunciation. Any person dedicated to giving Truth a voice will be ready to say with Micaiah, "As the Lord lives, what the Lord says to me, that I will speak." That was certainly not tactful. It cost him popularity, prosperity and comfort. It earned him loneliness, privation and prison. This is what the ministry meant to Jesus, and to the New Testament ministry, and we are distinctly told that we must accept all of this in principle in order to follow Him. The modern idea of comfortable conditions, flourishing and popular churches served by ministers who please everybody is foreign to the Bible. We are in real danger of obeying the demands of respectability rather than righteousness; heeding the voice of tact rather than the voice of truth; demanding comfort rather than accepting a Cross. We need to heed Peter after he had gained spiritual power through the discipline of suffering when he says, in 1 Peter 4:1, "Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same thought, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer by human passions but by the will of God."