Prophetic Silence
Prophetic Silence
"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven...a time to be silent and a time to speak." (Ecclesiastes 3.1 and 7)
"It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young. Let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him." (Lamentations 3.27-28)
I simply will not believe that God is saying all that prophetic website after prophetic website proposes and reports today. There is too much noise; there is not enough silence.
Silence is a singular proof of the genuinely prophetic person.
"I will make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth so that you will be silent and unable to rebuke them, though they are a rebellious house. But when I speak to you, I will open your mouth..." (Ezekiel 3.26-27)
"My strength is dried up like a potsherd (broken piece of earthenware), and My tongue sticks to the roof of My Mouth...Dogs have surrounded Me...they have pierced My hands and My feet." (Psalm 22.15-16)
"But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities...He was oppressed and afflicted, and yet He did not open His mouth; He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth." (Isaiah 53.5 and 7)
What meaneth such silence in our yackety-yack Church, and our ruined, clamorous world?
"But when I was silent and still, not even saying anything good, my anguish increased. My heart grew hot within me, and as I meditated, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue." (Psalm 39.2-3)
"So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name, His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot." (Jeremiah 20.8-9)
It is God who shuts the prophet's mouth. He cancels the seer's speaking engagements. Not the "corporate" preachers, who foolishly believe that they've successfully marginalised and smothered the inconvenient voice.
The genuine prophet is regularly shutdown and left alone.
"Then the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet. He spoke to me and said, 'Go, shut yourself inside your house. And you, son of man, they will tie with ropes; you will be bound so that you cannot go out among the people.' " (Ezekiel 3.24-25)
For in solitude and silence, God's word enters and begins burning with ever-increasing heat. Then it bursts out...not merely to warm a little or enlighten a tad. No! It springs forth to melt rock-hard hearts and destroy the vainglorious ziggurats of men...setting fire to the very air itself!
Such prophets might speak only once...but the fire lit will burn until The Day.
"I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled." (Luke 12.49)
"If anyone tries to harm them (My two witnesses), fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies." (Revelation 11.5)
The prophet's heart is the blast-furnace of the Lord. In silence and solitude he is first-of-all smelted and refined in temperatures far greater than his hearers will ever have to bear. Then he may, in due season, speak a word worthy of the Saviour who sends it, and His Bride who must be wounded and then healed by it.
"The truth is formed in silence and work and suffering, with which we become true. But we interfere with God's work by talking too much about ourselves - even telling Him what we ought to be - advising Him how to make us perfect and listening for His voice to answer us with approval. We soon grow impatient and turn aside from the silence that disturbs us (the silence in which His work can best be done) and invent the answer and the approval, which will never come.
"SILENCE, THEN, IS THE ADORATION OF HIS TRUTH." (Thomas Merton, Trappist hermit, Kentucky 1915-68)
