Sword & Trowel 2016: Issue 1


 In the 1980s a leading preacher of the charismatic world declared


that the teaching of the Bible is not enough. This would never win a community by itself. You needed alongside it what he called ‘a power encounter’. He claimed (wrongly) that whenever the Lord Jesus Christ preached (or the apostles later) a miracle was also worked. Only miracles would make people listen. You must, he insisted, be able to raise the dead, or to look at people and know exactly what their sins were, and tell them. He would tell the story of how he would sit next to someone on a flight, and turn and tell that person all his or her worst sins. I cannot know whether he made these stories up or whether he was a sadly deluded man, but he had numerous accounts like this. And he was copied widely. There could be no Gospel impact without such clairvoyance or miraculous insights.


Essence of the prophetic call If we do not have a strong sense of


the power and majesty and knowl- edge of God, then we soon imagine we need something more than the Word and the Spirit. What can we think of? What can we do that will dazzle and move people, causing them to listen to us, and to come to us? Human schemes and gimmicks will be devised to help God out. Without the substance of Ezekiel’s vision, our faith will not be enough to weather the ungodliness and hostility of our age. We must have the all-important sense of God and of his power and holiness and all-seeing eye. So much of the evangelical world


page 34 When God Commissions


has lost its vision of God, and become frightened that if we focus on preaching the Word, we will make no great impact. Traditional biblical methods must therefore be overthrown. Ezekiel 1 tells us of God’s means of ensuring that Ezekiel would remain absolutely faithful to the calling, message and pattern of operation that he would receive. This was the essence of the prophetic call. The very last verse of Ezekiel 1


reads: ‘As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.’ Does this not remind us of the


words of the apostle John in Revela- tion 1, ‘And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead’? Ezekiel fell upon his face and heard the voice of Christ, the pre-incarnate Christ, speaking to him. That is what we need, the voice of the Lord through the Word, so applied to our hearts and minds by the Spirit that we have the deepest possible realisation of the glory, power, holiness, knowledge and infallibility of God, driving us to proclamation, witness and service, and imparting to us utmost trust in him. We will not then feel the slight- est taste for or need of the flimsy and incongruous expedients of contemporary worship, worldly at- tractions, entertainment-style services or any other invention proposed by those who have never tasted an Ezekieline call.


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