The Power of His Resurrection # 24

Elisha and the Sons of the Prophets (continued)

Looked at naturally, all those who have known and lived on the principle of the risen life of the Lord Jesus would appear a very poor lot indeed. If you could gather all the men and the women of this New Testament dispensation who have lived wholly upon that principle of life triumphant over death, and you looked at them as men look at people, you would say: "That is a poor crowd." Take Paul! Some people would get a big surprise if they could see Paul as he was. We have all the romance of nearly two thousand years of the effect of Paul's ministry. We have all this volume of literature on Paul, his life, and letters, and work.  If Paul were able to meet us as he was then, and we had no spiritual perception, but simply saw him as a man, would should say: "Is this the man who created all this literature, and caused all this talk, who has stirred the world to its very depths for nearly two thousand years? I do not see anything in him!" But there is a deeper side. So you ask him: "Paul, did you know all the way through your life, when you were in this great work, such resurrection power that you never had an ache or a pain, and never felt tired, and never know what it was to be depressed, to feel fears, to be anxious?" He would answer: "I knew them all as few men have known them, fightings without and fears within. I knew what depression was; I knew what it was to be tempted to doubt; I knew what it was to go through dark patches where ultimate questions arose; I knew what it was to despair of life." We may take it that there were many, many occasions when Paul was not conscious pre-eminently of the power of His resurrection, and yet he was living on it, and that accounted for everything.

That what is real and that of which we are conscious may be two different things. All that we know at times is that we go on in spite of ourselves. What is it that carries us on? It is that other "something" that is deeper than thought, deeper than understanding, deeper than feeling; it is the Lord going on in us.

The sons of the prophets made room for death by opening the door for human evidence, proof through the senses. That is spiritual immaturity. They will never graduate to the full prophetic ministry, until that which is true of Elisha has become true of them. Let us recognize that if Elisha comes out of Jordan, has his roots in Calvary, and, therefore, is the embodiment of the meaning of the Cross, then for these sons of the prophets, and spiritually for us, he points to the absolute necessity for the natural mind going to the Cross before ever we can know the risen life in Christ. They would seek to be justified by their works, and so they scoured the mountains and the valleys. They would have been justified if they had taken the spiritual position and believed.

Turn to chapter 4:38-41. Here we see that these sons of the prophets went out to gather herbs for a meal, and when they fond some wild gourds, and cast them into the pot, it almost meant disaster. The lesson is a simple and clear one. It is again the coming in of the element of death: "...there is death in the pot." Death comes in here amongst the sons of the prophets along the line of a lack of discrimination in what was suitable to the maintaining of the spiritual life. There is a derth in the land, the very life of the Lord's people is endangered, imperiled. And so that which is necessary for the sustenance and the maintenance of life, is the primary issue. These men (note again) are in preparation for spiritual ministry, and one thing which will most certainly arise in their ministry, and a primary thing, will be the question of what is suitable for the spiritual life of the people of God. And the one thing that they will need in the fulfillment of that ministry is to have discrimination. Moreover, they are going to fulfill their ministry in times of sore need and pressure; for the prophets came up, as we have seen, in connection with the state of spiritual declension. Prophetic ministry is to be exercised mainly in times when the order of God in its fullness and clearness is not obtaining, when thing have swung away from the Lord's full thought, and the glory of the heavenly order is no longer existent. There will be, therefore, pressure and difficulty in the times when the prophets fulfill their ministry. The people will be in a state of great spiritual need, and the prophets will have to be in a position to say what it is that is suited to that need.

Pass your eye forward, and you will see the clash between the true and the false prophet. Certain false prophets prophesied the things which were pleasing for popularity's sake; things that they were expected to say; things that they would get reward for saying. And so they prophesied smooth things, and these things were death. The true prophet had to withstand the false, and prophesy the things which very often were not popular and acceptable. These sons of the prophets were preparing for their spiritual ministry, and that ministry was to be the ministry of life triumphant over death. And a great factor in such ministry is ability to discriminate between what is of life and what is of death, what is living and what is dead.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 25)