Lately, I’ve been noticing how the evangelical emphasis on salvation can come at the expense of any meaningful discussion of sanctification.
I see it everywhere I go: Christian radio and media, leaders who hold correct doctrinal beliefs but live abhorrent lives, personal testimonies, even the texts chosen for our favorite sermons.
Rebecca Johnson
Broadly speaking, white evangelical churches don’t preach from the prophetic books of the Bible. We love the Gospels. We love Paul. Even Revelation can be wielded to good purpose when the need arises. But I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard a church preach all the way through a book of prophecy.
Outside of our favorite Christmas and Easter texts, we avoid the prophets like the plague.
In her brilliant work The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior makes the case that evangelicals understand the world through the lens of conversion, a mode of thinking that can morph into an all-too-neatly-packaged narrative of “I was a sinner. Then I met Jesus. Now I am saved.”
“The prophetic books offer a necessary course correction, if we’ll have the courage to study them.”
This narrative is linear, black and white, and often obscures the truth. While a defining encounter with the risen Christ is a crucial part of one’s spiritual story, focusing our cultural attention solely on the clear “lost vs. found” dichotomy can become dangerous.
We run the risk of sidelining sanctification, and we may even ignore the need for repeated repentance in the believer’s life. Idolizing a singular moment in the past where I was made right with God can run the risk of anesthetizing me to the ways I need to get right with God today. The prophetic books offer a necessary course correction, if we’ll have the courage to study them.
On one hand, I understand our aversion to Old Testament books of prophecy. The imagery can be disturbing, confusing and foreign to us. The texts address nations and places and people we’ve never heard of. The historical context requires us to learn about cultures that seem irrelevant to our own.
And let’s face it: The prophets themselves are oddballs at best, serious “Daniel Downers” at worst. In an era of seeker-sensitive church services that pride themselves on making the gospel accessible and relevant, there are few types of biblical literature less accessible and seemingly relevant to the unchurched than prophecy. It doesn’t lend itself to three alliterative application points and an invitation. So we skip it.
And yet, perhaps the jarring words of these ancient truth tellers are desperately needed among us here and now. Over and over, the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah remind God’s people that God’s judgement begins with them and that they will be judged on the basis of their justice.
In these texts, “justice” and “righteousness” are not spiritual abstracts. They are tangible economic and political realities: promoting the cause of those forgotten in our culture (Jeremiah 5:28), sharing food and clothing with the hungry (Isaiah 58:7), fair lending practices (Ezekiel 18:8), establishing asylum cities (Deuteronomy 19:3). When we use prophetic texts as the measure of what it means to be a Christian nation, it is easier to see (and turn from) the ways in which we fall woefully short.
“Turning from our collective shortcomings is a major theme of prophetic literature.”
In fact, turning from our collective shortcomings is a major theme of prophetic literature. Time and again, the prophets call the people of God to repent for equally tangible economic and political sins: Courts that twist justice in favor of the rich (Amos 5:12); burdensome taxes on those least able to pay them (Amos 5: 11); arrogance, excess and apathy toward the suffering of others (Ezekiel 16:49); mistreatment of foreigners and systematically denying them due process (Ezekiel 22:29); exploitative real estate practices (Deuteronomy 27:17); reliance on a system constructed from oppression and deceit (Isaiah 30:12); price gouging and predatory lending (Amos 8:5-6); religious practice that turns a blind eye to uncomfortable truth (Isaiah 30: 10-11); self-aggrandizing preachers (Jeremiah 5:31); leadership that refuses to address systemic dysfunction (Jeremiah 8:11); putting hope in militarism (Isaiah 30:2).
Reading the prophets sends an unpleasant shiver of recognition down my spine. I’m always struck by the tone that the voice of the Lord takes in these texts. God speaks through God’s prophets in a voice that demands accountability: “The Lord takes his place in court; he rises to judge the people. … ‘What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?’ declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty.”
I get the sense the Lord isn’t just asking a rhetorical question but actually expects an answer. We will give a reckoning one day for how our nation has treated the “least of these.” If the prophets are any indication, we won’t be let off the hook even if indeed we are “God’s chosen people.” If anything, we will be held to a higher account than those who do not claim to act in God’s name (Amos 3:2).
Maybe we don’t study the prophets because they scare us.
But there is encouragement to be found in these texts as well. Even in the midst of wickedness and dysfunction and judgment, God longs to be gracious. If our sins were beyond saving, why would God bother to send the prophets at all? These books full of terror and violence are poetic invitations to that most Christian of spiritual practices, repentance.
Turn! Repent! Clean house! Put away evil and do good! Each warning is an invitation to change and a reminder of the mercy of God, who desires that the people who bear God’s name become ministers of reconciliation, sowing the seeds of the kingdom of God in ordinary places with extraordinary love.
In order to embody the kind of just and righteous community God wants us to be, those of us who call ourselves Christians must do some soul searching and, yes, repentance. We must submit ourselves to the scalpel of Scripture and trust that God will amputate only those parts of our identities, beliefs and institutions that have become necrotic, so we may flourish.
It is only when we are chastened, repent and begin to put our own house in order that we can work for the flourishing of the nation in which we are exiled (Jeremiah 29). I praise God for the gift of salvation, for the conversion that happens in a moment and endures for eternity. I also praise God for the gift of sanctification, for daily repentance and repentance and repentance, that slowly I may become holy as God is holy.
And I praise God for the weird and wonderful prophetic texts that show us how this path has been walked before and how we may walk it again in such a time as this.
Rebecca Johnson has been an educator across three states in both public and private schools. She currently is a member of a Baptist church in Northern Oklahoma where she serves with her husband, Matt, in young adult ministry.