The First Prophet: Abel - Part 3

God's experience of Time is unique among all beings. It is not that He created Time and set it in motion, nor that Time exists within Him - it is none of these global concerns. It was in God's wisdom to reduce Himself to Time, to bind Himself to it, to live it, for it to affect His Being, and for Him to be submerged in time in the flesh of Jesus the Christ. The Most High has made Himself the Most Low: He took the very nature of a creature and a servant and limited Himself whilst being Eternal and Omnipresent. Through this impossible possibility we glimpse the heart of God.

He is Everywhere in Time, at once. A thousand years is a day for Him, and what seems distant in human history for Him is still keen and fresh - as if it happened yesterday. For Him, History is Now; it ever impinges upon the present. He sees the blow that fells Abel, the blood that drips into the soil, the stain it leaves, feels Abel's cold cheek and looks over the flocks that no longer have a shepherd. The instrument that wrought this cruel act lies in the dirt: the implement Abel used to slaughter the lambs for his sacrifice, the very sacrifice that sowed the discord that produced this fratricide. His blood still "speaks"; it cries for justice. Our Lord never forgets.

The pronouncements of Woe against the Pharisees in Luke 11 and Matthew 23 clearly show the pain Our Lord experienced over the murder of Abel: the trauma, the hurt, the suffering, the delight in Abel's humble offering. He was privy to Abel and Cain's last conversation. The greatest hurt party of all was the Lord. This is no parable or allegory for Our Lord; it is a tragedy that grieves His heart to this day. The sufferings of God started well before His earthly life. Unless we dwell here, unless our heart be like that soil that absorbed Abel's blood and soak in the unresolved issues and indictments and griefs of God's own heart, how will we see as God sees? How will we feel as God feels? How could we intercede for our own families, for warring nations and tribes, and for divided communities? Unless we call Abel our brother, how could we ever mourn with God and share in the fellowship of His sufferings? How could we ever stay our own hand when it wants to rise up against our righteous little brother? We must recoil in horror at the thought; if only we could hit 'rewind' and take the Lord's rebuke to heart before we hurt our brother; we could write a different story that would gladden the heart of God, and maybe make the sacrifice of Abel more sweet. Lead little Abel into the field and ask his advice about how his sacrifice was acceptable to God and ours was not. For indeed, the sacrifices of God are a humble and contrite spirit, and Abel was that meek and lowly fellow; Cain was not. You see, we are Cain before we can become Abel; and Abel before we can become anything like God.

The First Prophet: Abel - Part 2

Quite naturally we associate prophets with prophecy.
A prophet must therefore prophesy - No!
It is about actions and words - No!

Abel, the first prophet, has not one recorded word in Genesis. Not one speaking is attributed to him. He has no words. There is no prophecy . . . but he 'speaks'. And it is his blood(s) that speak(s): the testimony of his life - not an action bolted on to the spiritual life like a once-in-a-moment spiritual gift. The message is him; without guidance, he has intuited the requirement of God. He sees the state of the three individuals around him (Adam, Eve and Cain) and he instinctively knows the demand of God. The Law of God is written upon his heart. His wordlessness is not by accident, not some freak of a concise and sparse narrative style, but the specific design of God. His life, his action by faith and his murder IS the prophecy. His life is the parchment upon which God writes. The irony escapes neither us nor God Himself; it has always been the blood that seeps and speaks, that trickles - the life given in death, the prophet that speaks without words. And in a sense Abel prophesies the treatment of every prophet that came after him - even Jesus Himself, especially Jesus Himself. A prophet isn't a prophet unless he dies, unless his word is flesh, unless he is mistreated by those closest to him. Abel is the complete prophet and he is unacknowledged as one. Even amongst prophets he is hidden and of 'no account'. Thus the character and disposition of the Prophet is not found in words but in the actions of faith when there is no Law and no guidance.

The First Prophet: Abel - Part 1

This is the very seed and beginning of what it means to be truely prophetic.  No matter what we think of the Prophet or the Prophetic, we must deal with its inception in the bloodline of humanity. Here, it starts with Abel, and the first expression of anything in scripture is the anchor for anything that follows (Matthew 24:34-35). Take heed if you wish to understand the 'Prophetic'. The Prophet comes first before the Prophetic, from which it derives its nature and name. To be sure, the Prophet always comes first before the Prophetic: the noun - then the adjective; the Person - then the People. The whole house, the whole Nave and Ark rest upon such men who are laid in the dirt . . . and here is the deepest of them, the lowliest of them, the first of them. LISTEN! He still speaks. And the prophet can never speak unless it is by "the blood".

Born to an avaricious woman, who kept a superficial faith despite seeing the Lord God face-to-face, Abel was the younger of two bothers who may have been inconsequential to his mother - given his name: breath, vapour, vanity, emptiness, transitory . . . one might even add "pointless". A second labour for Eve could not have been easy, and no doubt the novelty of bearing another man had worn thin. Could Eve's naming of Abel (she named Cain) truely reflect her state of mind, that the burden of life on earth was exhausting? Did this affect how she saw her weaker son? If so, was it that Cain picked up on this? That from Cain's mother Cain absorbed - from young - the entitlement and right to possess and to have. To this point, I doubt Eve experienced pain like this and the words of the Lord God would have echoed sourly in her ears: "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children." (Genesis 3:16) Was her heart barren and empty for her younger son? Indeed, she had the fine, strong Cain; why would she need another? It was not until Abel's untimely and cruel removal would her heart be provoked to mourn for her son, but too late. Abel's evident weakness at birth belied his strength, yet provoked Eve's disgust and contempt for the first weak human on earth; Adam and Cain were magnificent specimens of physical humanity. Eve relished the physical; she could see little else. The breath that she thought so fleeting that would soon evaporate was the very stuff of life itself.

It is into and from such situations that a prophet is born: whether in family, community or national estrangement; whether in self-doubt or ideological barrenness. He is given into such circumstances as an unacknowledged gift, and out of those circumstances is he formed. He is the goodness that comes out of the cradle of sin, totally ignorant of his effect on those around him. Even his mother considers abandoning him for the pain he inadvertantly inflicts upon her. He is wanted by no one. This, and this alone is the hallmark of the Prophet: complete and utter weakness.

How we know what is in the heart

God brings us to the end of our strength, to the end of our joy, to the end of our resources, to the end of self.

Why?

To know what is in our heart. He pours us out until we are empty, until he reaches the dregs, the rotting detritus left at the bottom that should have been sieved long ago (Deut 8:1-5). A thing is not known to be in your heart until it comes out through the mouth or the hands, for the heart is hidden and deceitful (Jer 17:9); it must be drawn out by circumstance so that it can be seen. You need to see yourself in the mirror of this trial so you are confronted by your own heart. How else can we be disciples unless we are disciplined? God is making us his sons, we are not just sons by birth but by upbringing as well and what son is not disciplined. We are apt to forget that in the midst of the trial our feet did not swell and our clothes did not wear out. (v4)

We are brought into the desert to eat the manna from heaven, to depend entirely upon his word, to know that every blessing is from His hand and not ours, to make you dependent upon him - not your strength, your wits, your skill, your ingenuity: these things come from a man's pride. We are often interested in what is at the end of the journey rather than the journey itself, we cannot wait to get there but you have to isolated, your are on your honeymoon with your beloved. He needs to snap the ties of Egypt and the lust for the blessings of the Promised Land, that you will be dependent upon Him and only Him. He leads us out that we might be led-in once more; He finds what is in our heart so that we would know Him in our heart, and there the convenant is made from one heart to the other, so that we are not just sons by blood but sons in actuality. God is becoming our Father in a way we have never seen before. It would not be enough for one circumstance to expose out heart; the human soul is equipped enough to survive one night trudging through the desert and the Red Sea; one event in public with drama does not make a man and does not expose a man to God. Years of battering and daily weathering only denudes our pride until we come to the end of our tether; 40 years in the desert will do this; daily drudgery in the small things of life is where a disciple is born. Faithfulness and joy in obscurity because you are with Him are what really sustains you. Then you are led by the hand out of the wilderness by the one you truly love (Psa 77:20).

(Based upon, in part, on Oswald Chambers "My Utmost for His Highest", 21st October, Direction by Impulse)