Prophecy as a Burden
I have had my fair share of conversations with sincere but misguided individuals who claim that God has whispered his private counsel into their ears, and I’m always troubled by these claims.
For one thing, they make it impossible to engage the other person in reasonable conversation. If you happen to disagree with them, or have experienced life differently, debate, reasonable or otherwise, is impossible. You are arguing with a prophet after all, a mouthpiece of God, and when you debate omniscience, you always lose.
Secondly, I’m uncomfortable with these enthusiastic modern-day seers because they are so different from their biblical counterparts. Anyone eager to receive a prophecy has not carefully examined the life of Ezekiel, who was required to restrain his grief after the death of his wife, or Jeremiah, who was placed in the stocks for delivering his prophecies and vowed to quit, or Balaam, who wanted to profit (no pun intended) from delivering oracles against Israel but couldn’t.
Biblical prophets, for the most part, were devoted mouthpieces for the Lord, but they did not relish their gifts. This is evident in the very language they used to describe the miracle of prophecy. One of the most frequently used Hebrew terms for prophecy (massa), appearing twenty-seven times in the Old Testament, literally means “burden.” Most modern translations obscure the literal meaning of the word, opting for “prophecy” or “oracle,” but the King James Version renders it literally, prefacing the words of the prophets with a word signifying a heavy load to be born.
Gesenius argues the word is sometimes used in positive contexts, but Harris, Archer, and Waltke in the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament demonstrate convincingly that it denotes “prophetical speech of a threatening character… The contents of these prophecies consist exclusively of threatenings.” Shackleford explains that it conveys “a painful message.” Indeed, in every place, the word prefaces woes, threats, and corrections (cf. Isa. 13:1; 15:1; Nah. 1:1; Hab. 1:1; Lam. 2:14; et al.). Often, however, these oracles of dread are reserved for Israel’s enemies, so they could be looked at not so much as an announcement of doom upon the nations as a message of salvation to Israel.
Jeremiah uses the two senses of massa in an interesting wordplay in Jeremiah 23:33. He tells the people that when one of the prophets or priests critical of his prophecies mock him, asking, “What is the burden of the Lord?” they should respond, “You are the burden, and I will cast you off, declares the Lord.” In other words, Jeremiah’s bad news wasn’t the real burden; they were, and the Lord was ready to relieve himself of the unnecessary, cumbersome load.
Only Jesus through the gospel could turn the burden of the Lord on its head. “Come to me,” he said, “all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30). His way does involve commands, but they are commands to receive, to trust, to feast, to inherit. In the words of Bernhard Rothmann, “What can be lighter than a burden which unburdens us and a yoke which bears its bearer?”
Simon gives us the perfect picture of the nature of the burden of the gospel. As Christ collapsed under the weight of the instrument of his own execution, the Roman soldiers forced a bystander, Simon of Cyrene, to carry the Savior’s load. Simon had no plan that day to bear a cross; the prospect at first must have seemed at best inconvenient, more likely, despicable. But on top of the hill where he dropped his burden so the soldiers could nail Jesus to it, he discovered that the burden he bore was the greatest blessing he would ever know.
It is not in our nature to pray for burdens. God blesses us with the ones we need, and we find, to our surprise and delight, that they are lighter than any pleasure we might have chosen for ourselves.
I do not call my stories “burdens” because they compare to any degree with the prophecies of the Bible. They are obviously not inspired, nor have they been received by a miracle of divine revelation. But I’m interested in the lives of true prophets, men and women whose lives were complicated not in spite of, but because, God intervened. Their lives were complicated in beautiful ways so that their burdens became blessings, sorrow was turned into joy, and pain gave birth to redemption and new life. I humbly submit my stories to my readers with the hope that they might provide a small ray of light to lighten the load, maybe by sheer entertainment, maybe by insight, or, perhaps—dare I say it?—by bestowing on them peace and joy.
