Killing the Prophets

2 Chronicles 24:17-24
Acts 7:51-60

God created human beings with the ability to communicate. I recently saw a video on YouTube of diapered twins yammering away at one another in their own language. They clearly understood one another. One lifted his foot and pointed to his foot that was missing a sock. They seemed to have found it a reason for great hilarity. I could not help but join in the laughter as well. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY

Scripture points out to us that God gave us this ability to communicate because he himself wants to communicate with us. We are told that before the Fall, God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden. You get the sense of easy dialogue and sharing. We all love the old hymn that says “And he walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own.”

After the Fall God communicates through the prophets. He calls Moses to the mountaintop and explains to him the kind of community he is longing for his people to be. Throughout the Old Testament every time the people have strayed he sends someone to give the people God’s word, calling them back from disaster to redemption. It is never God who fails to make the attempt at communication. Over and over again, the people have rejected the prophets and declined to hear what God has to say. Jesus tells the parable of the rich man in hell wanting God to send someone to his house to warn his family about what happens when you live it up, rejecting God. He is told that if his family has not already paid attention to the law and the prophets it is unlikely that they will listen to anyone new. We are also told that since people refused to listen to the prophets, God sent his own Son to be the Word. The world’s answer to this wonderful form of communication was crucifixion. You would think that this would be the end of God’s desire to communicate, yet he goes one step further to send the Holy Spirit to speak directly in and to our own spirits. The Holy Spirit continually reaches out in a multitude of ways. It is we who refuse to hear and reject the word.
2 Chronicles, 24:18b-19, tells that the anger of the Lord came upon Judah. Although the Lord sent prophets to the people to bring them back to him, and though they testified against them [the false religious practices], they would not listen. God did not fail to keep trying. He sent his Spirit upon Zechariah, the king’s son, who spoke the word of the Lord but they killed him as well.(Sound familiar?) In the Acts reading, Stephen boldly tells his listener: “You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him.” And so, of course, they stoned Stephen.

God communicates. We stop up our ears. We grow hard. We grow rebellious. We "kill the prophets". We reject the Word that the Spirit longs to communicate. God weeps. And finally God judges.