ALL of the gifts of the Spirit, as wo have seen, are of vital importance to the church and its work. “Apostles” is, of course, the gift of first importance, for it has to do with first things. Second only to that of “apostles” is the gift of prophecy, the gift that has been apparently lost in the church. GoPH 36.1
When the sacred writers discuss these gifts they do not always put them in the order of their importance. There is one place, however, where Paul does this, and this is it: GoPH 36.2
“And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.” 1 Corinthians 12:28. GoPH 36.3
It is good to have the mind of the Spirit on this matter of the relative importance of the gifts. Left to our own judgment it is more than likely that we would have placed them in another order. The gift of prophecy is a gift of vital importance. We might not have known that, had the Spirit not made it plain. We might have thought that we were not losing much to be without the help of this gift. With this passage we know that the church would be losing, without this gift, something of inestimable value. GoPH 36.4
Nor is it likely that if we were left to arrange the gifts in the order of their importance, we would have put “ teachers” third. “Miracles” and “gifts of healings” would, no doubt, have struck us as of superior importance. But, in the mind of the Spirit, the gift of teaching, that wonderful, God-given faculty of imparting to others the very mind and truth of God, is of paramount importance; more important, indeed, than healing the sick or performing a miracle. Yes, it is good to have the mind of the Spirit here. GoPH 37.1
The gift of prophecy is primarily for the benefit of the church. GoPH 37.2
” Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not: but, prophesying serveth not for them that believe not, but for them which believe.” 1 Corinthians 14:22. GoPH 37.3
Conybeare puts this more concisely in his translation: “So that the gift of tongues is a sign given rather to unbelievers than to believers; whereas the gift of prophecy belongs to believers.” GoPH 37.4
This is the reason why the church possessing the gift of prophecy does not say much about it among unbelievers. The instruction brought by this gift is peculiarly and specifically for the church. The light it imparts may be given to the world and bring great blessing, but primarily its testimony is for the church itself. GoPH 38.1
Consider some of the benefits this gift has conferred on the church. In nearly every great movement of reform in the church this gift has supplied the leadership. This was the case in the great deliverance from Egypt, and it has been the case repeatedly since. GoPH 38.2
“By a prophet the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt, and by a prophet was he preserved.” Hosea 12:13. GoPH 38.3
Then, too, through the revelations made to those who have been permitted to exercise this gift, the future has been foretold. GoPH 38.4
” We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your hearts.” 2 Peter 1:19. GoPH 38.5
This certainly has been of great value and benefit to the church. GoPH 38.6
Above all, it has been through the operation of this gift that the Holy Bible has been given to the church, a benefit so great as to be beyond our power to estimate. A gifted Christian scholar and teacher has written this on the value of the Bible to the church and to the world: GoPH 39.1
“What, indeed, would the church be — what would we, as Christian men, be — without our inspired Bible? Many of us have, no doubt, read Jean Paul Richter’s vision of a dead Christ, and have shuddered at his pictures of the woe of a world from which its Christ has been stolen away. It would be a theme worthy of some like genius to portray for us the vision of a dead Bible, — the vision of what this world of ours would be, had there been no living word of God cast into its troubled waters with its voice of power, crying, ‘Peace! Be still!’ What does this Christian world of ours not owe to this Bible! And to this Bible conceived, not as a part of the world’s literature, — the literary product of the earliest years of the church; not as a book in which, by searching, we may find God and perchance somewhat of God’s will: but as the very word of God, instinct with divine life from the ‘In the beginning’ of Genesis to the ‘Amen’ of the Apocalypse, — breathed into by God, and breathing out God to every devout reader. It is because men have so thought of it that it has proved a leaven to leaven the whole lump of the world. We do not half realize what we owe to this book, thus trusted by men. We can never fully realize it. For we cannot, even in thought, unravel from this complex web of modern civilization all the threads from the Bible which have been woven into it, throughout the whole past, and now enter into its very fabric. And, thank God, much less can we ever untwine them in fact, and separate our modern life from all those Bible influences by which alone it is blessed, and sweetened, and made a life which men may live. GoPH 39.2
“Dr. Gardiner Spring published, years ago, a series of lectures in which he sought to take some account of the world’s obligations to the Bible, — tracing in turn the services it has rendered to religion, to morals, to social institutions, to civil and religious liberty, to the freedom of slaves, to the emancipation of woman and the sweetening of domestic life, to public and private beneficence, to literary and scientific progress, and the like. And Adolph Monod, in his own inimitable style, has done something to awaken us as individuals to what we owe to a fully trusted Bible, in the development of our character and religious life. In such matters, however, we can trust our imaginations better than our words, to remind us of the immensity of our debt. GoPH 40.1
” Let it suffice to say that to a plenarily inspired Bible, humbly trusted as such, we actually, and as a matter of fact, owe all that has blessed our lives with hopes of an im-mortality of bliss, and with the present fruition of the love of God in Christ. This is not an exaggeration. We may say that without a Bible we might have had Christ and all that He stands for to our souls. Let us not say that this might not have been possible. But neither let us forget that, in point of fact, it is to the Bible that we owe it that we know Christ and are found in Him. And may it not be fairly doubted whether you and I, — however it may have been with others, — would have had Christ had there been no Bible? We must not at any rate forget those nineteen Christian centuries which stretch between us and Christ, whose Christian light we would do much to blot out and sink in a dreadful darkness if we could blot out the Bible. Even with the Bible, and all that had come from the Bible to form Christian lives and inform a Christian literature, after a millennium and a half the darkness had grown so deep that a Reformation was necessary if Christian truth was to persist, — a Luther was necessary, raised up by God to rediscover the Bible and give it back to man. Suppose there had been no Bible for Luther to rediscover, and on the lines of which to refound the church, — and no Bible in the hearts of God’s saints and in the pages of Christian literature, persisting through those darker ages to prepare a Luther to rediscover it? GoPH 41.1
“Though Christ had come into the world and had lived and died for us, might it not be to us, — you and me, I mean, who are not learned historians but simple men and women, —might it not be to us as though He had not been? Or, if some faint echo of a Son of God offering salvation to men could still be faintly heard even by such dull ears as ours, sounding down the ages, who would have ears to catch the fullness of the message of free grace which He brought into the world? Who could assure our doubting souls that it was not all a pleasant dream? Who could cleanse the message from the ever-gathering corruptions of the multiplying years? No: whatever might possibly have been had there been no Bible, it is actually to the Bible that you and I owe it that we have a Christ,—a Christ to love, to trust, and to follow, a Christ without us the ground of our salvation, a Christ within us the hope of glory.”—” Revelation and Inspiration,” pp. 7173, by B. B. Warfield. GoPH 42.1
And this blessed Book, with its comfort and hope, has come to us through the opera-tion of the gift of prophecy. GoPH 43.1
“For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” 2 Peter 1:21. GoPH 43.2
Surely, we cannot afford to let this precious gift of prophecy go, or get along without its divine instruction and leadership. We must learn how it has come about that this gift has been removed from the church, why it has not been manifested as constantly as some of the other gifts. If this is due to some failure or some transgression on the part of the church, for which God has removed this gift, let us learn what it is, and correct it. The church of Christ needs the benefit of this gift more today, perhaps, than ever before. GoPH 43.3