Oracles of God

“… whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God.”

Assuming we take the word “speaks” to mean “addresses the congregation when believers gather”, it should be evident Peter wrote these instructions to Christians exercising the spiritual gift of teaching rather than the spiritual gift of prophecy, though we know both were present among members of the first century church.

The reasons for this are twofold.

Speaking = Teaching

First, genuine prophets required no instruction to speak the oracles of God. In fact, they could not do otherwise, as Balaam once confessed to the king of Moab, despite great financial motivation to prophesy something more pleasing to his audience than the words of God. He complained, “Did I not tell you, ‘All that the Lord says, that I must do’?” Genuine prophets did not interpret or paraphrase. They said, “Thus saith the Lord” and launched into God’s latest message, whether or not they fully understood it themselves. Speakers who held themselves out to be prophets while composing a message in their own words were not real prophets at all.

Second, Peter wrote these words in what conservative scholars believe to be one of the last five books of the New Testament. As with every book of the New Testament written AD65 or later, 1 Peter contains precisely zero explicit references to the spiritual gift of prophecy or its use in the local church, a subject explored in greater detail here. (It’s also solid circumstantial evidence the prophetic gift was in the process of passing away, just as Paul had taught believers to expect over a decade earlier.)

So then, not only did Peter have no need to tell prophets in the local church how to prophesy, it’s also likely there were few prophets left to whom he might give instruction even if they required it. He was speaking to gifted teachers, men who had opportunity to address the gathered saints, just as many still do today. His instructions apply to any believer who studies the word of God and tries to communicate it in public — be he itinerant, resident or layman, and whether he speaks in a church building, a rented school, or to a few couples gathered for a home Bible study. (Most first century churches met in homes.)

Aspiration and Reality

When we apply this verse to modern church speakers, you may be forgiven for quietly muttering in your beards that the words “oracles of God” are frequently more aspiration than reality. I tend to agree. Our formats, traditions and assumptions work against Spirit-driven ministry. Our speakers rarely get where we would like to, myself included.

Two different men spoke at a church I visited a few Sundays back, though they probably spoke longer and more formally than anyone would have in first century churches, with fewer interruptions and in the absence of discussion, as we tend to do these days. The format gave both speakers plenty of opportunity to go astray if either had been so inclined. Neither did, at least that I noticed. Both messages had obviously involved study, preparation and forethought. Both speakers quoted scripture to make their points. Both sermons, I’m sure, were buttressed with prayer and dependence on the Lord.

I’m not sure we ever hit “oracles of God” level in Sunday preaching, but one message came notably closer than the other. That’s my subjective opinion, of course, but as I’ve been writing and speaking publicly going on forty years now, I am pretty confident in its accuracy.

In the absence of the prophetic gift, modern attempts to teach the Bible have developed a rough form stolen from the essay style taught by secular schoolteachers beginning around fifth grade, with an introduction, a conclusion, and a number of points in between through which the speaker seeks to establish his case. We feel it necessary to have a main point, to make it to the best of the speaker’s ability, then to apply it to the lives of those present to give them something to take home, ponder and perhaps practice. Both these sermons did in fact have a main point and practical corollary or two, though that may have been in the eye of the beholder. But it’s arguable such a structure may not aid in “speaking the oracles of God”. Few of the messages we read in the New Testament follow that pattern.

Approaching the Ideal

Some messages are closer to the scriptural ideal than others. That should not be a contentious claim, and it remains true even if the audience that hears them is ill-equipped to judge the spiritual value of one over the other. If this were not the case, nobody would ever replace a pastor or rebook one speaker at the expense of another. Itinerant Bible teachers would all have lists of future bookings approximately the same length, and no family would ever have preacher for lunch at Sunday dinner.

Speaking anything approximating an “oracle of God” may be a function of prayer, meditation, time in the word, familiarity with all of scripture, or spiritual maturity, but that doesn’t mean a young man cannot come to the platform in harmony with the mind of the Lord and speak a word that is just right for the moment. Age and experience are good things, but they can also make you overconfident or blasé about the important task you are undertaking for the Head of the Church and your fellow members of his body. You can easily find yourself checking boxes rather than fighting a spiritual battle.

How to Be Oracular

I will not presume to be the final authority on the quality of other men’s ministry, but let me wrap up with a short list of qualities that characterize the oracles of God:

1/ An Oracle is Brief

The word translated “oracles” is logion, which is what is called a Greek diminutive. A logion is a literally a “little word”. Oracles are clear, brief and to the point. In today’s environment, an “oracle of God” will finish with time to spare. You will not find yourself looking at your watch twenty minutes after the appointed hour wondering if the speaker will ever stop.

Repetition for clarity is fine. Repetition because you haven’t prepared, have run out of things to say, can’t self-edit or can’t distinguish an important spiritual point from an aside or an anecdote … these things are not fine. They make your “little word” not so little: bloated, tedious and easy to ignore, especially if you are running late. I know the apostle Paul at least once spoke until midnight. In response, I should point out: (1) he was an apostle; (2) the New Testament wasn’t written yet, so the church in Troas could not get his teaching anywhere else; (3) he was leaving the next day, so there was some urgency to his message; (4) technically, he probably spoke multiple “oracles” that night; and (5) he killed somebody in the process. In short, that particular message is probably not one we should strive to emulate on a Sunday morning.

2/ An Oracle Originates with God

This might be too obvious to state, except that so many modern messages do not originate with God; rather, they have a few of his more convenient words grafted on after the fact. That’s not to say they are error or heresy; they are simply the product of a human being having an idea he’d like to communicate and using proof texts to make his point. They are products of logic, reason and intellect, rather than arising organically from the scripture. Speakers who prefer expositing a text are less inclined to introduce their own ideas than speakers who choose topics and grab verses from here, there and everywhere to make their cases, some of which may be relevant, and many of which, ripped out of their contexts, are manifestly not.

An oracle of God is “of God”. It originates in the Spirit, not in the flesh. (I’m not using “flesh” in the wicked sense, but in the sense of the natural man using intellect, reason and logic.) It works like this: A message prepared from human reasoning and propped up by proof texts falls apart entirely if you demonstrate the speaker has misused the texts, pulled them out of context, failed to do his due diligence on the language, freighted them with systematic theology or the like. An oracle of God will not fail like that. It is an idea that originated in God, so the whole of scripture will testify to it. The speaker may only call on “two or three witnesses”, as Paul often did, to make his case for the validity of the principle he is teaching, but if you challenge him, he could reel off ten more instances from scripture where the same truth is taught. He has marinated himself in the Word, and has become (on his best days) merely a conduit for that word to express itself to others.

3/ An Oracle is Fundamental

If we look at how the New Testament writers use “oracle”, we find Stephen referring to the “living oracles” of Sinai, God’s law, the fundamentals of Judaism. Paul is probably using the word the same way when he writes that the Jews were “entrusted with the oracles of God”. By way of contrast, the author of Hebrews seems to be referring to the fundamentals of the Christian faith when he writes, “You need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God”. The Hebrews to whom he wrote were surely capable of teaching the basic principles of Judaism. Their blind spot concerned the centrality of Christ in every aspect of the Old Testament, making it hard to teach them about the Melchizedek priesthood and other meaty doctrines, truths that had come not through the Torah but through the apostles.

Either way, “oracle” refers to that which is firmly grounded in divine revelation. It is not esoteric, speculative, sensational or novel. That doesn’t mean a man speaking as one who speaks oracles of God is uninteresting or has nothing new to say, but that he unlocks existing truths for his audience that may have previously eluded them. Truths get lost from time to time, and it takes a man speaking like an oracle to bring those truths back to the church’s attention. Those who hear a man speak as one who speaks oracles go away reminded of the sufficiency, finality and consistency of the scriptures in a fresh way. You will hear remarks after the message like “That makes so much sense” or “It all ties together, doesn’t it?” or “I always wondered why Paul said X rather than Y; now I understand” or “So that’s what Ezekiel is talking about in chapter 15.”

4/ An Oracle is Alive

Those who speak as one who speaks oracles invest deeply in their studies and are noticeably energized by them. The don’t go to the word of God because they have a date on the calendar by which a message must be prepared, but because they are in the habit of going there every day whether they are speaking or not. They go there because they must; the word of God is their food and drink, their energy and substance, their joy and perpetual occupation. If left to their own devices to find a topic to preach on, they have not one but ten.

Stephen spoke of “living oracles”, and you only have to read Psalm 119 to see that the law of God was intended to stir and uplift the soul, not just to order a man’s walk before God. Oracles are charged with the life of God. Nobody speaking like an oracle leaves you yawning in indifference unless there is something spiritually wrong with you. Likewise, nobody standing on a platform reeling off tired evangelical tropes you’ve heard 1,000 times is speaking like an oracle. It’s possible for a speaker to be passionate without having much to say, but it’s not possible for a man speaking like an oracle to sound uninterested in his own subject matter.