NOTES for Jer 1:9

Prophetic experience is the experience of direct revelation. When God tells a prophet that He has put His words into his mouth, the words of God must be understood literally. The uniqueness of prophetic experience lies precisely in the fact that the prophet quite literally hears the voice of God and bears witness to what he has heard.

But this does not mean that God uses His prophets solely as a mouthpiece. The experience of a prophet is far from the mediumism that was so popular in educated circles at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A medium really does become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the forces that use him: it is no accident that during a seance a medium is always in a trance and afterward does not remember what he said.

Nothing like this ever happened with the prophets. Even in cases when their ecstasies were stormy and even violent, even when it seemed that in their ecstasies they were somewhere in another dimension, so that the reality of our world ceased to exist for them, even then the prophets, unlike mediums, retained the fullness of consciousness. The proof of this was the fact that however violent the ecstasy, when it ended the prophets always remembered what they had experienced during it and could tell others about what they had seen and heard.

This distinction between a medium and a prophet is not accidental: God needs a person not as an instrument, not as a tool for carrying out His plans, but in himself, as a unique and unrepeatable person. That is why God never deprives His servants of personality, preserving for them both memory and the fullness of consciousness. More than that, God makes His servants His genuine coworkers.

When we speak of the prophetic word as the word of God, we must still remember that this word is divine-human, divine-human in all its fullness. For God the prophet is not only not a speaking machine, he is not even a secretary. For God, the prophet is a full participant in His plans. God does not dictate a ready-made text to the prophet; He reveals to him the meaning of what He wants to reveal, and to express the meanings revealed by God, to embody them in words, is the prophet's task.

That is why every prophetic book has its own unrepeatable face, and that face is human. There is nothing surprising here: God does not want simply to use people; He wants to save them, to bring them into the life of His Kingdom. And in order for that to become possible, He draws each of them into creativity, in which He Himself is the chief Creator.