How do we know about the activity of God in the world of human events? We cannot just look at a complicated group of "events" and infer God from them, any more than we can look at nature and infer God from it. What we find in the Bible, in the face of this problem, is not merely a recital of history, but an interpretation of history.
The claim that God is at work in Jewish history, for example, is an interpretation put upon that history by men who look at it from a special point of view. The inner meaning of the Red Sea episode is a meaning that is communicated to us by persons whose belief in God causes them to understand that event in a very special way.
We find that to some people God seems to grant special insight. Through them his will and purpose come closer to the rest of us than would otherwise be the case. These men are called "prophets." We often think of a prophet as one who foretells the future, as though he had a divinely guaranteed crystal ball. While it is true that the Old Testament prophets often talked about the future and what it would bring, their main significance was as spokesmen of God, forthtellers of God's will quite as much as foretellers of the future. And they spoke with authority. They did not say timidly,
"It seems to me a reasonable possibility that under certain circumstances we might just possibly interpret the will of God to be thus-and-so."
No, when they had something to say, they thundered forth,
"THUS SAITH THE LORD!" and then proclaimed the will of God for that particular situation. The prophets told the people what God was going to do, and what he was at that moment doing; they pointed out that God was active, that he participated, that he did not sit back and leave things to run themselves. And in thus witnessing to an acting God, they were, and have been, a means by which that God has been revealed to the rest of us.
We shall be looking at the insights of these prophets in some detail as we go through this book. For the moment, simply notice the kind of God with whom the prophets acquaint us. He is a God of strict justice, who demands that we take justice seriously in our human dealings (Amos); he is a God also of great compassion and mercy, unwilling to forsake his people even though they deserve to be forsaken (Hosea); he is holy, high, and lifted up, someone "other" than us (Isaiah). Much of our own awareness of God is the result of the arresting claims of the prophets.
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