By Art Katz
The Prophetic Continuum
There is, I believe, a prophetic continuum that is the same in every generation. I know that there are New Testament prophets like Agabus, but the kind of prophet that I think is a continuum in the redemption history of the faith is the oracular kind. His word distinguishes his calling. The prophetic word is weighty and we know it when we hear it. It makes a particular demand upon our attention and likewise a requirement in our obedience. That kind of word can only come out of the council of God. My concern is the debasing of the church, a decline in the value and the valuing of the word, when that which is not out of His council is being announced as the prophetic word.
As I have mentioned, Isaiah and Jeremiah are distinctly different men. There is a similarity of burden; there is the jealousy for the glory of God; there is the seeing of the ultimate purposes of God; there is a calling of Israel back to fidelity to the God of its fathers, and yet they are so different. They are both writing prophets, both men of proclamation, stately men, oracular men, but there is a difference. Jeremiah was known to "pluck up, and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow (Jer. 1:10b)," which was never said to Isaiah, although Isaiah's word did bring judgment on Israel:
And He said, "Go, and tell this people: 'Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking, but do not understand.' Render the hearts of this people insensitive, their ears dull, and their eyes dim, lest they see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and return and be healed (Isaiah 6:9-10).
Jeremiah's task from the beginning was a rooting up and a plucking out. He was with Israel right to its final judgment in the destruction of Jerusalem, which he had warned about. Here is a man lowered into pits where he suffered terrible indignities. He was a man of lamentation and crying, a man rending his heart trying to persuade Israel of her terrible, imminent judgments. I see Isaiah more as a man of warning. He begins his book (chapter 1):
Sons I have reared and brought up, but they have revolted against Me (v.2b). An ox knows its owner, and a donkey its master's manger, but Israel does not know, My people do not understand (v.3). From the sole of the foot even to the head there is nothing sound in it, only bruises, welts, and raw wounds, not pressed out or bandaged, nor softened with oil (v.6). How the faithful city has become a harlot, she who was full of justice! Righteousness once lodged in her, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your drink diluted with water (vs. 21-22).
It is a whole lament and accusation, an indictment to the nation long before the nation is even aware of its condition. The prophet is a seer, that is, one who sees as God sees. He is already anticipating what will come, but he sees it so vividly, that though it is future, for him it is already present and he speaks of it as if it is present. The reality that he communicates by that speaking is calculated, if the people will receive it, to save them from the thing that is being described, namely, the impending judgment. If they refuse that word, however, then they must inevitably suffer the experience.
The Distinctive of Prophetic Proclamation
What an importance, therefore, that puts on true prophetic proclamation. The prophet is not just coming to bring a piece of information or to foretell something, but he is speaking with an urgency. If you can hear God in that speaking, however much the man is an abomination in your sight, and you want to discredit him-and you find every reason for doing so-if you will only hear God's cry in it and take it to heart and repent, then you will be saved from the very thing of which he is forewarning. That gives, therefore, an urgency to the message of the prophet that makes prophetic proclamation distinctively different from teaching, evangelism or pastoral preaching. Jesus said about Himself:
If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin (John 15:22).
In other words, "My appearing and My speaking have removed from you all pretense. The truth has come in Myself, and now you are responsible. Before I came you had an excuse for your superficiality and for your religious carryings on, that you thought was the real thing, but now that I have come, now that I have spoken, you have no excuse. The divine standard has fallen. The reality of God, the revelation of His purposes has been presented, and now you are responsible for that. You cannot go on as you were before."
I am increasingly experiencing the audacity to say to congregations, "You are going to be sorry that you invited me, because after I will have spoken, you will now be responsible-and that eternally. If you choose to reject what comes, then be assured that you cannot go on as you were before. You will either fall back to something much less even than you had before, or you go on to a qualitatively new thing." The prophetic word is an 'event', a revelatory event, for the fellowship or individual, coming from one who is sent, who bears the word of God and to whom has been given the Spirit without measure.
The truly prophetic man not only embraces both the past and the future, but he himself is both. He is living in the eternal future. He is already in the apocalyptic future. There is something about his whole manner and being that shows in the way he bears himself. He is not in this world. I do not mean by that, that he is a vain kind of flighty creature. He already hears a resonance of the things which are coming to pass. His anticipation, awareness and appropriation of that reality are so real for him, that even when he does not explicitly speak it as a subject matter, he already expresses the aura of it. He brings something of the sense of the invisible cloud of witnesses. He brings a sense of the continuum of the faith. He is in the Son, the eternal and changeless One. He comes to a people who are locked in time, locked in culture and products of their age. He comes to break in, to splatter and to let that go flying in every direction. He shows the one, timeless and eternal, irrevocable statement of God, the truth and reality throughout all ages and the ages to come. The prophet stands more than any other beyond the conventional categories of time. He sees the eternal thing toward which everything is tending and he brings the significance of that into the present moment for those who are hearing him.
To sense 'the mind of God' or 'the heart of God' and to be able to articulate that is inherent in the prophetic calling. There is always going to be a tension of opposition between the mind of the world and the mind of God, between our own thoughts and His thoughts. Prophets are always, therefore, going to run into a wall, into a place of opposition, a resistance, because God's thoughts are not only pure, but they are contrary to our own and invariably make a requirement. You cannot hear God without being required of. We came to that conclusion in our weekly Bible studies: "If we are not hearing some requirement from God every time we assemble in the examination of His Word, then we are not hearing God. We are only using His Word as a text to have a study."
When God speaks, however, something has got to give. If we are not wanting to give that something, then there is going to be a tension of resistance and rejection of the word. If people cannot find their opportunity to oppose the word by virtue of rejecting the word, they will find their point of opposition in rejecting the man. God will always give them something to fasten on to as well. There will always be something if men want to find a way to absolve themselves from the implications and the requirements of God's word. Yet at the same time, for the man who is bringing it, he is not to employ it as an excuse, where if he has defect he says, "Well, that is what God uses". He needs to be grieved over the fact that there is any defect and seek in every way to rectify and make right, and to be impeccable and without offense before God and man. However earnest he will be in that, men will still find offense. They found it in Jesus, and they will find it in us, but "...blessed is he who keeps from stumbling over Me (Luke 7:23b)."-or "him whom I send, which is the very expression of Myself."
The Voice of the Prophet
God puts a great premium on the voice of the prophets. It is not just their words, but their voice carries the urgency of God, the divine seriousness. If you change that and yet retain the technical word, you have lost the message. There is the resonance of God in his speaking that conveys not only the content and the meaning, but the disposition of God's own heart and how He feels about what is being said. I often pray, "Lord, so possess me that Your word will have full expression and also the mood of the speaking." The mood has nothing to do with the prophet's choosing. There are times when he is like a piece of cardboard or a straight monotone and he cannot alter it. He is uncomfortable speaking like that and wishes that he had the liberty to give the word the flourish that it needs. He is, however, as much bound in God in the manner of the speaking as the content of the speaking. Other times the same man is beside himself. He cannot be contained. He is falling off the edge of the platform in the intensity of the moment. In both cases, it is not the man who makes that determination, but God.
There is something about the resonance of a voice that bespeaks the history and the quality of the person's relationship with God. I know that our voices are as distinctive as our personalities and our appearances, but all of these things are tempered by our relationship with God. When I look at certain faces, I know that they do not reveal the grace of God, nor do they reveal the evidence of a relationship of a continuing or deep kind. There is something lacking in the face. In other faces, however, they are not even conscious of a radiance emanating from themselves. When you are in God's presence and are a seeker after God, and there is a life of communion, devotion and pouring your heart out, then it cannot be otherwise than that that will be reflected both in the face and the voice of the believer. A voice is like a signature. Someone said that by the time we are forty we are responsible for our faces. We are also responsible for our voices. God held Israel responsible for failing both to heed His words and the voice of His speaking as it came to them through the prophets.
The Mood of the Prophet
When the prophet, whom God has raised up early and sent often, is not heard and the word is rejected, then the next and last thing is judgment. It is, therefore no wonder that there is an urgency in the speaking and that his words are designed to shock rather than edify. The prophet is, therefore, often seen as being horrid, slashing and shocking. The most common accusation is 'unloving', which he just has to bear. That is the way it sounds and appears, but how many of us can see that the harsh word is uttermost love? For a prophet not to have spoken it would have been unloving-if that is what the urgency of the moment required. That is not a justification to be in that mode continually. In the moment that God calls for it, then it must not be withheld. I would say that other than the Lord's prophetic use, such a man at other times would just be in neutral. He is not required to perform and to be in that mode, and that is what is surprising. He looks so unimpressive except for the time of use.
The prophet's mood is often in violent opposition to the mood that has already been established in the congregation, especially by the 'worship team'. I have had more conflict with worship teams and worship leaders than I can tell you. They seem to have an independent purpose for their own being, no matter what, and establish some kind of mood, however contrary to God it is. Instead of working in conjunction with the word that is to come, or sensing the mood and heart of God, they have already got their choruses numbered and what they are going to sing and do. They have their musical virtuoso, talent and amplifiers and they are going to 'do their thing', and leave you to make the best of it afterwards as well as you can. I have had many messages dulled and the power of it lost, because of that unspoken opposition and tension where worship ministry is celebrated as a thing in itself. If I could, I would pull the plug out of every overhead projector and every amplifier. Let us rather just splutter and choke along, and miss a word here and there, and come into the spirit of God's worship, than that we should be led with choruses and more choruses. What they are really often trying to do is to effect an atmosphere for a service, rather than touch the heart of God, let alone prepare for the receiving of a holy word for those assembled.
There is a struggle going on right within the church and no man feels it more acutely than the 'freak' who is bearing a strange word with a strange mood and that is contrary to and other than that which prevails, where everybody wants to go home feeling good, and nobody wants to go home in tension. A prophet will often send people home jarred and unhappy with many unanswered questions. He has not that mentality that wants everything to be wrapped up in one package with a ribbon on it, in one service, and send people home happy. He will let the people go home jarred, pained, and even agonizing. He will raise questions that he himself has not adequately answered, and they themselves have got to wrestle and fight their way through to a place in God. There are very few pastors, maybe one in a hundred, who would be willing to allow his congregation to suffer that kind of stress and tension. "Send them home happy" is the unspoken premise of contemporary religion to which we as prophets do not subscribe. We are not in the mood of sending people home happy. We are of a kind to send them home agitated with questions that they are compelled to consider and that cannot be answered in one service. If we were given three days, we might be able to bring the listeners all the way through. How many churches, however, are willing to submit to such a man for that length of time? One service at best and, "Get him away!"
My suspicions are alerted if there is any bombast or 'hype', any exaggeration or sensationalism that conjures up a manner or a mode of excitement that the ear loves to hear, that would draw out those who are bored and want some kind of alternative to their boredom. Those who speak of coming judgment should not invest it with anything more than the word itself. He does not have to bring to it an additional quality so as to make it compelling to the hearer. The word itself speaks for itself. Anyone who would seek to bring an extraneous element through his own personality or manner of speaking is likely false. The prophet, therefore, does not have great latitude in how he deports himself. If we are highly individualistic and want to cut a swath for ourselves or do our own thing in our own way, then we are disqualified. "I will put My word in your mouth and that is what you will speak and you will speak it in the manner that I want it spoken." For as much as the prophet's life is wholly given over to God, there is not a surrender of identity, but in fact it establishes it. He loses his life but he has found it. Prophets are distinct, flesh and blood men with formidable personalities. They are not automatons that bear the word of God as a mechanical contrivance. They are formed in the womb, and that forming is Gods.
Proclaiming the Word that is 'Given'
The prophet is not at liberty to address everything he sees. He can only address what God would have him to see. He does not proceed by his own seeing, nor by his own hearing, his own subjectivity or his own impressions. He is the Lord's and maybe that is why God is more jealous over the prophetic man than any other. More than any other, the prophet's life is not his own. A teacher is a teacher, but he is still himself teaching. The prophet is one who is the communicator of God's own word. It is not the prophet's word; it is not even his mood. The prophet is dead. He has no life until God gives it, and God gives it for His purpose and glory only. Even when you see those who are being addressed falling like flies and going down on their faces under the power and the impact of that word, he experiences often absolutely nothing in that moment. He is absolutely impervious and totally unaffected by what has brought others down on their faces. He is simply out of it because it is not his word. He cannot exalt in it. It is not his work. It is the strangest of feelings to be somehow detached from the power and the effect of your own word, nor are you allowed in any way even to touch it or to draw forth any satisfaction for yourself.
I will enter a congregation and they are having a ball and worshipping up a storm-and everything seems to be right-yet I am grieving. I am almost doubled over and knotted in the inner man. I am anguishing in my soul, while everybody else is having a good time. How many people have been in such functions where they are the only freak? Everyone else seems to be 'moved by God', and there is all kinds of talk about 'the presence of God', yet you feel no presence at all. You are not conscious of any anointing. You do not see any blessing. All you see is a sea of carnality and self-deluded people priming and pumping themselves up, and your one presence in that room is a disjuncture with and a contradiction to all that is going on. To top it all, you are not there as an observer, but now you are going to speak. What will you speak? Will you speak so as to confirm what people think is the spiritual reality that they are celebrating, or do you take your whistle out of your pocket and blow it, and cry out, "Phony! Pretense! False! Self-effected! Hyped up production! Emotional! Sensual!"?
The prophet is required to speak on the basis of one of two things: either what his natural eye sees as being impressively spiritual, or what his inner man is groaning about that is contrary. When you speak on that basis, you are challenging everything to which men have given their endorsement. Either your word is God's, or you are some wild freak who is "doing damage to the Body of Christ." That tension is with you always. The Lord will even allow an occasion here and there where it will not be Him, and you have acted in a way in which you thought it was the Lord, but it was in fact yourself. God wants merely to keep you honest; that you must not presume that on every occasion, impeccably, you can be confident that it is God, because that will remove the tension and the dependency. God will allow a humiliation and a failure, all the more to charge your heart anew with the enormous gravity of what you are about, and the requirement to be cleaving to Him and dependent upon Him for your every word.
There are situations where you are not sure what to say or what to do. It is a remarkable kind of suffering to be in that kind of predicament, and then even after the moment passes, we are still assaulted by the thought of perhaps having missed the moment when we should have done something and we did not. That is a suffering, but I want to say that that suffering is at the heart of the church. There is a suffering that remains to be filled up in the Body. This kind of suffering is inevitable, frequent and we have long borne it. Many of us have agonized over the condition of the church, and the Lord knows it, and there is a certain inevitability about it, a certain tension of not knowing. We will always wonder if we did rightly. We need to bear that suffering and the Lord honors that. When the redemptive answer comes, it will come out of that willingness to bear that suffering as being part of the faith.
The Seriousness of the Word Spoken
There is a weight of responsibility on God's people to correctly identify whom God has set before them, and there is a choosing. In making that decision and choice, something is struck that will profoundly affect that believing life for the rest of its days. Just the presence of the man, let alone the radicalness of his word, puts a premium of requirement upon the hearer like no other requirement that perhaps the church has got to face. What do you do with this man and this word? In fact, I almost invariably tell churches, "You have a responsibility in my coming and the hearing of this word more than you know. You will either go on in a qualitatively new way from this point forth, but one thing I will assure you, you will not go on as you were before. Something has come in moment of time that requires something from you, and if you will not recognize it and give it, then you are not just going to go on, you are going to fall back. Something incisive has come and your response to that will affect your whole continuance and future in God."
I believe that, and if that is true, how much greater our responsibility to be that authentic thing that compels God's people to choose with an earnestness that was never theirs before? How much more seriously do we need to consider ourselves and our own walk, and for that reason, how dare we give ourselves over to a casual lifestyle ourselves? There is a seriousness of God now coming to their fellowship that is making a requirement like nothing that it has ever known. All of a sudden they are having a guest speaker and the moment he opens his mouth something is struck and something is required that was never required before and that will be full of portent for all of their future.
The prophet's word is a work and is distinguished from teaching. Teaching is instructive and can be inspirational, but the prophet's word is an 'event' and causes something to happen in the hearing of which something is set in motion that affects things and brings a consequence for time and eternity. It is a creative and life-giving word. The mouth that God will allow for that use has got to be prepared in very particular ways. The prophet, therefore, is going to be winnowed and sifted more than the other callings.
The prophet's function is so absolutely life and death, more than can be said for other callings. If it is a false word, then it could be death. If it does not bring a warning, then it could also be death-literal, physical death. If it does not indicate the issues that are eternal, then it could be robbing the hearer. It is not an exaggeration to say that the rejection of the prophets was the death of Israel. How can one say more for something that is life or death for a people, and yet God invests that in flesh and blood, in mere man, who is subject to every frailty and weakness of humanity! It is an enormous weight of responsibility that he can say, "Thus says the Lord", or even if he does not intone that inscription, it is implied, and that the weight of that has to borne on the faintness and weakness of his mere humanity.
When God calls the prophet, "Son of man", He is not just mouthing a few words. It is as if the prophet needs to be reminded of his humanity. Why does God choose a frail piece of humanity for so ponderous a task? I believe that it is because it is a statement against the mystery of the principalities and the powers of the air. The prophet himself in his own person, what he is in himself, in the election of God, is itself a statement against the principalities and the powers of the air. One would think that God would reserve such elect speaking for Himself. He alone is qualified and has the authority, and yet to invest it in flesh, the very mystery of incarnation, runs smack dab into the face of the wisdom of the powers of the air. They would never have done a thing like that, but would have chosen something appropriate to the task, for example, something weighty, monumental, dignified and carrying all the credentials. God, however, takes a man out of the field like Amos. The men themselves are extremely conscious of their humanity, not only at the inception of their call but throughout the whole longevity of their use. "I am just a child. I cannot speak," said Jeremiah. He probably was called as a mature man but he felt himself to be a child in the light of the calling and that feeling never subsided. That consciousness of being a child in proportion to the task was always in the consciousness of the man. Paul's continual cry that he reiterates again and again is, "Who is sufficient for these things!?"
Prophetic obedience
Prophetical obedience would be one of the classic elements to be found exclusively in prophets. It is the fearlessness to bring the word of God knowing that it is calculated to offend the hearer, and not only to suffer rejection, but even the loss of one's life in the bringing of it. Jesus said of Himself:
Nevertheless I must journey on today and tomorrow and the next day; for it cannot be that a prophet should perish outside of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! (Luke 13:33-34a).
It is the inevitability of their fate. They have got to perish, and they have got to perish in the most significant of all places, where the action really is, namely, Jerusalem. That is where their end must be. In fact, one of the last episodes of Revelation are the two prophets, or the two witnesses, who lie in the streets of Jerusalem, then called Sodom and Gomorrah, and the people celebrate and exchange gifts because of the death of the two, who "...tormented those who dwell on the earth (Rev. 11:10b)." Their words were a torment, and the earthquake that follows their ascension is a judgment of a severe kind that God reserves for the mistreatment of His prophets. He takes very seriously the way in which His prophetic men are treated, because once again we come back to the theme: that to touch His prophets is to touch Him.
In 1 Samuel 3, we are given the calling of Samuel as a child through to sonship and onto maturity. The Lord called him and we have Samuel's reply, "Here I am", and he ran to the old priest Eli, thinking it was Eli who had called. He did that also a second time until Eli, however dull he was, recognized that it was the Lord calling this boy. Eli then told the boy what to do: "Go lie down, and it shall be if He calls you, that you shall say, 'Speak, LORD, for Thy servant is listening.' (v9b)." Samuel did exactly that. The first act that brought a boy into the place of prophetic responsibility was just merely saying what someone said he should say. How many of us being American or western would balk at that?-"I will speak my own words, thank you. Don't you think that I know how to respond to God if He calls me? I do not have to be cued. What do you think I am, a child?" That kind of an attitude will leave us outside of the faith; it will leave us on the shelf. There is something so pleasing to the heart of God of a rightly submitted spirit to the authority to which God has subscribed us.
Samuel then hears a powerful indictment against the priest Eli himself, and against his whole house forever. God is going to bring a fierce judgment. Can you imagine a boy getting an earful of that? What an induction into the prophetic ministry! Should God not begin with something light like, "The Lord says that He still loves you, but He is not altogether pleased. Please take this to heart"? Instead Samuel is given a word of severity, of judgment and of finality. It was probably one of the harshest statements ever recorded of God's indictment against a man or a nation, and it was subsequently fulfilled to the letter. Samuel stayed up all night, and when Eli awakens, he calls the boy to tell him everything that the Lord said. Samuel then faithfully gives every word that God gave him, not allowing a syllable to fall to the ground. When we read later that God honored Samuel and did not allow any of his words to fall to the ground that he spoke to Israel, it was because Samuel was faithful not to allow any of God's words to fall to the ground.
Obedience is the name of the game, and many of us need to go back and pick up at some point where we have missed it. If we find that the well has dried and the revelation is not coming, and we are fixated at some place and we just cannot break out of it, then probably what has happened is that we have failed in some critical point of obedience. God is not going to let us go further until we go back and pick up at that place and perform the obedience that is wanting-and go on from obedience to obedience.
The Prophetic Call - What is Prophetic Proclamation or Speaking?