By Art Katz
Prophets are foundations for the church, holy stones, as it were, able to bear the weight of all that they support and all that is put upon them. What an investment, therefore, from God's point of view, in the attention to the details of their lives, in the preparation, shaping and making of them. That formation does not lend itself to nice, clean, systematical principles on how to become a prophet. It is full of blood and vomit, sweat and agony, humiliation and failing. For if a prophet is anything, he is a 'sent' one. God will not send anything that does not authentically represent Himself. Jesus said that if you receive a prophet, you receive Him. There is an unbroken continuum between the sent one and God himself. When someone, therefore, purports to be that which is 'sent' and is not, it is a statement about God that is false. We need deeply to recognize that. We are not talking about some fluky phenomenon, but the very foundation of the faith, which is God as God.
The Prophet Is His Message
It is an ultimate calling and that points us again to the premium not of the office as some abstraction, but that it rests and inheres with the man himself. The man is the thing in itself. He is the prophetic man. His message is not some kind of an addendum. He is not a disembodied spirit who just brings a word and says, "Thus says the Lord." He is bound up with the word. If you reject him, then you are rejecting the word with him, which is to say, rejecting the Word made flesh. Those who cannot directly assault the word, because they sense that that would be doing violence to God, find it easier to deal with the man. In dealing with the man, however, you have thus dealt with the word. We need to see the inseparability of the office and the man, and that is why prophets are not born in a day. That is why they are not going to be produced in a three-month school, or any kind of thing. It is a work whereby God invests Himself. That is why it is so integral to God, that when you touch the prophet, you are touching Him. This is what He Himself is in His own essential Person. He is Prophet, Priest and King rolled up in one, and He is forming a man whom He has chosen in that image, a man who has not chosen himself. No man can presume to be a prophet or desire it because he has a romantic fancy to be prophetic and he likes the aura. It is either called, given, made of God or not at all.
The whole world commends itself, but the prophet sees it as a sham, a pretense and a phony thing. His seeing is another kind of seeing, namely, God's. How, therefore, does he come to that seeing? Prophets are not full-born; they do not come with one fell swoop; you do not pluck them off trees. How does a man come to a place where he sees as God sees, especially since God's way is not our way and His thoughts are not our thoughts? What men esteem is an abomination in God's sight. In a word, it is a controverting, a turning upside down of all values. Can you imagine what a painful thing a prophet is? The whole world is having a ball and here is this guy who sees it as a sham.
A prophet does not come to the seeing of God in a day, but by a process. There is a process of experiences. There are heart-rending and heart-aching disappointments, setbacks, castings away and things that you just live with as being inherent with your call and you bear it. He grew up in the world, and the values of the world as a man. He is recruited and called in, and brought out of the world, its values and seeing, and brought increasingly into the place of God's seeing, by a painful process for himself. If the prophet's word is going to devastate others, then he himself must first experience devastation. He has first to come out of his own false alignments and come increasingly into the place of God's seeing, and then in coming to that place, a courage to bear the reaction against him. You wonder why anybody would want to be one! The first definition of a false prophet is somebody who wants to be a prophet. It has nothing to do with what you want to be, rather it has only to do with the God who calls. It is nevertheless remarkable how many people are attracted to becoming a prophet because their definition and view of prophet are not what we are describing. Their view is of something much more honorific, romantic and dramatic where people look up at them with stunned astonishment.
This raises the question as to whether someone could reject their calling or go the wrong way with it. One biblical example might be Jonah. He ran the opposite direction and had to be swallowed up by a great sea animal and vomited out on the beach to fulfill God's role. Even then he complained and resisted the call. I would probably be more sympathetic to a man who is chafing and fighting or struggling against the calling, sensing what it is going to require, than someone who thinks it is a blast and is so giddy in it.
The Body - The Place of Formation
I want to suggest that the issue of isolation from a fellowship would make a true prophet become false. If he is not organically joined to an expression of the Body of Christ; if he is some kind of floating phenomenon, a phantasm, who is in and out and does his thing, and flits off to the next meeting; if he has no organic rootage with the people of God; if he likes isolation and to be by himself, then he puts himself in jeopardy. He needs daily surveillance because there is no one more subject to error and becoming false than a prophet. A teacher is not in such a place of jeopardy because he is more balanced. The prophet is an intuitive kind of personality and open for impressions of a kind that a teacher would never permit, and therefore opens himself to greater jeopardy for that very reason. The very nature, however, of the prophetic thing, the high tension of it and the character of it, can easily lead to warp, distraction and becoming false.
It is not to be imagined that God is going to send men like that out into the world and into the nations who have not first been sharpened and made acute within their own fellowship. They need to bring the word into the band of souls to whom they are daily joined. If the fellowship will not bear the word and be supportive of it, and of their prophets, there will not be men to be sent. He must be sent from a body who understands these things and recognizes the significance and the fatefulness of his speaking and acting, and that he is sent with the laying on of hands, which means, "We not only identify with you, but we sustain you by our own intercessions, because we are going to suffer the consequence of what you are doing. We are in this with you." That is the 'Antioch' that we are waiting for, that men could be sent out of such a context, with such an alignment.
Now there were at Antioch, in the church that was there, prophets and teachers: ...And while they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said,...(Acts 13:1a and 2a).
In other words, when men of those two callings were found 'together', that is to say, something more than sitting in the same room, "the Holy Spirit said, ..." Anybody who knows anything about this knows the painful tension between a teacher and a prophet. It is not because they are wanting to act contrary, but both of them, acting out of the integrity of their call, of necessity rub the other guy raw. The teacher wants it to be according to the Word, line upon line, precept upon precept. If there was not, however, the press that comes of visionary things to get the teacher beyond the safe, prescribed place according to the Word, the teacher himself would be limited. There is, therefore, an interplay, with both men acting out of the integrity of their call, and yet chafing one another. That is where love comes in, namely, to bear the strain and the tension of that, and to receive therefore the benefit of it, and not to flee from it because there is a painful or irritating quality.
The Spirit of God called out of the congregation at Antioch, "Set apart for Me Barnabas and Paul for the work to which I have called them (Acts 13:2b)." It was in the fellowship that they were they separated from their own ambitions and defects. The Body of Christ, the prophetic body, the supportive body, is an enormously crucial thing in the shaping, the perfecting and the sending of the prophetic voice into the earth. That is what we are talking about as a prophetic community. They do not all have that call, but they all have the awareness. They all understand the primacy and importance of the prophetic word. Institutional situations will never produce a prophet. There are not many 'Antiochal' sending bodies, but there will never be any unless we desire them and are willing for the cost of them.
There is nothing more aggravating to a body of believers than someone in the process of growth in the prophetic calling. If the prophet is the thing in himself, then we are not to think that he is instantly formed, but rather it is a lifetime in the making. His growth is often painful, annoying and nettlesome. They speak at the wrong time. Some of it is from God and some of it is out of their own flesh. He is always finding something to seize upon. He might interrupt the service and you never know how he is going to sound off. He is unpredictable, and part of the maturity of the church is its ability to provide an environment of love that is conducive to the bringing forth of such a one in its midst. You have to chew the meat and spit out the bones. You have got to be patient and forbearing. There is a process. They do not come full-blown. If we are impatient with that and do not provide the loving context, then the Lord will lose the prophetic man because they have got to come up and out of such an environment. That gives us a clue of Old Testament times when the Scriptures speak about the school of the prophets. It is a school in the sense of a kind of collegium, a community of a supportive kind around the prophetic man, sharing the burdens, sympathizing, understanding and contributing to the process of such a one.
Do we have the ability to recognize those who give evidence of the call? We are not to dampen them but encourage them, but yet at the same time to clip their wings and to show them the admixture of flesh and Spirit. By such a process of gentle and loving admonition and exhortation the Body can be a help them. The prophet needs to be separated even from the consciousness of his own calling, let alone any subtlety of ambition that needs for him to be seen, applauded and recognized. He needs to be able to bear the reproach and rejection of what will invariably be the consequence of his ministry. Indeed, the prophet's whole life and history in God is calculated toward that end. He is not a guy with 'a little house surrounded by a white picket fence and a sweet, little wife with an apron on, and they lived happily ever after'. It is aggravation, consternation and every kind of thing that you can think of, because that is how the prophetic is formed. There is no cheap way to incubate it. He has got to pass through the essence of the issues in order one day to address them with penetration and authority.
While his most radical obediences will most likely be performed alone, the prophet is a man both communal and corporate, not in an idealized sense, but as one himself frequently critiqued of others and desiring it. The moment of obedience may come as one standing alone before Ahab, but the thing that makes that powerful and confrontational is that which preceded it, that is to say, in the man coming out of a corporate life. That corporate life is not some idealized or romantic community out in the boondocks. It is rather a situation where that man is more subject to review and examination than any other that make up that community. If the community is not rendering that service, then I cannot think of anyone in greater danger than a prophet. The prophet must make himself accessible. A prophet who prefers privacy and who is unattended by others or is surrounded by a self-affirming, paid and mutually congratulatory staff is likely false or will become so. There is a difference between living in community and being surrounded by a staff of paid employees. The latter more often than not, and even unconsciously, affirm that personality and what he does-because he butters their bread. It is another situation when you are living in proximity and relationship and where others have every freedom to critique you and speak into your life. The true prophet knows, that unless he is receiving that kind of input and examination, then he will move into deception and that without even knowing it. Just because one has an anointing from God, it does not mean that one is invincible. The presence of an anointing does not necessarily mean that God's statement of approval is on the individual's life in its entirety. That misunderstanding has been the formula for disaster and falling of many great men of God. You can be anointed in the place of ministry, but the defects and contradictions in your life, personally and privately, need to be both attended and seen to.
Prophets are not to go out before they are threshed. They should be welcoming the threshing and expect it, because there are subtleties of soul in all of us-little insinuations of ambition, little presumptions of pride, little romantic notions of what we think prophetic service is-that God has got ruthlessly to deal with. This is necessary so that when the prophet speaks, it is His word not only in its content, but also in the mood of its delivery.
A prophet is not without honor except in his own home and country. He will be praised away from home. That is not a statement of condemnation but a statement of something intrinsic to the prophetic calling in the wisdom of God, namely, that a man's frailty cannot bear to be exalted both away and at home. There has got to be that breathing in and that breathing out, that alternate thing of exaltation and humbling, and the humbling is reserved for when he gets home.
The prophet needs to come to the place that Paul came, where he seems to have a confidence to say, "For to me, to live is Christ...(Phil. 1:21a)." Even when Paul offers as an opinion, "But in my opinion she is happier if she remains as she is; and I think that I also have the Spirit of God (1Cor 7:14)."-and then he goes on to talk about marriage and practical things. Those statements are, however, in the Holy Writ and are looked upon as definitive and as much the word of God as when Paul does speak by commandment. In a word, what Paul gave as his opinion was indeed God's own word. He is so much in God that his opinion is as much the word as the declarative commandments that God gave him to communicate. We have, therefore, to be true to the witness in the inner man and keep that inner man clear and free before God. Let nothing obtrude upon it.
Meekness - The Key to Revelation
The key to apostolic or prophetic seeing and the receiving of the revelation of the mysteries of God is found in Ephesians 3:8,
To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ.
In other words, all true seeing is given to men like Paul, who see themselves as the 'very least of all saints'. Paul is not being deferential and polite and making the kind of statement that a chamber of commerce speaker would make. He actually saw himself as this. He was the apostle to whom was afforded such visions, that God had to give him a thorn in his side, lest he be exalted beyond measure for the magnitude of the revelations that were given him. We must not, however, pass by apostolic character, which is to say, the deep humility, the authentic meekness and the Christ-likeness of the apostolic or the prophetic man.
We know that one of the deceptions of the last days are false apostles and false prophets. Even now it is becoming popular where everybody seems to be a prophet today, or even an apostle. They are also quite clever as they have studied and know how to appropriate Paul's council and advice and when to apply it, and mediate over church issues, etc. Is that, however, the foundational man upon whom the church is built? If the man is the thing in himself, then it is more than his knowledge. It is his very life; it is his character; it is his knowledge of God; it is what he communicates as one who comes to us out of God's own presence. This statement, 'the very least of all saints' is not Paul being self-deferring. It is Paul's actual, stricken, heartfelt consciousness of how he sees himself before God, having been in that presence.
It is a remarkable irony that the deeper you come in the knowledge of God, the more you see yourself as less. Instead of becoming more exalted by the increase of your knowledge of God, the further down you go in seeing how abased and pitiful you really are. It is a contradiction and a paradox, and it is a paradox to be found only in the church. Authentic meekness or humility is not something that one can learn, or pick up at school, or take to yourself. It is the work of God out of a relationship with Him. It is the revelation of God as He is and the depths of God that bring a man to this kind of awareness of himself. The revelation of what we are is altogether related to the revelation of who He is. The two things always go together.
Then I (Isaiah) said, 'Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts' (Isaiah 6:5).
This is the prince of prophets, Isaiah, speaking here. The foundation of the church is the revelation of God as He in fact is. That is the foundation. It is not as we think Him to be, which is more often than not a projection of the way we would like Him to be, especially when we have chosen to celebrate one attribute of God and ignore another. The key knowledge is the knowledge of God as He is, and the foundational men to the church are those who can communicate God in that knowledge. Paul had this knowledge because he saw himself as the 'least of all saints'.
It is an interesting question about the issue of humility, because the prophet is so singular, so single-eyed, so adamant and so utterly persuaded about the rightness of his word, that he speaks it with a seeming arrogance. I suspect that the false prophet is self-defacing; that he will appear 'humble'. It is something like a 'salesman's humility' that is effected and self-effacing in order to sell the product. If we are going to be a discerning church, which is to say, a prophetic church, then the issue of authentic humility needs to come into our consciousness. The quality of true meekness, which Paul had despite his uncompromising references to himself, seems to be so arrogant, and yet there is the true meekness.
The Lord Himself was absolute. He used language in such a fierce way, as well as overthrowing moneychanger's tables. Would you say that in an instance like that, where the Lord was violent either in speech or deed, that for that moment at least, He laid aside His meekness and was acting now in another character? Was He meek even while He was violent and offensive? This act set in motion the things that eventuated in His death. How do you reconcile the act of violence that Jesus performed and the meekness of God? When we think of meek, we think of lamb-like, quiet and deferring. This is an aggressive act, a violent act and yet we are saying it is meek. Meekness is total obedience to God. All the more in an act or a word that would give an impression to the contrary, and lay the obedient servant open to the charge of a reproach for being violent, or being angry, or being too zealous, or whatever it is.
There are instances where God will call us to obediences that seem to contradict meekness, and it would be arrogant not to obey, even by employing the excuse, "It is not my personality. It is not the way that I like to be because I want the favor and the approval of men to see me as a nice guy, and therefore, I want always to be reasonable and quiet and diplomatic." Yes, you will be applauded for that, but not in Heaven. In Heaven it is clear rebellion. If God wanted you to be violent and you withheld it because it contradicts your personality or anything like that, then you are putting something above and before God, namely, your own self-consideration.
A true prophet will not relent nor refrain. He cannot be bought or enticed into being 'one of the boys', and he shuns the distinctions and honors that men accord men. He necessarily has to or there would be a compromising of what he is in God. He is scrupulous in character and will never use his position to obtain personal advantage. He is naturally unaffected, normal and unprepossessing in appearance and demeanor, despising what is showy, sensational or bizarre. He is not necessarily the man that is going to be wearing the hairy garment. He may be wearing a three-piece suit. He will not call any attention to himself by externalities. He is the thing in himself, in the depth and the pit and the marrow of his being because of his communion with God and his history in God.
On the basis of this, a false prophet or a false bearer of God's word can be identified as one who gives the impression of being self-sufficient, always in his dignity, or he effects something like wearing a garment, or being bizarre and let his hair grow long to make sure that you have noticed him for his distinctiveness. The thing that will be absent in that which is false is the lack of meekness, and meekness is not something one can buy or obtain or learn. It is the indistinguishable sign of the authentic prophet as it is the quintessential character of God - and obtained and formed in the prophet in the place of prayer as communion.
The Prophetic Call - What is Prophetic Formation and Integrity?