PropheticReformation.com

Art Katz - prophetic perception

Now with the Lord, but still has much to say...

"There are two key words inherent to the prophetic calling and they are: revelation and interpretation. If you remove these two things from that which is prophetic, then it no longer is. We have more need than ever of revelation and the interpretation. It is not just the interpretation of the Scripture alone, but also events like natural disasters. Are they just a geophysical accident or are they a statement from a God who is seeking the attention of men? Prophetic interpretation, therefore, is going to be diametrically opposed to the way in which men would ordinarily construe natural events.

If that was the full calling of a prophet, then it would be enough right there. It is an exhausting task to restore the meaning of the past. History has a way of dissolving in time, particularly when it has to do with the history of the faith. We lose something very precious, all the more if we have not gleaned from the past all that we should. It will cripple us for the present and certainly hinder our future. Believers are a peculiar people whose reality and meaning somehow is established between the poles of the things past, the things present and the things future. Anything that makes us significant in the present is altogether related to the past and to the future. It is our past that makes us peculiar. Abraham is our inheritance, and we have a future of a glorious King and the hope of a coming kingdom. Between the things of the past and the things that pertain to the future is our present. We need to dig out the meanings in the things that are lost, especially in what has happened to the crucifixion of Jesus. It was the greatest, single, apocalyptic event in the history of mankind that set in motion the things that will bring the second greatest thing, namely, His return. Its meaning historically is essentially lost, sentimentalized and trivialized, because there has not been a church careful to keep alive and to root out the meanings of all that is implied in that act. Part of the prophetic task is just that, namely, to call the attention of God's people both to their past and to their future, because such a one cherishes and esteems these things, and God gives him an anointing to project them.

God is the God of History

The prophet sees the God of Creation as also being sovereignly the God of history, and he is unwilling to consider Him exempt from any event, however catastrophic or devastating. God is participant in history. He is a God who intervenes. The prophet does not see things as being accidental or that things just happen, but it is God operating through events, for example, the Holocaust. The very place where men say, "Where was God?" as being the testimony of God's absence, the prophet would say, "That is the place where He is most present." It is in the catastrophe and the things that shock us, that numb us and that defy our categories, that the prophet sees the hand of God. It is not that God is impartial or an unfeeling Deity, for we know that He is afflicted in all our afflictions. He is, however, still the God of the 'burning bush' who waits for those who would turn aside and see why the bush burns and is not consumed.

Things can be interpreted from natural standpoints and make a very compelling case, for example, a geophysical accident. We can say, "It's just the way nature is. Mother Nature is having a rampage." That is an interpretation, but it is not prophetic. Can you see why a prophetic statement is required? Which of the two will be easier for the public to receive? Which makes less demand on the hearer? 'Mother Nature' is some vacuous and ambiguous entity. She just does her thing and there is nothing that you can do about it. But if it is God who is rampaging; if it is God ventilating in anger; if it is God trying to arrest the attention of an unbelieving and blasphemous mankind and calling men by these disasters to a place of repentance, then that is another thing altogether. The prophetic word of interpretation is not just interesting curiosity—it brings requirement. His interpretation brings the man to a requirement of an inconvenient kind, and for that reason the prophets are stoned. It is much nicer if you would say, 'Mother Nature'. It makes no requirement.

Everything is subject to one interpretation or another, so not only does a prophet bring an interpretation which is spiritual, which is to say, as God sees it, and the requirement of that seeing, but he has got to contend with the other interpretations, that is to say, those that are in opposition to his view. It is not a gentlemanly opposition, but fierce and unto death. The prophetic thing is not a picnic, particularly if the Elijah task is the last-day's ministry of restoration. Just as then, the spirit of Jezebel is again coming forth in such power, in such subtlety and in such prolific manifestation and form, even within the church itself. They are carrying that spirit or giving ventilation to it and not even aware that they are vessels through which that thing passes. The struggle to give a spiritual interpretation from the point of view of God is not merely just to offer another opinion alongside of others, but to offer a view that the world hates and even segments of the church hate and wants to silence, if not by any other means than to threaten and intimidate the mouth from which it issues. We need to gird our loins if this is our calling.

Prophetic Significance

We need to constantly ask: "What is the significance of this or that?" It is not a phrase that the world has taught us to employ. I have been around the academic world and it is nothing more than a form of brainwashing. It is being enrolled in a certain curriculum that credentializes you, so that you can have a certain employment as a teacher, a lawyer or whatever it is. The significance of something, however, is rare to be emphasized in the world. It should, however, be so with believers, whether they are prophetically called or not. In fact, it should be at the heart of their distinctiveness. Do we ask what is the significance of the things that constitute our life, of the ordinary things that constitute our life? This is what the 'burning bush' means, and the God who was in the midst of it is waited to see if Moses or us would turn aside to see, and not only to see but to ask, "Why does this bush burn, but is not consumed?" That is to say, "What is the significance of this burning bush?"—in order to know the ultimate meaning. If we do not know the ultimate meaning to life, then we are not prophetic.

A prophet sees such dimensions where others see only the act. He has a way of reading into something and seeing multiple significances in a heightened way, both in men and in nations. For example, the Intifada or the Palestinian uprising, which started with the kids throwing stones at Israeli troops, but in my spirit I knew for Israel that it was the beginning of the end. I knew that it would never find resolution. They would never find a political answer and that it could not be suppressed by military power. It would set in motion the kinds of things that would eventuate in Israel's final ruin and devastation. That is going to be true, and increasingly more true today than when I saw it at the beginning of the Intifada in 1988. This whole alliance with the P.L.O. and with Arafat has grown out of the inability of the State of Israel to suppress this indigenous and unplanned uprising that came through children, but which has grown to such proportions, that it is a continual drain on the nation Israel in manpower, time and attention. It has set in motion the things that will bring about Israel's destruction. The prophetic man apprehends the implications of a small event and is called to communicate the significance of it.

I would say that that is the kind of thing that distinguishes life as against existence. Most of mankind merely exists. It is life as a mere succession of days, and so many tens of thousands of meals and acts of defecation and copulation, hardly above the animal level, even though they may be intellectual. That which distinguishes human existence in the intention of the God, who made us in His image, is the significance of what life means and what it is about. One of my greatest complaints of my Jewish people is not that they do not believe in their Messiah, but that they could care less. They are simply not serious enough about life. If they were serious about life, then there would be a handle to take hold of and to begin to raise questions and to fathom truth, but there is just not that seriousness.

A prophet, therefore, is one who interprets the Scripture in the light of present and future events, or brings the application of the Scripture into the interpretation of events. He has a way of perceiving events in the light of Scripture that is uniquely prophetic and interprets them for the church and for the nation. This is seeing as God sees, for a prophet is a 'seer'. What he sees is the condition of mankind as it in fact actually is. He sees right through the ostensible, outward, external disguise to the reality of the thing as it is—the dry bones. In a word, he sees as God sees, and his function is to communicate that seeing to people who have no awareness of it at all, and in likely will resist it.

The prophetic function is to bring mankind into an awareness of what life is and how it ought to be lived. That will not be easily attained. It requires that people turn aside to see, as for example, the Holocaust. Was it just a systematic, genocidal annihilation of six million Jews? Is there some greater significance in that the systematic annihilation of a people was performed not by some savage, primitive race in darkest Africa as is said, but the epitome of civilization? How is it that mankind has not wrestled with that? How is it that Germany has not wrestled with that? The fact that neither Jew nor German has probed the meaning of the Holocaust from God's point of view, virtually invites the judgment of God afresh.

Revelation - The Reality of God

The key to the source of prophetic understanding is revelation, which is to say, God's viewpoint or the direct impartation of God's reality, which is always at variance with man's. That is why it needs to be revealed and the Spirit of God is the medium of revelation. If we are averse to the Spirit, closed to the Spirit, fearful of the Spirit, unfamiliar with the Spirit, then we forfeit by necessity the revelation. There is a world of difference in knowing something that is true by creedal and intellectual assent, as opposed to knowing it by revelation. If it comes mentally, however correct it is, it has no capacity to bring a corresponding life change. Revelation has the power to change. It gasps like Isaiah, "Woe is me, I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips." This is the prince of prophets speaking, and he did not see it before because every in God waits upon revelation, that which is given from God and must come down from above.

What is the condition by which revelation is given and why is God not more generous? Why does it wait for a moment of time where Isaiah saw the Lord ,"high and lifted up," and you cry out, "I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips"? Why does He give that to Isaiah in the sixth chapter? Should He not have given it to him in the first chapter? Revelation is dependent upon humility, for God gives grace to the humble, and what a grace revelation is. It is the source of truth and of the deepest understanding of the reality of God that cannot be obtained in any other way. It is not just an alternative way, but rather it is a singular way. It is given to those who see themselves as the least of the saints. That is the key to prophetic seeing, to revelation of the mysteries of God. Paul actually saw himself as this, which seeing is more or less absent from contemporary Christianity. In other words, you can pound your brains all you want; you can have a stack of concordances, biblical commentaries and books, but you will never come to the definition of the truth and the reality of God except through the process of revelation. The same book can be just an intellectual operation where you get information, but when the process of God is working by the Spirit through that book, then the same statement is quickened and made alive. Something has come in a point of time that has to be given.

True humility is the awareness that we are powerless until it comes. We are as dead men and we cannot force God's hand. We cannot twist His arm. We cannot coerce Him to reveal. It is something freely given, just like the God who will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy. How would you like to go an entire lifetime without ever once having been privileged to receive revelation from God? That means that your whole 'faith' is constituted entirely on a human, mental and cerebral level, which must eventuate in a pathetic kind of Christian life. I would almost say that you would be better off being an atheist than to think that you are a believer. It is like having your nose pressed against the glass looking in, but unable to enter.

The prophet is required to communicate things as God sees them to a people who not only have a different way of seeing things, but who do not want to see it from God's point of view. That requires, therefore, an unction and an anointing of such a kind as to make the truth of that seeing to penetrate the unwilling heart to the point of repentance, and bringing into conformity that life to God's own seeing. That is a supreme task