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The text below is a mailing published and sent by Lars Widerberg, The European Prophetic College.

/Dag Selander

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This mailing contains a couple of cuts from a piece of writing which may be labelled “A manual for the prophetic man”. I do not hesitate to say that it is the only piece of writing of our days which fits such a label.

We remind you of its existence and encourage you to read it in its full length, 12 chapters:
 
THE PROPHETIC CALL by Art Katz
 
It will be sent on request, either as text in an ordinary e-mail, or as a MS WORD file via e-mail. Do not forget to tell us which format you prefer.

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Cuts from
THE PROPHETIC CALL
by Art Katz
 
There are two great words that I guard with a fierce jealousy, namely, prophetic and apostolic. The church is”...built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets...(Eph. 2:20b)”, and if those two words are ruined, cheapened, made merchandise of, lose their meaning or are made to stand for something that God did not intend, then we have lost our foundation.
If there is something flaky about our apostles and prophets, then what will the superstructure be if it is based on that foundation? The superstructure cannot exceed the foundation, and therefore the foundation deserves the most exceeding attention. This has been my long-standing passion and jealousy, and in a certain sense, a kind of a watchdog over these words, that they should not be used indiscriminately nor lightly, which in fact is exactly what is happening today.
 

There is a tremendous amount of difference and controversy that broods over this subject. The church has really suffered from a kind of dichotomy between the Old and the New, as if the New has displaced or rendered the Old null and void. That is not the way that God sees it. That is the terminology that men have employed, but not the terminology that God Himself has given, and we have suffered for that. Jews have also suffered for that because it leaves them secure within the framework of their own Judaistic understanding: ”You have your Book; we have our Book.” It is implying that: ”You have your God, and we have our God”.
It is an impression that God never intended, but that we have allowed Judaism to luxuriate in and find safety in. We need, therefore, to fight for the one faith, the one unbroken, continuous faith, given from the beginning, and that is climaxed, concluded and consummated at the end by the same God who gave it in the beginning. He is the same yesterday, today and forever.
If that is the way we see the faith, then can we expect and will we need prophetic men of the Old Testament kind in our own generation, and especially at the end? Is there a conjunction between beginnings and endings? As it was in the beginning, so also at the end? The issues of the beginning do not change, but are even brought into more intensive focus and significance at the end, but it is not different or other than what was at the beginning.
 

If we were to examine the callings of all of the prophets and their responses, we would see how often these men cry out, ”But I am a child and cannot speak.” After all of our examining we would have a portrait, and it would be a composite portrait of the prophetic genius. However much these men differ in their calling and personalities, there is some central thing that runs through them all that is designated ‘prophetic’, and that is what we are wanting to identify, because certainly the cry for that particular thing is with us in our final generation and in these last days. We cannot even conceive of the church independent of the restoration of prophets.
Somehow and all of the sudden, this subject has broken upon the consciousness of the church, and now there is a sudden flush of excitement and men seem to be running everywhere to hear prophets. These prophets seem to have come to an instantaneous popularity. They were not on the scene before and all the sudden they are here. They are also being heralded in very lavish ways, not just as prophets, but as ‘the oracles of the hour’. This is, therefore, a phenomenon that we need to examine to see how legitimate it is, and whether indeed it is the Lord or some kind of counterfeit.
 

The office of prophet differs from the gift of prophecy in that it is permanent. It is given with the man. It is a calling, and it may well be that men, who have the office of prophet, can go an entire lifetime in their service and never once speak out of the gift of prophecy, and yet still be functioning in their office. The church today is suffering from the ignorance of blurring these two categories. We are calling men prophets who have not the office, but who are operating in the gift of prophecy, and in many instances not even the gift of prophecy, but the gift of knowledge of a rather deceitful clairvoyance. We really need to be clear, therefore, on what we are saying.
The office of prophet is the ultimate thing and carries an enormous responsibility. Such a one brings the oracles of God. He is standing for very God and speaking from God with the authority of God in a troubled and final generation. His statements are the statements of God’s heart to His people that have to do with His purposes in an understanding of the present time in view of the things that are future and eternal. It is the prophet who is alerted. He interprets the event and communicates that interpretation to a church that would otherwise have passed it over. That is his function and that is his call for which he is not necessarily going to be understood nor heard. The word is more often than not going to be rejected and his life is going to be threatened.
 

The first expression of the prophetic calling is judgment. Unless we have a stomach for that, n we will not be allowed the privilege of the word that builds and plants. Note the order of the words: the hardest thing first. Everything that is painful to the flesh and that will earn for us the displeasure of men must first be addressed. The prophet is called to pluck up and break down the things that are dear to men, namely, their religious tradition, the false things that they have celebrated for generations, the things that they want to cling to because it has to do with their identity and their dignity and the way in which they even see themselves. Men will kill for this and yet the prophet has got to tear down and destroy. The things that are false will be contended for fiercely! He has got therefore to be painful and a destroyer. His word then is destructive before it is benevolent.
Unless we are willing to speak the destructive word, we will never be used for benevolence. Only the prophets who were faithful to speak the word of exile and judgment were also the prophets who spoke the word of restoration and return. They were given the privilege of speaking the creative word of restoration. It would be a much simpler task if we just had to establish fresh principles where it falls on virginal consciousness. When you first have to deal with and penetrate a whole existent medley of opinions and traditions that have become dear (if not sacrosanct), you will ironically be accused of being opposed to God!
 

A prophet does not major in minors. Out of a consummate jealousy for the glory of God, he sets forth the ultimate purposes of God in such a way as to obtain the sacrifices of his hearers to fulfill it. It is not enough just to set forth what God’s program is, but to set it forth in such a way that he has won the willingness of the hearers to be participant in obtaining the ultimate and eternal purposes of God— as sacrifice. That is where the prophetic word is more than the word of explanation. It does not just explain what the eternal purposes of God are, but he communicates it in such a way as to win the commitment of his hearers to the sacrifice necessary to fulfill them. That takes more than explanation.
 

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.
 

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.
 

The word is not spoken abstractly out of some kind of mechanism, but out of flesh and blood organism, out of man with all of his sweat, defect and limitation. I do not know how to say this. No man is more acutely aware of his human limitation than the prophetic man and that is why they always cry out, ”I am as a child, I cannot speak.” In fact, if they have not that awareness, then they are not even a candidate for use. There is nothing more glaring in contradiction than the nobility of what a prophet is required to speak as being the very mouth of God and for God, and yet coming out of all of the defect and shortcomings of his humanity. It is like a contradiction of an ultimate kind and so men who have that calling are understandably and frequently discouraged. Their humanity is always before them. If the enemy can play upon that sufficiently so as to stop their mouth, which is his frequent attack, then the word does not go forth.
 
We desperately need oracles from God who can say what this hour means, and what it is to which we are tending, and what is God requiring in the light of the things that point to the consummation of the age. We need men who can communicate the word. If a prophet is not distinguished by his speaking, then do not look for his credentials on the basis of his gifting or his miracles or his gift of knowledge. That would be a real snare. It is not that their messages are not biblical and good, so much as they have not been oracular, that is to say, prophetic in the sense of the weight, intensity and solemnity of the messages. A word can be sound, biblical and doctrinally clean and yet not be a prophetic word. It does not have the weight, nor the meaning or portent nor ultimate requirement that a prophetic word should.
 
We are moving into the dangers of the last days and I believe that it is a giddy love for the demonstration of power in some kind of gifting that will seduce millions of believers who are not to careful to examine the origin of that manifestation, so long as they themselves might be the happy recipient of a word of knowledge about them. People seem to need that, I believe, because they have a deep-seated insecurity in the faith. They have not the knowledge of God, nor the knowledge of themselves in God. They do not see themselves as they ought as accepted in the Beloved. They want a confirmation that God really knows them. To want to need that assurance out of an insecurity in one’s faith will move us towards deception.
The prophetic standard, which in a certain sense is the statement of God before His people, communicates His fear and His holiness in a real and searching sense. When something is being labeled prophetic and is not, not only is prophetic being denigrated, but God is being denigrated because He Himself is intrinsic to the thing that is prophetic. We need to recognize that and not treat the prophetic thing lightly, because that is to treat Him lightly.  God Himself suffers in esteem.
 

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Lars Widerberg
The European Prophetic College
Storskiftesgatan 87
S-58334 Linkoping, Sweden
Phone + Fax:  +46 13 213630