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2. This holy God refuses to absolutize the present, any present. This holy God drives always toward a new unsettling, unsettled future, which is not yet visible, when God’s purpose will be accomplished and God’s regime fully established. This threatening, promising future, which lives on the lips of prophets, warns against taking the present with excessive seriousness, even if it is a present that we happen to value inordinately.
From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann
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The prophet; a man in whom an inescapable, an overriding word of God has been formed to be delivered – at greatest cost, with the prospect of particular personal loss – to his fellow contemporaries who will ridicule and condemn him according to their own wisdom, in haughty opposition to that which is to be discerned in the prophetic man.
This kind of man will, by the very existence of an inner testimony, stand as an assayer – an examiner among people – that he may know and try their way. His sending has little to do with gifting, not even the gifts of charismata. The sending of the prophetic man is not related to that of a formal office, endorsed by established religious as well as political rulership.
His life and living is a life overtaken by the very nature of existence, by the very nature of a Holy God. His days, and nights, are filled. . . all of them are filled with probing and pondering, with a persistent pursuit for that which holds a minimum of correspondence to that which is holy and heavenly.
His life consists in coming to terms with the inner formation of that antithetical word, to articulate its innate judgment and to live with the hazardous consequences of the reality of the word to be delivered with clarity in words as well as through moral stature.
L. W.
Speech about God, speech that is daringly human and embarrassingly particular, regularly sounds themes that demand attention and require a revisioning of the human process. I should like to identify five such themes that are characteristic of the prophets, though many others might be cited.
1. Out of God’s unaccommodating holiness, the prophetic word is against idols, and consequently against self-serving, self-deceiving ideology. Idolatry and its twin, ideology, always want to absolutize some arrangement of power and knowledge so that we may bow down to the work of our hands. Against such an absolutizing pretension, the holiness of God critiques, exposes, and assaults every phony absolute since all such absolutes of nation, race, party, or sex will end in death.
From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann
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The Spirit of Prophecy: An Examination of the Prophetic Call
Art Katz
6 – Proclaiming the Word that is “Given”
The spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet. If it is not God’s moment, then we need to hold it. Something happens internally to the prophet when he contains and holds his own spirit and does not just spit it out. An ejaculation is always a great relief, but to hold it until the appointed time is beyond the issue of what relieves us. It is the issue of what glorifies God. There is still a ‘you’ involved when we blurt out something. We need to come to a place where there is no interest or satisfaction in ourselves. It is all the same to us to speak or not to speak, to be seen or not to be seen, to be used or not to be used, to be set aside or to be employed. Only then can we be used.
God’s purpose is not the alleviation of our tension, but the revelation of His glory. We are alleviation-minded and not glory-minded, and so long as we remain in that condition we will never be used to minister the Life of God. We have a question and so we expect an answer. The question may even be good and interesting, so why not ask it and get an answer! We have a need and we want it met. That is not being ruled by the Spirit of God but by self-interest. The fact that it is a ‘spiritual’ interest does not void it from being self-interest. The prophet does not operate by his own curiosity. Though something is good or valid, that does not justify expressing it. The only issue is what God intends in that given moment.
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, or 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. The prophet is one who is the communicator of God’s own word. It is not the prophet’s word. 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 himself subjectively 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 beside yourself and 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.
There are times when a prophet will enter a fellowship that seems to ‘have it all together’ and they are worshipping enthusiastically—and everything seems to be right—yet he is grieving! He is almost doubled over and knotted in the inner man. He is anguishing in his 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 soulish carnality and self-deluded people priming and pumping themselves up, and your one presence in that room is a contradiction to all that is going on. To top it all, you are not there as an observer; you are going to speak! What will you speak? Will you speak so as to confirm what people think is the spiritual reality 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!”?
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. It is a suffering, but 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 intrinsic to the prophetic.
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The Danger of Overreacting
We have already seen the reaction [the denial of spiritual longing and desire] among the masses of evangelical Christians. There has been a revolt in two directions, a rather unconscious revolt, like the gasping of fish in a bowl where there is no oxygen. A great company of evangelicals have already gone over into the area of religious entertainment so that many gospel churches are tramping on the doorstep of the theatre. Over against that, some serious segments of fundamental and evangelical thought have revolted into the position of evangelical rationalism which finds it a practical thing to make peace with liberalism.
The Tozer Pulpit, Book 4
