Identifying the prophetic man # 01

From the very beginning: A prophet is a foundational man. His is chosen and sent to draw forth that which is foundational. Prophets inquire and search diligently, to be able to prophesy of the grace of God, of the ways of God, of His nature and of the proper standing of the people of God. 1 Pet 1:10

The prophet shuns triviality, he chooses his words carefully. He understands that his words never cover the full intention of the Lord. Therefore, he is never careless when it comes to words and definitions.

He is chosen and sent to draw fort that which is foundational. His presence is oftentimes provocative, he is an annoyance when the people of God has chosen to sit idly. He is a rough challenge where comfort zones are firmly established. His words are meant to draw forth that which is foundational when the people of God have turned Church into Sunday culture.

His words bring radical demands, his life and living is as foundational as his words. He is a foundational man, a man of heavenly stature – often weak and perplexed, certainly humble. He has learnt to care for his people the hard way. The many who chooses to throw invectives and insults at their audiences and at opposing parties, has no part of the prophetic process which aims at redeeming and restoring.

The prophet’s words are tools in God’s hand, “pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times”. He is painfully aware of the possibility of a diluting of the words given, he is painfully aware of the possibility of an intrusion of his own fantasy and desires in the process of delivering the prophetic statement. He is painfully aware of the longing among the people for a “good” word, a confirmation, a word which soothes and lifts up – and his own weakness as to the standing firm in what the Lord has given.

The prophet is a foundational man, words and definitions are his main tools in the work which the Lord has assigned to him. A sure sign of the man sent from God is his way with words – even with truth itself. He lives the truth. The contours and at times even his countenance are well defined, sharp indeed. He serves the Eternal – which means, there is no change, no compromise, no possibility to ward off what has been said. God’s Word stands – and the prophet trembles at the delivering of a word from His mouth.

Lars Widerberg

Reading: 1 Pet 1:10, Ps 12:6

A prophetic necessity

Jeremiah, the prophet whose writings were cut asunder by a conceited king, had received a delicate description of the assignment unto which he was born: “I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down and to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” The major part of the prophetic assignment – any prophetic assignment – is one of discerning and confronting for the sake of making room for something radically other.

The prophetic necessity of confrontation lies within the heavenly framework established for the drawing forth of both personal as well as corporate character and integrity suited and designed to reflect Heaven itself. The prophet stands with a revealing and a breaking unto change – and is welcomed wherever men and women aspire for stature, virtue and prudence. The ultimate desire of the Father is a full-orbed personalities, a sainthood including guilelessness and purity of heart, even innocence amidst the antinomian, the lawless, chicanery of our culture.

The very modern view among Christians, adopted from psychology, is one which allows for a self-willed quest for approval and endorsement which fully contradicts the apostolic point of view – “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me”. It leaves behind the guileless position of a saint, only to invite carnal expressions of strength and prosperity as markers of spirituality. The modern gospel boosts selfhood and independence – as psychology does, thereby contradicting the saving message of the cross of Jesus Christ. It contradicts the message of the crucified One and the making of disciples – men and women maturing unto fullness as full-orbed, sanctified personalities.

Prophetic presence provokes. Prophetic presence induces a shaking. It shakes the very foundation of our view of what the Gospel is designed to accomplish. It dares to shake our preferences and comfort zones – for the sake of a correct building of a house, of a fellowship meant for true worship. The prophetic presence provokes, “admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ.” The prophetic presence produces radical testimony by requiring each and every man to begin to consider “what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Consider this: Humility is weakness at its very best. Holiness is beauty at its very finest. The conceited man stands against weakness and despises its expressions. The proud man takes ugliness to its optimized level – holiness stands as its radical opposite. The gospel which boosts self never saves. The gospel which reaches for personal fulfillment on man’s terms never saves. Selfhood and a self-focus is in itself that extreme opposition against God, which caused Him to send his only begotten Son to the Cross to die for us and to save us. . .

It takes prophetic presence in its radical form, like with Jeremiah, to challenge and confront the issue of carnality in our modern Church. It takes prophetic presence in its radical form to speak up against the gospel which does not save. It takes prophetic presence in its radical form to pray forth that which pleases the Father in terms of service, corporate service, in humility and holiness. It takes prophetic presence in its radical form, to bring the Church to a position in which it will be able to speak to the surrounding and hostile society. Such a testimony is brought forth by the Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of prophecy – which himself is the testimony of Jesus Christ, our Saviour and the coming King.

Lars Widerberg

Reading: Jer 1:10, Gal 2:20, Col 1:28, Rom 12:1-2

Prophetic thinking

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The Berean thinking is deductive thinking – a process of reasoning by which a specific conclusion necessarily follows from a set of general principles.
The Berean thinking is deductive thinking – God is light, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow.

Berean thinking asks the question, “What does the Word of God imply and mean.”
It is prophetic thinking which makes careful research and inquiry seeking to know the time and the circumstances of the Cross and the of glories to follow.
It has no hidden agenda.

It is straight thinking which does not allow for any interruption or interference by anything which is not aligned to this specific ambition.
It is a way of thinking which saves. Truth is an active factor of liberation. The Truth shall set you free.

The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace, refined seven times. It must be meditated upon in prayer which requests revelation. It never lends itself to man’s agendas. It is relevant, it is not religious. God is relevant, He is certainly not religious. His way of arguing is straight lined arguing. If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know. . .

The thinking set up over against the Spirit-led pondering upon the Word of the Lord may be called Seductive thinking.

It imposes its ideas by seductive means and techniques. Its favourite field of operation is to try to press the Word of the Lord into man’s moulds to support mans religious agendas. It uses the Word to gain support for and to prove man’s ways and man’s thesis. It appears as religious and sensual. It promotes a lustful approach to spirituality. The spiritual becomes a realm of entertainment under its influence.

The arguing techniques of the seductive thinking are loaded with contradictions and evasive changes of direction in a line of thought. It uses derogative means to do harm to an exchange of views. It dodges the main point by meaningless excursions. The seductive thinking shuts itself in and stops communicating when caught in its own contradictions. It at times threatens with spiritual suicide if heavily opposed – “you cannot do this to me, it’s unfair, you do not love me, it’s not God’s love. He is kind, the prophetic gifts are for edification.”

The seductive thinking is one of the major instruments to defend sin and to allow for the flesh to stay un-crucified. It gathers endorsement for its own way of interpreting the Word, and as much support is secured the new thesis has become “present-day-truth.”

The Cross of Jesus Christ sharpens the conflict between true truth and the seductive type.
The Cross of Jesus Christ positions a prophetic community in opposition to religious hype.
The Cross of Jesus Christ provides a line of division which is sharper than any law, and dictates for any and every man to decide for true life through death.
The Cross of Jesus Christ will never lend itself to the establishment of a Jezebelic, seductive interpretation of the eternal purposes of the Lamb, the Lord.

Lars Widerberg

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5. Prophetic speech, finally, is not an act of criticism. It is rather an act of relentless hope that refuses to despair and that refuses to believe that the world is closed off in patterns of exploitation and oppression.13 It stands against a closed present tense that is either excessively complacent about social relations or excessively despairing about an unbearable present tense. This speech knows that such closed-off life inevitably produces brutality, the child of despair, either out of strident control or out of hopelessness. It dares to assert in any and every circumstance the conviction known since Abraham and Sarah and Moses and Aaron, namely, that there is a God who can and will make all things new, even in the face of our most closed-down, self-satisfied present tense. This is what the text means when it asserts that God works an impossibility in order that “all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel” (1 Sam. 17:46).

From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann

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4. Out of God’s justice, prophetic speech characteristically takes a criticalposture over against established power. Established power, in predictable ways, always manages to legitimate itself until it drives every other factor out of the social equation and history comes to equal not only the play of power but finally the embrace of this particular arrangement of power.
Prophetic speech refuses such a seductive domestication of the historical process. Prophetic speech not only insists that the raw use of power is wrong and must pay heed to human reality but also makes the more difficult claim that, in the end, raw power cannot succeed and is not the final datum of human history. Prophetic speech is realistic in knowing that massive power matters enormously; it is equally insistent that massive power does not matter ultimately as regards the outcome or significance of the human process. This view of power is not an obscurantist supernaturalism that bails out with reference to God. Rather it is the studied conclusion that there simply is not enough power in the long run to sustain itself in the face of human restlessness among those who refuse to be eradicated as an inconvenience. Moreover this human restlessness that refuses eradication is rooted in God’s own resolve for the world.

From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann

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3. Out of God’s justice, prophetic speech characteristically speaks about human suffering. It takes human suffering as a definitional datum of the human, historical process. Thus, already in the exodus narrative, when Israel cries out, God sees, God hears, God knows, God remembers, and God intervenes (Exod. 2:23-25; 3:7-14).12 It is the utterance of hurt that moves God to newness. The powers of modernity want not to notice human suffering; they want to define suffering as a legitimate and necessary cost of well-being or as an inexplicable given of human history. Prophetic speech demystifies pain and sees clearly that much pain is principally caused by the manipulation of economic and political access whereby the strong regularly destroy the weak. Such suffering is not a legitimate, bearable cost; and it is not inexplicable. Instead, social pain is a product of social relationships that can be transformed. Prophetic speech focused in hurt speaks against any tidy administration of social relations that crushes human reality in the interest of order, progress, profit, or “the common good.”

From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann

Fire in the Bones 03

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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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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 courage and burden of the Old Testament prophets, the prophets of scandalous impossibility, was to find speech that is adequate for the character of God. There would be no prophets (as here understood) without this God who is the subject of their speech, and there would be no prophetic word were God not a God of whom it can be said, “Thus says the LORD”; to put it succinctly, human utterance sounds holy speech.

 

Accordingly, for all our interest in sociology and politics, the theme we strike is theological in nature and has to do with the character of God and the courage to bring this God to speech What the prophets assert is that human processes and policies are, apart from this God, wrongly construed. I suggest three ways of speaking about this God who keeps human history open to possibility. The character of this God who does wonders (pela’) is described one oracle at a time, one crisis at a time, one possibility at a time:

 

1. This God, unlike other gods, is holy, brooking no rivals, utterly unapproachable. There is at the center of the historical process a force and a will that cannot be harnessed, domesticated, manipulated, or bought off.

 

2. This God, unlike other gods, is a “lover of justice” (Ps. 99:4), intolerant of injustice, mightily at work in the public processes of history, allied with the powerless, critical of the greedy powerful, intervening with a “preferential option for the marginal.”

 

3. This God, unlike other gods, because holy and because just, is a dangerous, subversive God, unsettling every status quo that offends holiness and that mocks justice. This God, unlike any other, is one who subverts, ending what is cherished and beginning what we little expect, in order that the world may receive and enact its proper life as God’s creation.

 

The prophetic word in history is human utterance about this God, unintimidated by modernity, unimpressed by excessive religion, nonnegotiable about rhetoric, nondefensive about its epistemology, daring to insist that this God who works wonders in the historical process is still at large, liberating and healing.

 

From:

Like Fire in the Bones

Walter Brueggemann