An interview with Alistair Reese, New Zealand, April 2001
A: Give us your name, family status, occupation and your ethno-nationality.
Art: Well, I am a Jewish believer from both parents, married, and I have three children and six grandchildren. I am 72 years of age. Occupation? I write ‘retired’ when I have to fill out the passport or visa applications coming into different countries, but I am a spokesman for the Lord, a mouthpiece, and something of an author.
A: What have been some of the key influences that have helped you to form your worldview? Firstly, people.
Art: I am hard-pressed to think of any outstanding influence that has come through men. I have been grateful for pastors, ministers, and publishers over the years, but I cannot think of a single formidable personality, someone like an A.W. Tozer; however, I would say the brother from New Zealand in Palmerton North, Ken Wright, is probably one of the singular influences to bring a degree of balance and fatherly warmth to me at a stage when I was yet a bit up in arms and needed to be quieted in a right way. I have always enjoyed my time with him, his counsel with me, and he was a real benevolent influence. I could probably think of others, but it would take some time.
A: Okay, then, what about literature?
Art: Watchman Nee, A.W. Tozer, Berkhoff, the Dutch theologian, and, principally now in the most recent years, Karl Barth, have all influenced me with their work. I especially love Barth’s books; he has been a great influence. Then, of course, Paul himself has influenced me through his Epistles. I could think of a number of other authors over the years that have been significant, usually theologians who are not well known. I love Charles Spurgeon, of course; Spurgeon’s Treasury of David, his commentary on the Psalms, has been a great blessing for me. I have a German theologian, Hans Joachim Kraus, who is also the author of a commentary that has been a blessing from yet another perspective, not so much inspirational, but more scholarly. Walter Brueggemann, an American theologian of the Old Testament and the Psalms, has been a significant influence. I am thinking of the German Old Testament scholars and the Hebrew scholars like David Baron and Adolf Saphir. Their commentaries on Israel and the Messianic prophecies are excellent.
A: So then, moving on to experiences, what would be some of the experiences that have brought you to where you are now and caused you to think the way you think now?
Art: I would say that the greatest experience has been that of community for this past quarter of a century, having to go through various ordeals and trials, as I mentioned this morning, coming into meetings that are so compacted and tense that you stop breathing when you enter the room and feel that there is no answer to the predicament, then coming out two or three hours later walking on a cloud, because the Lord has brought some transcendent answer. One of the highlights was a trial of the brother whose flesh was given over to the devil, that his soul might be saved, a three-hour actual judicial hearing that was a transcendent experience; we heard housewives speaking out of such depths of wisdom and compassion, prompted by the significance of what we were about, and performing righteous judgment. I have had a host of experiences through the community that have been very formative in my life, and I am sure that I would be something other than what I presently am if my lifestyle had been modeled more along the lines of those who live privately and comfortably. I would not have appreciated the hardships, difficulties, confrontations, and misunderstandings. In recent years, the Lord has even tempered me in giving me a bit of a father’s heart and a pastoral heart, which I have never had in all the good times and did not think I was required to have, but it has come out of the necessity of living real life.
I have also been greatly shaped by experiencing the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I once had a great experience, probably the profoundest in God, in preparing the message on mercy. In Ma Brogger’s trailer up at the farm, the Lord lifted the veil, so much as a crack, and beams of light came forth in such a way that I was found two hours later when she returned with a friend, stretched out on the floor, on my face and unable to move. I was surrounded by wads of soaking kleenexes from my tears, and she went right to the phone to call for an ambulance; I could only gesture that it was not necessary, but I could not speak, I was so overcome by the power and the glory that had issued from this little crack of God’s revelation. Finally, they put me up on a seat, and I tried to explain what had happened. It was now time for me to speak, so they wanted to drive me down to the camp. I said that I could not get into a car, nor could I even ride on my bike. I could not touch anything made by man, and I could not even walk down the regular road to the camp; I said that I had to go the back way, so as to not see anyone before I went up onto the platform. That is how profound an experience that was.
The second experience, not as dramatic, was the 10-day fast and 24-hour prayer vigil that we conducted at one point in the community’s history. On the seventh or the eighth day of that fast, I was so spiritually spent and exhausted and wasted that I remember being stretched out on my face, unable even to pray. There was a groan, and something came on me that made me utterly aware of myself and my prostration as a piece of creation before the Creator; I realized how cursory and insufficient a little three-day fast had been when we prayed for a question of need prior to a trip, but a ten-day fast and prayer round the clock (because we were committed this time) brought a whole new dimension of the lowliness of myself, in view of the greatness of the Creator who is worth everything. No fireworks, no fresh baptism in the Holy Spirit, though we needed it, just that consciousness of God and myself and my own mortality and frailty was invaluable. I have never forgotten that experience, and I hope to retain it.
A: Art, how would you describe your Christian tradition in terms of the evangelical, charismatic, those sort of terminologies?
Art: Hard to pin down. Certainly, I am Spirit-filled, but I have been one of the greatest critics of the Charismatic movement. I have grown up in the Pentecostal movement, so I am a kind of ‘son’ of Pentecost, saved in the Assemblies of God in Jerusalem. I have spoken in many of their schools and churches over the years, though not in recent years, so it would be very hard to compartmentalize me. Of course, I am an evangelical, but I praise God for the latitude and freedom that I have that can fit into context and venues of almost any kind: Egypt, East Germany under Communist rule, Singapore with wealthy congregations. It does not matter, because I am at ease in every place, and I have spoken at many universities in confrontations because of my ex-Marxist background. So, what do we say? Messianic? Is that the name that is now given to Jewish believers? Yet, I am more opposed by Messianic leaders than by any other, because of my differing views on Israel. Shall we then say apostolic and prophetic? Yet, I have had more conflict with men who purport to be apostolic and prophetic than with any other. Therefore, I will just have to leave that question hanging.
A: Art, some Christian leaders in New Zealand call you a prophet. Do you accept that terminology?
Art: I accept it because it is not something I am free to deny. It is nothing that I would boast in as if it were something that I have fashioned or formed; it is something that has been given, and to deny the givenness is to repudiate or contradict the God who has given it. He has made clear over the years that this is indeed my calling. I acknowledge it, I am grateful for it, but I do not boast in it, and I do not—if it were not for the fact that an issue has now risen, where the issue of authenticity is at stake—I would not refer to it myself. But now we are at a place over the issue of Israel. Whether it has an apocalyptic and violent destiny or can rather progressively improve, is of great moment. If we are sounding a warning of something that is not to come, then we are bringing unnecessary disturbance, but if we are bringing a warning of a calamitous thing that must come and requires an appropriate preparation in the church, then there is no word more significant. So, on what basis do we offer our perspective? If it is only a personal opinion, then it can be as readily rejected. Therefore, when I speak, I say I am not giving an opinion, but I am speaking out of the perspective of the prophetic scriptures in keeping with my call, because I believe that God gives to men who have this office an understanding of prophetic scriptures that is not available to others. This now has become a critical question, whether something is an opinion or issues out of a man’s office and call; otherwise, I would not take the pains to speak of it. However, because of it, I am required now to address the subject of true and false prophets.
We have a whole book on our website on the prophetic call and a little 50-page booklet that you have obtained, The Spirit of Prophecy, an extract from that larger work, because I have over a quarter of a century of a history in this calling and am very jealous over the word; if we lose it, we lose everything. The prophet in this circumstance presages the coming of that which is apostolic and even prepares the church to anticipate and recognize it. Therefore, if the prophet himself is disqualified, or if the word loses its cogency, as I believe is happening now in the loose present popularity of the prophetic call, then the game is lost. I am very jealous of the prophetic word, its meaning and its integrity, for it has become an issue of significance in this hour.
A: How did you realize, or how did you know, that the nature of your ministry was prophetic as such, as opposed to pastoral, teaching, or whatever?
Art: It had to be brought to my attention by others, men like Ern Baxter, who, after I finished bringing three messages on the Patriarchs, followed them by thanking me, expressing that these were prophetic commentaries, and I naively thought, “Is that so?” In the beginning, other men making frequent allusion to the word ‘prophetic’ made me to be aware that they were seeing something that had not, at that time, been brought to my awareness. The first consciousness of this title came from other men acknowledging this in me, but I always knew that I was not a teacher. Except as a prophetic teacher, I have done the work of an evangelist; there is a very clear mode of being, of perceiving and expressing, that is distinctive of the prophetic, which is unquestionably what I am about.
A: How would you describe prophetic ministry?
Art: Well, there is a whole book on this subject on our website. It took me five days at Youth With A Mission in Lausanne years ago to begin an assessment of what the word ‘apostolic’ meant—and they are very similar. ‘Prophetic’ is expressing God’s own heart and perceiving things as He Himself sees them, a certain mode of being, living, a certain jealousy of an intense kind, a certain concern for His glory, His Name, His honor, a certain seeing through appearances to the reality beneath. Had you been with me Sunday morning, you would have seen this demonstration. I walked into a church, and I was instantly uncomfortable. After I attended their prayer meeting in the side room, where the discomfort was not lessened, I came into the sanctuary and watched the worship team and the pastor performing. When I got up, my first word was, “What would you think if out of your very congregation, some young man or adolescent went berserk and shot up his high school and his teachers?” I said, “You’re in an environment conducive to that conduct in your unreality. You’re forming the nexus out of which that kind of aberration can take place,” and I did not lighten up or let up. I went right on through, breaking down the facade and its appearances, confronting them with the truth of their conditions, and the pastor, after I finished, had the temerity to come up and take the microphone and continue in the same droll, mealy-mouthed way that I had identified before as being false. I could not believe it, and I could not bear it; I got up and had to tell him, “You have said enough, much too much.” In fact, if he had continued, then I really would have caused a scene. As it happened, we had lunch with this pastor and another family—the brother who hosted the lunch is here now—and when we had lunch together, I said, “You need to go before the congregation tonight and apologize for continuing in the same mode that God had exposed as being false and ask their forgiveness for seeking to go back to ‘business as usual’ after this corrective word from God.” But I do not believe that he did it.
In this confrontation, you have a small picture of what it means to be prophetic: fearless, uncompromising, no concern for how one will be regarded in terms of reputation, no question of the jealousy of God for reality to address the thing that is quickened, where there is no other thought or message that can be considered but that thing that is pulsating in your heart because of your identification and union with God. It does not always take that form, but frequently it will. So that is prophetic, to speak for God out of the sense of God Himself, without concern for what the effect will be, whether it has been received or rejected, or how you personally will be received. In fact, I thought to myself, “Surely, if ever I qualified for being stoned, it’s now.” I was bringing down the whole house, the whole thing that had had too long a history of deceit and religious hypocrisy. They either had to stone me or fall before the Lord as being the word of truth. I think many in the congregation did, but the pastor himself was so rooted in that system that he continued to babble and had to be reprimanded.
A: I think there is a sense where you have answered this question already by that example, but I wonder—you might be able to further clarify—how would you describe the nature of your prophetic activity?
Art: It is an attempt to restore lost foundations, to bring the breadth of God’s ultimate purpose, particularly as it pertains to Israel in the Last Days, to underline the significance of that understanding for the church, and what it requires sacrificially of the church to fulfill. Yesterday, I used words like ‘cosmic, primordial, eschatological, and apocalyptic.’ I am attempting a breadth of understanding that the church has lacked and for which reason it is one-dimensional, shallow, and vacuous today. That is the prophetic seeing. It is rooted in Deuteronomy. My Holocaust book, understanding the Nazi Holocaust, has been a statement of God’s judgment, promised in Deuteronomy. All of the prophets were Deuteronomic in their understanding of blessing or curse and understanding of divine causation of sin and consequence. To bring that view of God, particularly in judgment, to a church that has not been disposed to see it, is one of my continuing burdens. Yesterday, I used the German word, weltanschauung for worldview, a cosmic perception of the faith, which, once understood, can help the church to see itself in that larger context; otherwise, it is doomed to a mere succession of Sunday services and programs. It needs to have this overview, the arching overview of God, and see it in its context and its great history, even in its primordial pre-history. There is a great theme of the salvation of God written into His whole enterprise that needs to be understood; otherwise, we reduce salvation itself to a mere formula—step one, step two.
I am called and formed to breathe out this breadth of understanding, by which the church can identify itself and take up its task and calling to appropriate and to serve out of the prolific endless and indestructible life of God Himself. It is the call of the church to resurrection reality. When it sees the mandate and magnitude of its call, that it cannot be fulfilled on the basis of its own religious well-meaning intention, it will be brought into the glory of God’s own Life. Because I not only describe that call but speak it out, this thing from that Life, they hear not only the proclamation, but they see the demonstration in the very word that comes to them! So the prophet is called not only to proclaim, but also to demonstrate in himself, to be the thing in himself, to which the church is called in its own prophetic stature and identification. When I spoke at a Revival School on the subject of Israel, it was like a door, like a furnace door bursting open and an apocalyptic view of things gushing out on these young people. When I finished, the director of the school tried to smooth it over because it upset some of their categories. He even put revival in a lesser place in the keeping with the greater purposes of God, of which revival is only a means, not the end in itself. However, the students came up on the platform when everything was dismissed and were touching me like, “Aahhh, where did this guy come from? What is it? We have heard of the prophetic, but this is the thing in itself. We have heard, we have seen with our own eyes, we have touched with our own hands, this remarkable reality.”
A: Art, what do you think is at work in that kind of a presentation? What is happening?
Art: It is the very Life of God, the indestructible Life, not only as an energy, but also as a content and as a character. I used the word ‘Davidic’ yesterday. The church is called to a Davidic kingdom; it is not just a governmental scheme, but also that which has a character in keeping with God Himself! The Life conveys the wisdom of God, the energy, the dynamic, but also the Spirit, the form and the essence of what He is in Himself, for the spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus. What we are setting forth is the Lord Himself; therefore, the way in which men regard us or treat us is invariably and often their statement toward Him. Their rejection of us is their rejection of Him. It is never a question of self-pity if I am rejected, but I feel sorry for those who do not realize what their rejection of the prophetic man constitutes with regard to Him, seeing that the spirit of prophecy is His own testimony. It is an awesome calling, and I am grateful beyond words that this is my privilege by the sovereignty and ordination of God. I am a privileged man.
A: Can you describe the main area of your prophetic concern?
Art: The issue of Israel is my concern, and it is ironic that the thing that most contends against my apocalyptic view is the present sentimental, humanistic, and idealistic, if not romantic, affinity of Christians, usually Charismatic, for Israel. This militates against the glory that God intends for a redeemed Israel, which, in my opinion, may require the sinking and extinction of this present political entity. That is my jealousy—to bring, to convey, a view of the meaning of Israel in dimensions that the church has not yet begun to suspect. The church much prefers a sentimental relationship, because it requires less of them. To be participant in the restoration of Israel after a humiliating defeat and exile, being expelled into nations, and sifted through nations, makes of the church God’s salvific agent. In order to perform that, the church itself must come into a greater and ultimate stature. I would say that is the brunt of what I am about and what occupies me: bringing this view to the church. It is remarkable what it will require.
Being in the Philippines, a third world country, I saw poverty-stricken men wanting so much to succeed as pastors as a means of escaping poverty. I brought to them a view of what all of this means for the church and for the ministers that completely controverts that ministerial model; I watched men forsake this model at the loss of their own hope for success, as only Israel, rightly depicted and conveyed, has the power to do. The issue of Israel, in the last analysis, is the issue of the Kingdom. We cannot understand Israel except in the theocratic context, in which its restoration means the “word [going] forth out of Zion” (Isa. 2:3). The actual rule of God over the nations waits for this, the nexus of a restored Israel. That is why Israel will be so bitterly opposed, even unto annihilation, by the powers of darkness. In the absence of this theocratic view, every kind of petty kingdom has flourished in the religious world; denominations, movements, individual ministries are petty kingdoms, for the want of the knowledge of the great Kingdom, inexorably connected with the issue of Israel’s restoration. You cannot appropriate and understand and seek the Kingdom of God independent of Israel’s restoration. When the disciples of Jesus said to Him, at the end of His 40 days of resurrection instruction on the Kingdom of God, “Is it time now to restore the Kingdom of Israel?” (Acts 1:6), they were not rebuked for that question, because it was totally scriptural and valid. It is the Kingdom of Israel, it is the Davidic Kingdom, and it must issue from the throne of David, from the holy hill of Zion. To say that is not to confine it to Israel. It goes out from Israel to all nations. Therefore, this is my principal burden: to communicate the dimensions of what Israel means for the Church in the context of this theocratic rule.
A: This morning, when you were talking, you talked about the office of a prophet. Does that mean that everything you do is prophetic, or do you have a sense that sometimes you are prophetic and sometimes you are not?
Art: I am not sure that you can take off the garment. If the prophetic man is the thing in himself, then it is not just something that he puts on ministerially. It has got to be consistent with the totality of his life. His marriage is a factor; the character of that marriage, its failure, humiliation, is the very design of God in shaping the man, so you cannot separate his life from his function. All of it is designed to attain or obtain the prophetic reality. I think I am always in that mode; I am always thinking, and my thoughts are being always attuned. Therefore, I see significance in little things and have a tendency to interpret all things in this contextual light of God’s significance in the totality of His sovereignty that cannot be compartmentalized, where you distinguish ministry from life. The ministry issues from the life. It is a total thing.
A: How would you relate that to, or compare that to, the general people of God being a prophetic people and their understanding of what it means to be a prophetic people, as opposed to the office of prophet?
Art: I think that the office models for the church something of their call as the church. The church that is not prophetic is, ipso facto, not the church; it ought to function to the nation in a way that is relative to the way in which the prophet functions to the church, interpreting for the nation the significance of current events or future things in the context of history and of the whole breadth of the prophetic word of God. The church that is prophetic ought to be doing that for its nation. I gave the example yesterday of the Japanese minister who leaped to his feet in a minister’s conference in Osaka when I suggested, or more than suggested, that the atom bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not mere political military decisions, but the judgment of God for a nation that has historically kept Him at arm’s length. The nation needs to see this catastrophe not as some arbitrary thing issuing from men, but from God, intended for their redemptive repentance. This man leaped up and cried out, “Lord, make me a prophet for my nation!” I believe that the church in the nations ought to serve that function to interpret for the nation that meaning of its own events.
I mentioned yesterday that the funeral of Princess Diana was a scandal of failure for the church in the world, and especially in England, for not interpreting it for what in fact it represents and allowing it to go in some unquestioned premise as being a ‘Christian’ funeral. She was a debutante and a jetsetter, immoral, and humanistic, who even received an occultist’s consultation; yet, she obtained all the trappings of Christian burial at the highest levels of the Anglican church, with their clerics of the greatest order, intoning with great solemnity, as if this were in fact the burial of a Christian! The church should not have stood still. It was a silence that needed to be broken. That does not mean that we are going to be successful or even heard, but to be silent in the face of some direct contradiction of the faith, to diminish God by it, calls for a statement. Our failure to make it condemns us and lessens us even in our ability to discern the next time when such response should be called for, until we are so habituated to the world that we do not even look up. I have never recovered from the silence of the church of England and felt required myself to write a statement on the prophetic significance of Princess Diana’s funeral—it is on my website. It has not caused a beep anywhere, so it may be without any consequence, but I could not be silent. The church should not be silent; it needs solemnly to address society on those things that contradict God and His image and purpose in man. If that is defamed and despoiled, then we cannot remain silent, and I have counseled even East German Christian leaders of their obligation before Communist authorities to oppose propaganda campaigns that have resulted in widespread opposition, because men cannot live with the lie. Even if it meant they were going to prison, without any hope of succeeding, they could not afford to be silent. That is the prophetic church.
A: Art, how do you know that what you are doing and what you are saying is authentic in the biblical sense of the word?
Art: Well, I think your question answers itself. When I present my perspectives, I say, “I’m not giving you something I’ve received by a light going on, or a dream, or a vision, or some revelatory experience. What I’m giving you is a knowledge or insight from Scripture of accumulative kind that is revelatory but founded in the Word. It’s not some extra-biblical view of a kind that seeks your attention. This is rooted in the Word and therefore can be tested in the Word. You can fault me of anything that I’m saying if it is contradicted by what is itself in the testimony of the Scripture.” Also, I am living in a community where I am not functioning as the prophet, but I am a brother who is subject to criticism of other brothers, to their correction, that would keep me in the straight and the narrow way.
A prophetic man has a great sense of his responsibility before God: “My Lord, to be Your mouthpiece, to speak Your Word. How dare I traffic in this, or take my liberty, or use it for any self-aggrandizement or take liberties with Your Word, or seek affect?” There is a great ponderous weight of responsibility before God not to violate the trust, and yet we hear Elijah say, “As the Lord my God lives before whom I stand it shall not rain or dew, but according to my word” (1 Kin. 17:1), and he commands the widow woman to feed him first; we also hear Paul say, “Follow me as I follow Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1), and Moses describes himself as the meekest man upon the face of the earth. In one sense, it sounds like the most arrogant egotism, but in the deeper sense, it issues out of brokenness and a humility that men of this character, substance and history, know and have. Therefore, I would say that brokenness, the dealings of God, is a requisite for the prophetic man. God has to keep him somewhat in that state at all times, keep it current and let him taste humiliation frequently. I mentioned today, even when he has sought the Lord with fasting and believes that he has the Lord’s Word, to hear an indictment that you have failed the Lord and have grossly, adversely affected God’s people, and to consider that, yes, that might be true. You always live in the tension that you might fail; therefore, you take as great a precaution as you can and being careful over what you say, but knowing also that in the volume of much speaking, there is sin. My daily prayer is always, “Forgive me, Lord, for the iniquity of much speaking, because invariably something will slip in, the tone of accent, an illustration that is not totally Yours, for which I ask Your forgiveness and Your cleansing, and that will be more perfectly the expression of Your heart and life.” That is a great and awesome responsibility and call, and that is why such men need to be prayed for, need to be attended by prayer, by intercession. Those men who are not in that kind of relationship and have organizations rather than communities, who of necessity would affirm them and not bring correction, are in the greatest danger of becoming false.
A: You have given some examples already; are there any others that come to mind of some impact of your prophetic ministry?
Art: Well, I mentioned the Holocaust message that came in Kansas City was certainly one, as 2,000 people went down. That was the first statement on the Holocaust at a big charismatic conference of 1977, and I had volunteered for the theme, ‘The Holocaust: Confrontation and Repentance.’ I made it my own title, took all of my scraps that I had saved over the years, came to the hotel room, spread them out over the window sill and desk, from one end to the other, filled the entire space, and looked at all of this material with despair. How would I ever fashion a message out of that? I sat down, rolled up my sleeves, and did not get up for eight hours. I forgot lunch, had not eaten breakfast, and realized that I was meant to fast. When I finished, I had an outline, and I came back every evening from the sessions of this conference, looking at the outline, now stone cold dead. I could not get a word, waiting for the Lord to put the flesh on that skeleton, till the Saturday morning came that I was to speak; I had nothing more than the outline.
The brother with whom I was to share that speaking time had to leave abruptly—his wife had a child at two or four o’clock that morning, so I had the whole speaking time for myself. I got up, and all I could do was read it in a monotone voice, and there was deadliest silence that ever followed a speaker, not an ‘amen,’ not a ripple, not a sound, that gave every appearance of unbelievable failure before 200 Jewish believers and 2,000 charismatic Christians. Then, as I finished, I was confronted by some man coming down the aisle saying that he was a prophet, Jewish, sent by God, that I had offended grievously against the Body of Christ and needed to repent of the message. I was looking at him in stunned astonishment because it could have been true, and in that moment, BOOM!! Cries broke out all over the auditorium, the deepest heart cry of repentance I had ever heard then, or ever since, and people virtually tumbled out of their seats, called the Jewish believers to stand, and asked for forgiveness of those in the audience against whose forefathers we had offended by our Jewish presence in Europe as a critical voice against the faith, mocking the virgin birth and all these things, and people stood up in the congregation out of German and Polish backgrounds asking our forgiveness, as Jewish believers, for their forefathers assault against us. It was an event. It was a piece of church history.
Something like that also took place in Jerusalem in 1974 after a message on Elijah, where I had chosen not to accept the invitation to be a speaker. I did not want to give up my hidden identity if the Lord had a future purpose for me in that land, and was tacked on at the end. I was spotted at the passport control, and my name was on a blacklist; they assumed that I had nothing to hide, so I was somehow unknown and still being allowed into the country. Then the circumstances unfolded. The Jewish believer called to replace me never showed up because he was sick, and people saw me around. There was not a single Jewish speaker on a conference in Jerusalem. “Why don’t we invite Art?” So they give me five minutes, then seven minutes, but as I was speaking on Elijah, a note came up, saying take 45 minutes, so I took 45 minutes! Only later did I find out that it really said take 4-5 minutes. All these years later, 29 years later, I still suffer the reproach as the man who does his own thing, but it gave the Lord the platform to bring the Word of the Lord before that people, and is now one of the chapters in the book Reality: The hope of Glory. There have been certain significant epochal statements that the Lord has been pleased to make through me over the years for the church, for which I am grateful, but each one was an experience of death, like that of a eunuch for Christ’s sake, and you never know when those moments are going to come.
A: How would you describe your relationship with the church?
Art: Well, which church do you mean? I think the church at large does not even know of my existence, but the Lord put the word ‘remnant’ in my heart some years ago, so I seem to be a factor for a certain remnant of the church in many nations who have been prepared and are fitted for a word of this kind. I have not been a charismatic ‘darling,’ and as one brother said to me, “Art you could’ve gone so far with your gifts. We don’t know of anyone who so challenges God’s people in the way you do, but unfortunately you can’t be counted upon. If only you would play the game, if only you would go along and employ your gifts in a right way, there’s no limit to what would accrue to you and your benefit.” I have never played the game, and I once asked a more current, internationally-recognized prophet, “How is it that I’m not invited to your prophetic functions, seeing that I have the history in this calling long before any of you?” He said, “Art, the reason you’re not invited is that you are not an ‘in-house’ prophet. We can’t count on you to go along. You might upset the apple cart.” What I recognize in this flush of the new prophets is a fraternity of mutual, self-congratulatory men who affirm one another, and I do not fit in with that environment. They know it, and so I am not in that dimension. I am not known, or if I am known, I am either little known or scorned. So what church are we talking about here?
I sent out a circular letter for 50 prominent men in America who were either prophetic or aligned in somehow with that calling, to raise questions about what is now being accepted and defined as being prophetic on the basis of the accuracy of prediction. I said that for me, the issue was not prediction at all, let alone its accuracy, but the issue of oracular pronouncement. A prophet is distinguished by bringing the statement of the oracular mind of God to the church in the hour, and I am not hearing that. What I am hearing is homilies and truisms, and little preachments to get the Word out of the way and then go to the real business for which the people have come: personal prophecy! Yet, these men are called the oracles of the hour, and I am pained that they allow themselves to be so described when there is not a word that issues from them that in any way suggests that. Now they are doing with the word ‘apostolic’ what they have already done in trafficking with the word ‘prophet,’ forming organizational frameworks by which men align themselves in that word, which in itself is the very contradiction of what the word ‘apostolic’ means in its ethos, that is, antithetical to human organization!
I cannot express in so many words, how profound my jealousy is for these two great words ‘prophetic’ and ‘apostolic’; they are the foundations of the church, and if they lose their meaning, their cogency, if they stand for something other than what God intends, then we have lost the game. If I could, I would say to these guys, “Listen, play your games with other language—‘Body of Christ, church growth, power evangelism’—go ahead, but don’t touch these sacred words; they’re not yours to defame and to employ.”
I think this is the great issue of the hour, and I am jealous for other prophetic men to be watchmen on the wall and to be careful how these great words are understood and employed. To stand against these organizational, fraternal collectives of men who congratulate one another and call that ‘being submitted.’ I was told in Singapore, by one of their American spokesmen, that I am out of relationship, and I am not truly submitted, and that is why I have the strange views of Israel that I do! But he did not even begin to touch the depth of the authenticity of what we know as a very real submittedness, they have it only in the organizational, mutually applauding and congratulatory framework, which is a deceit and a contradiction of the very words ‘prophetic’ and ‘apostolic’! There is something here of grave concern that we need to be aware of.
A: Do you have a relationship with the non-Christian world?
Art: I don’t think so. I mean, maybe only in the places where I have spoken at universities. I believe that as the crisis of Israel deepens, the Jewish authorities will not be in any place to give explanation; therefore, I foresee the possibility of addressing secular Jews, not in churches, but in public lecture halls, libraries, or university venues. We must bring the spiritual into the secular, because the crisis will obtain for us an opportunity to be heard. [Since this interview, and as of November 2002, the Lord has moved Art to New York City in direct availability to the Jewish community there.] Other than that, I could hope that maybe my book The Spirit of Truth might be equally as valuable for the non-Christian reader as the Christian reader, because the issue of truth is the issue of reality. I would like to have a greater involvement with non-Christians, but the little effect I have had is a letter to the editor of our local newspaper over some issue that has come up in our locality when the last Star Wars film came and there were these 6-7’ cutout, bizarre figures from that film, fostered by Pepsi-Cola Corporation who paid $25 million or so for the rights to use these figures, so that I could not go into a store without having one of these figures brooding over me. I wrote a letter to the editor, calling for a public outcry against the invasion of our privacy by this commercial undertaking that had captured our own children to the point where they sleep out on the street, waiting for the theatre to be opened to be the first ones in to see this bizarre thing that has invaded us. It is not a private thing that you can choose; it invades you. So, in that way, I have had some very minimal voice to the secular community, but I hope that it will increase. Like the issue of Princess Diana’s funeral, it is a secular thing that requires and deserves a prophetic interpretation and a prophetic outcry. In that charade, both British society and Christendom itself suffered enormous loss.
A: Art, can you describe how you receive the content of your message?
Art: Well, for example, Ezekiel 37, where I shared from today, was quickened in a new way at the very outbreak of the intafada [the Palestinian uprising in Israel], in the very first stoning of children against Israeli occupation. Something happened in my inner man; in my spirit, I knew that I knew that this was the beginning of the end for Israel. This innocuous stone throwing was the beginning of the end for this Zionist state. How did I know that? The Lord just triggered something in me. It is interesting how a message will be birthed or conceived. How did I fall upon Paul’s statement on widows and slaves? I just stumbled upon it, but it fastened itself and came alive in my spirit. Crises will produce something, different situations. It is just a brooding in the Scriptures in my devotional time every morning in the book of Psalms. I read the Psalm for the day, and it often becomes my Sunday message at my own fellowship. The Lord just has a way of triggering and generating and drawing from the well of salvation in things, both old and new in Christ, which He has invested in me. So I read and meditate on Karl Barth and other writers, and the Lord will call for it. I do not have a photographic memory—memory is my worst faculty—but the Lord can call for the resonance, or the residue, or the substance, the cumulative weight of things that have been nurtured, cultivated and deposited in our being, at any time. He can bring these thoughts into any kind of conjunction with other things as a synthesis of a new kind that is appropriate to the hearer. It is a remarkable phenomenon, the birthing of the word. I am continually not preparing the message, but being a prepared man. I am continually reading, studying, weighing up, and letting the Lord draw forth from those riches.
A: Art, are you able to describe something of the process of being able to discern the difference between something that you know has the Lord’s mark on it and something that is coming out of, for example, your own frustrated persona or that kind of thing?
Art: The only safety in not expressing personal pique as being somehow the prophetic heart of God is to be free from personal pique. That is to say, the work of the Cross has got to be deeper in us than in men of other callings. I do not think that teachers, as much as I respect them, love and admire their work, have the same depth of dealings from God as the prophetic men. The Lord has had several speak to me a verse from Isaiah that describes my own calling: “You are a threshing machine with fine teeth that will thresh up the hills as chaff” (41:15), and I think to myself, “What they don’t know is that before I’m allowed to thresh others, I myself am threshed.” The only thing that will save us from interjecting any personal pique or petulance or pet thing and calling that the prophetic statement is that the Lord is continually dealing with the root of self, so that you are free from personal pique, and what you express is not some vagary of your own imagining or some personal thing, but God’s own heart. Yet, it comes out of your personal life, out of your marriage, out of your community, out of your circumstances.
A: Art, what about the presence of God? Do you see any relationship between the presence of God and the prophetic?
Art: Well, I am always enjoying the presence of God. I don’t make a fetish out of it, and I do not seek it as a thing in itself. In fact, I am saying that what the Church needs is to learn to function in obedience in the absence of the felt presence of God, because we are coming to a place where we have to come full circle in what was the Lord’s own experience, and in the great crises of testing, we will also be required to say, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” We will experience the actual forsakenness of God, at least in terms of the felt presence. I do enjoy a continual sense of God’s presence, but I never seek it for the experience, and in my daily morning devotional times, I am not prompted by that presence, and it is very often conducted in the absence of that presence.
I am concerned for the way in which the issue of God’s presence is now becoming a significant theme in contemporary church life, and we even have the audacity to think we can invoke it by performing something; for example, we think certain choruses or a style of worship will actually usher in God’s presence, which makes Him the respondent to our initiative, and that is dastardly. I oppose that greatly. There is a great emphasis now on experience and presence that is disturbing and of great concern, because it is not the preparation for the kind of Last Days obedience that will be required, with or without the sense of God’s presence. We are a sense-sated church, and so much disposed towards feeling; that is why we have even blurred the distinction between soul and spirit. If something revs us up and affects us emotionally, we automatically assume that that must be God. When our knowledge of God is so minimal, and we are hungry for experience, we will not be much concerned as to what the source of that experience is.
I have stood out like a proverbial sore thumb in the midst of the most electrifying view of people falling and crying, and I am strangely undisturbed and unaffected. Either I am the deadest man who cannot even be moved, or I have kept my spirit inviolate, and anything that comes to me as experience, if it is not conformable to and compatible with what I already have in the knowledge of God by the Spirit, then I will not allow entrance. I think that the church is presently paying a great price for its easy acceptance of anything that comes that is emotionally moving, whatever lifts them up; later on, the enemy who, has much call for that kind of thing, has a hook in those who have subscribed to it, such as this generation of people who puncture themselves, perforate themselves, tattoo themselves. With every such act, the enemy has gained access.
I am also concerned for this trend in what has recently been called ‘revival.’ I see the proclamation of the word of God disparaged by men who claim to be under the so-called power of God, but who can do no more than choke and splutter, or even speak coherently to defend their faith. When I hear both the Lord and the preached word denigrated in the name of experience, you can believe that every antenna in me goes up instantly. In my own spirit, I have no sense of it coming from God, but rather coming from another place altogether. Of course, experience is to be cherished, but it is not to be sought in this mindless and uncritical way. I think the reason for the wellspring of this emphasis is the lack of a confidence that believers have in the knowledge of God, and that is why they run to these ministers for a word of prophecy or an 'experience.' They seem to need to traverse the earth wanting an experience or word to confirm that God loves them, when He is already available right in their prayer chamber.
This confidence in God has safeguarded me, and has made me impervious to entreaties in the realm of soul and feeling; even when the entreaties seemingly serve the ostensible purpose of repentance with North American Indians and those who have brutalized and offended against them, I am totally unmoved. I sat through such a meeting in Canada where they were going up to the microphone and asking for forgiveness, and while everyone around me was weeping, including the people that brought me to the conference, I was unmoved. As we were driving home, “Art what did you think of this tonight?” I said, “When you saw me, I was totally unmoved, and I am trying to understand why that is. Certainly I am concerned for reconciliation, for the injustices of the past, but I felt that this was staged, this was contrived, this was a soulish counterfeit that was not waiting on the Spirit of God, and it was humanly manipulated.” And do you know what I think? I think my view of Israel and the judgment of God has been so foundational in my understanding of God, that somehow in itself it gives me strength against the incursion of soulish things. I don’t know how to explain this. It is as though a right apprehending of the mystery of Israel is God’s own provision against the deceptions of the Last Days, because the receiving of God in judgment brings an iron to the soul on a depth of apprehension of God that somehow also serves to insulate us from the soulish entreaties to which we would otherwise be subject. The church is suffering in that way from the centrality of Israel rightly understood, and it is therefore easily moved and taken in by many of these episodes.
A: Struggling to define these terms that we are looking at, ‘prophetic, prophet,’ etc., you have talked a little bit about some of the disquiet that you have with that neo-prophetic movement, if we can call it that. There is another school that labels itself prophetic, and they are, I suppose, in the political realm; they are talking about social justice, and the term ‘prophet’ is used to refer to people who operate in that realm. Do you have any comments to make about how wide you think we can enlarge this term and still remain valid?
Art: I have had no personal contact with anyone who pursues social justice in the name of that which is prophetic, but I think I mentioned this morning that the call of Moses as Israel’s deliverer out of Egypt was not the basis of his apprehension of the slavery or the injustices perpetrated by this people who had moved him 40 years before to kill an Egyptian, but God’s perception and His hearing the cry that had risen up to Him. “Therefore, I send you” (Ex. 3:10). I was in a seminary once, and I watched these middle class students’ beating hearts, crying crocodile tears for the injustices in Latin America, the poverty and the exploitation of the poor. I was not at all impressed. It was more a cathartic release for their middle class guilt, because God does not call us to a direct lineal response to injustice, but to Him, or else we be deceived and drawn away by apparent need. It is not for us to discern, but only to be sent by Him who rightly discerns and moves. Therefore, I would be somewhat suspicious of those who have seized upon social themes and calling that prophetic as acting out of their own initiative; their motives might be dubious and self-serving. The only valid response to social ills is what is sent from God from heaven, and not our own direct apprehension of the ill itself. This saves me, and the entire church, from running off in every direction.
A: Art, I know that you are an infrequent but long-term visitor to New Zealand. What can you see as the challenges facing us as a church?
Art: As I mentioned this morning, this is the only nation where I have heard myself saying that God will not only meet with Jews in the wilderness of New Zealand, but that the whole nation will be a wilderness among the nations. It may well be that the whole nation will be given to the receiving and providing of refuge for Jews in flight. That means that there is an exceptional call, not only on the church within the nation, but also on the nation, per se, as a nation. Last night, I was profoundly impressed by the prayer that I heard going up from this congregation—the depth of the prayer, the earnestness, and the hunger that was expressed. I would have to look back far in my experience to remember another occasion of hearing the saints from any nation expressing prayer in that kind of depth. I have appreciated New Zealand for producing saints of this kind. I felt myself so unworthy to be the Lord’s spokesman to them. I am glad for last night and for what was revealed; whether they themselves realize it or not, in their prayer and in their cry, there was something that I have not seen elsewhere in a spiritual depth. Therefore, there must be a destiny, a calling, for this church and nation that is beyond, what belongs to others. Why that is, I do not know. Geographically, where you are located, safely distanced and remote from other nations, might be the key. It is the farthermost ends of the earth where God will expel them and then bring them back. He has not spoken that to me or revealed that to me, but I am privileged to minister here and sense this quality and this depth among the saints.
A: Art, is there anything you want to add to this whole subject?
Art: Just a thought that this issue of personal morning devotion before the commencement of the day; it might be more significant that anyone knows, and it might be the actual factor of Israel’s hope of deliverance. For this, I use the text of Mark, chapter nine, of the young man who was thrown into the fire by a demonic spirit. “How long has this been going on?” Jesus asked the father. “Since childhood” (v. 21), since infancy, since the inception of his life, so that, prophetically, I am thinking, “What is being represented here? This is not just a child being molested, harassed. This is a child that is the particular object of demonic fury seeking to kill him.” This must represent Israel itself. The disciples, being unable to cast this out, asked Jesus, and He answered, “This kind [this ultimate kind] cometh not out but by fasting and by prayer” (v. 29). The way that I have been given to understand that in the light of my own experience is that it is a prayer beyond petition. It is that communion with God where we linger and wait in His presence, because He is God and not because of anything that we would receive of utilitarian kind, that imbues us with something of Himself, so that when we have to confront Last Days’ demonic activity, we bring that reality, which is the accumulation of the daily times with God, that is greater than the visible reality of their power. What we obtain in that early morning communion will be critical in the Last Days for Israel’s deliverance. It is not heroics; it is devotion.
I would just encourage those who are reading this interview to be inspired to not neglect the commencement of the day with the Lord, not just for the issue of their petition or reading of an obligatory chapter, in order that they have done their religious duty, but to spend sufficient time in the Lord’s presence, even when it is not felt, so that something is given of what is God Himself, ultimate reality. In the Last Days, we will defeat and move and deliver a victimized Israel from the clutches of those dark powers. That would be a last encouragement that I would like to express.
taken from http://missionsinaction.us/art_katz_bio.htm