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.