Last week I gave a brief summary of the problem of saying
“God told me” when there is no evidence in the Word of God that He told me
anything. We serve a Holy God and I think it is a dangerous thing to put words
into His mouth or worse, to lie about Him. A couple of years ago I posted this
great blog by John Piper but I think it clearly demonstrates how God speaks and
works in our lives. I pray it brings clarity to this subject.
Let me tell you about a most wonderful experience I had early
Monday morning, March 19, 2007, a little after six o’clock. God actually spoke
to me. There is no doubt that it was God. I heard the words in my head just as
clearly as when a memory of a conversation passes across your consciousness.
The words were in English, but they had about them an absolutely
self-authenticating ring of truth. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that God
still speaks today.
I couldn’t sleep for some reason. I was at Shalom House in
northern Minnesota on a staff couples’ retreat. It was about five thirty in the
morning. I lay there wondering if I should get up or wait till I got sleepy
again. In his mercy, God moved me out of bed. It was mostly dark, but I managed
to find my clothing, got dressed, grabbed my briefcase, and slipped out of the
room without waking up Noël. In the main room below, it was totally quiet. No
one else seemed to be up. So I sat down on a couch in the corner to pray.
As I prayed and mused, suddenly it happened. God said, “Come
and see what I have done.” There was not the slightest doubt in my mind
that these were the very words of God. In this very moment. At this very place
in the twenty-first century, 2007, God was speaking to me with absolute
authority and self-evidencing reality. I paused to let this sink in. There was
a sweetness about it. Time seemed to matter little. God was near. He had me in
his sights. He had something to say to me. When God draws near, hurry ceases.
Time slows down.
I wondered what he meant by “come and see.” Would he take me
somewhere, like he did Paul into heaven to see what can’t be spoken? Did “see”
mean that I would have a vision of some great deed of God that no one has seen?
I am not sure how much time elapsed between God’s initial word, “Come and see
what I have done,” and his next words. It doesn’t matter. I was being enveloped
in the love of his personal communication. The God of the universe was speaking
to me.
Then he said, as clearly as any words have ever come into my
mind, “I am awesome in my deeds toward the children of man.” My heart
leaped up, “Yes, Lord! You are awesome in your deeds. Yes, to all men whether
they see it or not. Yes! Now what will you show me?”
The words came again. Just as clear as before, but increasingly
specific: “I turned the sea into dry land; they passed through the river on
foot. There they rejoiced in me—who rules by my might forever.” Suddenly I
realized God was taking me back several thousand years to the time when he
dried up the Red Sea and the Jordan River. I was being transported by his word
back into history to those great deeds. This is what he meant by “come and
see.” He was transporting me back by his words to those two glorious deeds
before the children of men. These were the “awesome deeds” he referred to. God
himself was narrating the mighty works of God. He was doing it for me. He was
doing it with words that were resounding in my own mind.
There settled over me a wonderful reverence. A palpable peace
came down. This was a holy moment and a holy corner of the world in northern
Minnesota. God Almighty had come down and was giving me the stillness and the
openness and the willingness to hear his very voice. As I marveled at his power
to dry the sea and the river, he spoke again. “I keep watch over the
nations—let not the rebellious exalt themselves.”
This was breathtaking. It was very serious. It was almost a
rebuke. At least a warning. He may as well have taken me by the collar of my
shirt, lifted me off the ground with one hand, and said, with an incomparable
mixture of fierceness and love, “Never, never, never exalt yourself. Never
rebel against me.”
I sat staring at nothing. My mind was full of the global glory
of God. “I keep watch over the nations.” He had said this to me. It was
not just that he had said it. Yes, that is glorious. But he had said this to
me. The very words of God were in my head. They were there in my head just as
much as the words that I am writing at this moment are in my head. They were
heard as clearly as if at this moment I recalled that my wife said, “Come down
for supper whenever you are ready.” I know those are the words of my wife. And
I know these are the words of God.
Think of it. Marvel at this. Stand in awe of this. The God who
keeps watch over the nations, like some people keep watch over cattle or stock
markets or construction sites—this God still speaks in the twenty-first
century. I heard his very words. He spoke personally to me.
What effect did this have on me? It filled me with a fresh sense
of God’s reality. It assured me more deeply that he acts in history and in our
time. It strengthened my faith that he is for me and cares about me and will
use his global power to watch over me. Why else would he come and tell me these
things?
It has increased my love for the Bible as God’s very word,
because it was through the Bible that I heard these divine words, and through
the Bible I have experiences like this almost every day. The very God of the
universe speaks on every page into my mind—and your mind. We hear his very
words. God himself has multiplied his wondrous deeds and thoughts toward us;
none can compare with him! I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more
than can be told (Psalm 40:5).
And best of all, they are available to all. If you would like to
hear the very same words I heard on the couch in northern Minnesota, read Psalm 66:5-7. That is where I heard
them. O how precious is the Bible. It is the very word of God. In it God speaks
in the twenty-first century. This is the very voice of God. By this voice, he
speaks with absolute truth and personal force. By this voice, he reveals his
all-surpassing beauty. By this voice, he reveals the deepest secrets of our
hearts. No voice anywhere anytime can reach as deep or lift as high or carry as
far as the voice of God that we hear in the Bible.
It is a great wonder that God still speaks today through the
Bible with greater force and greater glory and greater assurance and greater
sweetness and greater hope and greater guidance and greater transforming power
and greater Christ-exalting truth than can be heard through any voice in any
human soul on the planet from outside the Bible.
This is why I found the article in this month’s Christianity
Today, “My Conversation with God,”
so sad. Written by an anonymous professor at a “well-known Christian
University,” it tells of his experience of hearing God. What God said was that
he must give all his royalties from a new book toward the tuition of a needy
student. What makes me sad about the article is not that it isn’t true or
didn’t happen. What’s sad is that it really does give the impression that
extra-biblical communication with God is surpassingly wonderful and
faith-deepening. All the while, the supremely-glorious communication of the
living God which personally and powerfully and transformingly explodes in the
receptive heart through the Bible everyday is passed over in silence.
I am sure this professor of theology did not mean it this way,
but what he actually said was, “For years I’ve taught that God still speaks, but
I couldn’t testify to it personally. I can only do so now anonymously, for
reasons I hope will be clear” (emphasis added). Surely he does not mean what he
seems to imply—that only when one hears an extra-biblical voice like, “The
money is not yours,” can you testify personally that God still speaks.
Surely he does not mean to belittle the voice of God in the Bible which
speaks this very day with power and truth and wisdom and glory and joy and
hope and wonder and helpfulness ten thousand times more decisively than anything
we can hear outside the Bible.
I grieve at what is being communicated here. The great need of
our time is for people to experience the living reality of God by hearing his
word personally and transformingly in Scripture. Something is incredibly wrong
when the words we hear outside Scripture are more powerful and more affecting
to us than the inspired word of God. Let us cry with the psalmist, “Incline my
heart to your word” (Psalm 119:36).
“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18). Grant that the eyes of
our hearts would be enlightened to know our hope and our inheritance and the
love of Christ that passes knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God
(Ephesians 1:18; 3:19). O God, don’t let us be so deaf to
your word and so unaffected with its ineffable, evidential excellency that we
celebrate lesser things as more thrilling, and even consider this misplacement
of amazement worthy of printing in a national magazine.
Still hearing his voice in the Bible,
Pastor John
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