We live in an age of increased and expanding communications. Cell phones. A literal plethora of new Social Media. Email. Text Messages. Google Hangouts. Skype. Face Time. The land-line is an imminent dinosaur. In the midst of this chaos, is God also LinkedIn?
At this moment I sit on my back porch attentive to sun’s descent behind darkening pines – reflected upon a river canvas, swelling from surging tides. Oranges to softer pinks. Blues to deepening black. The color burst that is nightfall in North Jacksonville, FL has commenced and I am stilled and listening.
I hear the murmur of countless persistent critters – crickets and their kind. I hear the cry of migrating fowl, the rapping of woodpeckers, the croak of many toads. I hear the swish of surfacing fish – rumblings of far distant trains – faint hum of highways. Yet I am persevering in patience in hope to hear something beyond, and to be more fully connected. Will He speak?
Christ did not die, dear Christian, simply to settle some cosmic matter of jurisprudence – nor to adjudicate the ontological conflict between us and the Father alone. He died so that we might have the capacity to listen when He talks. He died that we might be restored to personal walks in the cool of the day, in gardens where He speaks to us by His word and Spirit. Or does He still seek to communicate to His people?
Human insight is of some value – but in the scheme of things is relatively nothing. Friends are cherished and important – but are relatively unreliable. The whispers of spouses, precious – yet they too, are frail. To hear God speak, on the other hand, is everything, and everything else by contrast is nothing.
In seminary, the contemporary machinery of making pastors, I was taught biblical hermeneutics – the art or science of scriptural interpretation – to discover what God has said. God’s voice was to be revealed by scholastic clarifications. These enterprises are important but God’s voice is not limited to this exercise. If I was taught to listen in these scholastic halls – I wasn’t listening. I have more recently discovered that good scholarship, far from being a substitute for spiritual sensitivity – but that rightly applied would lead the Christian to greater listening.
Prayer too, I am discovering, is less about what we articulate, or an arrangement of righteous requests. True prayer is more about encountering God through intimate and aggressive hearing. But the burden of encountering God’s voice also lies with the Messenger – the One who lovingly and willingly speaks. He seeks our communion – His Spirit with ours. The true sheep recognize the voice of their Shepherd, Jesus said.
And from the Prophet Joel we are told that in the last days, God will increase His communiqué with us.
”It will come about after this
That I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind;
And your sons and daughters will prophesy,
Your old men will dream dreams,
Your young men will see visions.” Joel 2:28
I contend that this is happening. But for those of us stuck in the mires of modernity – and whose suspicions are draped with naturalist assumptions – dreams are deemed an antiquated and inferior, if not extinct, form of divine communication – to be feared, even disregarded. Dreams seem so impractical and illogical. Doctrinal research is superior and replaces these older forms of divination? Right?
I raised this question to a friend whose perspective I always expect to be insightful and intriguing. He ventured to say that God’s preference for dreams and pictures begins with the bridging of the cognitive-emotional gap – that pictures and stories unplug the emotional or cognitive overdrive so that we can genuinely hear.
Redemptive history has surely turned on the dime of God’s deposit of dreams. Given this pattern in the past and Joel’s promise for the future – it would be unlikely that God no longer speaks. It would be implausible for God to go to such extremes to redeem us by His grace, fill us with His Holy Spirit and no longer invade our dreams – the one time of the day when we aren’t intoxicated with our own overriding thoughts, emotions, words and the worldly communications around us.
It is possible though that we are failing to listen. We are in between the two great epochal and redemptive events in all of history – His first coming and His second. Has He gone AWOL? In this Internet age and scientific fueled culture of suspicion, that God is speaking and we are not attuned, is the more likely probability.
He is a poet and has often, for whatever discernible reason, spoken metaphorically in pictures, stories and dreams. Even when God came in the flesh, in the person of Jesus, He spoke in complex parables – as if to keep the un-attuned, out of the loop.
And if the encrypted codes of God in dreams are not always discernible, neither are adult conversations by children – but their imprint upon the developing consciousness is of greater import than what we are always able to see.
Would we prefer the more controllable environment of scholastic inquiry over the fanciful world of dreams? Haven’t cults started this way? In this day and age, is this an unsafe and imprecise form of hearing from God?
Perhaps so. But if the God of the universe, the Redeemer and Lover of my soul wants to meet with me…I’ll take that appointment anywhere. And if I don’t entirely understand what He says, it matters not. What matters is that I am experiencing a foretaste of that beautiful and sanctified place, where Paradise returns, where God speaks.
I must admit that I’m not particularly comfortable with this, nor am I in anyway an expert in the field. However, I am open. I am asking the God of the universe and of my personal redemption to speak in soft whispers on my back porch. And while I rest, to give this old man dreams.