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. FaceTime. The landline 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 the 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, Florida, has commenced, and I am stilled and listening.
I hear the murmur of countless persistent critters, crickets and their kind. Migrating fowl cry overhead while woodpeckers rap and toads croak. Surfacing fish swish below, joined by rumblings of far-distant trains and the faint hum of highways.
Yet I am persevering in patience, hoping to hear something beyond and to be more fully connected.
Will He speak?
Does God Still 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 return 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 it is relatively nothing. Friends are cherished and important, but relatively unreliable. The whispers of spouses are precious, yet they too are frail.
To hear God speak, on the other hand, is everything. Everything else, by contrast, is nothing.
Scholarship and Spiritual Sensitivity
In seminary, the contemporary machinery of making pastors, I learned biblical hermeneutics, the art or science of scriptural interpretation, to discover what God has said. We sought God’s voice through scholastic clarification.
These enterprises are important, but God’s voice is not limited to this exercise. If those scholastic halls taught me to listen, I wasn’t listening.
I have more recently discovered that good scholarship is far from a substitute for spiritual sensitivity. Rightly applied, it should 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.
Dreams, Pictures and the Voice of God
The prophet Joel tells us 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, whose suspicions are draped with naturalist assumptions, dreams seem antiquated and inferior, if not extinct, as a form of divine communication. Many fear them or simply disregard them.
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 bridging the cognitive-emotional gap. 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 seem unlikely that God no longer speaks. It would seem implausible for God to go to such extremes to redeem us by His grace, fill us with His Holy Spirit and then stop invading our dreams, the one time of day when we aren’t intoxicated with our own overriding thoughts, emotions, words and the worldly communications around us.
Perhaps We Are Failing to Listen
It is possible, though, that we are failing to listen.
We are 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 scientifically fueled culture of suspicion, the more likely probability is that God is speaking and we are not attuned.
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 unattuned out of the loop.
And if we cannot always discern the encrypted codes of God in dreams, neither can children fully discern adult conversations. Yet those conversations can leave an imprint upon a developing consciousness greater than 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 any way 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.