Does God Speak Today?

There is in Scripture a widely reported phenomenon not often experienced by many Christians today: the awesome privilege of hearing the voice of God.

Have you ever heard God speak?

If your answer to that question is in the affirmative, did you know that some in the evangelical world would be very uneasy about you? They’re just not too sure of those people who hear voices!

Of course, those in the psychiatric community would be very sure about you; and, yes, they have a jacket that will fit you just fine!

The comedienne Lily Tomlin wryly observed, “When we talk to God we are praying, when God talks to us we are schizophrenic.”

But if we could hear God speak, that, in a most extraordinary way, would contribute to our intimacy with him.

So why is it that this phenomenon, so commonly reported in the Bible, is so suspiciously regarded today?  Why is doubt the dominant response?

The answer offered by some runs along these lines. They would tell us that all biblically reported episodes of God speaking occurred as they did because Scripture hadn’t been completed yet.

Today, however, it is different, they assure us. Citing Jude 3, they remind us that the Bible is the revelation “once for all delivered to the saints.”

Therefore, the only way God speaks today, they contend, is through his written Word, the Bible. Nothing more is needed, according to this view—neither in message conveyed, nor in mode utilized.

Reflecting on this view, it must first be acknowledged that the motivation prompting it—a desire to preserve the authority and superiority of Scripture—is worthy. Indeed, it can be strongly affirmed that the only God-breathed book ever written is the Bible, and that nothing is to be added to it or to be subtracted from it.

In fact, every input or impression we receive is to be subject to and scrutinized by the unerring Word.

When it comes to divine revelation, the counsel F.B. Meyer gave is certainly wise.

Let us not seek for revelations through dreams or visions, but by the Word of God. Nothing is more harmful than to contract the habit of listening for voices, and sleeping to dream. All manner of vagaries come in by that door. It is best to take in hand and read the Scriptures, reverently, carefully, thoughtfully, crying, “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.”

This is good counsel, for only the Scriptures can be trusted for revelation. All other means of communication ordained or used by God should never suppose in its attainment, or aspire in its desire, to that level of spiritual authority.

As A.B. Simpson put it, “No vision, no revelation, can have any weight against the Word which God has already given to us, and by which all truth must be judged and all destiny decided.” This is a criterion that must be cemented in our understanding.

But to say the Bible is a closed book is not to say that God has stopped speaking. Why should we ever assume that the completion of the Scriptures has now silenced God? Did the Bible itself ever say that?

No, what the Bible did say is that Jesus has come to live within us. So what would you think if someone took up residence with you but never said a single, solitary word? What if that person just sat, stared, nodded, and took up space—all day, every day? 

Is this what we are to believe about Jesus: that it’s all right for us to talk with him, but that he’s not going to talk with us?

Theologically, there is no reason that a respect for the Bible should burden us with a mute Messiah or with a catatonic Christ.

A simple distinction needs to be made between the exalted, elevated Word of God, universally applicable and therefore intended for every nation and generation, and a more specific, situational word from the Lord that might be given to an individual or church.

Further explaining this distinction, Norman Grubb wrote:

… guidance is the direct communication of the Spirit with our spirits and is not to be confused with the Scriptures. God’s written word is the general guide to his people. The Bible is the inspired and infallible revelation of the principles of Christian living, and any individual guidance which does not conform to it is a false source.

If we recognize that the guiding, prompting, correcting, and exhorting of our God has a purpose always lesser in status and more limited in scope than truths presented in the Bible, there need not be any compromise or distortion of truth. Instead, these communications from the Lord could help us make more biblically-consistent decisions.

One has to be obtuse to conclude that a communication from the Lord that tells one apostle to leave Jerusalem and go to Gaza (Acts 8:26) and tells other servants not to go to Asia but to go to Macedonia (Acts 16:6-10) somehow competes with the revelation Scripture gives. The specific instructions given were needed then, and instructions like these are needed now.

These types of communications are obviously in a decidedly different category. Indeed, had the New Testament been completed and published, the apostle then, like the servant of God today, would still need this type of communication.

There are right ways and wrong ways to pursue hearing God’s voice, however. So more on that in the next post.