Journal

Words 'from God'

Posted on December 1st, 2004, in the afternoon

I've been thinking a lot about prophecy this evening. Not prophecy in a grand book-of-Isaiah sense of the word, but about the more day-to-day side of hearing from God, and particularly about how you receive words ‘from God’ from other people. What follows is a brief summary of a journey I’ve taken as I’ve thought it through, so do join me if you’re interested…

There have been lot’s of times in my life when people have spoken words ‘from God’ that have been spot on, and one or two occasions when they’ve been so right-to-the-core, no-other-explanation-for-it incisive that I’ve been filled with the kind of love/fear for God that CS Lewis captures so well in the feeling Narnia’s creatures have towards Aslan. But when things are less immediate, when people speak more general words ‘from God’ how do we get a measure of their worth?

Some people might solve the problem by deciding that this is all nonsense and it’s just luck that some ‘words’ turn out to be right; fair enough, it does solve the problem, but, my goodness, it lacks subtlety, and I simply don’t find it a satisfying treatment of the experiences I mention above.

Others (and I think I have been of this kind in the past) have a tendency to imagine they can infallibly arbitrate between false and true ‘words’. But I’ve watched with my own eyes as hindsight delivers an unfavourable verdict on some ‘words’ I’ve thought sounded true.

Unfortunately it’s all too easy to say “these are words from God” when they’re really just one’s own desires or words that capture the underlying feeing of a group. Not that people mean to give ‘false’ prophecies, but maybe the mix of familiarity with ‘prophetic’ language and good intentions sometimes lead to personal desires or group feelings being expressed as ‘from God’.

I certainly don’t want to “despise prophecy” (as is warned against in 1 Thess 5:20), but I also don’t want to dance a merry jig to every word that’s said with ‘from God’ tacked on; too much would be lost if I became closed to people speaking words ‘from God’, but equally I can’t see that a lot has been gained by believing every ‘word’ that comes along if the measure of truth is only hindsight.

John (whose letters seem almost primarily concerned with this subject) offers what seems to me to be sage advice on the subject:

Dear friends, don't believe everyone who claims to have the Spirit of God. Test them all to find out if they really do come from God. Many false prophets have already gone out into the world.

1 John 4:1

Which is frustratingly not an easy answer, in fact it barely does anything more than state the problem. But like so much of the Bible, the intention (in my understanding at least) is less to give a one-size-fits-all definitive answer as it is to teach you how to ask a better question and to act as a signpost to the source of the deepest kind of answers.

Far from treating my question as slightly dangerous or subversive, 1 John 4:1 pretty much asks the same question itself. (One of the most interesting things I’m discovering as I read the Bible more is that it constantly asks harder questions than easy answers can cope with.) Although this verse does give a kind of answer to the initial question, saying we should “Test them all [speakers of such ‘words’] to find out if they really do come from God” this answer just asks another question: “How do I “test” speakers or their words?” At first glance it may not look like that has taken us very far forward, but for me the new question is opening up a path to what look like deeper answers…

It’s now the morning after. I held off from publishing this post, and prayed and thought about the question instead. If I wrote down the thoughts I came to yesterday in black and white they themselves would probably look easy-answer or maybe even unrelated, so I’m not going to do that. Instead I’ll leave you with the better question that bringing my questions and frustrations to scripture produced; it may or may not be helpful to you: “How (as a believer) do you “test” anything?”