This entry probably won’t make any
sense unless you’ve read at least some of the previous entries. The whole series starts <*here*>.
Our
“experimental journey” has brought us to the edge of foolishness, and it can be
a dangerous place to be. Specifically,
in the previous entry I asked the question “Is it remotely possible that God
could put thoughts in our minds?” I
suggested that, in order to proceed with our experiment, we had to at least
allow for the possibility that the answer to this question is “yes.” I personally think the answer is yes, and I
live my life as if it were so. I know
lots of other people who do the same.
But it presents a BIG
problem.
The
problem is this: how do you know when
you’re hearing God’s “voice” rather than some other “voice”? We hear all sorts of voices in our
heads. We have ideas. Thoughts pop into our minds. We daydream.
We have real dreams. It is our
constant experience that thoughts come and go from our minds. By allowing for the possibility that some of
these thoughts might actually come from God, we have opened ourselves up to utter foolishness. I will give you a personal example of exactly
this problem below, but I hope that you can immediately see the problem. If you are like me, you have all sorts of
thoughts and there are certainly some thoughts that are definitely not
from God! If you start believing that
most of the thoughts in your mind are from God, then you’ve gone past the edge
of foolishness – you are in total freefall toward a lot of really foolish ideas
and foolish actions. I don’t want you to
go there.
The
easiest solution is not to get anywhere close to the “edge of foolishness”. Thus many people, even those who believe that
there is a soul and a mind and a real, personal God, will simply reject any
notion that God could put thoughts into your mind. It’s not a bad approach. I will probably need to come back to that
whole line of thinking at some point in a future entry. But, at the very least, we need to put a lot
of boundaries around this whole concept.
I want to address some of those here.
First,
“test tube #2” cannot be untethered from “test tube #1” <*see here*>. Specifically, the Bible
describes a lot about God and presents a lot of things that God “likes” and
“doesn’t like”; things that God “hates” and “loves.” Our experiment is related to God as described
in the Bible, so we must start with the boundaries that are already written
down. Those are givens. And, of course, we can’t know the givens
unless we are reading the Bible, and thus test tube #1 has to come first.
I
know that most people would like to be untethered from the Bible. But then you are not doing the same
experiment and not testing the same God.
In that situation, you have to be careful about what conclusions you
draw. Personally, I think there are many
people who perform an “experiment” (usually not very seriously), completely
untethered from the Bible, and then, when that experiment fails, conclude that
the God described in the Bible must not exist.
For example, I talked about this previously <*here*> where someone
stated: “…Why can't he [God] just reveal
his true self, clearly and unequivocally, and settle the question once and for
all? If God existed, why wouldn't it just be obvious?” God, as described in the Bible, is often
subtle. You might conclude that an
“obvious God” doesn’t exist (because it’s not obvious!), but that does not mean you can also conclude that a
“subtle God” does not exist <*here*>.
OK. So, we’re going to subject the “voices in our
mind” to the principles we find described in the Bible with respect to the
kinds of things that God might say to us.
For example, if the voice in your mind is telling you that “God will
protect you” if you attempt to harm yourself (e.g. “God wants me to jump off a
cliff and He will protect me by catching me and setting me gently on the
ground”), then you are definitely not hearing God! In fact, that specific example is something
Jesus experiences (see Matthew chapter 4 verse 6-7). Jesus gives a principle here – you should not
test God. You can’t just “imagine” that
God will do something and then expect him to do it.
We
will have to discuss this whole issue much further, and there is a lot to
cover, so let me end here by giving you a negative example from my own
life. This happened when I was an
undergraduate. I lived a pretty Spartan
existence for much of my undergraduate life:
I went to class, I studied, I worked, I focused on my spiritual activities,
and I slept and ate. No TV, no internet[1],
no games. I was pretty boring. But also very busy. I was taking a full load of classes and
working at least 20 hours a week. If
you’ve been there, you know what happens:
you don’t get much sleep!
At
that time, I did a pretty good job of tracking my time in the various tasks
that I did. As a result, I could clearly
see that there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do everything. In fact, I calculated that I needed a 26.5
hour day. I normally needed about 7.5
hours of sleep a day, so it was easy to see that if I could survive on 5 hours
of sleep each day, I could get everything done.
I “believed” God wanted me to do all the things I was doing, so it
seemed logical that God would do a miracle in my life: specifically, He would allow me to live on 5
hours of sleep instead of 7.5. All I
needed was faith. In this case “faith”
would be exhibited by not allowing myself to sleep longer than 5 hours. God was clearly going to do this and it was
going to work out great. So “I” thought. I did allow for an out – I said that God
would have to make it plain to me from the Bible that He did not want me to do this.
Well,
I managed to keep this up for 10 days somehow, although I’m sure I didn’t learn
anything in my classes during that time.
I still have my personal journal notes from that time, and it was
clearly an awful time. I had to set
multiple alarms to get up. I’m sure my
roommates loved my “experiment in faith.”
I was totally exhausted.
On
the tenth day I read the following verses from the Bible: “Do you not know that your body is a temple
of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not
your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.” [I
Corinthians 6:19-20]. Given what I was
doing to my body by depriving it of sleep, I took that to mean that God did not
want me to keep doing this. In my
journal I wrote that “I slept until noon the next day!”
That
was over 35 years ago and I still remember it as an important lesson. You can’t just dream up things that “God” is
going to do and then expect Him to do it.
You can’t force God’s hand. That
was not God’s voice I heard in my
mind, telling me I could get by on 5 hours of sleep.
On
the other hand, I personally did, and still do, feel that it was God who
arranged for me to come across the verse in Corinthians that indicated I should
stop being foolish. I did not come
across that verse randomly – I was systematically reading and studying through
the Bible at that time – and came across it in the course of what I was
reading. It fit the situation
perfectly. I say that God “spoke” to me
through that verse.
If
your natural response to my claim that God “spoke” to me is one of significant
skepticism, then I’m with you. It could
have all been total coincidence.
Besides, after ten days of sleep deprivation, any verse could have been twisted to mean “stop being an idiot.” The point is very valid. However, the point of relaying this
particular experience is not that you will believe that God spoke to me – that’s my problem – it is to
understand how God might speak to you. One way this could happen is that you come
across a Bible passage that seems directly written to you for the very specific
situation that you find yourself in at that particular time. When these things all come together, it can
be rather shocking. But you have to experience it yourself. If you allow for the possibility of God
speaking to you in this way, then there is a chance, however remote, that it
could happen. If you exclude the
possibility altogether, then there is zero chance it could happen.
There
is much more to go on this topic, as it is fairly complex. Next we will have to discuss the various things
that can influence our mind.
