Skip to main content

Thoughts on God’s Silence

In my work as a pastor I have found people who never hear the voice of God and others who claim that God is a chatterbox who is never quiet.  The one question many people want answers to is this:  Is God silent?  We would have to modify that to say: Is God’s normal behavior to be silent?”

The classic Baptist seminary answer is that God spoke, the valuable stuff he said was written down in the Bible and we do not need any other words from God.  Certainly, there is not any additional revelation than what is revealed in the Bible.  God can reveal anything he wants in eternity, but right now, while humans have the Bible, there is nothing extra biblical that we need to know.  Therefore, if God speaks, or a prophet speaks for God, whatever they say must be consistent with the written text of the Bible.

I have read books by authors who claim that God, in the person of the Holy Spirit helps them find their car keys or warns them of an accident on the road.  These seem harmless, but also confusing.  If the goal of the Holy Spirit is to be our private helper then that seems to go against the Scriptures that say He will continue to the work of Christ, and there is no record of Christ helping people find things other than himself.  Also, why does God help this one person and not others?  One answer is that this person has more faith and I do, but that seems to be an unbiblical answer.

If we look at the narratives of the Bible and examine how often God spoke and to whom, we would find that God spoke rarely and to very few people.  The book of Judges spans 300 years in Israel’s timeline.  A judge pops up every 40-75 years on average.  Most judges have no encounter with God.  Gideon had several exchanges with God through his angel, but Samson never heard from God.  It is clear that God answered Samson’s prayer in the end, but no conversations were held.  In the book of Exodus, God clearly speaks to Moses and Aaron and a few others, but the vast majority of Israel never communicates with God, they were disallowed.

There is no teaching in the New Testament about carrying on a regular conversation with God.  The Holy Spirit teaches and brings to remembrance and convicts and guides but in most cases this seems to be one-way, through the Bible and without supernatural words.  As for me, I had a dream which was my call to the pastoral ministry.  Jesus was in the dream and he talked to me.  That was it, decades ago.  I now hear God through his word, through other people and through circumstances.  Sometimes I just know what to say or what to do.  I can attribute that to the Holy Spirit, but it can also be a sanctified mind.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering the Franklin Day Planner

This week I have been rereading Hyrum Smith's book "The 10 Natural Laws of Productivity and Happiness." This book was written in the late 1980s and I remember reading it for the first time when I was working at Seagate Technologies, after my time in the Air Force. The core tool talked about in the book is the Franklin Day Planner . I remembering having one such planner, long before smart phones and Palm devices. Mine was a leather bound loose-leaf binder with calendar and note pages in it. I kept my daily tasks list and appointments in that binder, which became a record of my work history at Seagate and beyond. The Day Planner binders, pages and supplies were sold at a store called Franklin Quest , which was located at Valco Mall in Sunnyvale. At that time, I was a computer programmer. I was able to keep a record of all request for software, who made the request and when and what the requirements were. It seemed that I was the only one keeping a record of this b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts on the Gap theory

The Bible is a closed book.  When God was done writing the Old Testament, he stopped until Matthew.  When he wrote Revelation, he stopped.  There are warnings in the Bible about adding or subtracting words from the Bible. Deuteronomy 4:2 & 12:32 and Revelation 22:18 are the three most specific.  The idea throughout the Bible is that this book is inspired Scripture and people have no right or authority to add to them or take away. This is why the Gap theory is so strange.  People probably feel it would be too obvious to add 16 extra chapters to Romans or Ephesians, so they try and sneak some extra stuff into Genesis.  That is the Gap Theory. The Gap Theory says that there is a space of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.  The space that some people insert is a couple of hundred years all the way up to billions of years.  The most popular use for the Gap Theory is to put the entire evolutionary process between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1...
Post a Comment
Read more

What do I preach?

I preach the Word of God.  The style I use is called expositional exegetical .  I draw the meaning out of the Scripture and explain it.  I believe this is the only approved type of preaching.  To preach events out of the newspaper or the latest psychology fad does nothing to edify the saints or glorify God and certainly it does not contain the power to save. The context for my preaching is that I preach through books of the Bible.  Most recently I have been preaching through the gospel of John.  I started in John 1:1 and last Sunday I preached through John 21:15-17.  Charles Spurgeon preached through the entire Bible, but did not take the verses in order.  He bounced around, and got through the entire Bible. One of the most popular styles of preaching in large churches or churches that want to be large is a style called “topical.”  Traditionally topical preaching takes a topic that is from the news or something that the pastor is reading....
Post a Comment
Read more