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God as Tender as a Mother? Does God have a Feminine Side? The Motherly Love of God? My passionate yearning is for this webpage to be both highly biblical and go way beyond touching merely your intellect. The goal of the following – indeed of the entire website – is to help you fall more deeply in love with the most fascinating, exciting, wonderful and lovable Person in the entire universe. A committed Christian of very many years standing confided that an early draft of this webpage had empowered her to see God in a thrillingly new light. ‘ What a huge difference!’ she wrote, ‘Instantly I felt I could communicate with God again.’ For the first time, she saw God as being highly protective of her. A satisfying and much needed sense of security in her relationship with God flooded her. Suddenly she knew that God could be trusted to keep his covenant with her. Her experience hints at why I am writing. No matter how intimately you already know God, my longing for you (and me) is for a spiritual revelation propelling you into life-transforming greater fulfilment in your relationship with God. The prayer of my heart is that my writings be a launching pad from which you leave my words behind and get caught up in a divine encounter. In Luke 15 Jesus delivers three consecutive parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost (prodigal) son. In them, God is likened to a shepherd and a father. Some of us are shocked to realize, however, that in the middle parable, Jesus likens God to a woman ( Luke 15:8 ). Should this really surprise, since God made both male and female in his own image ( Genesis 1:27 )? I am driven to write about our perception of God’s ‘gender’ because it has profound, practical implications for us, and can deeply affect the warmth and nature of the most satisfying, fulfilling and vital relationship any human can enjoy – our relationship with God. Gender is a highly emotive issue for us humans. It is at the very core of our being. It is such a primary aspect of human identity that gender is usually the first thing we notice about a person and what we most want to know when sizing up a stranger. To think of God as a father or mother would hit us deeply even if it only raised gender issues but by linking God with parenthood it can send our sensitivities through the roof. Our strongest emotional bond during our most impressionable years is with our parents. If something goes even slightly wrong with that foundational relationship, causing the love and trust that children instinctively want to give their parents to be violated, it affects profoundly our every other relationship until our dying day, unless we experience a remarkable degree of healing. Even among those who think they have survived their childhood unscathed, many think of a father as colder and sterner than a mother and this unconsciously affects their feelings for God. Yet another emotive layer to this mix is that those who truly know spiritual truth correctly recoil from any whiff of pagan religion. Rightly or wrongly, any hint of God being anything other than emphatically male conjures in many people fears of paganism or departure from biblical truth. Occasionally fear might protect us, but it also has the disturbing potential to paralyze what should be our relentless quest to know the God of the Bible with ever increasing depth and accuracy. Our only true protection is to be led by the Spirit, not driven by fear. So the issue of God’s gender and linking God to parenthood by using the word Father, profoundly interacts with the deepest part of us, affecting us not just intellectually but causing the feelings of many of us to cool toward the warmest Person in the universe. People who think themselves better than those whose emotions cause an irrational reaction against the thought of God being a father, seldom have any right to feel smug because they are often the very people whose rational and spiritual pursuit of truth is stymied by an emotional reaction against the notion of God being like a mother. The real God is the God of truth. And fear, emotions and prejudice are the enemies of truth. Regardless of the position taken, much that is said on this subject reveals more about our personal hang-ups and biases than it does about the heart of God. To have any hope of diffusing some of this we need to take a wider view before zeroing in on the issue of whether it is biblically accurate to think of God as a mother. Life’s Greatest Adventure Let’s begin by intensifying our passion for discovering all we can about God and by gaining deeper insight into why life’s greatest adventure centers on continually growing in our intimate understanding of the most beautiful Person in existence. Like a babe’s knowledge of its mother, our knowledge of God can be warm, intimate, fulfilling and continually growing but there still remains much beyond our capacity to understand. Our lack of understanding can at times be frustrating, as it is sometimes for children not understanding adult wisdom, tastes, sexuality, and so on. Growing in our knowledge and understanding of God, however, should be as exciting as lovers getting to know each other. The Almighty is so much bigger than us that the never-ending challenge is to keep bursting the confines of our own hang-ups and narrow human thinking and shallow reading of Scripture. We need daring humility, a courageous passion for reality, and a yearning for divine intimacy if we are to continually expand our understanding of God to include more and more of the full biblical revelation of who God is. Even a brief meditation on the following Scriptures will affirm that our highest calling and life’s most thrilling adventure is to know God as intimately and as fully and as accurately as humanly possible. Romans 1:21-22 Because, knowing God, they didn’t glorify him as God, neither gave thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools Jeremiah 9:23-24 The Lord says, Don’t let the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, don’t let the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, that he has understanding, and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, justice, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, says the Lord. John 17:3 This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ. Job knew God so well that we read: Job 1:8 The Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant, Job? For there is no one like him in the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears God, and turns away from evil.” Yet still this man of God had grasped so little of God that he later declared: Job 42:5-6 I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. Knowing God deeper is an on-going adventure: Ephesians 1:16-17 . . . making mention of you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him John 8:31, 54-55 Jesus therefore said to those Jews who had believed him . . . ‘It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say that he is our God. You have not known him, but I know him. . . .’ Isaiah 55:9-8 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Psalms 119:18 Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things out of your law. Matthew 16:17 Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. . . .’ Jeremiah 29:13 You shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart. Exodus 33:18 He [Moses] said, “Please show me your glory.” Mark 12:28-30 One of the scribes came, and . . . asked him, “Which commandment is the greatest of all?” Jesus answered, “The greatest is, ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ . . . Let’s pray: Dear Lord, The magnificence of your glory, the perfection of your ways, the depths of your intellect, the scope of your powers, the vastness of your love, and every other aspect of your nature, far exceeds human comprehension. Nevertheless, relative to what we are currently capable of grasping, we do not want to settle for a hazy or inadequate or even fanciful view of you. We want to know the real you. To know you is to love you, and to love you is to want to know you more. If we have misunderstood you or limited you, leaving ourselves with feelings for you that are colder than you deserve, we ask that you melt our hearts with a deeper revelation of who you really are. If you are more wonderful, more beautiful, more desirable, more thrilling, more lovable than we realize, we ask that you open our eyes to see you more fully. We ask you to explode any blockages that our past hurts or prejudices or worldliness or small thinking might have created. We want you to captivate our hearts, taking us on a never-ending journey of discovery of the breathtaking beauty of your heart. God’s Courage Deuteronomy 32:15 . . . he abandoned God who made him, and rejected the Rock of his salvation. More than twenty times the Bible calls God a rock. That’s a bold act because by calling himself a rock God leaves himself wide open to misinterpretation. This is typical of God. Consider for instance when Jesus lost a huge portion of followers by saying that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. He could easily have expressed that far less offensively but instead of carefully explaining, he used it to differentiate between those who genuinely wanted the true God from those who preferred a god of their own fancy; a god who requires little faith because he is within the scope of their own intellect. If you want a staid, predicable God, you are doomed to an inferior earthly life and perhaps even a terrifying eternity. To qualify for life’s greatest adventure, you must be willing to tolerate mystery. If you want a God you always understand – one who will not so frustrate and mystify you that you often feel offended – then you do not want the true God at all. You want a fanciful god of human invention, not the God who is too driven by his love for us to limit himself to human ways rather than use all his resources – his infinite intellect, supernatural ways, access to dimensions that we cannot even conceive of, and so on – to lead us into what is best for us. The Bible choosing to call God a rock is not in any way a denial of the fact that God has many abilities beyond that of a rock, such as intelligence, senses and emotions. Likewise, the Bible calling God Father cannot of itself be taken to deny that God has attributes far beyond those of a father. To say that God is a rock does not mean God is unfeeling. Likewise, to say that God is a father cannot of itself be taken as implying that he is lacking in motherly softness or feminine tenderness. To know whether God is more feeling than a rock and has motherly compassion necessitates a deeper exploration of biblical revelation than hasty presumptions based on a couple of words. We might despise rocks as cold and hard but it would be foolish to reject the Judeo-Christian God as cold and hard if, in fact, the Bible reveals that God is loving, gentle, kind and compassionate, and that he is a rock only in such ways as dependability, agelessness and a place of shelter and safety. It would be a tragedy of eternal proportions if we were to rob ourselves by rejecting the God of the Bible just because some preachers or certain superficial readings leave us with the false impression that God is cruel, harsh or egotistical. It would be a serious mistake to create a God of our own making that suits our own whims and fantasies. We must come face to face with the real God, as truly portrayed in the Bible, not as we guess him to be as a result of a superficial encounter with him or shallow reading of Scripture. Just because some people think warmly about fathers does not mean that even for them there are not thrilling, staggeringly beautiful aspects of God’s nature that are not adequately covered by the word ‘father.’ Not having hang-ups about fathers does not mean a person has grasped all the depths and beauty and love and purity and goodness and wisdom of God. No matter how much we know of God’s heart, there is still more to learn, and no matter how deep and sophisticated our conception of God, our understanding is still shallow and over-simplistic relative to who the almighty, eternal, holy, infinite Lord really is. As a friend, commenting on an early draft of this webpage, wrote: God is a rock, but not just a rock! God is also a father, but not just a father. To say God is only Father would be to apply human constraints on a limitless God. God is Not a Man Many societies twist and distort males, forcing them into a mold that is contrary to God’s conception of masculinity. Jesus – the perfect man and the perfect revelation of the heart of God – cried often and had a tender heart. In fact, wherever we look in the Bible – even among men sometimes mistakenly thought of as being somewhat callous, such as warrior David, Old Testament prophets, loud-mouth Peter, and the apostle Paul – we find men crying. I suggest you let your eyes glide over the vast number of biblical references to men crying. You might be amazed at the impact of seeing all the references gathered together. That many of us think it unmanly to cry shows that there is a softness about the biblical conception of masculinity that is often lacking in our view of what it means to be male. Nevertheless, one of the most basic biblical revelations is that God is not a man. Neither is he to be represented by the image of a man. Numbers 23:19 God is not a man, that he should lie, nor the son of man, that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good? 1 Samuel 15:29 Also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent. Romans 1:23 and traded the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man . . . I know a woman who from a very tender age was not just molested but sexually tortured. Understandably, she became so sexually inhibited that as a teenager she recoiled from so much as a glance at her partly unclothed body such that she had no idea what even her pubic hair looked like. Very many sexual abuse survivors have shared their hearts with me, along with many married couples, yet today this woman stands out as so remarkably healed that although she is highly moral, within the sanctity of marriage, the average Christian wife seems riddled with hang-ups in comparison with her. This outstanding healing came about by God, without any human intermediary, personally and very intimately teaching her about human sexuality and marital love. What allowed this to happen was this woman’s assurance that God is not sexual and therefore fully trustworthy in the realm that terrified her. As she discovered, God is not anti-sex. He is the Creator of sex. Nevertheless, he himself is not a sexual being. To develop sexual feelings toward him is as inappropriate as it is to have sexual feelings for any non-human, whether non-living objects, animals, demons or angels. God is not a man. Neither is he a woman. At least until very recently, almost every application form asks for your sex and date of birth. God couldn’t answer either question. They apply to earthly creatures but not to the infinite Lord. He couldn’t even give you his street address or telephone number. ‘What is God’s sex?’ is as meaningless a question as, ‘How old is God?’ To have sex (gender) implies not only sexuality but a certain incompleteness outside of union with the opposite sex. There is no incompleteness in God. To think of God as either male or female – as humans are – is not only theologically mistaken, it is an insult to God. God is neither fully male – which would imply some sort of need or yearning for a female God, nor is he an emasculated male, as if there were something lacking in him. The Almighty is perfectly whole and self-sufficient. God is not only not sexual, he is not even physical. He is warm and personal and yet he is spirit. He has many qualities of which our own are reflections, and we have such compatibility with him that we were literally made for him, and yet he is breathtakingly different to us. As a mother and baby are so intimate and yet so different in their abilities, God is even more intimate and different to us. Since all humans have gender, few, if any, earthly languages have the capacity to refer to a being who has a personality without automatically assigning a gender to that person. This has nothing to do with the nature of God, but the nature of human language. So to know whether the Bible teaches that God is male, one has to delve deeper than the mere use of the male pronoun. The Lord referring to himself as if he were male must not be interpreted in a strictly literal sense, any more than we should interpret literally God calling himself a rock, a tower, a shield, a lion, and so on, and referring to his “hands,” “feet,” “wings”, and so on ( Deuteronomy 3:24; 1 Corinthians 15:27; Ruth 2:12 ). When it is Insulting to Call God, ‘Father’ There are hearts for whom the words, ‘Daddy is home’ are the most chilling, terrifying words that could ever pierce the air. Tragically, these dear people cannot even imagine how those same words flood millions of hearts with delight, making them feel warm, secure and content. That children can beam from ear to ear at the sound of a father’s entry staggers their imagination. So different is their father that they find it almost beyond belief that there are those for whom their father is not only their protector and hero; Daddy is fun. There are children who know that in their Daddy’s eyes they are as close to perfection as any child could get. These greatly loved children know it is not because they are special; they think all fathers are like that. When seeking to portray something that nothing in the universe can match, it is a communicator’s nightmare that what for some people conveys the most powerfully evocative and accurate picture, is for other equally important people so far off beam as to be considerably worse than nothing. If the Christian God is even remotely like the person many people know as father, we would have good reason for rejecting and despising him. For vast numbers of us today the word ‘father’ produces little of the warmly secure feelings of being cherished, doted on, protected and wisely guided that the word was intended to have when originally delivered to humanity. In present-day western society, fatherhood has suffered such horrific breakdown that what God’s Word meant by Father is as foreign to many of us as ox-drawn plows and other features of Bible times. God: The Best of Both Genders? Genesis 1:27 God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them. This famous Scripture shows that women, as much as men, are in the image of God. It also hints that both male and female were required for God’s image to be complete. In fact, it might be that a man and woman made one through marriage portray the fullness of God better than individuals. We certainly know from the biblical teaching of the body of Christ that the fullness of Christ is better portrayed by the entire church than by individuals. God is neither male nor female, but in whatever respect one gender excels, in that respect that gender better reflects the nature of God. For example, the typically greater male physical strength – significantly more important in pre-mechanical eras than now – means that in their ability to offer the security of physical protection, men in biblical times portrayed slightly better that aspect of God. On the other hand, if women tend to be a little less callous than men, in this respect they are that bit more like God. In their ability to nourish and comfort, women typically better portray that side of God’s nature. We need to keep expanding our view of God. For instance, down to the minutest detail, God knows exactly what it is like to suffer period pain or impotence; not because God has male and female characteristics, but because he is all-knowing. The Lord knows you more intimately than you know yourself. The Almighty, without feeling the need to explain his actions, has chosen to reveal himself to humanity as a God and not a Goddess. One possible reason is that in the biblical era men usually filled leadership roles. However, I suspect a significant factor behind God’s choice is the nature of human sexuality. Men, tending to be more sexually volatile, seem more likely to fall into perversion than women. Consider, for example, the horrific incidence of child sex abuse instigated by men, relative to the somewhat lesser incidence of female-initiated sexual abuse. (And this without men breast-feeding babies or spending the long periods alone with them that is typical of mothers.) As much as it may shock you, a few women actually nurture sexual feelings toward God. I suspect that male sexual vulnerability is such that perverted feelings for God would be more prevalent in humanity if God were commonly thought of as being female. So not only does God’s application of the male gender not imply male superiority, it might actually be an accommodation to a weakness in fallen males. There is also a heartwarming reason for God preferring to reveal himself as Father. If, in this fallen world, fathers are more likely than mothers to be cold and aloof, then people will need God as the warm, approving father they never had. It might grate on us initially, but the ironical reality is that the less able we are to see a father as being kind, loving and gentle, the more we need to see God as Father because, like it or not, suppress it or not, we have a deep, painful ache within us for a good father figure, and nothing can meet that need like a relationship with Father God. This webpage, however, is for the many of us for whom that is too much, too soon. Another complication is that human language and thought patterns restrict our ability to cope well with the concept of a person who has no gender. Our language leaves us with no option but to say ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘it’ when referring to God. The Lord is most certainly not an ‘it.’ God is so personal that alongside him we are coldly impersonal. This forces the selection of either the masculine or feminine pronoun. Until quite recently in our history, the English language was such that the words ‘man’ or ‘men’ often referred not exclusively to males but to every man and woman in the human race. The Hebrew language (the original language of the Old Testament) was the same. Thus, Genesis literally says in Hebrew: Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him [note the singular male pronoun]; male and female he created them. Clearly in some contexts the Bible’s use of ‘he’ or ‘him’ in its original language is gender-neutral. It might well be that it is in this gender-neutral sense that the Bible uses ‘he’ or ‘him’ when referring to God. In many contexts when the original says ‘men,’ we would be very mistaken if we assumed it only refers to males. We might be making a similar mistake if we read too much into the apparently masculine references to God. Studies have shown that even in modern English literature, referring to a male to illustrate a point is seen by readers as excluding the other gender less than if a female were cited. So even in modern English, to refer to God as ‘she’ might more pointedly imply that God is female than referring to God as ‘he’ implies God is male. Some people are beginning to avoid all references to pronouns when referring to God and simply say ‘God’ each time. Given the direction our language is going, this, although tedious, might be technically more accurate. Whatever God’s reasons for choosing to reveal himself using the masculine pronoun, I respect God’s wisdom and holiness too much to dare tamper with his decision by using the feminine pronoun. I seek, nevertheless, to broaden my understanding of God to embrace the full breadth of his revelation, which includes what we might label feminine characteristics. Feminine Aspects of God The Interpreter’s Bible Dictionary sees it as highly significant that the Hebrew term for the uniquely female organ, the uterus (womb), is used in the original Scriptures to describe God’s compassion. God’s wisdom is obviously an integral, eternal aspect of God. Scripture frequently speaks of this highly rated aspect of God’s character as if it were a person. Scholars believe John’s concept of the Logos, the Word that was God and became flesh ( John 1:1-14 ) was derived from the Old Testament understanding of Wisdom as much, probably more, than from the Greek idea of Logos. And yet Wisdom, the one with whom are riches and honor and righteousness ( Proverbs 8:18 ) and who shared with God in the creation of all things ( Proverbs 8:27-31 ) is consistently given a female gender in Proverbs and by Jesus ( Proverbs 1:20; 4:6; 8:1,11; 9:1; 14:33; Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:35 ). God as Mother Ponder these words from the lips of God: Isaiah 66:13 As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you. . . . By what it inserts in brackets, the Amplified Bible (Classic) leaves no doubt as to how its scholars interpret the words immediately prior to these: Isaiah 66:12 For thus says the Lord: . . . you will be nursed, you will be carried on her hip and trotted [lovingly bounced up and down] on her [God’s maternal] knees. . . . In a beautiful picture of maternal love, Jesus expressed the depth of divine compassion with the words: Matthew 23:37 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to her! How often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! Since Jesus came to show us the Father ( John 14:11-6) it is not surprising that we find in the Old Testament a similarly beautiful picture of God’s love: Psalms 36:7 How precious is your loving kindness, God! The children of men take refuge under the shadow of your wings. Tender, Compassionate Jesus, Versus God the Father Millions upon millions of people see Jesus as tender and giving and compassionate; a friend of the outcast; a defender of the downtrodden; someone personally and voluntarily overwhelmed by the depths of human suffering. They see him as warm, approachable, innocent. He is all that is loving and desirable. He is a dove; a soft, inviting blanket to cozy into in a shivering world; a protector who would gladly take a knife or bullet for you. What is startling, however, is that many who rightly hold this view of Jesus see God differently. Nothing could break Jesus’ heart more than someone imagining the Jesus is kinder or gentler or more forgiving than the true God. Reading about someone is very different to meeting that person in the flesh. This is one of the reasons why there are a million mistaken views about God. A significant part of Jesus’ mission was to sort out the mess. God, as he really is, is exactly what you see in Jesus. John 14:7, 9-10 If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on, you know him, and have seen him. . . . He who has seen me has seen the Father. How do you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I tell you, I speak not from myself; but the Father who lives in me does his works. John 5:19 Jesus therefore answered them, “Most certainly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the Father doing. For whatever things he does, these the Son also does likewise. . . .” John 10:30 I and the Father are one. Jesus’ God – the true God – is so different from the God of most people’s imagination that one of the favorite names early Christians had for God was “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Let’s select one of these: 2 Corinthians 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort (Other Scriptures) No wonder the New Testament is filled with such Scriptures as: Hebrews 1:3 His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his [ i.e. God’s ] substance . . . Have We Got It Back To Front? When wanting to gain insight into God, is it Scripture’s intention that we should use as a springboard not so much our feelings toward our parents as our parental feelings toward our own children? Let’s read Scripture with new eyes: Matthew 7:11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! Jesus was not saying, think of your father: God is like that. He was saying, think of your tender feelings and sacrificial love for your own children: God is like that. Moreover, he was saying that God’s love is so good and pure and selfless that alongside him even our best attempts at love are evil. The Divine Dilemma The insurmountable difficulty is that there will always be people for whom an analogy evokes the intended warm feelings of love and security far more effectively than any abstraction, and at the same time there will be some people, though fewer, for whom the analogy is a disaster. Any group of humans – children, lovers, grandparents, sisters, pet owners, pastors, nurses or any others you could name – who for some of us epitomize tenderness, loyalty, devotion, selflessness, wisdom and all things good and wholesome, will be symbols of raging hurt for a few of us. Communicators can only appeal to the intelligence and charitableness of their audience to realize that when they select an analogy they are thinking of the finest examples of that group of humans. There will be some dear people, however, whose emotional pain screams louder than their ability to be coldly intellectual. Ironically, those for whom an analogy is an excruciating disaster are the very ones who desperately need to discover that God is the one person who can fill their gaping wound with his loving compassion and faithfulness. Your Dadda Three times, the New Testament in its original Greek refers to God as Abba ( Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6 ). The peculiar thing is that this is not even a Greek word. It was the word Jesus used when speaking his native language. Mark, apparently because he felt there was something precious – almost sacred – about the expression, left Jesus’ choice of words untranslated. We can’t be sure whether Paul’s use of the term was influenced directly from Jesus’ earthly preaching or came from the apostle’s own revelation, but he, too, clearly felt there was no Greek equivalent that adequately reflected the depth of Abba. It is popularly thought that Daddy is the best English approximation, but we can do a little better. For the people Jesus addressed, Abba was a baby’s first attempt to call out to its father. The closest English is Dadda. It is not entirely coincidental that it even sounds a little like Abba. It is derived from baby talk. Being one of the very first words a normal baby ever utters, it must be easy for a baby to say. (In some households, the word would be Pappa, but again you’ll recognize the similarity.) The significance of this choice is that Dadda engenders feelings of tenderness and intimacy and trust that might not be there with the more formal Father. The word Dad might suggest someone a little boring or taken for granted, but Dadda or Daddy has connotations of someone who is special, maybe even exciting. Names used by older children might also bring with it overtones of a disciplinarian, since fathers are likely to be stricter with older children than with babies. The point is that this tender expression was Jesus’ and Paul’s choice of the most appropriate form of address to God. If thinking of God does not elicit within you warm feelings of love and acceptance and security, then you are missing a significant aspect of what God was wishing to convey to humanity by the use of this word. When things get tough, God would like us to have the carefree confidence of a little child leaving her broken bike with Daddy and happily running off to play, certain that Daddy will fix it. There are some very moving Scriptures about the depth of God’s compassion for his children. The eye can slip over them in casual reading, but I urge you to view these Scriptures one on top of another, letting the impact mount until they touch you deeply. See God’s Tender Love . Grasping for analogies Of course, divine love is not merely equal to that of earth’s best parents. God’s love, being perfect, is incomprehensibly superior to all human feelings. Psalms 27:10 When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. Isaiah 49:15 Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, these may forget, yet I will not forget you! Matthew 7:11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! God’s love is so immense that we are forced to scan the full range of human attachment and love and compassion to find a mere shadow of God’s feelings for us. We have noted that in grasping for glimpses into divine love that we might understand, Jesus in just one chapter, likened God’s love to a woman, a shepherd, and a father. The woman was deeply anxious about her lost coin, which might have been part of her dowry, having great sentimental and emotional, as well as material, value. Today’s equivalent would be a stone from an engagement ring. The shepherd, upon finding the sheep, actually carried it home, joyfully lugging the quite heavy eastern animal on his shoulders. The highly forgiving father had apparently been on the constant lookout for his ungrateful son, day after day, month after month, year after year. Seeing him a long way off, he runs the distance, throws his arms around him and showers him with kisses in an emotional display that could call for no less than the slaughtering of the prize calf and throwing a party ( Luke 15 ). Another hint of God’s love is the commitment of the most faithful husband or even the excitement of a newly wed: Isaiah 62:5 . . . As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so your God will rejoice over you. Yet another way that Scripture tries to convey to us what is ultimately indescribable is by using our commitment to our own body. The New Testament often refers to Christians as being part of Christ’s own body. What could be more intimate? Christ nourishes you, protects you and feels your pain, like you would feed, look after and to rush to soothe the pain of any part of your body. God treats his people as the apple (pupil) of his eye – that most precious part of the body which we instantly shield by blinking or taking whatever measures are appropriate to meet its every need. Thus we find this description of how God treated the Israelites: Deuteronomy 32:10 He found him in a desert land, in the waste howling wilderness. He surrounded him. He cared for him. He kept him as the apple of his eye. In a rush of metaphors, the inspired psalmist prayed: Psalms 17:8 Keep me as the apple of your eye. Hide me under the shadow of your wings And the Bible’s attempts to convey God’s love keeps coming. Many people think Jesus must have had a very special love for his earthly mother. He did. There’s a wonderful side to this, however, that is often overlooked. The special feelings Jesus had for Mary are the very same feelings he has for you. It is with that extreme devotion that he loves you. Or maybe for some of us, the love of a brother or sister is more meaningful. No problem. Jesus said: Matthew 12:50 For whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother. Jesus’ longing to be our brother, pushed him to astounding extremes: Hebrews 2:11, 14, 17-18 For both he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one, for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brothers . . . Since then the children have shared in flesh and blood, he also himself in the same way partook of the same, that through death he might bring to nothing him who had the power of death, that is, the devil . . . Therefore he was obligated in all things to be made like his brothers, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people. For in that he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted. Romans 8:29 For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. Comprehending the Incomprehensible Ephesians 3:14, 17-19 For this cause, I bow my knees . . . that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strengthened to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge , that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Emphasis mine) As brilliant as Paul was at communicating, he found himself forced to resort to prayer because he wanted his readers to gain insight that no amount of explaining or describing could ever achieve. He longed for them to experience the supernatural miracle of knowing that which was beyond knowing. Each time Paul mentioned Abba, he did so in the context of receiving a revelation from the indwelling Spirit of God. Romans 8:15 For you didn’t receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” Galatians 4:6 And because you are children, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” So the only hope we have of truly knowing God’s love is by a spiritual miracle that begins with new birth. For help in entering this, the most significant of all human experiences, see You Can Find Love: What Your Fantasies Reveal Healing of hurts Vast numbers of us carry wounds because our earthly father was considerably less than perfect. Your loving Lord feels your pain and he wants to heal you in two ways: 1. By continually being the Perfect Father you have always deserved. (If you have been emotionally wounded, this is something you secretly crave and yet something you fear. What makes it scary is the thought of again being let down. Thankfully, unlike any human, God fully understands and is utterly trustworthy.) 2. By removing the festering bitterness that would otherwise keep infecting your wound and preventing healing. The following few paragraphs are extracted from Serious, Do-It Yourself Healing From Emotional Pain. Maybe your resentment is as strong toward your father as implied below, maybe it is less, but the principles remain the same. Suppose someone broke your hand. This makes you so mad that every day as you pass that person’s photo hanging on the wall, you punch it with your broken hand. The release of pent up anger might feel good, but the constant punching prolongs your agony and prevents your hand from ever healing. A desire to see someone else suffer inevitably ends up perpetuating our own suffering. The devastating thing is that resentment is addictive. Like a junkie, we focus so much on the welcome relief resentment offers that we hardly realize it inflames the downer that follows, and so the agonizing cycle continues. Despite our fanciful notions, it is unlikely that we could ever see anyone suffer so profoundly as to satisfy our lust for revenge. Moreover, as people keep discovering to their dismay, it is our pain that drives the desire for revenge and, except for Jesus, no one else’s pain cannot lessen our own pain. So the tragedy is that if we get stuck on the revenge path, in fifty years’ time we will still be no closer to a resolution. For as long as we are dominated by the longing to see someone suffer, that person has succeeded in lowering us to his abysmal level. He hurt us. Now we want him to hurt. We degrade ourselves by entering the slimy world of hate, staggering through life a defeated person, floundering in the same moral mud in which our tormentor lives. In fact, sex offenders are often themselves abuse victims with heart-wrenching stories. They failed to resolve their anger and pain and so inflict it on others. Regardless of how it manifests, resentment enslaves and corrupts its victims. Pathetically, people blinded by anger or hate usually feel morally superior to other people who are blinded by anger or hate. Bitter people are beautiful people turned ugly. Thankfully the process is reversible, once we learn to forgive. We move from victim to victor only when we break free from resentment’s death-grip. I often hike in wilderness areas infested with snakes so venomous that without specialized medical treatment I would have only a couple of hours to live after being bitten. Suppose a snake bit me, then slid out of sight. I would be a fool to squander precious time angrily trying to find and kill the snake. First priority must be to seek medical attention. For your own survival, focus on healing, not revenge. I am convinced that just as martyrs are especially honored in heaven, so are those who have suffered greatly and yet have forgiven. Forgiving others is tough. It is so critical to our own emotional and spiritual well-being that our spiritual enemy strongly attacks us on this issue. Nevertheless, divine help is available. It’s sometimes subconscious, but people suffering great difficulty in forgiving others usually have as the basis of their agony the pain of having great difficulty forgiving themselves. The two sides of forgiveness – forgiving yourself and forgiving others – rise or fall together. Many people raging against someone else’s guilt are pressured to do so by an urge to keep suppressed the tortured screams of their own conscience. Their subconscious is forever frantically trying to deflect the attention off themselves by blaming others. Peace soothes our troubled mind when we dwell on the extent of the forgiveness and purity that we have in Christ. When we realize how much God has forgiven us, it becomes easier to act more Godlike and have that same forgiving attitude toward ourselves and others. For this reason, I recommend beginning with the webpages about handling guilt . Other pages you will benefit from are: Breaking the stranglehold of bitterness: Unforgivable! Lord make him regret what he did to me! Wrap Up A failure of those close to you to love you like God loves will leave you bleeding emotionally. But everything that is missing in human love is found in the endless depths of the One who longs to hold you in his arms forever. People so tragically hurt by one or more men that it darkens even their attitude toward God – the utterly sinless, genderless non-human – are suffering a crippling inner wound that God longs to heal. And, as already discovered by many astonished people who were once afraid to think of God as having any male qualities, at least part of that healing flows from finding in the safe, warm God, the love of the perfect Father. Ironically, it turns out that those who most object to relating to God as Father are the ones who will eventually most benefit from relating to God as Father. Yet this is so difficult to grasp for those who are deeply hurting because of abusive humans, and they desperately need to snuggle into God’s comfort long before they can see God as the tender Father who will fill a gnawing emptiness within them left by a hopelessly inadequate human father. Since God is nothing like an abuser, he does not force healing upon us. If a surgeon will not act until a person is willing to consent to the operation, God – whose respect for us is far deeper – will wait for you. Sadly, it often takes us a long while to muster the courage to heal. So if you do not yet feel ready to relate to God as Father, put that thought on hold, but do not perpetuate your inner pain by letting it hinder you from drawing close to the true God, who alone brings the comfort you desperately need. Those close to you are imperfect, but the One who is closest to you is perfect. Everything that a starry-eyed bride could wish for in love and security and faithfulness and devotion; everything a little child could hope for in a Mommy or Daddy or brother or sister or grandparent; God is all that and more.

God’s Tender Love     Feel yourself carried by the most comforting and protective arms in the universe:   Deuteronomy 1:31   . . . the LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.   Deuteronomy 33:27   The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. He will drive out your enemy before you . . .   Isaiah 46:3  Listen to me, O house of Jacob, . . . you whom I have upheld since you were conceived, and have carried since your birth. (4) Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you. Isaiah 63:9  In all their distress he too was distressed, and the angel of his presence saved them. In his love and mercy he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.   As a little child is frequently lifted by its parent, so God lifts you up into his arms:   Psalms 40:2  He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.   Psalms 145:14  The LORD upholds all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down.   Picture yourself as a little, trusting child holding the strongest, yet gentlest hand in the world:   Psalms 37:24  though he stumble, he will not fall, for the LORD upholds him with his hand.   Psalms 63:8  My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.   Psalms 73:23  Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand.   Psalms 139:10   even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.   Isaiah 41:10  So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.   Isaiah 41:13  For I am the LORD, your God, who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you.   Isaiah 42:6  I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. . . .   Scripture shows the Lord not as a father who only becomes involved with his children when they get older, but someone who tends to a baby’s needs from the moment of birth, even teaching the baby to walk:   Psalms 22:9  Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you even at my mother’s breast. (10) From birth I was cast upon you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God.   Psalms 71:6  From my birth I have relied on you; you brought me forth from my mother’s womb. I will ever praise you.   Isaiah 1:2  Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For the LORD has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.”   Hosea 11:3  It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. (4) I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them.   Here’s yet another beautiful picture of God’s tender love:   Isaiah 40:11   He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.   Footnote: Not until several weeks after compiling the above did I realize that every verse is from the Old Testament. That might shatter some people’s view of the Old Testament. The God of the New Testament is truly the God of the Old.

God's Gender As much as I would like to avoid an issue that raises many people’s blood pressure, I am obligated to explore the matter of God’s gender. Why? Because it affects some people’s feelings toward God. That renders it too important to sidestep. Before hurtling into this, we should acknowledge that it is disturbingly easy to be sincerely convinced that we are being spiritual, biblical, rational and objective when we are actually more swayed by other factors than we suppose. Let’s for a moment try to be honest with each other while I reveal my own biases and prejudices. There are women (and some men) who have suffered so atrociously at the hands of key men in their lives that the very thought of God being male chills them with terror or revulsion, or at least leaves them cold and wanting to keep God at arm’s length. Large numbers of such people have felt drawn to me because of my writings and I confess that they have a special place in my heart. On the other extreme, are certain men who want God to be male in order to justify them feeling and/or acting superior to women. I admit to feeling uncomfortable about such men, despite being a man myself. Humbling ourselves and exalting others seems far more in line with biblical teaching. In between these extremes are those who squirm at the thought of God being female, simply because it is a concept so foreign to their upbringing (always calling God ‘he’) that to them it ‘feels’ (i.e. an emotive, rather than spiritual, reaction) pagan. I confess to having a special affinity to such people and I suspect that a large majority of Christians congregate here. Many of us, having been brought up to apply the male pronouns he and him to God, would recoil at using she and her , as much as if our human father suddenly declared he wants us to think of him as a woman. But is this for some deep, spiritual reason or solely because it clashes with an ingrained habit? Language keeps changing, and the number of people brought up with gender-neutral language keeps increasing. So I cannot be sure if the study is still valid, but research not too long ago indicated that the use of the male pronoun when speaking in general terms is seen by people as being more gender-neutral than using the female pronoun. I suspect this would be particularly true of most Bible readers, unless they had been brought up on a very recent Bible version that, for example, never uses man for humanity . My guess is that this research points to a significant factor behind the reaction of many of us to referring to God as she . We find it easier to think of God as being less predominantly one gender or the other if we use the pronoun we are more familiar with, whereas the use of the female pronoun jolts us into thinking it implies not that God is in no sense genderless but specifically female. The truth is that for many of us, God’s gender is such an emotive issue that, despite convincing ourselves we are being spiritual and theologically correct, our own fears, biases and prejudices are in danger of raging stronger than our ability to hear the Spirit’s whispers and can cloud our reading of God’s Word. So much for sensitizing ourselves to factors that might be subconsciously influencing us: let’s plunge in. Things I am about to say are so contrary to the Holy One’s nature that I feel apologetic about even mentioning them. Nevertheless, it seems necessary in order to drive home just how different God is from our normal conception of what it means to be male. The exquisite but humanly flabbergasting uniqueness of God poses enormous difficulties when trying even to imagine him, let alone speak of him. One of the multitude of enigmas this poses is in choosing a pronoun to use for God. With human language being what it is, the options are only he, she, it or they. God is far too personal for it to be appropriate, and too united and opposed to polytheism for they . I would not dare accuse the God of the Bible of making a poor choice when selecting the male pronoun from these limited options but before bolting to wild conclusions, let’s remember that it does not say God is male and there are many senses in which every Bible believer agrees that he is not male. Most of us readily admit that God is neither a heterosexual male, nor homosexual male. He is sexually attracted to no-one. Both in the sense of procreation and in the sense of being attracted to gods of the opposite sex (of which, of course, there are none) we all agree that God is genderless, though not in the sense of being neutered, since there is no deficiency in God. There is nothing used to confirm gender in humans that applies to the divine. God has neither genitals, nor hormones, nor genes (chromosomes). Moreover, there is no opposite sex version of God with which to compare or contrast him. We cannot say he is taller, physically stronger or hairier or sweats more or has a deeper voice or flatter chest or a lower life expectancy or is less verbally proficient than his opposite sex counterpart. The very notion is, of course, ridiculous. Neither does God wear male clothing or is more likely to end up in jail, or have a receding hairline. There might be things an average woman is better at than an average man, and vice versa, but there is nothing that the God of perfection could be better at. To say the least, a ‘male’ lacking everything so far mentioned is a very peculiar ‘male.’ Neither is God male in the sense that males are more like him than females. Right from the beginning, the God of the Bible knocks this fallacy on the head by emphatically stating that both genders are equally in the image of God: Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 5:1-2 When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And when they were created, he called them “man.” When declaring that humanity is in God’s image, both these Scripture specifically mention both genders; perhaps hinting that there is something in what is unique about being female that is in the image of God and, likewise, there is something about what distinguishes males that is in God’s image. Perhaps, by consisting of both males and females, humans better reflect the fullness of the nature of God than either gender could achieve alone. It has been said that the sexes are not so much opposite as complementary. They complete each other. Christian theologians, however, have always insisted that God is complete in himself. Unlike Adam, he needs no helper. In fact, the Hebrew word used to describe Eve’s role as Adam’s helper ( Genesis 2:18,20 ) is never used elsewhere in the Bible of people serving God but almost always used to describe God’s role in rescuing us. This makes it closer in meaning to savior or hero than assistant . In any case, anyone trying to argue from Scripture that there is any way in which God is more ‘male’ than ‘female’ is forced to admit that it must be in an extremely limited narrow sense.

Hearing the Voice of God   The Thrilling Mystery of Hearing from God   Divine Guidance Made Easier     Your need to make a critical decision looms like a fast-approaching freight train. Yet despite desperately wanting to hear from God, he is frustratingly silent. That’s no surprise. God loves drama. Often he waits until almost the last split second before snatching us out of harm’s way. That builds faith. It puts steel in our backbone, spiritually.   But there is another reason for God having his own timetable. You are loved with an intensity beyond human comprehension. Relentlessly, the One who gave his all for you seeks to draw you closer to him, because that is our deepest need and our most exciting destiny. We, however, tend to be aware of our chronic need for his whispers only when our need for guidance is screamingly obvious. We get annoyed with God because we rarely recognize the extent to which our real need is not for occasional guidance, but constant companionship.   We long to know what to do; God longs for us to know  him . Guidance can come in a flash, but getting to know someone - especially when that Someone is infinite - is an adventure that never ends. Whereas we want a five-minute consultation, the Lover of our souls wants for us a lifetime of ever-increasing intimacy, culminating in an eternity of incomprehensibly greater intimacy.   When our agenda is shallower than God’s agenda, we will misunderstand what God is doing. We’ll think him frustratingly slow, maybe even cold and aloof, when he is actually molding within us things beyond our dreams. Likewise, this web series might move a little slower than you had wished, because it is responding not just to your heart cry for answers from God, but to his heart cry that you might better know him. And the two are inter-related.   Life’s Most Exciting Adventure   God is warm. He is fascinating, exciting, and full of surprises. He brings peace, contentment, security, love, and meaningful answers. To keep distant from him is to condemn ourselves to remaining a pathetic shadow of the vibrant, complete, fulfilled, confident, knowledgeable people we were born to be. And yet there are dark forces that want us to miss out.   Astoundingly, some people have so closed their eyes to reality that they imagine that even if there really are spiritual powers, none of them could be evil. Surely, a few minutes of world news should tell us otherwise. And anything evil is likely to be deceptive.   The God of love and truth has spiritual enemies non-human intelligences whose sinister purposes are furthered if they can discourage us from discovering how breathtakingly wonderful God really is, and from revelling in his goodness. They long to coax us down the slide toward supposing that God is a cold, harsh, angry, boring, killjoy - someone we would shrink from. The aim of their deception is to paint in our imagination such a false picture of our magnificent Lord that instead of instinctively snuggling into him, we apprehensively keep him at arm’s length. Should this deception succeed, God’s spiritual enemies would rob our loving Lord of his greatest joy, which is to lavish his blessings upon us. Hideous alien powers want to keep us weak and ineffective so that they can dominate us, rather than us rising up in the might of the Lord and thwarting their evil plans.   So our minds are a spiritual battlefield, regularly bombarded with demonically manipulated thoughts, fears, doubts and anything else that might weaken our longing to run into the warmth of God’s welcoming arms and enjoy him. This is why guilt feelings - the fear that God frowns on us - keep hounding Christians. (To counteract these lies, please bookmark this page and see   Handling Guilt .) And it is why we fear that God is going to tell us to do something unpleasant. (To see through that lie, read   Enjoying God’s Will for You. )   Once we cut through all this satanically inspired misinformation we can begin life’s most exciting adventure - discovering God, the most spine-chilling, most mind-boggling, most extravagant, most powerful, most loveable Person in all the universe. Locked within the Creators personality are wonders so beyond our knowing as to make the complexities and mysteries of the entire universe seem like a speck of dust. Trillions of words could never describe his magnificence. It even messes with my writing style. I dislike running so many adjectives together, but what can you do when fumbling around, trying to describe the indescribable? To hear from this terrifyingly perfect, spine-tinglingly majestic, heart-stoppingly beautiful Person, is to tap into infinite intelligence, infinite goodness, and infinite power. Hearing from God is the highest privilege any life form could ever hope to experience. And this incomparably desirable, stupendously intelligent, infinitely superior Person speaks to you. Often.     In the words of Scripture: For God  does  speak– now one way, now another – though man may not perceive it . Job 33:14 (Emphasis Mine) The Lord of the universe communicates with you far more frequently and intimately than you dare imagine. The heart-warming news is that you respond positively to his leading more often than you realize. Nevertheless, each of us would be stunned as to how much divine comfort and protection and loving wisdom we have missed because we did not realize the Lord was speaking.   The God Who Hides Himself Running through Scripture are two themes that almost seem contradictory. One is that God hides himself. The other is that God is evident everywhere. The apostle Paul proclaimed to the Athenians the One who was both the Unknown God, and the God in whom they lived and moved and had their being  ( Acts 17:23-28 ). What initially look like contradictory statements end up being almost the same truth. God hides himself by being everywhere; not by withdrawing from us but by being so intensely involved in our lives that the very frequency and intimacy of his dealings with us makes it seem too common and normal to be the supernatural God. We must explore this thrilling truth because until we grasp it we will end up dismissing a high proportion of the times that God speaks to us. The unseen Lord is ceaselessly sustaining us and working in our lives and circumstances. “ In him we live and move and have our being,” is a truth that Scripture applies even to non-Christians ( Acts 17:23-28 ). The omnipresent, omnipotent Lord is so much involved even in the lives of God-haters, that our problem in perceiving him is like a deep-sea fish that can never see the ocean for the water. The fish is so much in the ocean and gaining its whole life - its food, its oxygen, its ability to move - from the ocean that there is a real sense in which it has never seen the ocean. The water is transparent. The fish has never known what it is like not to be in water. It has never seen the surface, the horizon, or the shore. Likewise, God is so vast and we are so dependent on him, we are each so immersed in him and have never known anything different, that he is almost imperceptible. He is so close that we cannot step back far enough to see him properly. The Almighty is so pervasive - so intimately and actively and continually involved with us and in everything that touches us - that we have become blinded to much of what he does. We often find ourselves not seeing God’s provision, for the pay check; not seeing God’s love for us, for all the good things that happen to us; not seeing God’s leading for the astounding opportunity that suddenly opens to us; not perceiving God’s intimate word to us, for the Bible. Over and over, Scripture attributes to God, what we attribute to natural or human causes. When it says that God sends wind, rain, sunshine, locust plagues, and so on, it is not because people in the Bible era had not discovered the laws of nature. Do you think Jesus, who said God feeds the birds of the air, did not know all the effort a sparrow goes to in order to find food ( Matthew 6:26 )? Do you suppose the psalmist, who believed God gives lions their food, was unaware that they feed themselves by preying ( Psalms 104:21; Job 38:39-41 )? Isaiah said that even a farmers most rudimentary agricultural knowledge is the result of God instructing him. Do you think Isaiah was unaware that farmers teach their sons and learn off each other, and experiment and gain experience for themselves? Do you imagine he thought those who deny God are unable to farm?  ( Isaiah 28:24-29  is so contrary to our secular mindset that you might find it worth investing thirty seconds to read it.) Biblical thinking is so different to current thinking as to seem bizarre. This difference is not because Scripture was written by primitive people who did not know any better than to attribute natural events to God. It is because today’s society is plagued by spiritually primitive people who do not know any better than to attribute natural events to chance. No one imagines that an all-powerful God would be incapable of using processes or unable to control vast numbers of intricate, seemingly insignificant events. And yet somehow most of us begin to act as if the discovery of some of those processes removes God from the equation. The apostle Paul faced enough natural dangers to seize anyone’s attention - wild seas, infected wounds, bandits - yet he focused on spiritual causes. His gospel threatened the livelihood, pride and traditions of thousands. Wherever he looked, human reasons for his problems glared at him. Yet he saw the human component of his conflict as inconsequential ( Ephesians 6:12 ). Either the apostle was a fruit loop or we clash with the spirit world more than most of us suppose. In any act of God there are at least two levels of explanation, one of which science can contribute to. Consider, for instance, when Jesus told a man to stretch out his withered hand and it immediately healed ( Luke 6:6,10 ). Scientists might describe what took place within that man’s hand in terms of multiplication of cells, suddenly improved blood flow, and so on. Such an explanation, though accurate, would miss an entire dimension to this event: the hand was restored at Jesus’ word. Imagine someone thinking himself clever by deciding never to see an oil painting except through an electron microscope, expecting that such a restricted, but technologically advanced, view would enable him to appreciate the painting’s beauty and to understand what the artist wished to convey though his art. It is as if science lets us examine a masterpiece with a microscope (and such a view can be of value), whereas the Bible empowers us to see the big picture, enabling us to grasp the divine meaning and purpose of that masterpiece we call life. God in his genius separates those who love truth from those who are in love with themselves. He has devised a way that keeps bigheads ignorant and enlightens the sincere. We have little control over our natural intelligence but we have much control over our attitude. Jesus exulted in God being so ingenious as to make understanding of the most critical and profound truths in the universe dependent upon not I.Q., but attitude. Luke 10:21   At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.” Blinded by appalling arrogance, humanists imagine they have suddenly become incredibly smart, being able to discern physical and psychological reasons for phenomena. They have actually become incredibly thick, being able to see nothing but the blatantly obvious. The apostle’s words stick with appalling accuracy: “Professing to be wise, they became fools” ( Romans 1:22 ). Don’t catch their blindness. Suppose you are listening in awe at the talent of a concert pianist. Noting your reaction, a know-all exclaims, “Oh, how ignorant can you get! That’s nothing to admire! Look, I’ll just press this piano key. See? The noise you were hearing was simply because keys were being pressed. That’s nothing special! Even a cat could walk on the keys and make a noise.” Imagine him supposing he had undermined your reason for awe, simply because he knew how a piano operates! His observation was true, but pathetically shallow. The fact that he could prove his explanation was true just increases his arrogance and seals his ignorance. His understanding of physics and mechanics and sound waves might be astounding and yet the beauty and message of the music and the skill of the pianist went completely over his head. Before you think that no one would be so ignorant, let me break the terrifying news. We are each highly capable of such clever stupidity. In the words of Jesus, God has “hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” If we think ourselves smart, rather than utterly dependent upon God’s grace for understanding, we are in grave danger of knowing much and yet knowing nothing. Any of us can so easily miss the beauty, goodness, wisdom and message of God, even though it is right under our nose. Our claim not to hear God is like someone complaining he has never heard music, and even while he complains music is playing in the background. “Then what am I hearing right now?” you ask incredulously. “Oh,” he replies, “that’s just sound coming from instruments.”   God speaks, and we hear him, but often we recognize it only as words, thoughts, desires and circumstances. We fail to see beyond God’s chosen instruments to the divine conductor. The Almighty gets his message through to us and we usually respond, “That’s a good idea! I’ll do that.” Or, if it’s a warning, we think, “That’s right! It would be foolish to proceed.” We rarely stop to realize that it is actually God who is guiding us. As long as we end up doing the right thing, it is seldom essential that we recognize the divine origin of what we conclude is a good idea. Not recognizing the Source of our guidance, however, can result in us wrongly supposing that God is a little remote, when in reality he is passionately involved in our lives and repeatedly speaking to us. A still more disturbing consequence of not realizing that it is actually God who is speaking, is that we could ignore the message, not realizing that we are exposing ourselves to the pain of rejecting divine wisdom. For us to recognize God when he speaks or intervenes in our lives, we must never imagine that our apparent ability to fully explain something means we are seeing the full picture. Like a know-all brilliantly explaining the molecular structure of a work of art and yet completely missing the beauty and purpose of the masterpiece, so we might explain acts of God scientifically or rationally with complete accuracy and yet completely miss even God’s involvement, much less grasp his purpose and message in those events. Consider Joseph’s famous statement to his brothers who had sold him into slavery. The one-time prisoner who was now Pharaoh’s right-hand man, declared, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” ( Genesis 50:20 ). Filling the foreground, are the brothers, driven by hate, jealousy and deceit, doing their utmost to ensure Joseph suffered. It seemed obvious what was going on. We could explain every event in terms of human depravity. Completely out of sight, however, something astoundingly different was happening in those same events. God, brimming with love, kindness and wisdom, was using the brother’s hate-crazed actions to execute his plan to bless Joseph and his brothers beyond anything they could imagine. God did not plant evil intentions in the brothers’ hearts. On the contrary, he was continually restraining them. For instance, most of them were planning not Joseph’s slavery but his murder ( Genesis 37:18-20) . Their hearts were evil and anti-God, and they fully deserved the wrath and judgment of God. Nevertheless, God was still there in the background, guiding events toward a goal so contrary to their intentions that they could never foresee it.   It is so easy to miss what is happening on a spiritual level, not only because the spiritual is invisible but because, as we have just seen, God can be engineering the exact opposite of what seems to be happening. Our Lord loves creating lavish and beautiful surprises. When virtually no one would ever guess, the Lord was acting in Joseph’s life, bringing about good. (When all is revealed it will become apparent that God always and only does good.) When the Almighty surprises us by bringing good out of circumstances that we least suspect could have a happy ending, it highlights God’s genius in concealing his stunning, meticulously planned surprises. In the words of Proverbs 25:2 , “ It is the glory of God to conceal a matter . .  .” Only through the eyes of faith could anyone see God’s ingeniously concealed goodness in the midst of what seems a hideous tangle of disasters and setbacks. God declares that anyone displaying such praiseworthy faith deserves to rule with him as royalty for all eternity. As the rest of that verse in Proverbs says, it is glory of kings to uncover what God has cleverly concealed. What the Lord did in Joseph’s life is typical of what he does in the life of each of us. And just as the Almighty often conceals his hand, so he often conceals his voice. I would have liked to entitle this webpage  Divine Guidance Made Easy,  but the closest I could get was  . . . Made Easier.  Although we can make great progress in recognizing God’s voice, it is actually not intended to be particularly easy. God does indeed hide himself, even from his loved ones. If you are like me, you have felt hurt by this. I long to be on intimate terms with God and I have often felt offended that God makes it so hard to hear him and to sense him at work in my life. After much seeking of God about this puzzle I have at last made the heart-warming discovery that God hiding himself in no way suggests that he wants to remain aloof. On the contrary, he longs for us to find him. Nothing thrills him more than us by faith seeing through his disguises and discovering him speaking and loving us through people, thoughts, circumstances, desires, books, songs, dreams, billboards, nature, movies, Scriptures . . . does the list ever end? It is only if God lovingly hides himself that we can win the eternal glory of those who by the eyes of faith pierce the apparent darkness and silence and evil to see our holy, triumphant Lord loving us and speaking to us and weaving all things together for good. Perhaps you have heard of the man who in utter frustration asked his pastor why God had not been giving him answers. Unable to hear the pastor’s mumbled reply, the man moved closer, asking the pastor to repeat what he had said. Still unable to hear the reply, he moved closer and closer until finally his ear was almost touching the pastor. Then he heard in the faintest voice, “Sometimes God whispers so that we will move closer to him.” It is precisely because God is passionate about us that he sometimes acts slightly disinterested in us. Consider a woman faced with the heart-wrenching dilemma of having much stronger feelings for a man than he has for her. In her desperate desire for him she might decide to restrain herself and play hard to get. Despite it seeming that she is growing cold, it is actually a passionate attempt to win him. Since men differ, one would have to be God to know in what circumstances this tactic is wise. But the One who  is  God and  is  wise, yearns for our affections and attention more than we can imagine, and in the hope of gaining them he often seems to play hard to get or seems to give us the silent treatment. Even though the fact slips past our physical senses, we know by faith that God is present everywhere. Similarly, we can take it by faith that God is communicating and actively at work in us and all around us in countless ways, even though much of what he does for us slips past our senses. What matters is not whether we  feel  or can  see  God moving in our situation. The fact is that he is giving us comfort, support, wisdom and all manner of things, regardless of how conscious we are of it. Our challenge is to believe it and become increasingly skilled at detecting his hand and voice in the normal humdrum of life. Let’s see some biblical examples of how easy it is to miss God. Jacob went to sleep unaware that he was literally lying over the very gateway of heaven ( Genesis 28:11-17 ). Young Samuel could not distinguish the Lord’s voice from that of the man he served every day ( 1 Samuel 3:4-5 ). Multiplied thousands of people rubbed shoulders with the Son of God. They heard teaching like no one had ever given. They saw miracles that took their breath away. And almost none of them had a clue as to who he was. For miles, the resurrected Jesus walked and talked with two of his disciples, and they never realized who was speaking to them. ‘ . . . they were kept from recognizing him.’ The moment they discovered who it was, he vanished (Luke 24:13-31).   There were times in the life of Joseph, Job, Jesus - in fact everyone who has ever lived - when only through the miracle of faith could anyone see God’s loving hand in what was happening to them. Finally, at the time of his choosing - often not until after death - God lets people see without the eyes of faith what he has been doing behind the scenes. Then all those who have let doubt blind them will be ashamed of their foolish questioning of God’s love and goodness. But there are those who trust God’s loving goodness despite it seeming that God had abandoned them. These heroes will shine like the sun. Listening to God    Husbands are renowned for letting their wives’ chatter fade into the background. Sometimes this is because husbands have difficulty coping with the sheer volume of words coming from their wives. Usually, they suppose nothing significant is being communicated. Every now and then, however, they get caught out and discover they have missed something that even they regard as important. To our surprise, it turns out that this is often our problem with God. It is not, as we imagine, that God seldom speaks, but that he speaks so often that we take it for granted, and assume that if it is not fanfared by angelic trumpets it cannot be important. Often a husband misses out simply because he wants to focus on other matters, instead of what his wife is saying. He risks the health of his relationship, hoping he can grasp enough of what he needs to know from sampling the occasional snippet of what his wife says. Likewise, we take risks with God, paying only partial attention to what he is saying. Rather than giving listening for God top priority, we are too content to muddle through life with only a vague idea of the vital things God is wishing to convey to us. Nowhere is this more evident than in our attitude to the Bible. We acknowledge it to be the very word of God and without rival, and yet who of us could not devote more time to studying it than we do? As Elijah discovered, God may send a frightening earthquake or a ferocious wind or a wildfire, but to communicate he usually favors the subtle whisper ( 1 Kings 19:11-12 ). Of course the Almighty could split our eardrums anytime he wants. In an instant he could have us quaking in fear, pledging to do whatever he asks, but he prefers to be gentle. God longs for our love, not our forced or terror-motivated obedience. He prefers that we hear him because we want to hear him, rather than because it is impossible not to hear him. He longs to foster within us an alert, expectant, eager attitude toward hearing from him as we go about our everyday lives. The prophet Habakkuk asked a question of God and then said, “ I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me . . . ” ( Habakkuk 2:1 ). In other words, as a sentry posted to protect an ancient city from a surprise attack must be ever watchful for the slightest movement, Habakkuk resolved to be alert to the slightest sign that God was about to speak. A watchman must be continually looking for the unexpected. An attack could come at any time and from any direction. It could come in the form of a vast army or a small raiding party. They might be camouflaged or disguised. Likewise, we dare not presume to guess when or how God will speak. What would a commander think of a sentry who decided to take it easy and rest his eyes, expecting to be alerted by the commotion should he be needed? I confess to having had that mistaken attitude. I had assumed that whenever God wanted to communicate to me he would, as if were, shake me awake and get my attention, making it immediately obvious to me that he is speaking and cause me to easily understand what he wishes to communicate. What if we had this laid-back attitude to conversion; expecting God to give us a spectacular experience like Saul on the way to Damascus, if ever he wanted to convert us? Just as we know from Scripture that God wants our salvation, we know from the same Bible that he wants to guide us and commune with us. We have grasped the fact that God has already taken the initiative in our salvation and all we need do is respond by praying and in faith accepting salvation. Similarly, he has taken the initiative in wanting to communicate with us and it is now up to us to respond by actively looking and listening for him. At any moment he could be trying to get his message through to us in a manner that we will recognize only if we are alert and expectant.   Just as getting answers to prayer can take much praying, so hearing from God can take much listening. Obviously, the Bible is the most important way to hear from God. We acknowledge that understanding the Bible takes much effort. Even after a lifetime of prayer and study, every man and woman of God is still discovering new spiritual truths in the Bible. The more effort we invest in Bible study and in fervently seeking God’s illumination of what we read and in putting into practice what God reveals, the more life-changing wonders we will discover in his Word. Conversely, the lazier we are in these areas, the more we will miss. This same principle applies with equal force to recognizing God’s voice when he chooses to speak to us by means other than the Bible. “With the measure you use, it will be measured to you - and even more.” You have heard this principle applied to finances and to judging others but it is significant that in Mark 4:24 Jesus applied it to the way we hear what God says. In other words, the more time we devote to seeking God as to what he is wanting to tell us and the more attention we give to understanding what he says to us, the more we will receive revelation from God. On the other hand, the more casually and lazily we treat things divinely spoken into our lives - whether through people or circumstances or the Bible itself - the more we will miss things God is longing to tell us. Yes, God could speak to us in a way that we could not possibly miss it, but that is not God’s usual practice, just as he could give us everything without us ever praying, but that is not his usual way. Without us realizing it, God works in our lives and circumstances, doing all he can to coax us to seek him. If it were not for all God’s behind-the-scenes efforts, none of us would bother to seek him. Nevertheless, having done all this to make us want him, he usually makes it a requirement that it is only those who truly look for him, who find him; only those who truly listen for him, who hear him. In the words of Scripture:   Deuteronomy 4:29   But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him  with all your heart and with all your soul. 2 Chronicles 15:15    . . . They sought God  eagerly , and he was found by them. . . . Jeremiah 29:13   You will seek me and find me when you seek me  with all your heart. Psalms 119:145   I call  with all my heart ; answer me, O LORD, and I will obey your decrees. (Emphasis mine.) This applies not just to salvation, but to our on-going relationship with God.   Most often the judgment of God is not that he has ceased to speak to us but that we cease to hear and understand. So significant is the following that the New Testament cites it many times ( Matthew 13:14-15; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:39-40; Acts 28:26-27 - Romans 11:8 is similar) Isaiah 6:9   He said, “Go and tell this people:  “Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” (10) Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” The Bible is perfect. It is our infallible basis for knowing what God is like. Our interpretation of the Bible, however, is not infallible. Our understanding of the Bible will get better and better throughout our lives - unless we stubbornly refuse to accept that our first guess might have been less than perfect. Yes, we need to fear straying from truth, but we need also fear remaining in less than the full truth. The longer we are Christian, the more accountable God will hold us for stagnating around partial truths rather than moving toward full biblical truth. Not  our  interpretation, but  God’s  interpretation of the Bible is our final authority. Whether it be through the Bible or through any other means, hearing from God hinges on how content we are to settle for a mediocre relationship with God. The more care we pay to seeking God and keeping alert for his answers, the more revelation we will receive. Despite being godly and devoted to the Word of God, the inspired psalmist found himself having to pray, “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law”  ( Psalm 119:18 ). He recognized that regardless of his own intelligence and commitment, if he were left solely to his own efforts, he would never see revelations of God that were staring him in the face as he studied the Bible. He knew what is true for every one of us: that unless he sought God for spiritual understanding, he would never detect many of the exciting, life-changing truths of God that were right there in front of him. It is staggering to realize that this profound truth applies not only to the Bible, but to everything we see and hear. “ The whole earth is full of his glory ,” chanted the seraphim ( Isaiah 6:3 ). But instead, the average person observing this planet manages to detect little but suffering, accidents, cruelty and decay. This being so, we cannot expect to hear God unless we follow the psalmist’s lead and crave the spiritual perception that comes only through seeking God for it.   “ Call to me , pleads God in Jeremiah 33:3 ,” and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.” The apostle Paul was very conscious of the role of prayer in us becoming spiritually perceptive. Ephesians 1:17   I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. (18) I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints And both praying and listening necessitate waiting for an answer. So much does faith in God, and a relationship with God go hand in hand with waiting, that the Bible often refers to it as such. A well-known example is, “they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength . . .” To try to counteract the tendency for our eyes to slip over the many biblical references to waiting, let’s concentrate the power by packing together several significant examples. Psalms 27:14   Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD. Psalms 38:15   I wait for you, O LORD; you will answer, O Lord my God. Psalms 130:5-6   I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. Proverbs 20:22   Do not say, I’ll pay you back for this wrong! Wait for the LORD, and he will deliver you. Isaiah 8:17  I will wait for the LORD, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob. I will put my trust in him. Isaiah 30:18   . . . Blessed are all who wait for him! Isaiah 64:4   Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him. Lamentations 3:26  it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD. Hosea 12:6   But you must return to your God; maintain love and justice, and wait for your God always. And that is just a tiny sample. Clearly, this implies that much of our relationship with God involves waiting - and that’s something none of us like. Because he refused to wait for the few minutes it would take him to get some food, Esau sold his birthright and even though he desperately sought to undo the consequences of his impatience, he could never get it back ( Genesis 25:29-34; Hebrews 12:16-17 ). They were about to hear from God, receiving what generations of their descendants would cherish as the most significant revelation their nation had ever received - the Ten Commandments and detailed instructions about the tabernacle and the divinely authorized way to minister to God. They agreed that Moses should climb the mountain to hear from God on their behalf, but it was taking several days longer than they had expected. Growing restless, they decided to worship God without waiting any longer for God to reveal his word to them. They had barely started worshipping an idol when Moses returned with God’s Commandments, one of the first of which forbade worshipping idols. God was not amused. Saul’s army was terrified. Samuel, the priest said he would come in seven days, but time was slipping by and Saul’s troops were beginning to desert. Feeling that he could wait no longer, Saul did something only a priest should do: he offered a sacrifice. He had barely finished when Samuel arrived. Our Lord was so displeased with Saul over this matter Saul’s dynasty was taken from him ( 1 Samuel 13:7-14 ). Have you heard of anyone praying desperately for needed finances or material provision and God holding back almost to the very last moment before meeting the need? I would not be surprised if the Lord has deliberately done this literally millions of times in human history. God acts the same way when it comes to supplying needed information or guidance. Faith grows by stretching. The Story So Far Usually, the terrifyingly powerful Lord is ever so gentle. He longs not to have to startle us, or even raise his voice, to get our attention. As is becoming obvious in our exploration of these issues, it’s not that God isn’t communicating, it’s that we keep tending to dismiss the divine origin of what he is saying because it is gentler and more subtle than we expect. Military commander, Naaman, almost missed his healing because he had expected something more spectacular than being asked to dip into a dirty stream ( 2 Kings 5:1-14 ). Similarly, we are in constant danger of missing divine guidance because it seems too ordinary. Or, like Saul in a mad rush, we can miss out because we are too busy to wait or pay close attention. It’s not that God speaks louder to those who are forever saying, “God told me this, God told me that,” but these people are more willing to see God in the things we take for granted - in circumstances, feelings, thoughts, Bible readings and so on. If we look only for the dramatic, we’ll miss the plot. For instance, if we pray for God’s guidance on a matter, it doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily hear or see anything we can call guidance. To answer our prayer for guidance all that God need do is to ensure that what we end up doing is exactly what he wants for us. The Almighty has numberless options in getting us to that point, and many of those options would to us seem like chance or our own doing. We miss so much because of our preconceptions as to  how  God should act. Too often, when the Sovereign Lord chooses to act in ways beyond our narrow expectations we mistakenly assume he has not responded. A closely related reason for missing God’s voice is that we do not pay enough attention. We must seek to be continually alert for anything he might say.

Enjoying God’s Will for You More wonderful than you could imagine! At first thought, God’s will seems so oppressively restrictive that it’s frightening. And we’re scared we’ll be told to go somewhere awful and do something embarrassing. In reality, for us to fear God’s commands is as unnatural as a much loved baby fearing its mother’s breast; as a shivering child fearing sunshine; as someone sick fearing health. To obey God is to say good-bye to mistakes and regret and open the door to excitement and achievement. No one understands you like your Maker. No one knows your future like your God. No one has your best interest at heart like the One who shed his blood for you. No one can bring you happiness like the Inventor of sex and sunsets, sight and sound, touch and taste, life and beauty. He alone offers heaven. When you really analyze it, nothing could be more exciting, fulfilling and rewarding than God’s desires for you. Fearing God’s will is as irrational as worrying about what the world’s best mechanic might do to your car, and as stupid as insisting on defusing a bomb for fear that experts will not do it properly. The Almighty, your Creator and Savior, is selflessly devoted to maximizing your happiness. Moreover he has infinite knowledge. When God asks you to do something, he is granting you the unique privilege of tapping into the greatest Mind in the universe. You have the opportunity to do something infinitely smart. Explore that thought more later. It could add a whole new dimension to your life. Disregard your Maker’s right to tell you what to do. He merely gave you life and everything you’ve ever touched. He holds your atoms together and gave you the brain cells you think with. Forget that Christ purchased your allegiance by trading his life for yours, becoming the devil’s plaything on the cross so that evil couldn’t touch you. And overlook the power of God to determine your eternal destiny. Consider merely God’s infinite knowledge, perfect goodness, and self-sacrificing devotion to your highest good. That alone is enough to force the conclusion that disregarding God’s slightest suggestion is the height of stupidity. Yet another exhilarating thing about God’s will for you is that it is not only perfected by infinite love, it is backed by infinite power. It is not only achievable, it is unstoppable. For as long as you let Jesus rule your life, nothing can thwart it. Do you believe God is all-powerful? Then you believe he could over-ride your every weakness. He could ask nothing of you that he couldn’t do through you. And if he has a speck of love, or any respect for his reputation, he’s not going to command, and then abandon you to your own resources. It’s exciting when God asks the impossible of you. A miracle is around the corner! Since God, in his love, longs to see you reach your highest potential, his desires for you will stretch you to the limit. But no matter how Satan tries to distort that thrilling truth into something scary, there is always something more frightening than doing God’s will – not doing God’s will. The mere fact that we could fear God’s beautiful will is clear proof that God has a spiritual enemy who carpet bombs our minds with malicious untruths. Nothing could be wiser, or better, than obeying the God who has a sacrificial commitment to giving you the very best. God telling you to do something is the Almighty Lord expressing his desire for you to enjoy his best. And obedience is simply receiving that love, delighting and rejoicing in the beauty, perfection and security of God’s yearnings for your welfare. We only disobey when we secretly believe we are smarter than God, that his love for us is inferior, or that he is so weak that our inadequacies could nullify his power. Obedience is love made real. It has rightly been said that God’s will is the greatest good his infinite wisdom can devise. Snuggle into it. Experience the exquisite perfection of his love plans for you. Then luxuriate in the security of knowing that of every possible alternative, you have chosen the very best. Note that submission to God is letting God be God – allowing Jesus to assume his rightful place in your life. The emphasis is not on you trying to obey, but on Jesus ruling. It is letting him do the work. It is avoiding taking upon ourselves responsibilities that don’t belong to us. The Evil One would love to distort this into a dreary put down, but it is actually a glorious relief. We’re free to enjoy life as God’s children and leave all the hard work to Jesus. We don’t have to prove ourselves to God, Jesus has already done it. We don’t have to defeat sin, Jesus has already done it. Submitting to God must never be thought of as obeying a set of rules. That’s dull and cold. And God is neither. Following a list of dos and do nots is not following God the person, but something impersonal. It brings with it the great danger of shutting God out. Submitting to God is loving God the person, getting as close to him as you can, and drawing strength and comfort and direction from him. It is driving with God in the front seat with you, enjoying his companionship. From time to time in your conversation he will say such things as, ‘Turn left . . . You’ll need to slow down a bit here . . . Let me show you a short cut . . . This next part is easy, drive however you choose, I know you’ll handle it well . . . Further on it gets tricky. Better let me do the driving for that stretch.’ Now let’s be brutally frank. God’s directions are seldom that clear, although when the situation demands that degree of clarity, he will give it. Mostly, God leads by such things as vague feelings. That can be frustrating, but it’s our opportunity to let faith rise, trusting God to guide with whatever degree of clarity divine wisdom knows is best, while we play our part by drawing close and listening intently. God and I seem to have an on-going argument. ‘Speak louder!’ I keep telling God. And I think he keeps replying, ‘Listen harder!’ Why God’s Will is Exciting When you have a critical decision to make, what would you give for access to someone with infinite knowledge? He would know every fact in every universe; all the future and all the past. He could keep you fascinated for weeks just telling you things about yourself you never knew. He could tell you how many inches the nail of the third toe on your left foot grew in the last 6.34 years; how many breaths you took on your fifth day of life; what your father thought the day he first heard you were conceived; the real reason your first romance ended the way it did; what forgotten incident caused that peculiar fear that plagues you. All your enemies’ secrets would be open to him. He would know what that fabulous looking stranger in the bus thought of you. He would know what your boss thinks while he’s having a shower. What if he also had the astounding intellectual power to know every ramification of every tiny event – every chain of events set off for all eternity by every action? The implications of such knowledge explode the imagination. And he could figure the exact mix of short and long term happiness that would work best for you. If we pampered ourselves all day everyday, our long term happiness would suffer enormously, yet sacrificing everything for long term benefits could leave us so dejected that we never reach our final goals. He would have your perfect solution. Suppose he also knows the true function and purpose of everything. And imagine the implications if his integrity and moral judgment are impeccable. He would be absolutely good and know how to maximize the good in every situation. Wouldn’t having his input be the greatest thing that could ever happen to you? So great is God’s love for you that he longs to marshal his infinite resources to determine precisely what is in your best interest. And he selflessly offers this incomparable gift, not just for ten minutes, but for a lifetime. How can we book a flight when we don’t know which one will crash? And yet we regularly make far more dangerous choices by the hour, knowing almost none of the pertinent facts. We choose marriage partners, having no idea how the ravages of time will assault them, whether tomorrow they will be permanently paralyzed or lose their mind or die; not knowing how wildly their future income and expenditure will plunge or soar; not knowing whether their unborn children will be deformed or hateful and how they will treat them; not knowing, if or when, our prospective partners’ kindness will turn to cruelty and their love to disgust. Forgetting the future, we know frighteningly little even about their past. A basic thing like reading their thoughts is beyond us. God's will We repeatedly find ourselves trying to solve million piece puzzles when we rarely get to see more than a dozen pieces. We walk in a constant fog, making life and death decisions, knowing nearly nothing. So whenever the Almighty reveals his mind, we should erupt with the joy of a man lost in a minefield suddenly finding a marked trail. At last the light has shone. At last infinite knowledge has reached us in infinite love. We should rush to obey, treasuring the slightest hint of God’s will, like the last drop of water in a desert.

Developing Your Love Affair With God Continued Never ‘flirt’ with others 1. People We must love other people, but if ever there is a conflict of loyalties between God and anyone else, we must willingly choose God. Those who are united to Christ should avoid romantic involvement with anyone who is not fully committed to him. According to Scripture, for a Christian to marry a non-Christian is a spiritual perversion. If you are already married to such a person, however, God hates divorce and he wants you to do all you can to maintain that union. Naturally, we must continue to love, respect and, where appropriate, look after non-Christian relatives. The ideal is to be close enough to non-Christians to influence them for Christ, without being so close that they begin to adversely affect our spiritual life. 2. Spiritual Powers Since the only way to God is through Jesus, any spiritual experiences that occur without complete reliance upon Jesus Christ, cannot be from God. Such psychic phenomena must therefore be due to the activities of evil spirits. Most of us have had some association in the past with one or more practices like these. Many of us thought they were quite harmless, but it is necessary that we confess to God that we have sinned by becoming involved with them. Ask your Lord’s forgiveness and have nothing more to do with such things. Almighty God is far more powerful than anything in the occult. When Jesus returns to earth all evil powers will be totally destroyed. Fun ways to grow spiritually Christian music is a great way to learn and be reminded of wonderful spiritual truths. It obviously adds a whole dimension of beauty and power to church praise and worship, but modern technology means we do not have to leave this precious experience locked up in a church. We can take it with us driving or relaxing at home. Hunt around and you’ll find Christian music catering for virtually every conceivable taste. There are many thrilling and inspiring Christian books that you won’t be able to put down, such as books detailing Christians’ spiritual adventures. Ask at church and friends about their favorite Christian books. (And maybe place a hint or two about borrowing some!) Visit some Christian bookshops, explain roughly where you are spiritually and what interests you (maybe humor, for example) and see what they come up with. Good books are an entertaining way of fostering spiritual growth. Audio tapes, videos, websites, Christian television and radio, are other possibilities. Another easy but valuable help is simply chatting about spiritual things to Christian friends. ‘Any friend of his, is a friend of mine’ Your Lord loved you while you were still his enemy. You are therefore obligated to love your enemies. Beyond this, you have a special obligation to love those who are your true brothers and sisters in Christ – all Christians. Even if you don’t feel that great love is being expressed by believers that you know, that is no reason for allowing your love to diminish. Try not to allow the failings of others to influence you. Those of God’s children who are in fellowship with each other, enjoy greater security and satisfaction than those who are isolated from other believers. They are also more likely to experience (in a special way) Jesus’ presence and answered prayer. Yet another advantage is that each individual has greater power than if he/she were alone. Praying aloud with other believers can be a wonderful experience. Your choice of church is very important. If you really love Jesus and yet still find it quite a chore to go to church, it might be that you need to change churches. Don’t take God for granted God is so wonderful that he far surpasses any other lover, or anything else in existence. Of course, there can be no sexual aspect in your love affair with God, but your relationship can, and should be, far more intimate than would ever be possible between two humans. This is not just wishful thinking. We were, quite literally, made for this relationship. So realize the uniqueness of your relationship with God and never fall into the trap of accepting substitutes or be bluffed into thinking the ‘honeymoon’ is over! Enjoy your Lover’s wealth As explained in You Can Find Love , making everything that is yours (your time, abilities, possessions, etc.) available to God, makes everything that is God’s – his time, abilities, possessions, etc. – available to you. So there is now a huge collection of gifts your King wants you to enjoy. All you need do is accept each of them by faith and start using them. These gifts cost God dearly – they can be ours only because of Jesus’ death. So endeavor to accept, appreciate and use all his gifts. One of the precious gifts we should immediately begin cutting our teeth on is the divine power to break free from the hold that sin once had in our lives. Ask for one of his gifts (it’s probably best to concentrate on one at a time), believe that it is now yours, and then act as if you have it. Praise him Boast about your Lord. Appreciate his gifts. Grumbling and complaining breaks God’s heart. Praise is powerful because: It is the language of love It honors your Lord It increases your faith, building spiritual muscle like nothing else can It is a weapon that defeats evil forces It is God’s anti-depressant. It liberates us to become God-centered, instead of self-centered Praising God when things look bleak is an act of love and trust that particularly touches God’s heart and gains you eternal honor. You’ll praise your Lord forever, but when this world ends you’ll never again have the opportunity to praise God in difficult circumstances. So make the most of the opportunities that come your way! You will be eternally grateful for every time you have thanked and praised God, and particularly for those times you persevered in praise, even though it seemed hard. When all is revealed, it will be proved that, in every perplexing situation, our Lord was not only right in what he did, but he deserved our thunderous praise. In Scripture, God rarely performed a miracle for people who were not in serious difficulty. So rejoice when things seem absolutely disastrous and you can see no way out! A miracle is almost certainly just around the corner! Love him fervently It is important to work hard for Jesus, but he wants your love far more than your labors. One of your new abilities, due to your union with Christ, is that you no longer need be controlled by your emotions. You can rule your emotions. So, literally stir up your emotions and get excited about God. Stop thinking you would be happier with more money or more friends or some such thing. Realize that what you really need to satisfy that emptiness within is an even closer relationship with your Perfect Lover. Serve the Lord with gladness! Don’t be seduced Sincerity of belief is not enough: we must believe the right things. The Bible teaches that even if a true apostle or angel from Heaven preaches a gospel contrary to the Bible, that ‘gospel’ must be rejected. False teaching is to be spurned, even if it’s accompanied by supernatural manifestations such as visions, or even miracles. Of necessity, any parts of the teaching of false cults have to be true in order to seduce people, but the false parts are deadly. They usually don’t mention their false doctrines until you are beginning to let your defenses down. It is therefore important to specifically and politely question people concerning the following things. If they differ from the following beliefs, don’t listen to them. Politely ask them to leave and have nothing to do with them. That sounds harsh, but unless you normally disarm nuclear bombs before breakfast, leave spiritual poison to the experts. We can expect false teachers to quote freely from the Bible. The more familiar you are with God’s Word, the easier it will be for you to recognize any distortion of it. Important truths 1. The Bible is 100% God’s Word . It is therefore completely reliable and unique. Over and over in his teachings Jesus revealed his high regard for Scripture. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. Be cautious about those who teach doctrines that are based wholly or partly upon traditions, writings or visions that are not part of Scripture. Be particularly wary of those who belittle the mighty Word of God by implying that it has ‘errors.’ 2. The doctrine of the trinity We must not allow our conception of God to be distorted by our puny intellect and experience. When we examine all the biblical evidence (too vast to mention here), we are forced to conclude that, in one sense, God is three Persons: God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but, in another sense, God is one. Jesus is unique. Steadfastly refuse to attribute to anyone any honor that belongs solely to Jesus. He is divine, the eternal (uncreated) Son of God. The Holy Spirit is clearly revealed in Scripture as a person. He also has the attributes of God. 3. Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty our sins deserved The only way to God is through Jesus. No matter how much good we try to do, it will never remove our past. Only genuinely wanting to be free from sin and placing our faith in Jesus’ forgiveness can cause us to be united to God. After we are united to our Holy Lord (the only Source of moral goodness) we are then able to do good, but only because it is God working in us. Any true good comes from God, not us, and so we can’t get any credit for any good we do. All the honor and praise belongs to the Almighty alone. 4. Jesus rose from the dead and is now seated with God, interceding on our behalf. 5. Our standards of morality must match those of the Bible. 6. The dead spend forever in only one of two places – Heaven (a place of honor and joy in God’s presence) or Hell (a place of shame and misery banished from God’s presence). 7. No single church, or group, has a monopoly upon truth. Be wary of groups that seem to think their group is almost the only one whom God approves of. 8 . The true God is a supernatural God . He performed healings and miracles in biblical times and he has, of course, lost none of his power. Be eager to have his children The spiritual destinies (eternity in Heaven or Hell) of billions of people are at stake. It seems impossible to think of anything more important. Because the Almighty has purposely limited himself, he needs you to help save people from Hell. You are entrusted with this great responsibility because your all-powerful God has faith in you and loves you so much that he wants you to share in his great work. Don’t let God down. He’s depending upon you. How to have spiritual children 1. The essentials Maintain an intimate union with Jesus. Pray Live a life that radiates God’s beauty – love, joy, peace, kindness, purity, etc. Keep trying! 2. Methods Explain to other people the Christian message Tell others what Jesus has personally done for you Give them Christian tracts Invite them to Church meetings, etc Contribute to the financial support of those who are spreading the Gospel Have many grandchildren! After being used of God to bring a new Christian into this world, you then have the exciting responsibility of helping that person grow spiritually. Do all you can to encourage your spiritual children to spiritually reproduce. By this means, even if you are only a teenager, you can be a spiritual grand-parent or even great-grand-parent! Give your Lover gifts It is a great privilege to give gifts to the Lord. Only because of his great love for us does the Owner of the universe accept and appreciate our gifts. And the greatest thing you can give your Lover is your love. Give joyfully, liberally and out of love, because this is the way in which your Creator has given to you. It is quite unscriptural to think that we have fulfilled our financial obligation to our Lord once we have given one tenth of our income. On the basis of biblical principles we could conclude that if God really wanted to bless the church, he would create within it an unequal distribution of wealth. An immense flood of prayer, praise, love, joy, prosperity, and blessing would then result from the equalization of this wealth. A great, world-wide inequality does indeed exist. It is up to you and me in the rich countries to create such a flow of finance to our needy brothers and sisters that God will be glorified and the whole world will sit up and take notice. Perhaps you are thinking that you can hardly ‘make ends meet’ now. But God has promised to take care of all your financial needs when you give sacrificially to him. Of course, there is nothing basically wrong with money or material possessions, but we must face up to the realities of life. There are people dying of physical and spiritual starvation who could be saved if we gave them some of our money instead of spending it on ourselves. The really ‘rich’ people are those who have discovered the joy of giving. Look forward to your wedding day In one sense, your relationship with Jesus is, at present, more like an engagement than a marriage. Your marriage to Jesus will occur at the culmination of this age when Jesus fulfills his promise to return to earth. We long for our union with Christ to be consummated. Life with Jesus, right now, is great, but it’s only a vague shadow of the tremendous things that God has in store for you when his Son returns. When the King of kings returns to earth, you will become perfect, just as he is.

The Heart of Bible Interpretation The Word of God often identifies a “hard heart” as the reason for people failing to perceive spiritual truth. Isaiah 6:9-10   He said, “Go, and tell this people, ‘You hear indeed, but don’t understand; and you see indeed, but don’t perceive.’ Make the heart of this people fat. Make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed.” Mark 8:17   Jesus, perceiving it, said to them, “Why do you reason that it’s because you have no bread? Don’t you perceive yet, neither understand? Is your heart still hardened? Ephesians 4:18  being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them,  because of the hardening of their hearts  (Emphasis mine) Why the heart is critical in the perception and understanding of spiritual truth becomes obvious when we grasp the meaning of the term. In biblical thought, the “heart” includes that part of us that processes information and reaches conclusions: 1 Kings 3:9   Give your servant therefore an understanding heart to judge your people, that I may discern between good and evil  . . . Proverbs 2:2   . . . apply your heart to understanding. Proverbs 14:33   Wisdom rests in the heart of one who has understanding  . . . Proverbs 15:14   The heart of one who has understanding seeks knowledge  . . . Matthew 9:4  Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts?  . . .” Ephesians 1:16-18   . . . making mention of you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; having the eyes of your hearts enlightened  . . . Given the importance of the heart in understanding anything, here is a truth that haunts me: Jeremiah 17:9   The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? How disturbing it is to consider that the “heart” is the human factor most critical in determining one’s ability to understand, and yet it is treacherously unreliable! We have parts of us deep within that – ably assisted by our spiritual enemy, the Deceiver – are in constant danger of deceiving not just other people, but ourselves. Psalms 36:2  For he flatters himself in his own eyes, too much to detect and hate his sin. Proverbs 30:12  . . . pure in their own eyes, yet are not washed from their filthiness. Proverbs 16:2  All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weighs the motives. Proverbs 16:25   There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death. We keep tending to think that it is only non-Christians whose heart deceives them. This is most certainly not so: Revelation 3:17    . . . you say, ‘I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing;’ and don’t know that you are the wretched one, miserable, poor, blind, and naked 1 Corinthians 4:4-5   For I know nothing against myself. Yet I am not justified by this, but he who judges me is the Lord. Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and reveal the counsels of the hearts. . . . 1 John 3:20   because if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things. How difficult it is to get in touch with what is deep within us is perhaps hinted at in this Scripture: Deuteronomy 8:2   You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you these  forty years  in the wilderness, that he might humble you, to prove you,  to know what was in your heart , whether you would keep his commandments, or not. (Emphasis mine) Moreover, Bible readers are particularly open to self-deception. James 1:22   But be doers of the word, and not only hearers,  deluding your own selves . . . . (Emphasis mine) There is nothing like a head knowledge of Scripture for so blinding us with pride that we suppose we have arrived when we haven’t left the starting blocks. 1 Corinthians 8:1   . . . Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Both knowledge and love make a person seem bigger but one is nothing but hot air. Love is manifested by putting Bible knowledge into practice: John 14:15   If you love me, keep my commandments. Romans 13:9   For the commandments  . . . are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. . . .”   Breakthrough We gain God’s heart as a branch slowly gains fruit – by remaining spiritually connected to Christ, the vine and by allowing God to “prune” us. To the inexperienced, pruning seems a cruel and senseless waste of parts of the branch that have great potential. Despite appearances, however, pruning increases fruitfulness. I believe pruning can come in the form of trials for which Scripture tells us to be thankful. When teaching about the vine, however, Jesus emphasized the role of his Word in pruning us ( John 15:3 ). By obeying God’s Word we let him cut off our favorite sins and our favorite theories. We gain God’s heart by maintaining intimate oneness with Christ and letting God’s Word “remain” in us ( John 15:7 ) by heeding what it says. This is why Scripture says: James 1:22   But be doers of the word , and not only hearers, deluding your own selves. (Emphasis mine) We have noted that the Bible frequently cites a “hard heart” as the reason for an inability to comprehend spiritual truth. This must be important, but what exactly is a “hard heart”? Although in modern English we often speak of having a hard heart, basic hermeneutics rightly affirms that how a figure of speech is used in modern English does not necessarily reflect what it meant when the Bible was penned. The most accurate insight into the precise meaning of an expression is obtained by examining how the Bible uses that expression and related concepts. Surely sin is a factor: Romans 2:5   But according to your hardness and unrepentant heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day . . . Neither of the next two scriptures mention “heart,” but they seem relevant: Hebrews 3:13  but exhort one another day by day . . . lest any one of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Scripture links a seared conscience with being theologically deceived: 1 Timothy 4:1-2   But the Spirit says expressly that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, through the hypocrisy of men who speak lies, branded in their own conscience as with a hot iron .If sin is involved, does any particular sin predominate? Matthew 19:8   He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, allowed you to divorce your wives . . .” This is vague but it hints that a selfish failure to love as God loves could be a factor in having a hard heart. This suggestion is further strengthen by this incident: Mark 3:3-5  He said to the man who had his hand withered, “Stand up.” He said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do harm? To save a life, or to kill?” But they were silent. When he had looked around at them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their hearts, he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored as healthy as the other. Jesus kept clashing with people who, in zeal for upholding the law of God seemed faultless, but in loving as God loves were seriously flawed. I’m reminded of how the disciples’ reaction to the man born blind differed from Jesus’ reaction: John 9:1-2   As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” What an intriguing question! That would keep theologians in fever pitch for years. Instead, Jesus healed the man. It is so easy to find ourselves delighting in theological and intellectual discussion, rather than being moved by compassion for needy people. Remember in the parable of the Good Samaritan the priest and the Levite, perhaps on their way to holy duties in Jerusalem, walking on the other side of the road when confronted by human need. Again, “heart” does not appear in the following, although it might be implied: Matthew 25:24  He also who had received the one talent came and said, ‘Lord, I knew you that you are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter. The context suggests a “hard man” to be the opposite of someone we would call tender hearted. He’s the opposite of Jesus who was so easily “moved with compassion.” To harden one’s heart would seem to mean making oneself unresponsive to God and/or people. Though one might remain fervently religious and completely self-deceived about one’s spiritual state, to harden one’s heart is to become the exact opposite of Jesus. It is the breaking of what Jesus pronounced to be the essence of the entire old covenant: loving God and loving man ( Matthew 22:37-40 ). How much they needed to pray the prayer made famous by Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision:  Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God . This is a vital – and often forgotten – key to Bible interpretation. When encountering gays, prostitutes, child molesters, abortionists, liberal preachers or fallen pastors we might be exceedingly zealous in upholding God’s standard of righteousness, but do we uphold God’s standard of love and grace? How tender our heart is toward those who have failed morally is at least one measure of the hardness of our heart. How much our eyes are filled with God’s compassion is an indication of how likely we are to see biblical truth through God’s eyes. Back (If you reached this page by a link in the middle of another webpage) An important webpage that helps us locate and navigate around some of the other dangers is: How to Avoid Deception Beginning of this series

Help in Finding God’s Will For Major Life Decisions How to Avoid Deception How to Find the Correct Bible Interpretation This is for everyone anxious to discover God’s personal guidance, no matter what agonizing issues are involved. An early draft of the page was for those desperate to find God’s will about divorce and remarriage. This is a perplexing issue because there are so many conflicting opinions even among sincere Bible believers. As the page grew, however, it became obvious that it would be ridiculous to exclude people stewing over other life issues. The same spiritual principles apply to every difficult life decision. So you are the focus of this page, regardless of what issue you are seeking God about. Deception: It Can Happen to You Don’t bury your head in the sand: it is frighteningly easy to fall into deception. Even more devastating is that anyone deluded is completely unaware of it. Those in the greatest danger are the ones who think it couldn’t happen to them. Those who murdered their Messiah were appalled that their ancestors had killed God’s prophets. They were certain they would never do such a thing. The great apostle Paul wrote:   1 Corinthians 4:4 For I know nothing against myself. Yet I am not justified by this, but he who judges me is the Lord.   Let these Scriptures chill your spine:   Proverbs 16:2 All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weighs the motives.   Proverbs 16:25 There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.   Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it?   Matthew 24:24 For there will arise false christs, and false prophets, and they will show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the chosen ones.   Matthew 25:44 , 46 Then they will also answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and didn’t help you?’ . . These will go away into eternal punishment . . .   James 1:22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. . . . (NIV)   James 1:26 If anyone among you thinks himself to be religious while he doesn’t bridle his tongue, but deceives his heart . . . Avoid Presumptions About God’s Will   If we are to truly hear from God, it is essential that we avoid the trap of blindly assuming that if it is contrary to our longings it must be God’s will. It is equally critical that we not go the other way and automatically assume that if it seems certain to make us happy, it must be God’s will for us.    Few Christians – maybe none – have walked with God for long without sometimes mishearing him because what the Lord was seeking to tell them was contrary to their expectations. Scripture insists that as the sky soars way beyond our reach, so are God’s ways far beyond our own ( Isaiah 55:8 ). Yet still we unconsciously develop presumptions about God’s ways that seriously distort what he is seeking to tell us.    No matter how sincere, our preconceptions blind us to possibilities, without us realizing it. They have horrifying potential to send us spinning into delusion.    Mindsets, whether positive or negative, can dangerously cloud our perception of reality and of what people are really saying. For example, there are people whose tragic pasts have convinced them that they are unlovable. Some of them end up married to adoring partners and yet their mindset so blinds them that they continue to be convinced that they are not loved, no matter what extremes their partners go to in trying to prove love in word and action. In fact, many such people are so blinded to all the evidence that they deliberately act obnoxiously in an attempt to drive their loved one away because that seems less painful than what they consider the inevitable shame of being dumped. They can even be doted on by the most loving and most important person in the entire universe – Almighty God – and they still can’t accept it and, despite everything, they continue to feel utterly unloved.    A positive mindset can be just as dangerously blinding. With tragic consequences, young people can feel so invincible that they are certain that no warnings of danger apply to them.    So let’s briefly explore how mindsets can hinder us from hearing God’s voice and discovering his will for us.    Many of us fall into the rut of always expecting God’s will to be challenging, scary, painful. The Bible is dripping with evidence for this expectation. We are to love God more than any other person or thing. This can be divinely tested, as it clearly was for Abraham when he was asked to sacrifice his precious son. Jesus was continually asking people to give up everything to follow him. An entire book of the Bible is devoted to Job’s horrific test. We know God’s will for Jesus was terrifyingly painful. Jesus and the rest of the New Testament warn us to expect severe persecution. Scripture tells us to rejoice when trials hit, because they build character.    As if hundreds of Bible verses were not enough to make us expect the worst, many of us have the additional pressure of being prone to feelings of guilt, depression, inferiority, or pessimism. A friend of mine shares his experience, which is an extreme example of how preconceptions distort our ability to hear from God.    I had an abusive father who only sent me to church to get a free baby sitter. I often looked at God as similar to my father. I stopped attending church when I was 13. I tried to be a good Christian for a while, but before long I plunged from being a good kid to being a mean spirited, hateful person.   I tried numerous times to get back to God but each time I hit a wall of fear that was so unbearable that I felt compelled to turn away from God. I often told myself that this fear was God’s punishment for my gross sins and that it proved I was beyond forgiveness. I had a lot of bad thoughts about God that I had no control over. As a result, I often slipped into depression. I would then get on medication and return to my sinful lifestyle.    It seemed the only way I could function was to eliminate God from my life. I did fine for a while. I got married and had a son. I got off drugs and alcohol. I even started a business. For the first time in my life I was finally happy. I thought I had completely erased my past.    Then I began to think that all these good things were from God. I told myself, “It can’t be! There is no God!”    “Why do so many people love God?” I puzzled, “He wants only to send everyone to hell.” Wondering if I had overlooked something, I explored a number of websites and learned a lot about God. I asked myself, “Why do I despise God so much?” Within a couple of days I was once again overwhelmed by fear. I told myself, “This fear is surely God again; I remember this from years ago.” I immediately cried and began repenting. I vowed that I would face my fear of God. I turned my back on everything evil in my life.    I started reading the Bible but I was afraid that it would only confirm that I’m condemned. Before long, it felt like everything in the Bible somehow condemned me. My mother worried about my spiritual state and visited me a lot. I would often tell her, “Look, this verse right here proves I’m going to hell!” We would then go over it and discover its meaning was totally different. I couldn’t figure out why I could read something and get such a condemning message from it. I would often stop reading the Bible because oppressive fear would come over me.    I bought a book about spiritual warfare. All was fine for a while, then even that book seemed to be condemning me and in despair I put it down. Eventually, I forced myself to open the book again. I re-read the condemning sentence I had underlined. To my surprise, I couldn’t find anything in it that could lead me to feel condemned.    I began to notice that as I read, fear would sweep over me, causing me to throw the book down without finishing the sentence.    I eventually learned that the fear and condemnation were not from God, as I had always thought, but were from the enemy. This discovery changed everything. I looked back on all the things in my life that I had considered were from God and realized that they were not from him at all.    My friend’s experience might be far more extreme than yours but any preconception you have about God and his will is just as capable of distorting what God wants to tell you, and, like my friend, wherever you look in the Bible and Christian messages you’ll find much to confirm your presumption – whether it is really there or not.    Most Christians who don’t habitually expect God’s will to be unpleasant, fall into the opposite trap. Again there is much scriptural encouragement for this view.    Abraham was renowned for his wealth; Isaac and Jacob enjoyed great material success; Job was very rich, Solomon was mind-bogglingly wealthy and many of the Bible heroes were kings.    A study of the Old Testament use of the word blessing is astounding. The way experts ascertain the precise meaning of a word is to find as many different occurrences of the word as they can and examine each context. Do this and you will discover that almost every time, the word blessing refers not to spiritual blessings but to material prosperity – many children, overflowing harvests, livestock breeding like there was Viagra in their hay.    The Bible is filled with promises of joy, God’s love for us, answered prayer, miracles, healings and victory.   John 16:24   . . . Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be made full.     Psalms 37:4 Also delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.    Not only will God give you what your heart desires, he will (as stated in Philippians 2:13 ) give you desires that are from him so that the more you grow in your love for God, the more the deep desires bubbling within you will have been put there by God himself.    The obvious truth is that both sides of the coin – all the tests and pain and trials, and all the blessings – are in the Bible.    We can rob ourselves if we are not expecting earthly blessings. When Jesus walked this planet, many got their miracle from him solely because their faith that God will bless them fired them to keep pushing through all the obstacles.    On the other hand, there are dangers in expecting continual ease. Jesus warned us to count the cost. We find Barnabas and Paul “confirming the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith . . .” I’ve stopped mid-verse. So far there seems nothing different here from normal prosperity doctrine. But let’s read the entire verse to discover how they strengthened and encouraged them:    Acts 14:22 Confirming the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that through many afflictions we must enter into God’s Kingdom.    To embrace the full teaching of Scripture we must avoid both the mindset of always expecting God’s will to be scary and the mindset of always expecting God’s will to be deliriously easy and filled with more thrills than Santa Claus’ magic cave.    God’s will is always the best we could possibly experience and to settle for anything else is as smart as shaving with a chainsaw. But our long-term happiness and our short-term pleasure and ease are usually oceans apart. Our wonderful Lord wants our permanent happiness, not some sweet fizz that turns sour. We are so often like children wanting to sentence ourselves to a lifetime of gorging ourselves on no other food but chocolate and ice cream; having no idea that their conception of heaven on earth would slowly transmute into the opposite.    As God’s ability to see the future soars high above our own, so his knowledge of what will make us eternally happy is far above our guesses. Consequently, we need to look to God to guide us, and avoid presumptions.    Whether positive or negative, presumptions are dangerous because they can close our minds to things God wants to tell us and they can also cause us to seize what we suppose to be God’s will when it isn’t at all. To use marriage as an example, there are those who think to themselves, “I long to marry, so it’s probably God’s will for me never to marry,” or “There’s a degree of attraction between us but I wouldn’t want us to marry, so God probably wants us to marry.” Then there are others who tell themselves, “I love this person and feel I couldn’t live without him/her, so marriage must be God’s will.” In either case, one needs further confirmation of God’s guidance. We must confuse neither wishful thinking, nor confuse fear or pessimism with God’s leading. How to Avoid Misinterpreting the Bible Every Christian leader worth his salt – or to put it even better, everyone who is salt – stresses the vital role of the Bible in divine guidance. The necessity of verifying that any supposed word from God is thoroughly consistent with the written Word of God is so obvious that telling that to most of us is as superfluous as telling us to breathe. You’ll find this webpage crammed with Scriptures. What is seldom explained, however, is that unless our heart is right, a thorough Bible knowledge and deep reverence for the Bible will let us down – badly.   The devil used the holy Word of God to tempt Jesus. It was central to his plot to lure the Son of God from his divine mission. Scripture convinced devout Bible scholars that Jesus was a demon-possessed madman they should kill for the good of the nation. No doubt, it was also his knowledge of Scripture that played a role in firing up Saul to eradicate every trace of Christianity from the planet.   Bible knowledge is spiritual wealth. Give someone a million dollars and the vast possibilities range from using it to achieve enormous good, right through to destroying himself with it. Wealth – be it spiritual or material – tests a person’s character.   In a webpage for Christians agonizing over the morality of divorce, I briefly mentioned various Scriptural interpretations on the subject by sincere scholars. Rather than being enlightening, it was frustratingly confusing. Amazingly, however, it turns out that feeling confused and incapable of correctly interpreting God’s Word is a vital leg of one’s journey to hearing from God.   Those who suppose they have all the answers are the ones least likely to hear from God.   Ponder the implication of Jesus’ prayer:   Matthew 11:25 At that time, Jesus answered, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you hid these things from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to infants. . . .”   Those who are wise in their own eyes are in grave danger of spiritual blindness and deception.   1 Corinthians 3:18-20 Let no one deceive himself. If anyone thinks that he is wise among you in this world, let him become a fool, that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, “He has taken the wise in their craftiness.” And again, “The Lord knows the reasoning of the wise, that it is worthless.”   On the other hand, wondrous possibilities emerge for those with the humility to realize their “foolishness” – the natural human blindness to spiritual things – and their need of divine help in understanding biblical truth:   Psalm 25:9 He will guide the humble . . . He will teach the humble his way.   Even someone so spiritual and knowledgeable that he actually wrote part of the Bible, recognized his own need to pray for understanding of God’s Word:   Psalms 119:18 Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things out of your law.   The Lord intentionally makes his Word difficult to understand to shake us out of complacency and inspire us to passionately seek his understanding of his Word, like Jesus’ disciples who couldn’t understand his parables and so came to him for understanding.   An intellectual approach to the Bible, no matter how studious and informed, is never enough.   1 Corinthians 2:14 Now the natural man doesn’t receive the things of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to him, and he can’t know them, because they are spiritually discerned.   Discerning biblical truth either takes us to the height of spiritual intimacy or we will drift into delusion, no matter how much, like the devout scholars in Jesus’ day, we think ourselves the epitome of orthodoxy.   Paul commented on how Jews could study the Old Testament with great thoroughness and still never realize that Jesus is the Messiah it prophesies. He put it this way:   2 Corinthians 3:15-16 But to this day, when [the books of] Moses [the first five books of the Bible] is read, a veil lies on their heart. But whenever one turns to the Lord , the veil is taken away. (Emphasis and explanatory text, mine.)   To know the will of God, it is not enough merely to know the words of Scripture, you must know the Author, being on the most intimate terms with him. To do the will of God, it is not enough merely to know the answer, you must be in spiritual union with the Answer.   Countless thousands of sincere, Bible-loving Jews longing for their Messiah rejected Jesus as their Savior because he did not match their Bible-based – yes, Bible-based – preconceptions. Much of their misunderstanding was due to confusing the Messiah’s second coming with his first coming, and much of that was probably because their longing to be delivered from hardship was greater than their longing to be delivered from their sin.   God made it so difficult to recognize Jesus’ true identity that when Peter made this discovery, Jesus exclaimed, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. . . .” (Matthew 16:17) .   Here’s my poem. I hope it’s not too long for you:   Spiritual concerns are spiritually discerned.   (Well, it almost rhymes.)   For proof of this great truth, we need go no further than this: evil spirits were far better at knowing who Jesus was, than were all the priests, spiritual leaders and Bible scholars combined. Demons knew in an instant what the best theological minds could not figure out about Jesus.   So a critical step toward finding the mind of God on any issue is to recognize that insights into spiritual matters will not be attained merely by the intellectual process of studying the relevant Scriptures and reaching one’s own conclusion as to what they mean. There must be a humble recognition of one’s dependence upon divine illumination of God’s Word. This naturally leads to fervent, faith-filled prayer for divine revelation but, as we will discover, there are additional heart attitudes to be mastered. Genuinely Want To Obey God God loves you mind-bogglingly more than you could possibly love yourself. Because true, godly love is utterly selfless, your best interest is God’s top priority. The infinite knowledge and wisdom of God make the smartest human decisions look like the guesses of a moron. If you combine all these facts and ponder their implications, it becomes clear that God’s will is the wisest thing you could ever do. Now combine this with Scripture’s famous truth: “ The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom ” ( Psalms 111:10; Proverbs 9:10 – Job 28:28; Proverbs 1:7; 15:33 are similar).   To fear God is to literally fear the consequences of disobeying the One who is Wisdom. Ideally, we should be so in love with God that fear doesn’t factor because God’s happiness means so much to us that we would rather die than sadden him. If we truly loved, to know we had disappointed the Lord would devastate us so much that something terrifying could not make us feel any worse. Nevertheless, there is genuine reason to fear disregarding the directions of the God of all love and wisdom.   In our relationship with God we are like electricians working on 100,000 volt transformers. We are perfectly safe, provided we act wisely. If you don’t realize the danger for Christian and non-Christian alike, you know little about the God of the New Testament and I suggest when you reach the end of this page you explore a link there about the fear of God.   Psalms 25:14 The friendship of the Lord is with those who fear him. . . .   The Lord shares his secrets with those who would sooner tongue kiss rattlesnakes than disobey him.   John 7:17 If anyone desires to do his will, he will know about the teaching, whether it is from God, or if I am speaking from myself.   Jesus is saying that to receive the divine revelation as to whether it is just a man spouting his own thoughts or God speaking, the critical factor is one’s willingness to obey God. An openness to God’s will – resolving to obey him no matter how unexpected and what the cost – unlocks our mind to let God in to give us the revelation we desperately need.   Note how the psalmist linked receiving divine revelation with a commitment to obey God.   Psalm 119:34 Give me understanding, and I will keep your law. Yes, I will obey it with my whole heart.   Psalm 119:145 I have called with my whole heart. Answer me, Lord! I will keep your statutes.   It is tempting to seek God, not because we want to obey him but because we are hoping to hear him say, “Yes, you can have what you want,” and if he says anything else we’ll ignore it. Such an attitude does not inspire the Almighty to speak to us. If we are not going to obey, the Lord telling us his will is not just God wasting his time; it increases our accountability and the severity of our judgment.   To paraphrase Jesus, if you seek first the kingdom of God all other necessities will be provided ( Matthew 6:33 ). Although Jesus said this in relation to our physical needs, the principle surely applies equally to spiritual needs. If we put God’s glory foremost in our motives, he’ll give us the guidance we need.    Count The Cost What would you think of a soldier who was expecting war to be so easy that he gets upset when he breaks a fingernail and deserts? When urging the crowds to count the cost before committing to him, Jesus spoke of a king going to war. To succeed in war one must steel oneself with the expectation that it will be tough.   Walking a tightrope might be easier than writing this webpage. Hopefully, from what I said earlier, you will understand how seriously I have failed you if I unintentionally foster a dread of God’s will. Just presuming that it will be unpleasant can cause serious problems. What makes the tightrope so precariously narrow, however, is that it is also my spiritual responsibility to steel you for the possibility that, although not guaranteed, God’s directions might occasionally seem unpleasant initially.   We need to long to do God’s will. And lest a closed mind causes us to mishear what God longs to tell us, we must be alert to all possibilities, which, of course, includes the likelihood that even in the short term God’s plans for us will exceed our fondest hopes. Nevertheless, much of Jesus’ teaching focuses on the cost, because he sought to instill in us the mental toughness required to be prepared for any eventuality. Without a willingness to embrace short-term pain for long-term joy, we Christians so easily fall into delusion. Should this happen we will be horrified when we face our Judge. Expecting to hear a “well done,” we would discover that despite all our prayer, good living, hard work and sacrifices we have missed God’s best and wasted our lives. We might make heaven but for all eternity we will suffer the loss.   Sometimes God’s answer is right in front of us, but we don’t recognize it because we are expecting the Lord to find some soft option to our crisis, when no such option is in his loving plans for us. Too often we overlook our Savior’s insistence that we take up our cross and follow the One who for the joy set before him dragged his cross to Golgotha where he was tortured to death.   Yes, Scripture says it was for the joy set before him that Jesus endured the agony of crucifixion ( Hebrews 12:2 ). Our Savior said that doing God’s will was his food ( John 4:34 ). It was prophesied of him that he delights to do God’s will ( Psalm 40:7-8; Hebrews 10:5-7) . Nevertheless, in the garden of Gethsemane we find our perfect Role Model sweating, as it were, drops of blood; hoping against hope for a legitimate way of avoiding God’s will. So let’s get real: if we are Christlike, there will be times when God’s will seems the most agonizing and undesirable option. At such times everything within us will seem to cry out against doing God’s will, and since we love God, we will be pressured to disobey and fool ourselves into thinking we are still obeying him.   God’s goal for us is to become champions. Could our goal sometimes be an easy few years, regardless of how much it eats into our eternal reward? The glory of Christ’s champions is, through him, to do things that seem impossible.   Jesus kept saying we must deny ourselves. Peter said, “ . . . since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind; for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin ” ( 1 Peter 4:1 ). The parable of the sower refers to those who fall away when the going gets tough ( Matthew 13:20-22 ). If, for the One who gave his all for us, we are unwilling to embrace severe hardship, the possibility of falling into self-deception will skyrocket when obeying Christ becomes costly. If so, instead of having ears attuned to the Spirit’s whispers we will have, to use Paul’s words, ears itching to hear what we want to hear ( 2 Timothy 4:3 ).   When writing of those whose “god is the belly”, Paul seems to be referring to people who thought they were Christians ( Philippians 3:19 ). No matter how Christian they look, and how convinced they are that they are serving God, their real god – the one they serve and let determine the course of their lives and their eternal destiny – is not the wise, loving Lord, but their own passions and cravings.   Romans 16:18 For those who are such don’t serve our Lord, Jesus Christ, but their own belly . . .   There are those who seem indistinguishable from Christians when they can have a cozy life while acting godly. It is only in situations where they cannot have both their own way and God’s way that their real god is exposed. Even then, they will be so desperate to have both their fill of ease and the temporal status and eternal comfort of being Christians that their minds will buzz with excuses and rationalizations to the point of utter self-deception. Despite putting their own interests foremost, they convince themselves they are serving the real God.   These good people can be so anxious to have both God and their sin that they become the most devout non-Christians on the planet. We each have the potential to end up so sold-out to God that we match the Jews who went to extremes in keeping themselves ceremonially pure while finalizing the murder of their Messiah ( John 18:28 ). We could find all sorts of Scriptures to confirm the correctness of our actions, just like Satan found Scripture to prove the correctness of his arguments when tempting the Son of God to sin ( Matthew 4:5-6 ).   Once a person decides he or she wants to sin, the human capacity for self-deception knows no bounds. It is not the slightest surprising to find gay churches, embezzling pastors and adulterous or even incestuous Christian leaders.   We could find ourselves following not our crucified Lord but Ananias and Sapphira; struck dead for thinking they were having the best of both worlds by being hailed for their devotion, while secretly indulging themselves ( Acts 5:1-11 ). The easy way leads to destruction ( Matthew 7:13-14; Luke 13:24 ). If we want both our Lord and the easy life we can find ourselves with the throng on Judgment Day who will say, “Lord, Lord, didn’t we . . .” and will be stunned to hear those terrifying words, “I never knew you. Depart from me, you who work iniquity” ( Matthew 7:22-23 ). As Jesus says:   Matthew 7:21 Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.   Elsewhere the tragedy is described this way:   Proverbs 30:12 There is a generation that is pure in their own eyes, yet are not washed from their filthiness.   In the words of the prophet:   Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it?   No wonder the psalmist prayed:   Psalms 139:23-24 Search me, God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me . . . When Sin Sparks a Divine Communication Breakdown Many of us suffer a love-hate affair with a particular sin. Our loving Lord is most patient when we genuinely want to be freed from it but have not yet discovered how to draw upon God’s power for total deliverance. The entire process is a rich, though frustrating, spiritual learning experience, which will cause us to grow, even though during most of our struggle we will feel that we are going backwards. A link at the end of this page will help you.   If, however, we are not struggling against our pet sin but want to keep it, divine patience will begin to wear thin. Until we repent, we can expose ourselves to the danger of a communication breakdown with the Lord.   Psalm 66:18 If I cherished sin in my heart, the Lord wouldn’t have listened [to me]   Isaiah 59:2 But your iniquities have separated you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.   That is what happened to King Saul. He had surrendered to sin (for instance, he was continually trying to kill David, who as Saul had been, was God’s anointed). The spiritual implications of Saul’s sins came to a head when he desperately needed to hear from God. Not surprisingly, given his behavior, the Lord was silent. In desperation, he added to his sin by turning to a medium for guidance, despite being so aware of the sinfulness of this that he himself had previously banished all mediums from the land. He died just hours later ( 1 Samuel 28:3-29 ).   We can do the same in one of two ways. The first way is to keep trying to find the answer we want, rather than the answer we know God has given. If the Lord gives us an answer, but not one that we want to hear, we can keep seeking Christian advisors until we find one who says what we want to hear and choose to believe it, despite knowing deep down that it is not God’s counsel.   There are things we should not pray about because we already know God’s will on the matter and praying simply means we are hoping for a response that is contrary to the God of the Bible. For example, if a Christian prays, “Lord, should I rob a bank?” he is not praying to the real God because he already knows the true God is opposed to stealing. If he receives the answer he wants, it will not be from the true God. Such a person is, of course, careering into deception. When we are genuinely confused, the Lord is most patient with us, but if we know the answer is staring at us in the Bible and we are asking simply because we don’t like the answer the God of the Bible gives, then we are on very dangerous ground.   The second way we can act like King Saul is to consult non-Christian spiritual guides, such as reading the stars, having our fortune told, or even some secular means that does not focus on the Bible and seeking God through Jesus, and encourages us to take a path contrary to the leading of the one and only true God.   Scripture says that God put a lying spirit into hundreds of prophets, causing them to entice the king of Israel into a war that killed him. Why would the God of truth do that? Because these were prophets of a false god whom the king chose to worship; not prophets of the true God ( 1 Kings 22:5-38 ).   The Bible even says that God can go to the extreme of letting prophets of false gods foretell a miraculous sign that actually happens, and it is God testing his people to see if they truly love him or will knowingly reject him in favor of false gods ( Deuteronomy 13:1-3 ).   So to hear from God we must want God to wrench from our lives, not just the sins we hate, but the sins we love. And if at any time we have sought occultist guidance, we must repent and seek God’s forgiveness so that there is no blockage in our relationship with God. Look Beyond Human Advisors The word of God often comes to us served up by people. The Lord loves speaking to us through people because he loves people and delights in giving the objects of his love the astounding honor of sharing in his great work.   We are part of a body. We need each other, and the Lord has very deliberately placed spiritual leaders and teachers in the body of Christ. These are helps that we dare not ignore. If what we believe to be God’s guidance differs from the views of respected leaders, it is strong evidence that we have misheard God. We must be ever so cautious about disregarding their views.   Nevertheless, as I have said elsewhere, your church and favorite Bible teachers might be excellent and have far deeper understanding than me, but does that make them infallible? I doubt if anyone on the planet has a one hundred percent correct interpretation of every aspect of the entire Bible. How then can you be certain that that fraction of a percent where your church or Bible teacher is incorrect does not include the very issue you are seeking God about?   No matter how wise and spiritual people seem, they, like you and me, can occasionally have their own blind spots and their own hidden pressures influencing their judgment. We must not be content to have blind faith in anyone, but must personally seek confirmation from our Lord.   Even when God’s counsel comes to us through people, it is our responsibility to ensure that God truly is the real source of our guidance. The Holy Book preserves for our instruction the instance in 1 Kings 13, where a young prophet let himself be persuaded by a more mature prophet who claimed to have heard from God. Though it was contrary to the younger prophet’s personal leading he chose to believe the more experienced prophet. The mistake cost the young man his life.   Never Give Up Jesus deliberately made it hard for people to understand his teaching. We see this in his parables. Although powerfully helpful to the few who got close enough to him to be given the key to their meaning, to everyone else most of his parables were little more than frustrating puzzles ( Matthew 13:10-13 ). But Jesus even went beyond using parables in making things difficult for his listeners. He kept coming up with weird, even offensive, sayings such as, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you don’t have life in yourselves” ( John 6:53 ). This saying was enough for many of his disciples to leave him. He could have explained. He could have worded it differently. He could have avoided the subject. Instead, he used it to test them. The twelve, though as bewildered and as offended as the others, clung to Jesus. It was perhaps years later – after the resurrection – when it eventually made sense to them, but no matter how ridiculous Jesus’ teaching seemed, they stubbornly clung to the belief that Jesus had the answers they needed and that if they kept with him for long enough, he would eventually reveal what they needed to know.   God has not changed tactics. He still uses silences and Bible difficulties and offensive situations as challenges for us to rise to the occasion and prove that we believe that no matter what, the answer is found in Jesus and in him alone, and that if we cling to him for long enough, all that we need will be revealed.   We again see this in Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite (Syrophenician) woman. She needed him. He gave her the silent treatment. Instead of giving up, she hounded him all the more. When she finally wrung a response from him it was worse than nothing. He insulted her and said he wouldn’t give her a thing. Still she hounded him and ended up receiving not only her request but Jesus’ high praise ( Matthew 15:21-28 ). It turned out that despite not revealing a hint of it until it was all over, her persistence thrilled him. And when you receive the silent treatment, your determination to keep badgering Jesus because you believe he cares and will not remain silent forever, will likewise thrill him, gain you high praise – and you’ll hear from him as well.   It seemed to Lazarus’s sisters that Jesus had let them down by not responding immediately to their urgent plea for him to come and heal their brother. But they were wrong. ( John 11:1-45 ). Jesus is always faithful and always cares and always has more ways of bringing good out of disaster than our powers of imagination could cope with.   To our great loss, it is usually suppressed from official biographies, but many – perhaps all – great men and women of God have reeled in agonized bewilderment at having been certain they had heard from God; only for circumstances to later prove they had been mistaken. Why God allowed it, I do not know, but what proved these people’s greatness is that after that sickening blow they staggered to their feet and kept pressing forward for God.   We sometimes feel sure God will answer a prayer a particular way and for some mysterious reason it doesn’t happen. It can be bitterly disappointing and defy all understanding, but we continue to believe in prayer. Likewise when it turns out that we had misheard from God, we need to continue to believe in God’s guidance and his integrity.   Cling to him. Whenever God communicates, whether it be through the Bible, through circumstances, or whatever, he usually whispers. The further we let ourselves drift from him, the more likely it is that we won’t catch everything he is saying and we will unknowingly fill in the gaps with what we suppose he is saying, thus exposing ourselves to danger. Keep Seeking “Seek, and you shall find” said Jesus. And yet sincere, godly Christians have sought the truth about important spiritual issues come to opposite conclusions. This means that some must have stopped seeking before they truly found. They found perhaps half the truth and were content to stay there, rather than keeping open to the possibility that God still had more to show them. Don’t Let Your Feelings Drown Out God’s Voice   When we have already decided what we want God to say and anything else begins to seem unbearable, and – as always – we have a spiritual enemy who would love to trip us up, trying to discern God’s guidance becomes precariously difficult.   Try not to let strong emotions – passionate longings, pain, shame, fear, selfishness, or resentment – drown out the Spirit’s whispers. That’s a tall order when grappling with emotionally charged issues in which one’s feelings can rage almost uncontrollably. At the very least, however, you can be acutely aware of how strong yearnings for a specific answer greatly magnify the possibility of distorting your perception of what God is saying.   Do what you can – and pray that God will do the rest – to rein in your longings and bring your personal preferences as close to neutral as you can manage. I pray the next paragraph will sober your passions enough to save you from tragedy.   If, from heaven, you were to look back in time on what you currently think is the best option and, with everything revealed, you would still see it as the best option, then it is truly what your loving Lord wants for you. Remember, however, that millions of marriages turn out to be a most horrific mistake that scars and haunts people to their dying day. These people were once madly in love; desperate to marry the object of their passion because they are certain it would be heaven on earth. We can get it devastatingly wrong, not just with marriage, but with any other craving. When reality hits, our darling fantasies can so easily dissolve into nightmares. It is terrifyingly common to be intoxicated by an illusion. Likewise, we can dread things that eventually turn out to be a most wondrous opportunity that we dare not miss.   Paul Little rightly said that God’s will is the greatest good his infinite wisdom can devise. There is no greater security in the universe than snuggling in the center of God’s will. What is to be feared is every alternative to God’s will. Whatever God’s will for you is, you will spend eternity revelling in heartfelt gratitude to God for the perfection of his loving wisdom, and celebrating the ecstasy in having chosen it.   If you can absorb the truth of how good God’s will is and how secure it makes one, it will calm your spirit as you wait for him to speak. As the calming of a raging storm makes it easier to hear a conversation, so the calming of your passions and fears will help you hear the Lord. Wait Until You Are Certain   As I have said elsewhere, God loves drama. Often he waits until almost the last split second before giving us what we desperately need. That builds faith. It puts steel in our backbone, spiritually.   King Saul was chosen by God. He could have headed a royal dynasty, with his descendants ruling as king for untold generations. He lost it all because it seemed to him that things were so desperate that he could not wait a moment longer. In a panic, he acted hastily and paid for it for the rest of his life, and his descendents kept paying generation after generation. What he feared would not come soon enough, arrived just as he finished his rash act ( 1 Samuel 13:8-14 ). If only he had waited a few moments longer . . .   Don’t be like Esau; so driven to satisfy his craving that rather than endure the few unpleasant minutes that restraining himself would entail, he made the biggest mistake of his life. He thought every minute he denied himself would seem an eternity, but the real eternity was his never-ending regret over having sold his future for a mouthful of pleasure. He could never undo his devastating loss ( Hebrews 12:16-17 ). Avoid Complacency John Wesley remained single, denying himself for 47 years. Finally, this man of God, overflowing with spiritual wisdom, decided to complete his happiness by marrying. So atrocious was his choice that his wife ended up a continual source of torment and shame. They ended up permanently separated.   No one ever gets so old and wise or so spiritual that he or she cannot make a devastating mistake.   If Solomon with all his wisdom and initial devotion to the Lord could make wrong marriage choices and drift away from God, there is simply no way to avoid spiritual disaster other than daily obedience and intimacy with God.   Have A Real Need For An Answer God often shares his secrets on a need-to-know basis. Those whose interest is little more than intellectual curiosity or so they can point the finger at others, are much less likely to receive divine revelation than those faced with the serious need to make a decision. “ Call on me in the day of trouble . . .” invited the Lord in Psalm 50:15. The Answer Couldn’t Be Closer The Almighty is moved by your need. For our eternal benefit he develops our faith by stretching it, but at the right time he will come through for everyone who yields to him and in faith waits for him.   Rather than try to give you my answers to whatever issue is bothering you, I have pointed you to the Answer. Better than having all the answers, when Christ dwells in you, you have the Answer.

More Help in Understanding the Spiritual Side of Bible Interpretation    Part 4 Start at Part One Often, we must find the heart of God about matters on which the Bible seems to say frustratingly little. These are not opportunities to put the Bible aside. Rather, they are invitations to plunge deeper than ever into Scripture and the heart of God. One such subject is the morality of solo sex. It is not appropriate to deal with it here. I have addressed sexuality in depth elsewhere on this site. Here, I will select and adapt just those parts that provide insight into how we should use Scripture to enlighten us on issues the Bible seems not to specifically address. In order to move from the known to the unknown I will also briefly mention other behavior that the Bible says more about.    Scripture’s Silences We all have a tendency to read Scripture’s words in a way that least threatens our comfort or our presumptions. How much more, then, are we likely to twist Scripture’s silences, reading into them wrong conclusions. Once we concede that Onan’s sin was not solitary sex, nor does this common practice even rate a mention in the Bible, nor does it cause obvious psychological or physical injury, it might seem we can give it the green light. But such a conclusion would be dangerously premature. To demonstrate that neither apparent harmlessness nor the Bible’s silence are sufficient to suggest God views a matter as morally neutral, we will briefly consider an act that clearly has divine disapproval: sex outside marriage.   Especially in the past, some Christians’ teaching against sex outside marriage used to strongly emphasize the possibility of disease and unwanted pregnancy. Many people hearing this wrongly concluded that it must be these dangers that make sex outside marriage immoral. This is not what the Bible says. It is a human attempt to second-guess God’s reasoning. That’s dangerous because the next move down the slippery slide is to start regarding our speculations as fact.   In the era just before AIDS, when medical advances had lowered the physical risks, those who believed they had figured God out assumed that sexual looseness must now be morally acceptable. They thought anyone thinking otherwise must be adhering to a morality that applied only to less technologically advanced eras. Christian morality, however, has never been based on a crude and selfish analysis of the physical dangers to the offender. The Lord Jesus emphasized the sinfulness of lust, even though mere lust carries no possibility of disease or pregnancy, nor even the possibility of the victim being emotionally hurt. Similarly, the relatively modern rediscovery that self stimulation does not cause obvious physical harm, has led people to leap too soon to the assumption that it must therefore be morally acceptable.   It is staggering to realize that throughout the Bible even the sin of sexual intercourse between unmarried people is not spoken against as forthrightly as we might expect. Scripture definitely pronounces it to be a serious sin, but to find this clearly spelled out, one must search the Bible carefully and prayerfully. For the most part, Scripture is content merely to condemn “sexual immorality” without specifying exactly which sexual acts fall under this black umbrella. In the original language, the broad term used is  porneia.  The word is found 25 times in the Greek New Testament. It could be that when speaking so strongly against  porneia,  the range of sexual sins God had in mind includes masturbation. But if we have to seek long and hard to be sure that in God’s eyes  porneia  includes premarital sex (and it certainly does), we have to go even further into the heart and mind of God to know whether it includes solitary sex. The only way to truly know right from wrong was through fellowship with God. Devout Jews, however, typically poured enormous effort into knowing the Word of God, but little into knowing the heart of God. They ended up knowing Scripture so well and understanding it so little that they could “prove” emphatically that the Son of God was guilty of blasphemy and that it was their holy duty to murder their Messiah. The frightening thing is that most of us imagine we could never make the same mistake as the clean-living, Bible-revering, Christ-killing First Century theologians. Tragically, those devout murderers were equally certain they would never make the same mistake of their forefathers who murdered the prophets. Every day, we walk through a spiritual minefield, foolishly unaware that at any moment just one false step could be disastrous. The entire Christian life must be lived in total dependence upon our Lord. We either cling to Christ, trusting him alone – not our intellect, knowledge and experience – or the consequences are unthinkable.   It is hard to resist the powerfully persuasive logic that says God gave us sex for marital union and that, like prostitution or bestiality, solitary sex must therefore be a perversion of God’s gift. But is this  God’s  logic? I dare not steer my life – much less the lives of others – while intoxicated by my supposed cleverness. I have a deep distrust of human logic – be it the product of my intellect, or anyone else’s. Human attempts to fit together pieces of biblical revelation caused the greatest theologians and devout Jewish leaders to arrange the murder of their Messiah. Logic inspired Saul to conclude he was serving God by torturing Christians in the hope they would blaspheme the Son of God. Human logic might conclude that lust is morally harmless. The biggest limitation of human reasoning is that we have at our disposal only a tiny fraction of the facts. Our understanding of human sexuality and of God’s purposes renders human attempts to see things God’s way like trying to see the picture in a million piece jigsaw when we have only a dozen pieces. When railing against masturbation, a respected Bible commentator’s attempt at logic fell to the ground because it was founded on the medical knowledge of yesteryear, which, like most things human, time has revealed to be inaccurate. Many of my own thoughts will fall if solitary sex does not program our sexual response to the extent that I believe it does, or if it turns out that God puts sexual self-stimulation in a totally different category to anything else to do with sex. Christianity is not the product of human reasoning. It is the revelation of the most powerful Intellect in the universe – the God who made our brain cells. Christianity is not a vain attempt to use tiny human brains to guess the mind of Almighty God. True Christianity is about connecting to the God of the universe, the Designer of our bodies, the Creator of sex, and letting him reveal his ways, which are infinitely superior to our own, and letting him rule in our lives in the perfection of his love and wisdom. I do not want to be so arrogant as to shatter the divine silence in Scripture by sounding off as if my presumptions were the Word of the Holy One to the entire body of Christ. Instead, I urge all Christians who imagine they have divine approval to indulge in any form of solo sex to get down on their knees and seek the face of God about this. At times, Scripture gives us examples to help us grasp a divine principle and leaves it to us to connect the dots.    For an obvious example, consider  Exodus 23:4: If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again.   Scripture says nothing about an enemy’s horse or sheep or finding his stolen computer. What if his house is on fire? What if he is sick and his crop needs harvesting? God obviously expects us to use our brains and extrapolate general principles from Scripture’s specific examples. Anyone having the attitude of avoiding only those things Scripture specifically names as forbidden, does not have a heart for God. More than once the Bible tells us to meditate upon Scripture and to discuss it with each other. Clearly, God expects us to think things through as we prayerfully pursue the mind of God.   I can by no means trust my finite intellect. Nevertheless, everything God does is perfectly rational and consistent. I would therefore need to be particularly cautious about any “guidance” that seems contrary to rational thought. This is especially so when on one side looms the danger of sexual perversion and on the other is merely the possibility of missing a little pleasure (and even the possibility of pleasure is doubtful, since solo sex seems to aggravate one’s frustration and the carrot of satisfaction it dangles before our eyes is largely an illusion). Add to this the fact that our natural tendency is to try to convince ourselves that self-indulgence is acceptable. Furthermore, if solo sex is sin, the Evil One has a vested interest in deceiving us and he is not beyond giving supernatural “proof” to try to convince us that sin has divine approval. One would therefore need exceptionally clear guidance to go against rational thought and be certain that a decision in favor of Do-It-Yourself sex is not being influenced by our own cravings or by the cunning of the Enemy of our souls.       Hidden Agendas    I don’t think I’ve heard anyone preach more powerfully against sexual looseness. He kept it up year after year – until it was discovered that he visited prostitutes. I don’t believe his preaching was blatant hypocrisy. I suspect he was preaching at himself, trying to bolster his flagging resolve to fight temptation.    This raises two issues: whether we should have Bible teachers at all (we’ll address that shortly) and the distorting effect that personal experience has on one’s interpretation and exposition of Scripture.    Personal experience cannot change God’s truth, but it can hinder one from discovering the truth or from accurately conveying that truth to other people. Not even a genius can think straight about an activity that enslaves or entices him. Even people who are now free from a previous addiction often have clouded thinking. Ex-smokers, for instance, are legendary for the emotive way they react to people smoking in their presence.    Ideally, no one should be teaching about the morality of an action for whom it is an emotive subject. People yearning for a clear conscience while wanting to continue indulging themselves, or to keep questionable behavior as an emergency backup should their lives suddenly go haywire, will be strongly pressured to interpret the Bible in a way that justifies their secret longings. On the other hand, people wanting to argue the sinfulness of a behavior, to bolster their fight against a habit, or fearing a return to the habit, will be pressured to come out strongly in the other direction, overstating their case and making loud noises like the evangelist just mentioned.    No one peering through the haze of guilt feelings, defeatism and fleshly cravings can hope to see clearly. If you have a vested interest in, for example, “discovering” that God approves of a particular behavior, try to approach the issue as if it means little to you personally. If you find yourself strongly drawn to something, try to approach your search for God’s will about it as if with a simple prayer you would never again feel the slightest inkling to have what you currently crave and that everything positive would remain untouched. In short, seek to be as neutral as you possibly can and fervently pray that our gracious Lord override the frightening possibilities of any lingering bias.    Jesus said things in the hearing of all his disciples that applied only to Judas. They all needed to hear it so that later it would comfort them (and us) with valuable confirmation that Jesus’ death was no accident but a critical part of God’s plan. In the short-term, however, eleven of them misunderstood, and needlessly worried that Jesus was suggesting it was they who would betray him:    Matthew 26:21-22   . . . one of you shall betray me.   And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I? (KJV).   This is one of many times in biblical history ( Daniel 8:26; Matthew 13:17; 1 Corinthians 2:6; 1 Peter 1:10-12 ), and beyond, when timing was a critical factor in spiritual revelation. Everything would be clarified later.    Another perplexing factor, however, is the enormous variability between people; ranging from some who are alarmingly oversensitive, right through to those whose insensitivity puts them in grave spiritual danger. There are people who are so hardened by the deceitfulness of sin that Scripture’s sternest, most terrifying warnings are an act of divine mercy, desperately needed to shake them out of their spiritually suicidal apathy. On the other extreme, are people so delicate and tormented by groundless worries, that not only do such Scriptures not apply to them, but the gentlest hint of a warning directed at someone else, sends them reeling in needless fear and condemnation. People can even suffer from a medical condition that floods them with chronic feelings of guilt that bear no resemblance to how God views them, and causes them to misread Scripture and feel the object of God’s wrath, when nothing could be further from the truth. Over the years, literally hundreds of people suffering from this debilitating affliction have written to me. I have many webpages devoted to helping them (e.g, Scrupulosity).   In a webpage for people seeking to help people who are hurting I wrote about another source of sensitivity:   If you were treating the open wounds of accident victims, you would realize that the most gentle, well-meaning touch could send patients reeling. You would not be offended if someone you were seeking to help lashed out in pain with almost involuntary action. You would half expect it. But imagine the confusion if the wounds were invisible and the person looked uninjured. Consider the further complication if in that person’s experience everyone who had tried to help (and how does he know you will be any different?) had in their ignorance done little but inflict pain.   That’s the norm for someone who is hurting inside.   Emotionally wounded people cannot help but be highly sensitive. Words hit them like whips. It is vital that they be treated verbally with the careful tenderness you would use if you were dressing gaping physical wounds.   A totally different example of how much people differ is that for some people, Scriptures referring to God as a father are immensely comforting, whereas for some who suffered horrific child abuse, these same Scriptures are literally terrifying. Some even recoil at the Bible’s use of the male pronoun for God. It swamps their minds with thoughts, images and emotions that are utterly contrary to the intentions of the inspired writers.   There are many other factors causing people to react in wildly different ways to the same words. Consider, for example, fears, insecurities, a strong need to feel superior to certain people, an infatuation with a particular sin, a battered self-image, or the fact that everyone close to you insists that something is true. These are just a few more examples of life experiences, any one of which can blind us to biblical truth. It might be through no fault of our own, but if, for whatever reason, we end up convinced of the truth of any matter or strongly want something to be true, we are alarmingly vulnerable to having our minds play tricks on us, such that, without even realizing what is happening, our minds twist our reading of Scripture to confirm our own prejudices, convictions and view of the world, rather than allowing our reading of God’s Word to shape our thinking.   Ably supported by the status quo and by anti-God spiritual forces, our capacity for self-deception is terrifying:   Proverbs 16:2 All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weighs the motives.   Proverbs 16:25 There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.   John 3:19   . . . men loved the darkness rather than the light . . .   John 5:44 How can you believe if you accept praise from one another, yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God? (NIV)   John 7:17 If anyone desires to do his [God’s] will, he will know about the teaching, whether it is from God, or if I am speaking from myself.   2 Timothy 4:3 For the time will come when they will not listen to the sound doctrine, but, having itching ears, will heap up for themselves teachers after their own lusts   Hebrews 3:13   . . . hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.   Rather than being exclusively taught by God, all of us – no matter how sincerely we study the Bible – are far too much the product of our times, our education, and our fleshly weaknesses. In the words of Paul:   1 Corinthians 4:4 My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. (NIV)   1 Corinthians 10:12 Therefore let him who thinks he stands be careful that he doesn’t fall.   The astonishing variability between people’s reaction to the same words, plus the timing issue, plus our vulnerability to self-deception, means we dare not merely read Scripture, but we need to personalize it, by joining with the disciples in asking, “Lord, is it I?” Does this apply to me or to someone else? Do I need to take this to heart now, or should I leave it until later?   When seeking God on such issues, it is good to pray along these lines:   I come to you, the all-knowing Lord of the universe, seeking truth. I ask that in your mercy you lift from me legalism, worldliness, selfishness, undesirable cravings, a know-it-all attitude, a fear of pleasure, or anything else that could fog my mind from detecting and delighting in your truth. Give me your heart so that I might be worthy to be given your mind on this important subject.   You are no killjoy, precious Lord. In the extravagance of your love and creative genius you have crafted for your children a stunning array of exquisite delights. Before sin’s pollution, when everything sparkled with your perfection and purity, pleasure was an integral part of the creation that you pronounced to be very good. But I know it is not good to be a slave to pleasure, nor to be defiled.   May I delight you and thank you by enjoying all the thrilling things you have lovingly planned for me. And may I avoid every treacherous imitation of eternal fulfillment; every enemy of lasting joy.   I can escape disaster and find truth only by you breaking my infatuation with sin. So cause me to be so in love with you that my highest joy is to see you honored. I want to be so swept off my feet by the dazzling beauty of your holiness that I recoil in horror from the smog of the world; so captivated by the perfection of your ways that I would rather suffer a martyr’s death than experience the exquisite pleasures of sin.   I am surrounded by deadly traps – both satanically inspired license and equally satanic legalism. Only you can show me where the dangers lie. I cannot trust my own intellect nor even my conscience. As your Word says, “The heart is deceitful” (Jeremiah 17:9) . Open my eyes to the way you view my self-worth, my sexuality, and every other aspect of my being, so that I may be one with you on this vital issue. May your light burst through the fog of my upbringing, cravings, prejudices, fears, past experiences, faulty logic, lack of faith and whatever else could keep me from knowing and living your glorious truth.   When used as you intended, all of your gifts are perfect. May I not dishonor you by spurning your gifts, nor by misusing your priceless gifts. In your mercy, show me the difference between holy pleasure and Satan’s bait. Should We Even Have Bible Teachers and Bible Commentaries? We have hinted at the dangers of Bible teachers influencing others while themselves driven by prejudices and inner turmoil. Another serious issue is teachers or preachers wanting to be seen as authorities on various issues. Ideally, we all should trash trying to sound authoritative and infallible, and instead seek the higher honor of pointing people to  the  Authority. Matthew 23:10-12   Neither be called masters, for one is your master, the Christ. But he who is greatest among you will be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Rather than seek to impose my personal views on anyone, I much prefer the undeserved privilege of being used of God to assist others in reaching their own, divinely-inspired convictions. A leader’s greatest joy should not be self-exaltation but, as it were, carrying people’s bags, while they pursue their own personal adventure in discovering the beautiful and perfect will of God. But should we even have Bible teachers? The role of Bible teachers is emphasized in the Old Testament. A powerful example is: Nehemiah 8:7-8    . . . and the Levites, caused the people to understand the law: and the people stayed in their place. They read in the book, in the law of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading.. Other Old Testament examples abound. I’ll limit myself to two more: Leviticus 10:8-9, 11   Then the Lord said to Aaron, “You and your sons . . . are to teach the children of Israel all the statutes which the Lord has spoken to them by Moses.” 2 Chronicles 17:7-9    . . . [Jehoshaphat] sent his princes . . . the Levites . . . the priests. They taught in Judah, having the book of the Lord’s law with them . . . The role of teachers has not diminished under the New Covenant: Matthew 28: 19-20   Go, and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you. . . . Acts 2:42   They continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching . . . Acts 5:42   Every day, in the temple and at home, they never stopped teaching and preaching Jesus, the Christ. 1 Corinthians 12:28   God has set some in the assembly: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers . . . Ephesians 4:11   He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, shepherds and teachers. Colossians 1:28   whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. 1 Timothy 4:13   Until I come, pay attention to reading, to exhortation, and to teaching. Hebrews 5:12   For although by this time you should be teachers, you again need to have someone teach you the rudiments of the first principles . . . There are very many more New Testament references to the importance of Bible teaching. Since our Lord has ordained that there be teachers in the body of Christ, it would be an insult to the wisdom of God to imply that we do not need them. This does not mean, however, that the Lord has given us teachers to indulge our laziness. We each have a responsibility to prayerfully seek truth and personally study God’s Word. Neither does the importance God places on teaching mean that everyone who assumes that role does so under God’s direction. Nor does it mean that sitting under teachers protects us from all error. When someone we highly esteem knows the Bible thoroughly and deeply loves the Lord, it is hard to keep in mind that he/she can sometimes be mistaken. The reality, of course, is that nothing – not even the noblest assortment of gifts, graces and devotion – makes a person infallible. Just because a much loved Bible teacher is persuasively passionate about a subject does not, of itself, mean he/she is right, no matter how authoritative, how used of God or how much genuine revelation the person has received on other subjects. On the other hand, we should not reject a certain understanding of Scripture just because people who are often wrong in their beliefs and/or behavior happen to believe it. We must neither blindly accept nor blindly reject a teaching because of what others believe. A Spiritual Law for Bible Interpretation You reap what you sow. The measure with which you dish out is the measure used to pay back to you. Scripture uses many different expressions to describe this fundamental spiritual law that applies not just to money but to judging others and virtually every area of life. In fact, it seems to apply to the way we treat the Word of God. In reference to the attention given to Jesus’ teaching, we read:   Mark 4:24 “Take heed what you hear. With whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you, and more will be given to you who hear. . . .”   Another way of describing this law is whoever is faithful in little will be given much.   The more faithful we are with God’s Word, the more divine revelation we will receive. There are two key areas in which Bible readers should display faithfulness:   1. Intense Effort to Understand   Deuteronomy 6:5-9 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. These words, which I command you today, shall be on your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the door posts of your house, and on your gates.   Note how loving the Lord – the greatest command, taught Jesus – is linked not just to revering the Word, but to actively and habitually mentally processing it by discussing it, teaching it to your children and continually reminding yourself of it.   Consider the vast amount of time the Lord expects us to devote to studying and applying one’s mental powers to Scripture:   Psalm 1:2 but his delight is in the Lord’s law. On his law he meditates day and night.   Psalm 119:97 How I love your law! It is my meditation all day.   Psalm 119:148 My eyes stay open through the night watches, that I might meditate on your word.   Why would the Lord put such emphasis upon devoting so much prayer, time, meditation and discussion to the Word if it is his intention to reveal truth to Christians no matter how lax they are?   Why did Jesus plead with us to ask, seek and knock? Because he felt like spouting some empty words or because of the grim truth that unless we do it we’ll miss out?   For three full weeks Daniel prayed and semi-fasted for divine revelation about the meaning of what, like the book of Revelation, is now part of Scripture. Who knows how long this determined man of God would have kept this up had the answer been further delayed? We might read, puzzle, and consult Bible commentaries but do we with steely resolve set ourselves to pray and fast for understanding of a passage of Scripture?   When we consider spiritual heroes who pressed on to great achievements in God despite immense opposition, do we think to include in our personal hall of fame those who, rather than leave a matter on the too hard shelf or settle for anything less than God’s best, wrestled in prayer until they received divine understanding of a portion of God’s Word?   2. Putting It Into Practice   In addition to being faithful in intensive, prayerful study, we must be faithful with what we do with the knowledge gained. In any course of study, there is no point in undertaking more advanced studies if you have not mastered the basic lessons. Why should God reveal new truths to someone who is not even applying what God has already revealed to him? Master what you have so far received by living the truths you know and you will be given new truths.   Under the Old Covenant, each king was to have not just his own personal copy of Scripture, but:   Deuteronomy 17:19 It shall be with him, and he shall read from it all the days of his life; that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them (Emphasis mine).   He was to read the Bible “all the days of his life,” not for mental stimulation or religious ritual but for the highly practical purpose of applying it to his life and living it daily.   Again, we read:   Joshua 1:8 This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it ; for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.   Matthew 7:26-27 Everyone who hears these words of mine, and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man, who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat on that house; and it fell—and great was its fall. (Emphasis mine)   If a doctor prescribes medication, you can study the directions on the label, religiously read them three times a day and memorize them word perfect, but all your effort will achieve nothing unless you actually follow those directions and consume the medication as instructed.   If we are faithful in devoting time and prayerful effort into Bible study and faithful in prayerfully seeking to live what God is revealing to us, then we can expect our revelation to be continually expanding. Soaring to a New Level One cannot find love, joy or goodness by scientific analysis. Neither can one find spiritual truth by intellectual analysis. Limit yourself to studying a painting with an electron microscope or X-ray machine and you might pride yourself in going far deeper into the painting than the average person but you will completely miss what the artist intended to convey. Similarly, if you limit yourself to the tools of Bible academics you might pride yourself in your great knowledge, but you will completely miss the message God wants to convey. To explode to new heights in biblical revelation we need an invasion of the supernatural that hinges on us praying along the following lines. It is worded to help us glimpse the breath-taking beauty and wonder and joy of our calling. Lord, Like a finger on a hand, I was created to be in exquisite union with you. As a body needs its head, only with you am I complete. You are my love, my life, my joy, my hope. Only with you can I soar to my glorious potential. Without you I am pathetic. With you I am everything. So keep me ever mindful of my glorious dependence upon you. May I not frustrate myself, harming my Christ-bought potential for eternal greatness, by trying to see, be or do things without you. In you I am free. Only you can open my eyes to the spirit realm as you did to Elisha’s servant who suddenly saw the so-close but invisible armies of God (2 Kings 6:17). Likewise, only you can open my eyes to the exciting mysteries in your Word. I thrill in the knowledge that because of Jesus’ priceless sacrifice I have the mind of Christ and am indwelt by your very Spirit. Nevertheless, I shudder to consider how little this is so far manifested in my life and thinking. I beg you to deal with everything within me – most of which I am probably not even aware of – that is refusing to let you rule in me in the powerful, non-human way that you long to operate. I can understand your truth only to the degree that I have your heart. Only when your beauty becomes part of my lifestyle can I hope to appreciate the beauty of your ways. That necessitates letting you rip everything ungodly from my life. I know I must abandon the soft life and embrace the way of the cross. I am scared about what that might entail but it is the only way to the abundant life that you freely offer. You alone are the God of all comfort. Any other apparent source of comfort is a vapor that will turn to poison. Not only are you passionately and selflessly devoted to my eternal welfare (as demonstrated by Christ crucified), you alone have infinite knowledge of the past, present and future and can match that with infinite wisdom. Like a fish out of water, so am I when I’m out of your will. Help get this critical truth into my head. Etch it into my brain. Like the ugly duckling discovering he is a beautiful swan, so I am discovering my true identity whenever I find in your Word more of how you want me to live. I am only fully alive, achieving my highest when, empowered by your Spirit, I am living your glorious Word. To shrink from your liberating truth is like a shivering child fearing warmth, and yet too often this is how I live. Not to obey your commands is like money never spent, food never eaten, warm baths of pleasure never luxuriated in. Change my whole way of thinking that I might continually relish discovering and doing your will. To see as you do, I must, as it were, see through tear-filled eyes at a God-hating world. Fill me with compassion for those who despise me. Make my heart tender. I must take on your nature or I will always find bewilderingly incompatible your love and wrath, your mercy and judgments, and so many other aspects of your perfection. Either I yield to your longing to make me pure, selfless and righteous, or else biblical concepts like turning the other cheek, it being more blessed to give than to receive, and so much else will seem nonsensical to me. Without your holy, eternal perspective, I’ll never understand even fellow humans like the apostle Paul who, despite horrific torture and deprivations, kept talking of joy and “light, momentary” afflictions so inconsequential as to be beneath attempting a comparison with future glories. As I’ll never see what lies ahead unless I keep moving forward, so I’ll languish in ignorance unless I’m daily living more and more of your Word. As a vine bursts into seasons of fruitfulness only if it endures times when it seems nothing but a dry, twisted stick, so I must persevere, seeking your face and reading your precious Word no matter how dry it sometimes seems. May I cherish your word more than a starving man with his last crumbs. Keep prodding me to courageously press against the tide of popular thinking – even popular Christian thinking – whenever it clashes with your full and glorious truth. Break me out of the straight jacket of human thinking so that I might soar with you. Stop me from swallowing half-truths. Take me way beyond my natural intellect and morality. Give me no peace while I’m content to settle for second best. One by one, expose my blind spots and deal with everything within me that saddens you. Don’t let me get away living a shallow life. May my every moment bring you joy. May I give you my best and receive your best. I can do none of this alone – and I thank you that I don’t have to – but in your love for me you wait for me to cooperate. And in my love for you I want to dedicate to you my every effort. I yield to you, like a brush to the artist, like a drowning person to his rescuer, like a lover to caresses. The Next Page The next page delves further into how heart issues affect our ability to interpret Scripture correctly. You might have already read this page if you explored a link on an earlier page in this series. Or perhaps you would prefer a change of pace by exploring the related issues listed below. Otherwise, you’ll enjoy: The Heart of Bible Interpretation

Help in Understanding the Bible   Part 2 of Series About How to Avoid Misinterpreting the Bible Start at Part One   In the  previous webpage  (which should be read first) we began to discover from the Bible itself that the primary reason for missing biblical truth is not intellectual, but spiritual. We ended by noting that despite Jesus repeatedly teaching the disciples that he would suffer and die, this fundamental truth “was concealed from them” ( Luke 9:45; 18:34 ).   It would seem that had the disciples been able to grasp what Jesus was saying, they would have been much better equipped to handle the traumatic events following Jesus’ arrest. Nevertheless, Christianity’s central truth – that the Messiah would suffer – “was concealed from them”. We must explore this peculiar phenomenon because it is repeated in our own lives over and over.   The full reason for their failure to grasp the truth is probably a combination of several, or maybe even all, of the possibilities we will explore. Regardless of what kept  the disciples  in ignorance, however, each of the possibilities we will mention can blind  us  to spiritual truth, even though, like the disciples, we are devoted to Christ and have already received immense spiritual revelation. So let’s examine the possibilities:     1. The Disciples Saw No Need to Ask Jesus Was a significant factor behind the disciples’ ignorance simply that they felt no pressing need to seek a fuller explanation from Jesus? No doubt their own hang-ups made it hard for them to ask – and we’ll examine this soon – but had they been sufficiently motivated, they would have pushed through the obstacles and asked Jesus regardless.   How great is our loss, simply because we are content to leave something in the too hard basket and remain in ignorance? Or how much do we miss out on because we choose to puzzle over something ourselves, rather than specifically and earnestly and repeatedly seek Jesus’ help?   Proverbs 25:2   It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter. God plays hide-and-seek with his children. He deliberately hides spiritual truths and then begs us to seek them.   Jeremiah 29:13-14   You shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord . . .   Jeremiah 33:3   Call to me, and I will answer you, and will show you great things, and difficult, which you don’t know.   Matthew 7:7   Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you will find. . . .   But all this is lost if we don’t bother to seek/ask.   What if, like the disciples, we keep quiet and don’t get around to badgering Jesus for an answer? Let’s not allow James’ sad commentary to apply to us: James 4:2   . . . You don’t have, because you don’t ask.   This principle was understood by the psalmist who asked the Lord: Psalms 119:18   Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things out of your law.   For the psalmist, this was no throw away line. In fact, in this very psalm he asked six times that God grant him understanding of Scripture and a further nine times that God would “teach” him Scripture. And in yet another part of the psalm he prayed that God not “hide” the meaning of Scripture from him.   The man uttering these prayers was so divinely inspired that at that very moment he was actually penning Scripture and yet he realized that, even for him, the Bible’s spiritual treasury would remain locked unless he earnestly pleaded with God for the interpretation. Obviously, this man of God had already discovered powerful, life-changing truths in the Word of God. He declares: Psalms 119:98-100, 103   Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for your commandments are always with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, because I have kept your precepts. . . . How sweet are your promises to my taste, more than honey to my mouth!   Nevertheless, this enlightened man of God was not content with his abundance of spiritual insight. He knew there were still more treasures locked away in the Word of God and that continued prayer was an essential key to obtaining those riches.   Note this key to spiritual insight: Proverbs 2:3-5   Yes, if you call out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding; If you seek her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures: then you will understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God.    James 1:5   But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach; and it will be given to him.   Note that those who suppose they are already wise lose out completely. They won’t bother to hound God for the wisdom to understand his Word because they are too proud to even know that they need it.   Proverbs 26:12   Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.   “ I can of myself do nothing ” declared the Son of God ( John 5:30 ). We should burn those six words into our brains because if that statement applied to Jesus, how much more must it apply to us! And it certainly applies to our ability to understand the Scriptures.   Let’s not treat Bible interpretation as if God has died and left us with instructions as to how to cope in his absence. As the disciples could ask Jesus about the meaning, so can we. Jesus said it was  better  that he leave because then the Holy Spirit would come and guide the disciples into all truth ( John 16:7,13 ).   For devoted Christians, our greatest danger lies not in deliberately resisting God’s Spirit as he seeks to interpret Scripture for us. Our greatest danger is simply not seeing the need to keep asking for God’s help.     2. Too Ashamed to Admit their Ignorance   Maybe the disciples were too proud to ask. Or perhaps they feared that admitting their ignorance would produce yet another rebuke from Jesus for being slow of heart. Jesus certainly handed out many rebukes: Mark 4:13   He said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How will you understand all of the parables?   Mark 7:18   He said to them, “Are you also without understanding? Don’t you perceive that whatever goes into the man from outside can’t defile him . . .”   Mark 8:17-18   . . . “Why do you reason that it’s because you have no bread? Don’t you perceive yet, neither understand? Is your heart still hardened? Having eyes, don’t you see? Having ears, don’t you hear? Don’t you remember?   Luke 24:25   He said to them, “Foolish men, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! . . .”   And, of course, Jesus delivered other rebukes for lack of faith, and so on.   There is a thrilling side to Jesus’ rebukes. It means Jesus believed in them – even more, in fact, than they believed in themselves. He was not expecting them to fail. He saw their blunders as an aberration – a failure to reach what was within their grasp – not an indication that they were incapable. He knew they had what it takes to succeed.   Love and wisdom drive everything God does – even times when we wrongly think he is expecting too much from us.    Our constant temptation is to shrink back from God and keep him at arm’s length, fearing that he is harsh and disapproving. In contrast, God’s longing is for us to nestle into him and hear his heartbeat. Only then does Scripture come alive for us. Bible study must never be allowed to degenerate into a do-it-yourself project. If you think the disciples’ fear of rebuke would be unlikely to silence them, you have probably forgotten that they had all heard Jesus’ stinging “Get behind me, Satan!” in response to Peter’s reaction to this very subject – Jesus saying that the Son of Man must suffer ( Mark 8:33 ).   Heart to heart communication takes courage. It demands total openness and risking angry responses. If we keep quiet about our problems with God – our doubts about his goodness, our fears, our resentments, our anger toward him – we have kept from him nothing he doesn’t already know, but we enter a cone of silence ( Get Smart  fans will appreciate this) in which communication begins to break down.   God is big enough and loving enough to handle conflict but it can only be resolved by us facing it and talking it through with God. If we bury anything affecting our relationship with God, the result is a false and dangerous peace.   The Lord might at times seem as unapproachable and prejudiced against us as he did when he kept ignoring the Canaanite woman’s pleas to heal her child and implied she was a dog ( Matthew 15:22-28 ) . If we keep persisting as she did, however, we will not just gain our request, but his praise and proof that underneath his mysterious ways beats a tender heart that longs for us. Nothing thrills him more, and nothing is more rewarding, than when we resist the urge to shrink from him.   We must risk rebuke or whatever else it takes to maintain a transparent openness with our Lord. To avoid being kept in the dark, bring everything to the light.   3. The New Truth Seemed Unscriptural   Strong Jewish traditions, based on the Word of God, had the disciples expecting a triumphant king, not a suffering servant. With Jesus’ new teaching seeming to contradict Scripture, is it any wonder that they did not want to explore the implications of what he was saying?   It is tragically possible for a good grasp of some Scriptures to actually close our minds to further biblical revelation the Lord wishes us to have.   As I have written elsewhere: “Seek and you shall find” is a clear promise from God. So how can sincere Christians all seek God’s truth about a Bible passage or doctrine and not find the same thing? The obvious answer is that many of us stop seeking too soon.   When devout Christians come to wrong conclusions, much of their understanding is correct. Almost all of us, however, long to rush ahead and try to join the dots too soon. The problem then becomes our tendency to feel more certain than warranted by the evidence so far gathered, and to unintentionally close our minds to anything further God may wish to reveal to us that does not gel with our presumptions.   It is so hard to remain open to the possibility that we have reached our conclusions prematurely and that God has startlingly new things to show us on that topic. We tend to become closed off because we are rightly concerned about being seduced into error. Seldom do we consider, however, that we might already have slipped into a mistaken conclusion. This is one reason why humility is so critical for truth seekers.   And in yet another webpage, I’ve written:   Alarmingly many of our convictions about God that we presume to be grounded on divine revelation are actually the product of experiences gained through living from babyhood in a world that behaves in a way that is highly contrary to God’s heart. One might expect diligent Bible study would explode our every mistaken view of God. Instead, our preconceptions are so controlling that the more we revere the Bible, the more likely we are to end up unconsciously cherry picking verses to try to prop up our misconceptions and arrogantly maintain our illusion. Yes, we read the exhortation in  Romans  about not being conformed to the world and instead being transformed by the renewal of our minds ( Romans 12:2 )  but so deceptively persuasive is the relentless brainwashing of childhood experiences and everything around us that is not one hundred per cent of God, one hundred per cent of the time, that I wonder if anyone on this planet has ever totally broken free from their pervasive and beguiling influence.   “Who has bewitched you?” agonized Paul, distressed that the Galatians, who had started off so well in their grasp of spiritual truth were in danger of losing it all. The parable of the sower tells of those who don’t even start their spiritual journey because of birds that snatch the seed of God’s Word before it can take root. But the parable continues. Those who burst into spiritual life have no reason for smugly settling back. It’s a long, slow process from germination to producing grain and many, says Jesus’ parable, don’t make it.   We can start off so teachable and open to the Holy Spirit, that we grow remarkably in spiritual understanding, but if this growth turns to pride, everything sours. Like a ravenous lion, the Evil One waits for us to forget that spiritual revelation flows from the grace of God, not from our devotion or intelligence. Then the Evil One pounces, getting his revenge by perverting our divinely given knowledge into a source of pride that ends our spiritual growth spurt. Even our earlier gains can be mauled.   Spiritually devastating pride can ambush us at any stage of our journey. In fact, the further we go in God’s blessing, the greater the danger. King Saul started off so humble. Though chosen as king, he hid himself rather than take center stage ( 1 Samuel 10:22 ). Soon after, he again displayed humility by refusing to use his popularity and authority to take revenge on those who despised him ( 1 Samuel 10:27 ;  11:12-13 ) As he grew accustomed to being treated as royalty, however, he slowly sank into someone so drunk with pride that he repeatedly made a fool of himself and ruined his life.   No matter how much we grow in spiritual knowledge, there is always more in God and we never lose our utter dependency upon the Holy Spirit. The more we think we know, the more likely it is that we will cut ourselves off from new truths we desperately need. We must always be open to the possibility that our current understanding – no matter how Bible-based – is not the full picture.   Permit me to quote from my book “Waiting for your Ministry” to illustrate the power of humbly acknowledging that in God there is always more.   When I read that throughout his life George Muller “never stopped learning” and “was always willing to change” I knew I had found a vital root to his fruitfulness. While laboring in close association with Henry Craik, Muller discovered that Henry’s sermons were saving more souls than his own. I’d have assumed my mix of gifts was different and resigned myself to smaller yields. Muller was smarter. Careful observation revealed that Henry was more spiritually-minded, more fervent in prayer for soul-winning power and had a more direct approach. George prayerfully and humbly appropriated these elements into his own life and became an equally effective evangelist.   John Pollock writes of D. L. Moody’s amazing “capacity for growth right until the end.”   When eighteen-year-old Moody was interviewed for church membership he was asked “what has Christ done for us all – for you – which entitles him to our love?”   “I don’t know,” confessed Moody, “I think Christ has done a good deal for us. But I don’t think of anything particular as I know of.”   Two deacons were assigned to instruct him. Nearly a full year passed before he was finally accepted into membership and even then, commented his kindly Sunday School teacher, “little more light appeared.”   After about another year, his ungrammatical attempts at prayer made people so uncomfortable that he was asked to keep silent in future.   Eventually he decided that although he could not possibly teach children, he could at least bribe them with sweets and kindness to lure them to Sunday School. Once, to his horror, he found himself with a small group of children and no speaker. He was forced to stumble through a Bible story. He gradually discovered he could tell a story to children, provided no minister was within earshot. Addressing adults was unthinkable.   At age twenty-eight he would invite seminary students to preach at a church. One day a student failed to arrive and he felt obligated to act as an inadequate substitute. Slowly, year after year, decade after decade, he developed into an outstanding evangelist.   He once invited theologian Henry Weston to address his conference. Moody could draw far bigger audiences, and, through Christ, save thousands more souls than this man. In fact, it is conservatively estimated that in an era before microphones, not to mention no radio or television or jets, 100 million people seized the opportunity to hear Moody. Of the eight encyclopaedias, biographical and Christian dictionaries I consulted, all devoted space to Moody; Weston did not rate a mention. So vast was Moody’s influence that Weston’s own students challenged his views on the basis of what they had heard from Moody. Yet when Weston rose to speak, Moody carried his chair off the platform, placed it literally at Weston’s feet and sat there soaking in every word. Suddenly he shouted, “There goes one of my sermons!” Startled, Weston asked for an explanation. Moody replied that he would now have to dump one of his favorite sermons because Weston had just proved to him that it was based on a misconception. Weston recommenced his address only to be interrupted a little later by, “There goes another . . .”   Small wonder that like a towering tree, Moody kept growing and growing; eventually making those who had originally outstripped him look like stunted bushes. He developed gifts so vast that it is said he could have run for President of the United States.   To turn a vibrant, growing Christian into a tragedy, convince him he has already learned all that he needs to know. It’s not where you start that matters; it’s where you end.   So the challenge confronting us is the need to be continually open to new revelations from God, even if the new is as perplexing as the Messiah seeming to break one of the Ten Commandments, or, like Peter being asked in a vision to eat unclean food, the new initially seems contrary to a truth you, or even your entire church, hold dear. (Of course, in such extreme cases we must exercise immense caution and humility lest we fall into serious error.)     4. The Arrogant Ignorance of Narrow Human Thinking   Surely a significant component of the blockage keeping the disciples from grasping what Jesus was saying is that to them it was unthinkable. Their logic must have run like this: “There is no way God could be glorified by the Messiah being murdered, therefore it could not possibly happen. This must be yet another of Jesus’ strange sayings: whatever he means, it could not possibly be what he seems to be saying.”   For every situation, the Almighty has more options than we can conceive of. No doubt the disciples must have been as moved as any of us by the unforgettable words the Lord spoke through his prophet: Isaiah 55:9   For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.   As much as we all try to keep remembering it, the disciples – like we so often are – were still caught unawares by the implications of this profound truth.   There is so much more to faith in God than stubbornly believing our way is best or that our way is the only conceivable way.   Narrow, human thinking blinds us to spiritual truth. When Peter got it so wrong when Jesus spoke of his coming sufferings that his Lord had to say, “ Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me,” the Lord added, “ for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of men ,”   ( Matthew 16:23   – emphasis mine). Even though just verses earlier, Jesus had lauded him, saying “ Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven,”  ( Matthew 16:17 ), Peter was back to human thinking again.   God said no the holy One’s plea to “take away this cup from me”  ( Mark 14:36, KJV ) and to Paul’s plea to take his away the thorn in his flesh ( 2 Corinthians 12:7-8 ). Both of them so desperately wanted a less agonizing way that they begged for it not once, not twice, three times ( 2 Corinthians 12:7 ).   No matter how many Scriptures and testimonies we amass that God never denies faith-filled prayer, every Bible reader slams into glaring exceptions, like the two just mentioned. The Faith Chapter, for instance, piles example upon example of God rewarding faith with miraculous deliverances but then, when least expected, it takes a sudden U-turn: Hebrews 11:35-39    . . . Others were tortured, not accepting their deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Others were tried by mocking and scourging, yes, moreover by bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned. They were sawn apart. They were tempted. They were slain with the sword. They went around in sheep skins and in goat skins; being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts, mountains, caves, and the holes of the earth. These all, having had testimony given to them through their faith, didn’t receive the promise   In theory, the sudden reversal should jolt us awake; ramming home the error of our presumptions. Many of us, however, grow so cock sure that we have the biblical principle – and God – figured out, that the total contraction to our theory barely registers, and we remain convinced that faith always delivers us from poverty, suffering and death, despite Scripture emphatically stating the opposite.   This is where cherry picking Scriptures to prop up our presumptions can turn so dangerous that when reality finally catches up with people, the shock can so bewilder them that rather than acknowledging they had read into the Bible ‘promises’ that were never there, they mistakenly conclude that God lies or that he is against them. Instead of finally realizing how unbiblical their theory had been, some end up so flabbergasted that they even give up on God.   Though they all fled, and Peter suffered the shame of being so unprepared that three times he denied his Lord, eleven of the disciples spiritually survived their harrowing experience when ignorance hit reality. But many don’t: Proverbs 1: 20-32   Wisdom calls aloud in the street . . . “How long will you simple ones love your simple ways? . . . If you had responded to my rebuke, I would have poured out my heart to you and made my thoughts known to you. But since you  . . . ignored all my advice  . . . I in turn will laugh at your disaster; I will mock  . . . when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you. Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me. . . . For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them . . .”  (NIV)   If ignorance is bliss, it’s akin to the drug-induced high of someone on a building top thinking he can fly.   5. Blinded by the ‘Obvious’   We’ve touched on this, but let’s probe a little deeper.   Ponder this context: Luke 9:37, 43-44    . . . a great multitude met him. . . . while all were marveling at all the things which Jesus did, he said to his disciples, “Let these words sink into your ears, for the Son of Man will be delivered up into the hands of men.”   They saw Jesus, highly popular and displaying great power. What Jesus was saying did not make sense to them because their own logic – based on current circumstances and, as already mentioned, their current understanding of Scripture – was screaming so loudly in their heads that it drowned out what Jesus was trying to get through to them.   Other than to give us a push if we are stalling, the Lord has no need to tell us something that is already obvious to us. Any revelation that we desperately need will therefore clash with our current understanding and expectations.   This puts us continually on the wrong foot. We are always biased toward dismissing as nonsensical whatever new revelation the Lord is trying to get through to us. And the more impressed we are with our own intelligence or grasp of spiritual truth, the more closed off to God we will be.   We think we love God too much to be continually dismissing what he is trying to tell us, but love isn’t the issue. When mixed with his inadequate understanding, Peter’s love for Jesus was so exploited by Satan that Jesus had to tell Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” The problem was that Peter thought he knew better than Jesus. If we had asked Peter if he thought he was wiser than Jesus, he’d have sincerely denied it. And yet here it was for all to see.   Our ability to discern spiritual truth hinges on our awareness that our current understanding is incomplete. At best, to use Paul’s famous expression, “we see through a glass, darkly”  ( 1 Corinthians 13:12 , KJV). Since God’s understanding is infinite and ours is not, at any moment the Almighty could be trying to reveal to us something significant that does not gel with our present understanding. This tests two key areas in our lives:   1.      Our humility  How willing are we to admit that our understanding has been wrong or inadequate? 2.      Our faith Is our faith rooted in our current understanding of Scripture or is it rooted in the Spirit’s ability to go beyond our current limitations and lead us into all truth? How much do we trust our loving Lord to lead us deeper into truth, while protecting us from spiritual deception?     6. Scared of the New Truth   The biblical accounts are clear that the disciples let fear stop them from asking Jesus about this critically important topic: Mark 9:31-32   For he was teaching his disciples, and said to them, “The Son of Man is being handed over to the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, on the third day he will rise again.” But they didn’t understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him.    They even asked each other, rather than Jesus: Mark 9:10   They kept this saying to themselves, questioning what the “rising from the dead” meant.   John 16:17-18   Some of his disciples therefore said to one another, “What is this that he says to us, ‘A little while, and you won’t see me, and again a little while, and you will see me;’ and, ‘Because I go to the Father’?” They said therefore, “What is this that he says, ‘A little while’? We don’t know what he is saying.”   What precisely was it that made them too scared to ask Jesus? We have uncovered some possibilities, but let’s keep probing.   When Jesus was talking about his suffering, could the disciples have grasped enough of it to sense it was something so unpleasant that they simply did not want to know what Jesus talking about?   At all costs, we must pursue Jesus, who is Truth, even if it means having our pet theories blown out of the water, having to admit we were wrong, or being booted out of our church. The cost of facing up to truth can sometimes be so great that it is exceeded only by the eventual reward. The disciples were in turmoil from Jesus’ arrest until his resurrection appearances. Could they have spared themselves so much distress and defeat if only they had had the courage to seek the truth earlier?   Multitudes foolishly refuse to become Christians because they won’t face the truth that they are sinners doomed to hell. They do not understand that seeking God for truth sets one free and is always abundantly rewarded, no matter how distasteful the truth initially seems.   Our need to swallow what seems bitter truth in order to savor God’s blessings does not end at salvation. Throughout our spiritual journey we face the dilemma of whether we will have the courage to embrace the next truth God dangles before us, or whether we will recoil from it in fear.   The enemy of our soul is the ultimate liar who loves to slander God. The deceiver is continually hinting to us that the Perfect One is harsh and egotistical. In reality, God is love, and true love is total unselfishness, as demonstrated by Jesus’ sacrifice. God’s will for you is always the greatest good his inexhaustible wisdom can conceive. As I explain in a webpage devoted to the subject, to fear God’s will is as ridiculous as a shivering child fearing sunshine. To miss God’s will is to miss the best we could have had and leap off a cliff in the dark. No matter how exhilarating the freefall, we will inevitably smash onto the rocks of regret somewhere below. Our only hope is that our crash is soon. The longer the painless fall, the more disastrous the end.   So courageously seek God’s truth at all times, knowing that ignorance is bliss that ends in tragic regret.     7. Their Hearts Differed from Jesus’ Heart   Is the following order of events mere coincidence?   Luke 9:44-46   “Let these words sink into your ears, for the Son of Man will be delivered up into the hands of men.” But they didn’t understand this saying. It was concealed from them, that they should not perceive it, and they were afraid to ask him about this saying. There arose an argument among them about which of them was the greatest.   While Jesus was talking about humiliation and selfless sacrifice, they were striving for the exact opposite.   We see something remarkably similar another time that Jesus discussed his suffering: Matthew 16:21-25   From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up. Peter took him aside, and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This will never be done to you.” But he turned, and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of men.” Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it.    So here again we see a worldly mindset apparently preventing one of Jesus’ disciples from understanding.   If God’s passions are not our passions, communication problems will be rife in our relationship with him. How can God share his heart unless we share his heart? If we don’t understand his heart, we have little chance of understanding his words.   When evaluating two possible interpretations of a passage, one of which devastates you and the other delights you, which interpretation will you be biased toward? Consider someone with a raging sex drive who from infancy has let Hollywood be his moral teacher; or someone whose goal in life is to make millions; or someone lusting after revenge. Imagine the enormous psychological pressure on such people to twist Scripture into meaning something that does not threaten their heart’s desire. The pressure to ease their conscience could be so intense that they might be completely unconscious of distorting Scripture to conform with their desires. Again, ponder the implications for someone given to laziness or comfort or selfishness or fear or negativity or whose self-image differs markedly from God’s view of them. The range of extreme situations is vast but perhaps even more dangerous are less obvious differences between God’s heart and our heart. Although miscommunication is highly likely with someone who has a different set of values to our own, miscommunication is almost inevitable if we don’t even realize that our values differ.   The psalmist confessed: Psalms 73:3   For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.   That’s hardly a godly attitude. Not surprisingly, it affected his ability to discern spiritual truth: Psalms 73:16   When I tried to understand this, it was too painful for me.   He leaves us in no doubt about the spiritually blinding effect of his ungodly attitude: Psalms 73:21-22   For my soul was grieved. I was embittered in my heart. I was so senseless and ignorant. I was a brute beast before you.   God shares his secrets with those who share his passions. Since Jesus is the truth ( John 14:12 ), we know truth to the extent to which we know Jesus. If we don’t know his heart, we won’t know his truth.   7. Satanic Interference   The instinctive reaction of most of us is that dark forces could not possibly be a factor in the apostles’ failure to understand. These were God’s chosen; hand-picked to be the receivers and then the carriers of the divine message. Moreover, they were continually living in the physical presence of the almighty, demon-crushing Son of God. But wait . . . didn’t Satan enter into Judas? Okay, he was the solitary exception. But then there’s Peter. Wasn’t he virtually the leader of the apostles and the one who received such revelation from God that Jesus commended him saying, “ Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. . . .”  (  Matthew 16:17 )? Yet when Jesus started talking about his future suffering, things got so out of hand that Jesus had to tell Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!”   For Peter to have received that rebuke, evil powers must have involved at the very time that Jesus was telling the apostles about his sufferings. When the devil was at work in Peter, the apostle was not slipping into obvious sin or anything likely to make an opening for the devil. On the contrary, he seemed to be expressing genuine love for the Lord by wanting to spare Jesus from suffering. (I’m reminded also of Saul who supposed he was zealously serving the Lord by persecuting Christians.) If the enemy could influence Peter so greatly that Jesus had to issue that staggering rebuke at the very time when Jesus was seeking to reveal a new truth, we too could be subject to the deluding powers of darkness when our Lord is seeking to reveal a new truth to us. Like Peter, none of us reaches the point of being beyond the possibility of satanic influence.   Whether it be through demonic brainwashing, delusion or whatever, “ the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving ”  ( 2 Corinthians 4:4 ). The god of this age is no longer our god, but he is our spiritual enemy, preying after our souls. Since every spiritual truth that we have yet to discover and apply to our lives will make us a greater threat to the kingdom of darkness, and since our enemy is the Deceiver, specializing in blinding unbelievers from the very truth that will set them free, he will surely seize any opportunity he gets to use his well-honed tricks and blind us to new truths that we need to know.   Through our victorious Lord we are not helpless pawns when dark forces move in. Nevertheless, since no one who is deluded thinks he is deluded, we must be ever alert to that possibility and continually seek God to keep our spiritual eyes open.     8. Not God’s Timing?   Perhaps it was simply not God’s time for the disciples to understand. If so, Jesus was not wasting his breath. They needed to be able to look back later and realize that Jesus had known it all ahead of time.   Despite learning the Scriptures from childhood and being taught by Jesus for years, it was not until after his resurrection that Jesus opened the disciples’ minds to see how all the Scriptures they had studied referred to Jesus ( Luke 24:45 ) .   He told the disciples who had sat under his teaching for years: John 14:26   But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and will remind you of all that I said to you.   The Spirit’s role in reminding the disciples of Jesus’ teaching shows that Jesus’ teaching (found in the gospels) is critical, but it is not enough without the Spirit’s action on that teaching.   We could think of the Word as a light bulb and the Spirit as the power. We are illuminated only when they work together.   There are seasons in God.  Colossians 1:26  speaks of “the mystery which has been hidden for ages and generations. But now it has been revealed to his saints”. There are words that will be sealed up “to the time of the end”  ( Daniel 12:4 ).   There are seasons in another sense as well. There is a time for sowing – for absorbing, memorizing and meditating on Scripture even when it makes little or no sense – and there is a time for reaping, when suddenly it all falls into place and we have that divine “Eureka!” moment.   Sometimes, even with divine revelation, we will never reap in joy if we never sow in tears. To reap, we must embrace the pain of study and times when reading Scripture is like feeding on dust. God honors faithfulness and diligence. As mentioned already, Jesus told his disciples that the Spirit of God would teach them and bring to their remembrance all that Jesus had taught them.  ( John 14:26 ). The supernatural came only after the natural. Had they not sacrificed years of their lives to sitting under Jesus’ teaching, the Spirit would never have done his part.   One final thought on God’s timing: there’s a time for asking and a time for receiving, but those who delight God and win for themselves much glory are those who praise God for answers before they hold them in their hands. Likewise, there are seasons when spiritual understanding is easy, but there are those with the faith and devotion to God to gain understanding ahead of time.     The Story So Far   Our Lord is a teacher who hands his class a textbook he knows everyone will find confusing and will misunderstand. He is unconcerned by this because he specializes in one-on-one teaching. He longs to personally take each of us through the book, explaining portions of his choosing until they not only become highly meaningful and precious to us, but life-changing. This does not mean, of course, that we will fully understand everything in the book. He gives the same textbook to both his newest and his most advanced students. What a tragedy it would be if on earth we ever reached the point of fully understanding the Bible! There would be no more new discoveries for us and little more growth.   Since the Almighty is in every way superior to us, we must be willing to tolerate mysteries – even mysteries that highly offend us. We discovered that an additional reason for mysteries being inevitable is that God has seasons for so many things, and divine enlightenment is no exception. Yet another reason for divine mysteries is that the Lord uses them to test our hearts. When Jesus walked this planet, the mysteries included what seemed unintelligible teaching and the way he perplexed and offended people by seeming to be a Sabbath-breaker and thus a breaker of God’s Ten Commandments. It’s essentially the same today. The Bible still seems peppered with moral dilemmas, unintelligible teaching and offenses to the intellect. Just as Jesus could have removed offenses in his ministry, so God could have removed offenses from Scripture. Instead, they are cleverly embedded in the Bible to filter out people whose god is their mind, whose moral standards are their own invention or who want to serve not the King of Glory but some predictable god who is so pathetically small that even they can figure him out. There are people who let God be God and there are those who want to be God’s God. There are those who are willing to trust the perfection of God’s wisdom and integrity and there are those who, like the devil himself, think they are better than God.   Consider Jesus saying people must consume his flesh and blood. He refused to explain, even though people left in droves. I’m reminded of Richard Bach’s quote: “If you love something, set it free; if it comes back it’s yours, if it doesn’t, it never was.” Those who truly believed in Jesus would cling to him no matter what. Everything in the Christian life hinges on faith, and faith grows best in the dark.   In reality, what people considered to be the low point of Jesus’ ability to communicate divine truth was astoundingly brilliant. By referring to eating his flesh, Jesus was delivering a profound truth cleverly packaged in such an unforgettable way that if they followed Jesus for long enough the saying would eventually be detonated by additional facts and explode into meaning for them.   Although we must not be offended by spiritual mysteries, we must not tolerate them to the point of defeatism, where we despair of ever understanding them in this age and so stop asking God and seeking. A know-it-all attitude is such a killer of spiritual growth that it should be feared. Equally deadly, however, is an I’ll-never-know attitude. The two attitudes often combine into a spiritually numbing I-know-all-I’ll-ever-know approach to certain biblical truths. No matter how dry we feel and how long the wait, we must keep asking and seeking.  Your  name is on God’s calendar.   Nevertheless, as Jesus said about himself: “ By myself I can do nothing ”  ( John 5:30 ). We don’t even know what to seek (we need some truths far more desperately than others) nor how to seek. So we must look to the Lord even for help in seeking. Everything in the Christian life is done in intimate partnership with our Maker.     Other Dangers   We’re all on a voyage of spiritual discovery leading to increasing fulfillment and achievement. But there are great dangers. So far, we have identified just the tip of the iceberg that could sink us.   Although we have exhausted what seem to me the most likely possibilities for  the disciples  failing to grasp the meaning of one facet of Jesus’ teaching, there are many other spiritual and heart issues that could be stopping  us  from discovering truths in God’s Word. As already mentioned, it will eventually turn out that spiritual ignorance is anything but bliss. This makes it critical that we not settle for recognizing only the few dangers so far identified. We need to discover everything that could be keeping us in spiritual ignorance.     So let’s proceed to the  next page: The Neglected Spiritual Dimension to Bible Interpretation

The Neglected Spiritual Dimension To Bible Interpretation Every Christian, simply by being a child of God, has access to truths that even great theologians might have missed. Part 3 of a Series About How to Avoid Misinterpreting the Bible Let’s recap: we are exploring matters that are vital to all Christians, and easily understood by all. Even the newest Christian is engaged in the pursuit of biblical truth. We all use hermeneutics (methods of interpreting the Bible) even though most of us never use the word. The emphasis in most Bible schools and seminaries tends to be on teaching methods of interpreting the Word that anyone can use, regardless of whether the person has any spiritual connection to God or is even pagan or atheistic. This is no criticism of theological institutions. The techniques taught are important and could be called basic or rational hermeneutics. We simply need to understand that there is more to Bible interpretation than this. As children, we learned to read. This has proved a most valuable skill that we continually draw upon when studying Scripture. Some of us learned to read in a Christian school. Most of us learned in secular schools. It makes no difference, because an ability to read has nothing to do with one’s relationship with God. What we could call basic hermeneutics is like that. It could be taught just as effectively in a secular college as in a theological institution. It’s a valuable skill that we should be using all the time when studying the Bible. But just as one can read the Bible well, without truly understanding it, so one can skillfully employ basic hermeneutics and not understand the spiritual truths of the Bible. The danger is that the more highly trained someone is, the more he might fool himself into thinking he understands a Scripture, when he is actually completely missing or misunderstanding much of the divine message. No matter how great his intellect, when a non-Christian encounters spiritual truths, “ . . .  he can’t know them, because they are spiritually discerned .” (1 Corinthians 2:14). That sounds spooky. We who pride ourselves on our intellect can find it so offensive that we reject the possibility of there being things the finest human minds cannot grasp without a spiritual transformation. It almost takes a divine miracle just to gain the faintest inkling as to why understanding spiritual truth is beyond the grasp of the unaided human mind. What would it be like to experience the sensations a lizard feels when it detects a sexually desirable lizard or a delicious cockroach? No matter how much ingenious research we did, trying to figure out what it feels like to be a lizard would remain mostly guesswork and we’ll never know how off the mark our presumptions are. The only way to perceive things as a lizard does, is if, for a while at least, we had the mind of a lizard. And even if offered that opportunity, some of us would find the offer too scary to accept. This is like the impossibility we face in trying to understand spiritual truth. It is something so foreign to human experience that no matter how great our intelligence and how deeply we ponder and analyze it, we cannot perceive things as God perceives them without undergoing a transformation of mind-boggling proportions. The sheer impossibility is reflected in Paul’s almost nonsensical prayer about God’s love: Ephesians 3:14-19  . . . I bow my knees to the Father . . . that he would grant you . . . to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge  . . . Learning facts will never do. We cannot understand as God understands without a supernatural transference of God’s mind/nature to our mind. This life-changing experience does not come in a one-off explosive burst, wrecking every neural connection in our brain. It comes one staggering revelation a time throughout the life of everyone who is in intimate union with the divine. It is an on-going process that we can stop or hinder at any moment. This is why Peter urges Christians t o grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ ( 2 Peter 3:18 ). Paul, too, speaks of “ increasing in the knowledge of God ” ( Colossians 1:10 ) and tells his readers they “ put on the new man, who is being renewed [note the tense] in knowledge after the image of his Creator ( Colossians 3:10 ) . Here’s a fascinating promise: Isaiah 54:13 All your children will be taught by the Lord  . . . The promise is not merely that all will have access to Scripture. As important as access to the Bible is, it is like the excitement of being given a seat on a jumbo jet, only to discover that the plane has no pilot. As a telephone is dead unless someone speaks to us through it, so is Scripture, unless God speaks to us through it. Our great need is to be taught by the Lord, as the above Scripture promises. The Almighty usually does this through Scripture, but it is something he must do. If, rather than being taught by God, we are self-taught, we will inevitably miss vital spiritual truths, no matter how diligently we study the Bible. Proverbs 28:26 One who trusts in himself is a fool  . . . The same is true about looking to human teachers, rather than the Lord: Isaiah 2:22 Stop trusting in man, whose breath is in his nostrils  . . . Matthew 16:17 Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.  . . .” In the previous two webpages (which should be read first – please start here ) we began exploring the factors determining our receptivity to divine empowerment to discern spiritual truth. Having commenced this fascinating and critical subject, we now need to uncover still more spiritual factors affecting one’s ability to understand the Bible. Elsewhere on this vast website I have written much in which I needed to use Scripture to discern God’s heart on various subjects. Sometimes when writing on these matters I thought it helpful to explain various principles I had had to draw upon in order to have any chance of “properly handling the Word of Truth.” So although most of this series of webpages about Bible interpretation is new, there are occasional quotes or adaptations from portions of my other webpages, here compiled to bring together some of the many factors that affect our ability to discern spiritual truth in the Bible. The following section is one such instance. You Can Find Truths Missed by Theologians We mentioned earlier that the need for this series of webpages becomes frighteningly obvious when we consider the degree to which Christians differ on doctrine and Bible interpretation. What is so disturbing is that these matters divide not just new Christians or worldly Christians or uninformed Christians. We are tempted to think poorly of anyone who disagrees with us, but if we dare look with godly eyes we will find Christians worthy of our highest esteem passionately believing opposite things. We might not know who is wrong, but clearly some of them must be. They cannot all be right! This sends us crashing to the humbling – even scary – reality that whenever we seek to understand such topics we are daring to confront a matter on which numbers of truly great men and women of God have got it wrong.   It is tempting to think that if God allows this divergence of opinion among even the most spiritual and knowledgeable Christians on earth, it must be because the matter is unimportant. If this were so, however, it would become perhaps even more confusing. It would mean that so many fine Christians on  both  sides are wrong in thinking it is important.   If people more spiritual, knowledgeable, experienced and gifted than ourselves have somehow missed the truth, who are we to get it right? The thought seems enough to send us reeling into defeatism. We feel the same way when hearing the crushing news of a great Christian having a moral fall. If such a person could fall, what chance do we have? Nevertheless, there is one truth with the power to lift us out of defeatism: no matter how much Christians may differ in giftedness, causing some to seem superior to us, everyone without exception is equally dependent upon the grace of God for the understanding of spiritual truth and for every spiritual step we take. Some of us can leap higher than others but it makes no difference in a quest to reach the moon. To leave earth’s gravity, each of us, no matter how athletic or disabled, is equally dependent upon a power outside of us – a spacecraft. Likewise, in reaching heavenly truth, human advantages or disadvantages make little difference. All that matters is our willingness to yield to a power greater than any of us – the grace of God.   If anyone could be mistaken, it’s me. But if anyone can reveal the truth, it’s God. If it depended on us, we might have little hope, but since it depends on the grace of God, each of us has boundless reason for hope.   If we can stop putting our faith in our devotion, experience, Bible skills and human teachers, and place our faith solely in the Almighty’s power to override all our inadequacies and penetrate our dull minds with his truth, then we have mastered two key factors in receiving divine revelation: humility (“ He will guide the humble  . . .” –  Psalms 25:9 ), and placing all of our faith in the Almighty, none in our finite, easily deceived selves.   The obvious starting point for discovering God’s truth is, of course, a right relationship with God. The psalmist prayed for the miracle of supernatural insight into Scripture’s wonders ( Psalm 119:18 )  but we cannot expect divine answers while unrepentant sin hinders our relationship with God. “ If I cherished sin in my heart, the Lord wouldn’t have listened ” ( Psalm 66:18 ). “ But your iniquities have separated you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear ” ( Isaiah 59:2 ). Sin must be removed by us trusting in Jesus’ cleansing and by genuinely wanting that cleansing. We are genuine only to the extent that we passionately long for purity and for devoted obedience to our Lord.   Another essential for accurate Bible interpretation is to have such a driving passion to receive the truth from God that we rival the mother of the demonized child who kept refusing to be put off from her quest to receive from Jesus the longing of her heart. Our Lord “ is a rewarder of those who seek him ” ( Hebrews 11:6 ). Seeing Through God’s Eyes When Jesus said, “ Why are you fearful, O you of little faith ?” ( Matthew 8:26 ) did he roar the words with terrifying, spirit-withering fury? Did his eyes fill with tears or tender compassion? Could the disciples detect a wounded expression on his face or in his voice? Was there a twinkle in his eye or a faith-inspiring hint of a smile? The disciples often had enormous difficulty in understanding what Jesus was saying and yet they had access to invaluable non-verbal information that has been stripped from the accounts we are left with in Scripture. How much harder our task is! To fully understand the Bible we need information that only God has. Our one hope of regaining what is lost is to be so filled with the Spirit of God and walking so close to the Lord that we know his heart. Despite the priceless opportunity to read Jesus’ non-verbal signals, the disciples often got it wrong because they were not able to read Jesus’ mind. The ideal would be not just to read Christ’s mind but to open the Bible and read  with  Christ’s mind. Imagine being able to read the Gospels with Jesus’ understanding and insight into those events; feeling what he felt, seeing what he saw, and knowing what he knows. That would be the ultimate in knowing precisely what Jesus meant. This is no pipe dream: 1 Corinthians 2:16  “ For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he should instruct him ?” . . .  We feel like plunging into defeatism again. What chance has anyone with a three figure IQ to understand the infinite Mind? How can we, with eyes fogged by selfishness, prejudice, self-justification and impurity, see as God sees? There’s no possibility for those not spiritually connected to the Lord. Yet for us, the verse continues in the most thrilling, staggering manner:   But we have Christ’s mind.   Access to the mind of Christ is the right of everyone in genuine relationship with Christ. The outworking of this, however, is a progressive experience that requires our cooperation. This is why Paul had to urge Christians: Philippians 2:5   Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus  (KJV)   Had this been automatic for Christians, Paul would not have had to mention it. Again, he told Christians: Romans 12:2   Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind  . . .   And he reminded other Christians: Ephesians 4:12-23   ... were taught in him . . . that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind.   We have the mind of Christ to the extent that we have died to selfishness and let Christ live his life through us and think his thoughts through us. “ Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus ” refers not to academic knowledge but to a radically changed, otherworldly mindset even to the extreme of willingly submitting to voluntary suffering for the glory of God ( Philippians 2:5-8 , KJV). “ . . .  be transformed by the renewing of your mind ” is prefaced by, “ present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God ” ( Romans 12:1 ). This is worthy of careful reading: Ephesians 4:17-24   This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their hearts; who having become callous gave themselves up to lust, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you did not learn Christ that way; if indeed you heard him, and were taught in him, even as truth is in Jesus: that you put away, as concerning your former way of life, the old man, that grows corrupt after the lusts of deceit; and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, who in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of truth.   The Bible is divinely designed to be understood only by people indwelt by the very Spirit who experiences the actual feelings and deepest secrets of God. Please read this prayerfully:   1 Corinthians 2:6-13  We speak wisdom, however, among those who are full grown; yet a wisdom not of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, who are coming to nothing. But we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the wisdom that has been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds for our glory, which none of the rulers of this world has known. For had they known it, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, “Things which an eye didn’t see, and an ear didn’t hear, which didn’t enter into the heart of man, these God has prepared for those who love him.” But to us, God revealed them through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For who among men knows the things of a man, except the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God, except God’s Spirit. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that were freely given to us by God. Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things.   Although every Christian has the Spirit of God, our ability to grasp biblical truth is proportional to our willingness to let the Spirit have his way in our thoughts and actions. Scripture provides a practical way of measuring how much the Spirit is illuminating our understanding:   Galatians 5:16   But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you won’t fulfill the lust of the flesh .   We are filled with the same Spirit who inspired Scripture, to the degree to which we are victorious over fleshly or selfish desires. Lack of temptation is  not  a measure of our walk with the Lord. What counts is not what assaults us, but whether we resist.   What hope have we of seeing as God sees if lust, bitterness, greed, envy or any other ungodly attitude clouds our eyes? How much we see as God sees depends on how much we yield to God’s longing to kill every ungodly attitude within us. Dying to self is far more exciting and fulfilling than we dare hope. There is a valuable link about this at the end of this series of webpages.   No matter how much we study the Bible, we cut ourselves off from biblical revelation to whatever extent that the Spirit of God is not having full sway in our lives.   We let the Spirit rule in our lives and understanding by, wherever there is conflict, trashing human wisdom and treasuring God’s wisdom; despising our own wishes and delighting in God’s will; killing ungodly desires and birthing godly ones. This is not attained by human effort. It is a divine miracle. Almighty God manifests his love, however, by not abusing his fearsome power by forcing godly attitudes upon us. Instead, the King of kings waits for our cooperation.   To Understand the Word of God We Must Understand the Heart of God   This section is adapted from a webpage of mine about the unforgivable sin.   Suppose a parent warns a child, ‘Disobey and I’ll kill you!’ The correct interpretation of those words depends entirely on the person’s character. It will mean radically different things if the parent is loving and gentle, with a sense of humor, or is harsh, or is quite capable of murder. To know for sure that we have correctly understood someone’s words, we must know that person exceptionally well.   To understand what God means in his Word, we must get to know God as deeply as we possibly can. We must know his heart and character and values. Related to this: a key way of knowing how someone will react in a new situation is to observe over a long period how he handles similar situations. So to understand how God will react to someone blaspheming the Spirit, let’s look at how he acted previously, after issuing other dire warnings: * The Law of God said no Moabite could ‘ enter into the Lord’s assembly; even to the tenth generation ’ ( Deuteronomy 23:3 ) and yet Ruth, David’s great-grandmother, was a Moabite and became God’s chosen ancestress of the Messiah. * God’s law said that everyone guilty of adultery must be put to death  ( Leviticus 20:10;   Deuteronomy 22:22 ;  John 8:5 ). David, the adulterer, repented and, despite God’s anger, he was not only allowed to live but to continue to reign as king with God’s full blessing ( 2 Samuel 12:13 ). * The prophet Micah prophesied in the days of King Hezekiah, saying, ‘ the Lord of Armies says: Zion shall be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest’ Hezekiah sought the Lord, and God relented ( Jeremiah 26:18-19 ). * King Hezekiah was terminally ill. The great prophet Isaiah said, ‘ The Lord says, ‘Set your house in order, for you will die, and not live .’’ Hezekiah prayed and another prophecy hit the dust ( Isaiah 38:1-5 ). ‘ But whoever denies me before men, him I will also deny before my Father who is in heaven .’ ( Matthew 10:33 ). The same Greek work here translated “disowns” is used several times in the original Scriptures to describe what Peter did to Jesus and twice to describe what the Jews did to Jesus ( Acts 3:14-15 ) and yet full forgiveness was offered to them all ( John 21:17-19 ;  Acts 3:19 ). 1 Corinthians 6:9-10   Or don’t you know that the unrighteous will not inherit God’s Kingdom? Don’t be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor extortionists, will inherit God’s Kingdom.   If we panic, however, it is because we have ripped such verses out of the Bible; reading them in isolation, without adequately considering the rest of Scripture. In this case, the answer is in the very next verse:   1 Corinthians 6:11   Such were some of you, but you were washed. But you were sanctified. But you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God.   The importance of the context in which a verse appears is often emphasized. The latest example highlights the value of this. In the earlier examples, however, we found a key verse for understanding a Scripture in a quite different part of the Bible.   It makes no difference whether the interpretive key to a Scripture is in the next verse or a thousand verses away; a verse is taken out of context not only if surrounding verses are overlooked but whenever a passage is divorced from the full biblical revelation of God. Look at how Jesus responded to the devil’s attempt to tempt him by distorting Scripture ( Luke 4:9-12 ). Jesus did not search the Internet for the opinions of highly acclaimed theologians on that Scripture. Neither did he say, “Well, devil, if you look the preceding verse . . .” Or, “If you look at the historical context . . . And the ancient Hebrew means . . .” Jesus didn’t in the slightest analyze or argue about the Scripture the devil quoted. He merely quoted another Scripture that to him was indisputable and contrary to what the devil was implying. That was enough for Jesus. Furthermore, a verse is also taken out of context if it is interpreted as if it were spoken by someone of different character to that of the true God. The Lord is neither fickle, nor a liar. He sticks steadfastly to what  he  means; never to anyone’s misunderstanding of what he means. The only way to avoid misunderstanding God is to never underestimate his merciful, loving heart, and how an offender’s change of heart and faith in Christ’s sacrifice frees God to forgive as he longs to, and suddenly the impossible becomes possible. Of course, if a person does not respond the way God hopes, the dire statement remains in force. This overview helps us see the heart of God and know what he really means by harsh statements that seem to give no way out. Their very harshness is intended to move people to seek God so that he could relent.   Here’s a verse that seems to give no hope to anyone found guilty:   To understand what God means by, for example, an unpardonable sin, it is essential to interpret it in the light of God’s forgiving heart, and his ability to forgive through Christ,  and  his inability to forgive outside of faith in Christ. If, however, instead of reading the Bible in sync with God’s heart, we read it while letting ourselves be dominated by a condemning conscience or by fear that Jesus is not ‘ able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him ’ ( Hebrews 7:25 ) we will repeatedly get it wrong. Although the full revelation of Scripture helps us see the heart of God, there are spiritual and psychological factors that can hinder us. For example, feeling sure of God’s forgiving nature is particularly difficult for people who themselves are harsh and unforgiving. Sadly, it is also difficult for some people brought up by harsh, judgmental parents or suffering psychological afflictions such as Generalized Anxiety Disorder (free-floating anxiety can be misinterpreted as being unable to be freed from guilt), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (which can cause a condemning conscience and/or uncontrollable, blasphemous thoughts), major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or delusional disorder. And not everyone suffering from such an affliction has been diagnosed. Treating such illnesses and correcting spiritual problems will help people read the Bible in a way that is closer to how God intends it to be understood.   Our Frightening Capacity for Self-Delusion The Word of God often identifies a “hard heart” as the reason for people failing to perceive spiritual truth. This, along with its implications for Bible interpretation, is worth exploring. Since the findings are somewhat similar to what we have already discovered, however, I’ll place it in a separate webpage:   Bible Interpretation: The Heart of the Matter.  For those who wish to move on, I’ll just cite one of its conclusions: how much our eyes are filled with God’s tender compassion for those we are tempted to despise is an indication of how likely we are to see biblical truth through God’s eyes. If part of us craves assurance that we are not disobeying God, and part of us yearns to do something contrary to God’s will, we will be subjected to strong psychological pressures to interpret Scripture in a manner that assures us that we can go our own way without displeasing God. In an attempt to silence the screams of a nagging conscience, intelligent people concoct cunning and persuasive manipulations of truth to try to pervert Scripture into excusing their sin. So if, for example, you believe you are sentenced to lifelong sexual frustration and deprivation if Scripture says a certain practice is morally wrong, there are ready-made “clever” arguments waiting for us to be impressed by their logic and references to Greek/Hebrew, rather than believe what Scripture actually says. 2 Timothy 4:3   For the time will come when they will not listen to the sound doctrine, but, having itching ears, will heap up for themselves teachers after their own lusts. Without us realizing what is happening, our yearnings, fears, prejudices and presumptions can cry so loudly within us as to drown out the Spirit’s whispers. 2 Peter 3:16   . . . his [Paul’s] letters, speaking in them of these things. In those, there are some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsettled twist, as they also do to the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. Truly, we need to pray: Psalms 139:23-24   Search me, God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me  . . . Our only hope is to be so aware of our potential for self-deception that we don’t trust our own perceptions and thinking processes, but instead put all our faith in God’s grace – his willingness to forgive and reveal truth to us, despite our unworthiness. To trust in our own intellect, our purity of motives, our faithfulness, or our ability to hear from God is like trusting a computer programmed to give the occasional wrong answer in an unpredictable and undetectable manner. By definition, no one knows when they are deluded. How vital it is that we take seriously this Scripture: Proverbs 3:5  Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding . . . . Don’t be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord, and depart from evil. And how important it is that this Scripture does not apply to us: Matthew 15:8   These people draw near to me with their mouth, and honor me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.   A Suicidal Date With Delusion We all have the tendency to explore the Bible, not so much to find the mind of God as to find proof texts of what we have already decided to be the answer. Far too often I come to an understanding through reading portions of the Bible and from then on I lose objectivity. No longer am I without bias and humbly open to whatever my Lord may reveal. Instead, I absorb Scripture through the filter of what might be a too hastily reached conclusion. Although barely aware of what I am doing, my mind is probably trying to make the rest of the Bible conform to my own belief, rather than honestly yielding to the full teaching of the Bible and letting Scripture shape my belief. We all tend to develop a theory, or a preference, or are handed a doctrine by someone we rightly respect. From then on – often without realizing it – we end up wrestling Scripture into submission, making it confirm our theory, rather than passively submitting to the Bible, freely allowing it to modify our theory. Unless we resist the urge to use the Bible to prove ourselves right, we will most likely end up – while barely aware of what is happening – twisting Scripture to suit our own purposes. To do so is to open the door to delusion. It has rightly been said that the Scriptures we most need are the ones we haven’t underlined in our Bibles. They are the parts most likely to kill our theories and threaten our narrow thinking. Our motive in searching the Scriptures should always be to boldly find God’s truth, no matter how much that truth clashes with our hopes, fears and presumptions. Since we all have blind spots that we are quite unaware of, we need to keep praying for an openness to any revelation that is truly from God that we might unknowingly reject because it “does not compute,” as it is incompatible with our current mindset. It is essential that we maintain a humble dependence upon the Holy Spirit’s illumination. We desperately need the grace of God to avoid reading his Word through glasses colored by our expectations, or pride in our human ability to interpret Scripture, or a longing for a soft life. We must delve not just into God’s writings, but into God’s heart. The Lord himself – not our interpretation of experience, nor our human interpretation of Scripture – must be our authority.   Much More It takes humility to remain open to the possibility that even though we have strong biblical support for a belief we hold dear, our view could still be distorted because we have not yet discovered the full truth. What if, for example, we consider ourselves more spiritual and more biblically correct that Christians who differ from us, and we have no idea that those we look down on have seen another aspect of biblical revelation that we have failed to grasp? As I have written elsewhere: One of the greatest dangers for us Bible lovers is not blatant error but oversimplification. Certain glorious truths shine so brightly that we let them blind us to other, equally vital, biblical truths. Liked chocolate-coated poison, oversimplification is a particularly sinister form of error. We come to trust oversimplification because in easy situations it works but just when we are most vulnerable, it lets us down. Even worse, we are then tempted to imagine it is God or his Word that has failed us, when the real cause is letting a shallow reading of the Bible entice us to jump to false conclusions. Half-truths are as exciting and addictive and deceptive and dangerous as the early stages of heroin addiction. For so many of us, what we rather proudly think of as our theology or doctrine would better be called a set of presumptions. Here’s an ancient prayer of uncertain origin that stirs me deeply: From cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from laziness that is content with half-truth, from arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, O God of Truth, deliver us. To have that prayer answered is a huge step toward receiving divine revelation as we read the Word of God. Nevertheless, there are even more matters to be considered, so let’s proceed to the  next page.   How to Receive Spiritual Revelation

I’ve recently attempted something quite different to anything I’ve ever done before — crafting lyrics for a song to touch the hearts of people whose beliefs are utterly foreign to me. I refer to people spiritually confused by Woke and/or New Age beliefs. Their issues are probably foreign to you, too, but they need Jesus, of course, as much as any of us. I’m told the most appropriate music for the most needy audience is likely to be rap (again something foreign to my own tastes and experience). However, I have no musical ability, nor any way of getting an audience even if I did. Unless God raises up someone with the appropriate gifting it will never take off. If you would like to join me in prayer about this, I would be most appreciative. If you would like to see the lyrics as they currently stand, I will place them below. It’s called “Reality.” The repetition is deliberate. I’m sick of the game, Pretending I’m enough, Hiding my blame, Flouting my shame, Enslaved by people’s opinions. It’s time to end the insanity. What I call “my truth” is a mockery God, shock me with your truth. I need the view from eternity. Hit me with reality. Appalled at my flaws I look at the cross, Stunned at what you’ve done. I’m without excuse, You’re my only hope And you’re all I’ll ever need. I’m done with make-believe, Mesmerized by mirages, Pretending I’m a god When it’s obvious I’m not, Fleeing reality like a panic-crazed coward. Appalled at my flaws I look at the cross, Stunned at what you’ve done. I’m without excuse, You’re my only hope And you’re all I’ll ever need. Spiritual delusion won’t cut it; I’m desperate for reality. Almighty God, open my eyes like never before. Unchain me from beliefs that will never endure. I need what will last for all eternity. As I look to you, O Timeless One, You draw me back two thousand years. I gaze at the cross and begin to see The ultimate reality— Divine mystery embedded in human history. Never have such agony and purity met. I’m appalled, I’m enthralled, I’m numb, Overwhelmed by what you’ve done to pay my debt. No one but you could go to such extremes. You’re my only hope And you’re all I’ll ever need. I’ve had enough of telling myself I’m enough, Pathetically brainwashing myself in an attempt to avoid reality. I’m ending slavery to what people think of me. No more imprisoning my mind in a fantasy, Driven by a sick attempt to get people to like me. The more I ponder the cross, the more I find I’m leaving delusion behind And encountering the ultimate reality— Divine mystery embedded in human history. Never have such agony and purity met. I’m appalled, I’m enthralled, I’m numb, Overwhelmed by what you’ve done to pay my debt. No one but you could go to such extremes. You’re my only hope And you’re all I’ll ever need. If things grew so bleak That even the strongest quaked And whole nations despaired, They could still look to you and boldly declare, The darker it gets the better we see You’re our only hope And you’re all we’ll ever need. The darker it gets the better we see You’re our only hope And you’re all we’ll ever need.