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God is still speaking to human hearts. The Bible does not reveal
a God who cannot speak. The God of the Bible speaks and acts in
every age of human existence on this earth.
Some very well-meaning scholars try to make it seem as though
the devil is the only spirit able to communicate with human
beings today. They say this because far too may people are going
around claiming to speak for God. And some of us may
occasionally (or even frequently) place great spiritual
importance on dreams and other emotionally-loaded experiences
that are not necessarily the voice of God.
I have little doubt that people have been greatly moved by all
sorts of feelings and fears and wishes and superstitious ideas
since the beginning. After all, Adam and Eve put great stock in
a snake that talked in the garden of Eden. They must have
thought that snake had a lot of spiritual wisdom, because they
chose to believe it over the very Lord God who had given them
everything.
People are silly, and we have all made foolish choices about
many things. But none of this takes away God's power or
willingness to speak. God speaks. People are supposed to listen.
Yet we often find that we do not. We are awed by tricks and
humanly-devised dazzle, and then we doubt God, wanting Him to
prove Himself to us. As I said, people are silly.
The Bible is the very best way to always be sure that God is the
One doing the speaking. We can still be confused (by our
ignorance of the Bible), and get things wrong, but we can trust
anything that the Bible clearly teaches and affirms. What we
need to do is to become familiar enough with the Holy Scriptures
to know what the Bible is clearly saying.
The devil and his gang of would-be smart guys often quote
Scripture when they are misleading people. Does this mean that
the Bible is confusing or that it teaches contradictory ideas?
No. It means that far too many people know so little about the
Bible that they can be talked into almost anything. That is a
terrible shame, because God gave us the Bible to reveal the
truth about Himself, about sin, about eternity and about
salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.
The Bible is the Word of God. It is a collection of the things
God has been revealing since the beginning. Prophets of God
spoke and wrote down all kinds of things. The Holy Spirit of God
was the guiding hand in all the work of recording, collecting
and assembling the Bible as we have it today. Don't fall for a
lot of intellectual hooey that says that once, thousands of
years ago, there may have been a really good Bible, but that now
we have a messed up Bible.
Is God dead? Did He lose His touch? Did things get out of
control? Are silly people (or the devil) greater, stronger or
smarter than God? Of course not. If God could use people to
speak and record and gather and bundle the Scriptures in
ancient times, He is certainly able to handle the transmission
of His Word into our day. We have great Bibles, Holy Bibles,
perfect Bibles, right here, right now, today.
If God has ever spoken to human beings, He is speaking right now
in the pages of Holy Scripture. If the Bible is broken today,
then it never was the real Word of God. Because God is either
God or He is not. It really is that simple.
So when God speaks to us, as He does when we read the Bible, or
hear it preached and taught in a church gathering, we need to
stop and listen. We need to pay attention. We need to allow the
Holy Spirit to make God's message alive in our hearts so that we
can grow spiritually, and so we can learn and know the will of
God here and now. God is speaking. God still speaks. Will we
listen?
Jim Sutton
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