WHAT IS GOD’S NORMAL PATTERN OF COMMUNICATION?
There are some today who claim angelic visits, visions, God’s Voice speaking aloud to then, and supernatural messages delivered to them that they feel are to be proclaimed to others as directions from God. So a perfectly timed question at Christmas is:
Does God picture that His guiding dreams, visions, angel visits, supernaturally guided shepherd, and Wise Men visits continued in these believer’s lives?
The answer is: No. That type of direct revelation was a very special form of revelation. It was infrequent and always targeted for specific times in God’s plan.
There were no more recorded angel/dream visits for any of those people.
Note I said: recorded. So are we arguing from silence in the Scriptures for a doctrine here? In a sense: yes. Now think with me:
God inspired the Scriptures.
God said Scriptures were all we needed for doctrine, correction, and instruction in righteousness for us to be completely equipped to serve Him through life.
Then the recorded history with no more recorded angel visits, dreams, and voices is what God wants us to learn from. God’s Word gives us the facts to frame our understanding of how God operates. The secret things (those not revealed in God’s Word) belong to God. He does whatever He pleases.
God wrote down our doctrine, our framework, our pattern for everyday life.
God shows us that in all of Divinely recorded history (that is what he have in the Bible): God gives Special Revelation in clear, powerful ways for special periods of time, and then stops.
The next truth we need to hold onto today is the reality that:
GOD WANTS TO COMMUNICATE CLEARLY WITH HIS PEOPLE
God uses Joseph as an illustration of the incredible array of communication methods our Lord can use, has used, and still has at His disposal: even to this day.
God gives us the lesson by what He reveals and doesn’t reveal, that: He does not want us to think that we must have constantly added revelations of God’s speaking to us beyond what he has already given us.
God also shows us how amazingly He wants to guide our lives.
Turn back to Matthew 1:18-25 with me. In these eight verses, we see the opening event of the 10 personal & direct communications from God with the characters of Christmas starting in Matthew.
(FTF-12; 141221AM)
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