My article from this week's newspapers about things "The Lord Told Me..." and other such claims to direct revelation:
Q: If I feel like God has spoken a
message to me personally, is that possible?
How can I know if that message is genuine and whether or not to trust
it?
Extraordinary revelations, personal
experiences, and spiritual perceptions have been a topic of debate among
Christians for centuries. Some of these
are more extraordinary than others, varying from reports of an audible voice
from heaven complete with bleeding or crying statues to the simple feeling
within the Christian that God desires them to take a certain course of action
or beware of certain dangers.
Some of these instances have been
heeded while others have been ignored, and some have been understood as
accurate while others have failed to play out.
With this sort of inconsistency, direct, personal revelation is a topic
to be handled with great care.
To begin with, we have to ask whether
it is possible. Since God has directly
revealed Himself to people, such as Peter, Paul, and numerous Old Testament
prophets, we would have to conclude that God is capable of revealing Himself
directly to individuals. At the same
time, we also have to note that He has never promised that He will reveal
Himself directly to all believers, nor did He ever instruct us in the New
Testament writings to seek such revelations.
On some instances, we can rule such
revelations as certainly inauthentic because they contradict a known fact about
Christian doctrine or God’s character – for example, if a revelation encouraged
murder or directed one to trust in other gods.
Even for those that do not fail on those grounds, we still lack positive
verification of their origin. So, for
any particular instance of suspected direct revelation, the most positive
answer we could possibly give is, “Maybe.”
Another question that must arise from
this is what warrant is there for anyone else to believe the revelation or act
according to it. In this case also,
unless there can be positive verification of the revelation, others would be
unwise to accept its validity, lest they be deceived. So here it would be limited, at best, to only
the person who received it.
Even if such revelations prove to be
accurate, their accuracy does not necessarily equate to authenticity. For example, since the demonic world
possesses great knowledge (although not perfect knowledge, like God) of events
in the world, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that a personal
revelation, even when accurate, is a deception intended to distract a person
from God’s promised means of revelation or to open the door for them to later
accept a deceptions which threaten to undermine faith.
In contrast to these uncertainties,
we do have promises that God will reveal Himself in certain ways and
instruction on where to seek Him. The
most explicit and detailed of these is the Bible. God has promised that the words we find there
will prove authentic, and directed us there to seek Him.
Even the authors of the New Testament
directed their readers back to the Old Testament, and not to their own
experiences, to authenticate their claims about Jesus. And even the Holy Spirit, who often receives
credit in cases of direct revelation is inseparably connected to the written
Word of Scripture, as in the Gospel of John, where Jesus most detailed teaching
on the Spirit describes the Spirit’s work as reminding the Apostles of the
things that Jesus has already said – and not in revealing anything new.
God also reveals Himself as He washes
away sin through Holy Baptism and feeds believers with His Body and Blood for
the forgiveness of sins and to sustain faith in the Lord’s Supper. When we seek Him where He has promised to be,
we can have confidence that it is Him we have found and His gifts we have
received, rather than being left to wonder about feelings and intuitions which we
have no assurance are authentic.
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