Category: Voice of God

The Day of the LORD – May 25, 2021

During the week of June 16, 2019, the word of the Lord came to me twice.  Prior to the first, I received a vision from the Lord.

I was in Massachusetts.  I saw a wooden box on a dock near the ocean.  It was shut up tight.  I had a deep desire to open the box, but I did not approach it.

The Lord then showed me a future time when the cover would be pried off and the box would be opened.  From that image I saw a path of destruction being torn through a countryside.  It looked like what happens when a powerful tornado tears through a region, but there was no funnel cloud and no storm.  I saw dust and grass being torn up and tossed into the air, revealing a scar in the landscape.  I saw houses and barns being torn to pieces, as though an unseen set of hands was tearing them asunder and throwing the pieces aside.

Then, the word of the Lord came to me, saying:

I will strike America from the head to the tail, and a scar will mar the land.  The scar will remain until the end.

Some days later, as I was in prayer, the word of the Lord came to me again.  At the time I had a rash in a couple of spots under my arm.  The word of the Lord said:

This is a sign to you.  A plague will strike your people.  Sores like these will cover the people from head to toe.

As I exposed the falseness of the idols of Egypt, so I will expose the falseness of the idols in which your people have placed their trust.  Children will rebel against their parents.  Medical science and its miraculous cures will be impotent in fending off the diseases that are yet to come.  Those who try to live in harmony with nature, will find nature turning on them from the insects to the animals to the very plants.  They will find no safe place.  For those who have come to rely on my steadfastness in maintaining the laws of nature, they will find what was once stable becoming erratic and unpredictable.

They must learn that I am the Lord, the one who holds the chaos at bay, who brings order and life, who sustains my creation by my powerful word.  What have been called laws are in truth my steadfast love, what has been called a cure is in truth my mercy.  Your people have assigned my glory to created things and, like their ancestors, have worshipped the creation rather than the Creator.  I have already turned them over to a debased mind, but soon I will upend their understanding of the universe itself to reveal the foolishness that has been embraced as truth.

Some years later, now, during the week of May 16, 2021, the word of the Lord came to me again and returned me to these instances two years prior.

Again, I was given a vision.  I was floating high above the earth.  I was able to see the entire east coast of the United States laid out below me.  It was in the evening, and I could see the lights of cities illuminating the earth.  Then, I saw beams of light raining down from the heavens upon America’s east coast, from Georgia to Maine.  The lights did not touch Florida.  There were thousands of little beams of purple and green light that began somewhere below me and were falling upon the coastline.

As the lights continued to fall upon the coast, they began to move inland.  From Georgia to New York City, they moved in as deep as Washington, D.C. (perhaps 200 miles).  The area upon which the lights fell turned dark after they passed.  But something different occurred in the northeastern states of New England.  The lights kept advancing until they had passed over all of New England, stopping at the border of Canada.  All of New England and sections of northeastern New York turned dark as the lights passed over.

Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying:

An ecological disaster is coming.  If I did not set its limits, it would wash over the whole continent.  It comes from the oceans, and boils come with it.  These are my locusts.

When I asked why the east coast and particularly New England had been singled out, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying:

The first Europeans who came to this land took it upon themselves to make a covenant with me.  I made no covenant with them beyond that which I have made with all who put faith in Jesus.  But, they took the initiative to covenant with me.  They swore an oath to sanctify this land to My glory; they covenanted to respect my teachings and to live out faithfully their trust in my Son, Jesus; they committed themselves to living faithfully before me so long as their colonies existed.

But, almost immediately they rejected the teachings of my Son, picking up instead the covenant I had made with ancient Israel as their own.  They did violence in this land, and their descendants have rejected me entirely as their God.  In the days to come, I will hold them to the vows they made before me.  Though I sought no kingdom on the earth, they pledged their allegiance to Jesus.  To this day this oath has been betrayed over and over again.

I have sent prophet after prophet, judgment after judgment, plague after plague upon their descendants that they might turn from their wickedness and fulfill the vows of their ancestors.  But, they would not turn.  They have given their hearts to foreign gods who are not gods and to the worship of created things by which they claim they have been made.

I release now the locust storm I have held back in my mercy.  A nation reaps what it has sown.  To those who are faithful, faithfulness will be shown.  To those who are faithless; faithlessness is their lot.  I am the Lord; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God Who became flesh in the Person of Jesus.  Hear, O people of the earth, and tremble.  I will no longer hold silent.  The sound of My voice will once again shake the heavens and the earth.  For the people of the earth have forgotten themselves, and the false gods, who are not gods, have fallen with them.  Woe to those who do not repent and turn from their faithless ways, for the day of salvation wanes!  The day of the Lord is at hand.

Reflecting on the Voice of God

~ J. Thomas Johnson ~

I am an academically-minded person who has been raised in a pietistic tradition. Oftentimes I have found these two aspects of my religious identity to be mutually complementary. However, at other times they have caused some conflict for me. Perhaps nowhere is this conflict more apparent than in my longing to hear God’s voice in my own life and experience.

Most of my training in exegesis and hermeneutics–that is, the tools, assumptions, and methods of biblical investigation and interpretation–came from two schools rooted firmly in what is often called the ‘theologically conservative evangelical tradition’—Gordon College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In those contexts I came to appreciate the distinction traditional Christianity has drawn between the way God spoke to and through the prophets and apostles who wrote and edited the canonical Christian Scriptures and the ways in which God speaks to us today. In these contexts, at least as I experienced them, it is deemed most appropriate to seek to hear God’s voice by a living engagement with Christian Scripture. In many ways I have found these exhortations persuasive.

However, my primary experience of Christian formation and community has been in the more pietistic tradition of the Church of the Nazarene, which has been shaped in fundamental ways by the American Holiness Movement of the 19th century. Whereas my formal education encouraged me to seek God’s voice through a disciplined study of the canonical Christian Scriptures, my pietistic upbringing also encouraged me to be suspicious of the sterilizing of God and His contemporary accessibility and activity that I was warned often occurred in the ivory towers of academia. As a pietist, I am convinced that God still speaks, and I long to hear God’s personal voice speaking personally to me in the intimacy of a growing relationship with the Creator of all things. As I have come to understand my own upbringing, the pietist in me is inclined to believe that the canonical Scriptures create space for God to speak, but the voice of God is more immediate, more immanent, and more personal than the voices preserved in the written Word of God. In many ways I have found these commendations to be persuasive, as well.

So, I find myself bearing the strange, and sometimes lonely, conviction that the Scriptures are inerrant (without error) in all that the writers of Scripture intended to contend for or against while at the same time being convinced that God did not stop interacting personally with His people after the death of the last of the Apostolic witnesses–that is, the writers of the New Testament. Consequently, and perhaps paradoxically, I remain convinced that God speaks to us, and yet, I am also convinced that the only place we can be certain we have heard God’s voice is in living engagement with the canonical Christian Scriptures. These are the tensions out of which I read Scripture, and before I proceed to reflect on the ‘voice of God’ today, I thought it best to place these assumptions on the table, so to speak.

So with these preliminaries before us, I want to begin to reflect on a story preserved in chapter 13 of the First Testament book of 1 Kings that has long perplexed me. After the death of King Solomon, his son Rehoboam became king over Israel. However, because of Solomon’s idolatry in the latter years of his life, God had covenanted to take the larger part of the tribes of Israel and give them to another, hence dividing the one nation of Israel into two. The man God chose to govern the northern kingdom of Israel was Jeroboam, son of Nabat.

Upon his coronation, Jeroboam began to move away from the instructions of the Law of Moses (Torah) almost immediately, and his motivations seem to have been primarily political. Rehoboam had retained kingship over the tribe of Judah, and it was in the tribe of Judah that the Temple of the Lord was located. Therefore, every time Jeroboam’s subjects were to celebrate the most important festivals of the yearly calendar, every time they were to make sacrifices for sin, every time they were to gather together to praise and worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a community, they would have had to enter into the jurisdiction of Rehoboam.

Jeroboam was a wise ruler. He realized that this reality could eventually destabilize his rule. So, his solution was to create alternative worship centers within his own borders. He placed one in the far south of his territory, in Bethel, and one in the far north, in Dan. He then instructed his subjects to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in these locations in place of Jerusalem.

Jeroboam faced another dilemma. The only family authorized to serve as priests were the descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron, and the only tribe authorized to serve at the temple was the tribe of Levi. It would seem that Levi was remaining faithful to the Law of Moses and serving in the temple in Jerusalem (or, at least, Jeroboam believed they would remain faithful). So, Jeroboam moved even further from the Torah of Moses by ‘ordaining’ folks to be priests in his new worship centers who were neither Levites nor descendants of the Levitical family of Aaron.

In response to these quite politically pragmatic decisions, which went on to plague the northern kingdom of Israel throughout its ensuing history, the Lord sent a prophet from the tribe of Judah to prophesy against the worship center in Bethel. 1 Kings 13 preserves his encounter with Jeroboam.

While Jeroboam was standing by the altar to offer incense, a man of God came out of Judah by the word of the Lord to Bethel 2 and proclaimed against the altar by the word of the Lord, and said, “O altar, altar, thus says the Lord: ‘A son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name; and he shall sacrifice on you the priests of the high places who offer incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.’ ” 3 He gave a sign the same day, saying, “This is the sign that the Lord has spoken: ‘The altar shall be torn down, and the ashes that are on it shall be poured out.’ ” 4 When the king heard what the man of God cried out against the altar at Bethel, Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar, saying, “Seize him!” But the hand that he stretched out against him withered so that he could not draw it back to himself. 5 The altar also was torn down, and the ashes poured out from the altar, according to the sign that the man of God had given by the word of the Lord.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), 1 Ki 13:1–5.

In response to this, Jeroboam entreated the prophet to pray for his healing, which the prophet proceeded to do. And, after being healed, Jeroboam asked the prophet to stay and eat with him. Then the prophet revealed another message he had received from the Lord:

8 But the man of God said to the king, “If you give me half your kingdom, I will not go in with you; nor will I eat food or drink water in this place. 9 For thus I was commanded by the word of the Lord: You shall not eat food, or drink water, or return by the way that you came.”

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), 1 Ki 13:8–9.

Then the prophet began his journey home, and this is where the story has gotten perplexing for me. On his way home, the prophet ran into what the text calls ‘an old prophet’, who would prove to be a false prophet. He told the prophet from Judah that he received a word from the Lord instructing them to eat together. The prophet from Judah believed him, ate with him, and, as a consequence of his disobedience to the actual word of the Lord, got mauled and killed by a lion. Yeah, that’s right.

At least three questions arise from this narrative for me: (1) How did the prophet from Judah receive the word of the Lord that led him to Bethel? (2) How was the prophet from Judah so easily deceived by a false prophet? (3) Why was the consequence for his gullibility so severe? I’m sure there are more questions that might be asked, but I want to think a bit about these three queries in the context of what it meant then and what it means now to hear the voice of the Lord.

I listened to a message this week by Nazarene evangelist Dan Bohi entitled “The Voice of the Lord.” Bohi addressed this passage specifically, and one of the things he seems to have assumed is that the prophet from Judah discerned the voice of the Lord in roughly the same way any of us would, perhaps as a sense or a feeling or a voice or an impression that comes to us personally in some way.

However, I think the details of the text suggest that prophets in these days might have been receiving a more direct kind of communication. When the false prophet reported the means by which he received his message from God, he claimed in 13:18 that an angel spoke to him. Angels (or messengers) from God are commonly referenced in the First Testament, and in every instance of direct communication with humans of which I am aware, the messenger always appeared to be a person and spoke real words into the real world. This experience is so common in the First Testament that both the writer of Hebrews (Heb. 2:2) and the Apostle Paul could maintain that the old covenant was given by angels.

19 Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made; and it was ordained through angels by a mediator.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Ga 3:19.

In fact, in every instance of the First Testament that I can recall, when God spoke to a person, He spoke either through a real, tangible messenger, by direct encounter with God, or by a repeated dream confirmed by a specified, alternate interpreter. What I’m saying essentially is that the First Testament seems to assume that the voice of the Lord was not a deeply subjective type of communication that was to be personally and individually discerned.

And it would seem that this is what tripped up the prophet from Judah in this story. The older prophet claimed to have had such an encounter, and the text implies, to my reading, that his son served as witness. Two witnesses were sufficient under the Law of Moses to verify such a claim, and so, the prophet from Judah assumed God had changed His mind. What he did not realize is that the older prophet was a false prophet intent on deceiving him. Was there any way he might have known to be wary?

The young prophet from Judah seemed quite clear on what God wanted him to declare in his confrontation with Jeroboam, which was confirmed by two signs (as required by the Law of the Moses)—the splitting of the altar and the shriveling of Jeroboam’s hand. He should have trusted the word entrusted to him. However, he did not allow God’s certain word to help him to discern the false word of the older prophet. He allowed the two claims to compete, and he paid the penalty for his gullibility. In fact, in Deuteronomy 13:1-4 the Law of Moses had already prepared him for this sort of a dilemma.

13 If prophets or those who divine by dreams appear among you and promise you omens or portents, 2 and the omens or the portents declared by them take place, and they say, “Let us follow other gods” (whom you have not known) “and let us serve them,” 3 you must not heed the words of those prophets or those who divine by dreams; for the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you indeed love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul. 4 The Lord your God you shall follow, him alone you shall fear, his commandments you shall keep, his voice you shall obey, him you shall serve, and to him you shall hold fast.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Dt 13.

The Torah had warned that God would allow false prophets to live and to thrive among the people of Israel as a means of testing the faithfulness of the Israelites. No matter how persuasive a speech, how miraculous a demonstration of power, or how truthful a teaching might appear to be, there was a sure test of its truthfulness built into the Torah. If the prophet who performed the miracle or spoke the word encouraged disobedience to the instructions of God, that alone was proof of falseness. The prophet of Judah might have known that the second instruction to disregard the first could not have been from God. Perhaps the consequence was so dire because the stakes of failing to discern are so very high for the people of God.

Jesus, too, it would appear was cognizant of this teaching of Torah. He affirmed as much in Matthew 5:17-19:

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.[5]

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Mt 5:17–19.

Jesus, too, insisted that however His teachings might be interpreted, they should not be understood as nullifying the Torah given to Israel. Paul’s use of Torah to mediate ethical disputes in the early church seems to flow out of this assumption, as well, as do the ethical instructions of the rest of the New Testament. Even the book that draws the sharpest distinction between the Old and New Covenants, the book of Hebrews, still exhorts believers to submit to the moral and ethical requirements of Sinai. For the writer of Hebrews, only those requirements of the Law completed by the ministry of Jesus both as sacrifice and as High Priest—sacrifices, purification rituals, separation rituals, etc.—need not be repeated any longer. My inclination is to believe that Jesus intended to clarify and perhaps even to expand Torah, but not to alter or diminish what had already been given.

False teachers and prophets proved to be as much of a challenge in the New Testament writings as they had been throughout the history of Israel to that point, and I suspect that their presence will remain with us as long as the Lord tarries. Further, my inclination is to be believe that the criteria by which falseness might be discerned today remains much the same as it was for Israel. To quote the Apostle Paul in Galatians 1, speaking on behalf, I believe, of the prophets of Israel and the Apostles of Jesus:

8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! 9 As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Ga 1:8–9.

Does God still speak today? I think He does. Will He speak a word today that invalidates the words He has delivered to us through the prophets of Israel and the Apostles of Jesus? I think the answer is no. May those who have ears to hear, listen.