Do you want God to speak to you? Have you been desperately searching for a word from God? Many people want to hear from God, but they are uncertain exactly how to know whether He has spoken to them or not. Often-times I hear people say, “well, I think He spoke”, and other times people want so desperately for Him to speak that they become deceived and start believing a lie, sometimes for years. I hear the frustration of people when they say, why can’t God just make it simple to hear His voice!
Well, God has made it simple. God has spoken. And what He has spoken is so profound and so vital for each and every person, that once heard and received will change your outlook and your entire life. Today we will be studying exactly how and what God has spoken to us, and by seeing this truth, we will not be uncertain any longer.
These last weeks we have been studying about human perceptions, and how we often live life through our perceptions, rather than the truth of God’s word. We actually exchange the truth of God’s word for whatever our feelings, emotions and circumstances tell us, because we are in the moment and without realizing it, a lot of us live life on autopilot most of the time and never stop to think about what is true. I know that statement might put some people off, and I may be accused of generalizations, but let me give you some examples:
We know that God has named Himself our Healer (Psalms 103:2), Protector (Psalms 41:2-3), and Provider (Philippians 4:19). Yet our default response when one of these areas appears to be lacking is to try and find a reason why God has not come through, and we make excuses upon excuse… such as “I have sin in my life”, “He’s using it to test me or purify me”, “He wants to keep me humble” – these are all common phrases that I have heard believers say, and it’s almost an automatic response for most people… they just spout this religious language because they have heard it for years, sometimes all their lives, and they have accepted it to be true because it came from a well known pastor or someone that they trust, but it is not really Biblical at all.
You see, what we have been really doing is living sensual (that is, by our human senses) and defining our reality and what’s true based on what we can see, hear, touch, taste and feel, instead of by what the Word of God says is true; and when our senses tell us that we seem to be lacking something, we then begin to try and rationalize in our own mind the apparent need. We get mixed signals… there’s a mismatch between what our senses tell us versus what the Bible actually says – however we were never called to live by our senses, our feelings, our emotions or our experiences. We are called to live by faith. And that faith is the information of Jesus Christ and what He has done. (Galatians 3:9-14)
Take a look at John 1:14:
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelled among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Notice that the Word was made flesh. This is the Word of God. That very word of power, that very word of love, the very word that created all things, the very word that verse one of this chapter states, is God (the past-tense language there is speaking of the beginning of time – even back then, the Word existed, and was God).
So then, since Jesus is the Word of God manifested in the flesh, and we know God through Jesus (John 14:7-9), then we shouldn’t be trying to define what’s true through any of our human resources or faculties. In reality what we have done is reverted back to our own selves, exchanged truth for a lie, and because it is the truth that makes us free, we have jailed ourselves as well.
In Exodus 33:20 we learn that no-one is able to look at God’s face and live. That is a totally true statement – but it also carries a marvelous divine truth for us today; a manifold truth that each of us should know. Today we are able to behold the face of God in Jesus Christ… turn with me over to 2nd Corinthians 4:6:
“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Notice that it is specifically mentioned that God who has shined in our hearts, gives us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. You see, we behold the face of Jesus today, every time we look at the scriptures and see Him. I am not saying that the Bible itself is God, but what I am saying is that you can (and should) see Jesus when you read the Bible! To do otherwise is just a fruitless reading exercise. Again, you don’t need to take my word for it; in the previous chapter, 2nd Corinthians 3:15 states that a veil remains when the Law of Moses is read without revelation of the Spirit of Jesus Christ; and there are a great many people reading their Bible with wrong motives and devoid of understanding – not seeing Jesus but seeing dead rituals and laws which cannot save or justify.
However, when you truly see the face of Jesus, trust me, who you used to be dies, and you become a new creation. The light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ will shine in your heart and it will drive away the darkness.
And there is a lot of darkness today, many of us live by our senses, and our reasoning and our emotions, intellect and experience. In many ways we have reverted back to the way that seems right to man (Proverbs 14:12, 16:25), not realizing that it leads to destruction and death. Then we think that God isn’t speaking because we’re in darkness, and we are stumbling around in the dark and what we really need is for someone to turn on the light, and the light comes from Jesus Christ.
One of the curses listed in Deuteronomy 28:29, is that you will grope at noonday as a blind man gropes in darkness. In other words, you will wander and stumble around because of being in darkness and not having any light. And you will not prosper in any of your ways. And in verse 15 of Deuteronomy 28, the reason for all of the curses is If you do not listen to the voice of the LORD your God.
Now in their covenant, they were commanded to observe the Law of Moses… where do we find the voice of the LORD today for us? Ironically we have turned the voice of God into the very things that we have been discussing today: our five senses, our reasoning, our human thinking: “Oh I feel God here, I sense Him there”, “well, this person didn’t get healed so that’s not God’s will”, “He didn’t provide so He is testing me”, “this is just my thorn.”, “He’s punishing me for what I have done.”
I say this with all of the love of Christ: Stop that. It is foolishness. If we live that way by our own human faculties then we have stopped allowing Jesus to be our theology and made ourselves and our circumstances higher than truth, and we become deceived, confused and abused… all because of lies from the world, and the fall of man and the pit of hell.
Let me ask you a very simple question: If Jesus never said these things, then why do we? If Jesus never demonstrated these things, and He is the Word of God revealed, then why are they even in our theology?
We should be throwing these things away, not clinging to them to try and rationalize our current circumstances. If the things that we say and the things that we think do not line up with the revealed will and character of God in the life of Jesus Christ, then we need to stop wasting our time with those things and get rid of them!
If you still cling to the image of an angry, judgmental and demanding God based on the Old Covenant, then you are deceived because the entirety of the Old Testament writings in the tanakh (Law, Prophets and Writings) is all a type and shadow of the One which was to come, Jesus Christ and His Better Covenant with Better Promises based on the mercy of God. He is the New and Living Way, and you cannot put a new patch of cloth on an old garment (Matthew 9:16) – Jesus is not just a patch for your law-keeping. He’s not just a safety net for your behavior. Jesus did not come to make bad people good, He came to make dead people live again by giving us His very life. And you cannot put the New Wine of Christ into old wineskins.
If you go back and try to define God by the old covenant with the veil still on and without the light of Christ and the understanding of the Spirit of Christ and you fail to interpret the old testament through the lens of Grace through Jesus Christ, then you will be deceived every time. And a lot of people have been deceived in exactly that way and people have lived their entire lives in bondage with a wrong image of God in their mind, thinking that God is still judging them and seeing them in their sin when in-fact He is seeing Jesus and judging Jesus in them and He sees them as perfectly righteous in Christ Jesus.
Go back to John 1, and look at verse 18:
“No man has seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.”
Who declares God the Father to us? It is Jesus! Not a man! Jesus declares the Father and He has declared Him. So all the things that we tend to think… well, God doesn’t heal all the time, sometimes He choose to let people suffer and let people die, and sometimes He chooses to do this or that. If these things do not line up with the life of Jesus and His clear expression of the Father through His interactions with people on the earth, then throw out these false human ideas!
God cannot go back on His Word or His promises! God is not a man that He should lie! (Numbers 23:19)
We say God sometimes chooses not to heal, God said lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover (Mark 16:17). We make it a roll of the dice, maybe God will, maybe God won’t – He’s already spoken His word!
We assimilate all of this doubt through life experience, but Jesus never taught us these things. It’s time to re-focus and re-align to Jesus.
You cannot know God, or the will of God or hear His voice, unless you make the honest choice to throw away all of these man made ideas, these golden-calf’s that have been set-up, and look straight at Jesus and see Him, and the perfect image of God that He revealed through Himself. When you’ve seen Jesus, you’ve seen the Father.
Our last scripture today is Hebrews 1:1-4:
“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets,
Has in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;
Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high:
Being made so much better than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.”
Jesus is the perfect expressed image of the person of God. If you want to know the character of God, if you want to know His will and His intentions, then look at how Jesus expressed them through His life. And if your theology, doctrine, ideas, feelings or any other thing, does not line up with what you see in Jesus in His word, then get rid of it. It’s not worth it to hang onto something and to remain in darkness, just to protect something or someone else, including yourself.
God Has Spoken through His Son, Jesus. And His Word is Everlasting, does not change and is reliable and true for all time. You can bank on His word, and you can stand secure on His Word. His ultimate word to you is Jesus!