Romans 1v20 - For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse (New King James version)
God speaks through creation to men. All men, me, you, (even, gasp! ... them). Yes, it's not actual words like the ones spoken, written down and printed like the Bible itself but it is communication, you can't deny that. Like a beautiful landscape or a great painting or a good movie. Ask any artist and they'll tell you that any work of art is a species of communication. It's not in the same league as the entire universe but it's definitely the same language.
I love the movie "It's a Wonderful Life", the finale always makes me smile so hard to avoid welling up and blubbing like a baby. I love stargazing on a clear night in the countryside. You can see more stars there and the view is, to me, quite simply breathtaking. I remember the first time I drove through Glen Coe in Scotland and my heart seemed to just swell inside my chest with the beauty. These experiences 'speak' to me and the voice I believe I hear is God's.
I say 'believe' but that's to allow a sceptical reader to keep reading. Yes, I'm looking at you; but not at you, you know what I'm talking about. Having made that one concession to the sceptical I'm going to carry on as if we all were believers. The sceptics now know I'm not to be trusted but can carry on because I respect them and their beliefs and the believers can smirk.
Kidding.
Anyway, God speaks, through creation. Loudly.
Now, the Bible. Scripture. It's The Word Of God. It's definitive and it says, pretty much, everything that needs to be said about God, Man, and the relationship between us. It says a lot (I have supernatural understatement abilities). I'm probably going to share a lot about what I think it says in the coming days but just now that's not my focus. I'll get to it soon, have patience, or faith.
In his book "On Writing", the writer Steven King says that writing is telepathy. Yes, really, telepathy. It goes like this:
I'm thinking of a room, it's about ten feet square, richly decorated in blues and greens. In the centre of the room there is a table and on that table there is a golden cage; inside the cage there is a parrot.
Now, as you read that, look at what's happening. I thought of some stuff, the room, the decorations, the table and the parrot and you read my thoughts. The thoughts came out of my head through my fingers onto the 'paper' and you read them where they turned into thoughts in your head. This even works across time and space, I'm writing this on Valentine's day 2008 and I live in the UK, you the reader can be anywhere else, anywhen after this point in time and you still pick up my thoughts from there and then. Telepathy. Who knew?
Of course some noise gets in to the process. You didn't pick up exactly what colours blue and green decorate the walls, the cage is golden but is it really gold, you don't know, I didn't tell you. You have to use your own brain to fill in the details to get a proper picture, but you can, and the basic idea is still there. You got the parrot, right? Pictures help of course, the old adage of a picture painting a thousand words would be easily true for my little telepathy exercise. I wouldn't have to tell you exactly which blue and green, for example, you'd see it and know instantly - but it's still got thinking room in it, can you hear music in the room for instance. But you still got the parrot, right?
Which is starting to get to the point. Communication. Language. It's thought transference via a medium - words and/or pictures for humans, words, pictures, planets and/or near numberless galaxies for God. But the actual thoughts engendered by the medium, the actual stuff you process is really up to you and your own imagination, what goes on inside your head is entirely out of my control once the thoughts (my thoughts) leave my mind they take on an existence independent of me and they are subject to your interpretation. My thoughts are not your thoughts and my parrot is not your parrot.
God is in a similar boat, albeit a better appointed one. He can speak, but how you interpret the thought thus transferred is up to you, how you react to those thoughts is up to you. That's what Free Will (and we'll look at that some other time) is all about. You have the choice to make about what your reactions are about the words you hear - however you hear them. If you allow me to tell you how you should react to, say, John 3:16 then what you have done is choose my words over God's words. It's not my problem, you did the choosing, you chose to react the way I told you to rather than reacting the way YOU (your soul, heart, inner you whatever) personally thought you should, but the CHOICE was yours.
Which is, paradoxically, why you need to think and read as much as you possibly can so that the choice you make (me or God, good or bad, kill or heal) is as informed as possible. You need to know as much as you possibly can about as much as possible so that the choice of reaction you make is as true to you as possible. Don't simply go with what others tell you, think about it for yourself because they (me too) might be wrong and, well the choice you might make could have huge consequences (or not, I'm sort of exaggerating here to make the point; you don't need to be a master chef to decide whether you want waffles this morning for breakfast for example).
And here, kind of, comes the point.
You might not have the whole picture, you might, but on the whole I'm betting not. I know that I don't always have the whole picture whch is why I tend to qualify everything I say. Whenever a human talks to another human there will be something missing, guaranteed, I know, I'm human. So I must think for myself when it comes to another human's communication and what I do with it. You will have to think for yourself when you get to the end of this and decide what your conclusions are.
Whenever God speaks you can be sure the whole picture is being given, but you must then be sure you've heard it all. The human factor in a God to human exchange is at the receiving end, me in my case. God speaks to me from scripture and from the whole creation. I can't 'listen' to just one because to do that is to ignore as much as half of the message - just how wrong do I want to be. It's wrong to say one supercedes the other either because that is to deny the other as being God's communication - do you want to tell God he was wasting his breath with the Milky Way galaxy? Thought not.
To not think for yourself, to not listen with your complete attention isn't just rude, it's potentially a terrible mistake.
Thank you for your patience.
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