“Do you think that God might be speaking to me?” he asked. This young man was new to the Presbyterian Church and to Christian faith, and so had the audacity to wonder about such things. It reminds me of the saying: “A saint is someone who speaks often to God. A lunatic is someone to whom God often speaks.”
He’d been reading John chapter 5 — the story of a man lame and lying by a pool hoping for healing for 38 years. Jesus approaches this sad case and asks, “Do you want to be made whole?” And the lame man responds, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” When I read this passage, the lame men sounds like someone who feels good about feeling bad; the type of person who extorts sympathy by means of his woe begotten tale. This isn’t the way the young man heard God speaking to him by means of the story.
He said, “I was wondering whether these words were for me? Maybe God wants me to be someone who helps people who have no one else to help them?” This is a different sort of question than ministers often get. Often folks want to know whether it ought to be carpet or tile in the kitchen, whether the meeting ought to be Tuesday or Thursday. “Do you think its God speaking to me through the Bible?” he asked.
A question like that unsettles the clergy; it unsettled me. I know that we offer prayers for illumination in church before we read Scripture texts and preach. We lay ourselves open to the Word of God by means of the Bible and the Holy Spirit. I know that it is a bone fide profession in our Reformed Tradition: “the Word of God preached is the Word of God.” I have sung many, many times, “Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on me …”
However, confronted by this intelligent undergraduate in philosophy, who asked whether God was speaking to him, a member of the clergy can come to realize how shaped we are by secular, single-layered, late modernity. We find ourselves more comfortable with almost any explanation other than, “It was God!”
What runs through our minds is: “I wonder if he had a good night’s sleep” or “Isn’t this a case of self-aggrandizement,” or “The nerve: God, speaking to him?” or “That sounds like wish fulfillment — he’s at that stage of life.” I believe that the world in which we live has catechized and confirmed us all in explanatory atheism or at least cynical suspicion about any claim that God speaks.
It would be naïve, however, to contest that we sometimes (even often) are deceived by ego or ethnocentricity in our reading of the Bible. Our vanity, instability and need for inventiveness do co-opt Scripture to our own desire. It is true that we like to identify with the figures of the Bible that are the winners, the more rather than the less pious, the hero rather than the villain and sometimes we display too much interpretative imagination. Classical biblical interpreters, like Calvin, draw attention to our lack of piety, not to our lack of technical expertise, when they search for reasons for why we go wrong in Bible reading. The cultivation of a teachable spirit, a certain self-mortification and a willingness to offer grateful response is required of serious listeners for God’s voice. If the young man that came to my office had said, “You know, Jesus is a lot like me — healing people and all, I can be like that,” I’d wonder if it wasn’t Messiah complex.
Interpretation can go also awry when we get the words or the context of a passage just plain wrong. Sometimes what we think God is saying is just a mistaken interpretation, a failure to grasp what Scripture says. If the young man came to me and said that he felt God wanted him to be a pool-shark because of the story of the lame man at the pool whom Jesus healed; it would offend against the obvious sense of the story. I would be right to be suspicious about that sort of incompetent, misinformed interpretation.
The way the story goes, the words used, critical historical and literary context, rule this interpretation out. What’s more, there’s the larger context of the overall story of the Bible and calling people to be pool-sharks (with the implication of ripping people off) just doesn’t seem all that consistent with the main lines of the big story. Pool sharking wouldn’t conduce to the love of God and the neighbour; even if Jesus, the Saviour, does seem to have spent time hallowing the ancient equivalent of pool halls.
“Do you think that God might be speaking to me?” To admit that there may be a distinction between what I sense God says and what God says is refreshing. It opens a space for prayerful discernment with the church. The very fact that this reader of the Bible would submit his own sense of God’s voice through Scripture to the discernment of the fellowship provides, I think, a check on interpretative fancy.
When we say: “I believe … in the communion of the saints,” don’t we commit ourselves to a community of interpretation, with those living and dead, who have tried to read Scripture to discern the risen Christ speaking by means of it? It was Eli who helped Samuel understand the voice that he heard in the night as God’s voice, and to answer it (1 Samuel 3). Phillip was the one who taught the Ethiopian Eunuch correctly to understand what he read from the prophet so that he confessed and was baptised (Acts 8). And the clergy — Ministers of Word and Sacrament, even though we can shy away from it — are called to help Christians discern the Word in the words of Scripture.
I really do think that God spoke by means of Scripture to the young man who entered my office that day. I believe that because his was a call to waste his life, put it all on the line, for the sake of others. And there’s just something about hearing that sort of word that confirms God’s behind it. The pattern is strangely, hauntingly, familiar.
Study Guide for God’s Presence and the Bible
1. Discuss how you would respond to someone who asked you, “Do you think it might be God speaking to me?”
2. Why do we find it difficult, at times, to even countenance the claim that God speaks by means of Holy Scripture?
3. What are some of the checks on biblical interpretation?
4. Read the story of Samuel and Eli from 1 Samuel 3.
a. Why does Samuel have trouble discerning the voice of the Lord?
b. How and why is it that Eli knows what Samuel does not?
c. What might this story mean for cross generational Bible study and discernment?
5. Read the story of Phillip and the Ethiopian Eunuch, Acts 8: 26-40
a. What does the Eunuch find in Scripture without help?
b. When Philip interprets Isaiah, where does he end up?
c. What does this passage do to our idea of private bible reading?
6. Discuss the quotation from the article, “A saint is someone who speaks to God often. A lunatic is someone to whom God often speaks.”
