If it ain’t in the Bible…

…it ain’t biblical. In my research on the English Civil War founders of my own church, I came to the conclusion that a single aberrant doctrine – Fifth Monarchism – had caused our Baptists in particular, and other Puritans more generally, a lot of trouble with both Royalist and Commonwealth governments that might, perhaps, have been avoided by more critical biblical thinking. It taught me the importance for every church’s leaders to “watch your life and doctrine closely,” which in this context means watching what your church believes or practices that might diverge from biblical teaching, with bad consequences. That responsibility is not, of course, limited to leaders.

One example, more than hypothetical. You send your young people off to a Noted Christian Youth Camp, from which in the course of things they will come back enthused from having sung their hearts out, heard the gospel (we hope), and had an intensely positive time of meeting other young people from church environments.

Note that I did not say “other Christians,” for nobody will deny that such a church-party will consist of some who have a real testimony of conversion, some who assume they are Christians because they been brought up in church and haven’t yet established their own faith, and some who don’t believe at all, but have come along to be with their friends, to see what happens, and so on.

So on their return, you hear, amongst the other enthusiastic reports, that all the kids were happy to participate in the exercise of quietly waiting on God to speak to them through the Holy Spirit, and many testimonies were reported of what he said to them. Applause. This is nothing new – my own children, even younger than such teenagers, were encouraged at Spring Harvest back in the 1980s to exercise spiritual gifts for each other, thus supposedly acquainting them with the supernatural power of God they can access. Nothing could go wrong there… a shame that only one of them is a Christian now.

But there is a problem here – or a number of problems, actually.

In the first place, nothing in Scripture, no doctrine and no example, teaches us that God routinely speaks to those who quietly wait for him to speak. That belief has, I know, become standard teaching in Evangelicalism, almost immune to contradiction. Proper prayer, we hear, isn’t just asking for things, but is a two-way conversation. But I say that is not what the Bible teaches, so it is unbiblical. And therefore a lie.

When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, he teaches them rather famously what to ask for, but gives no hint that they should expect a divine reply, audible or otherwise, as they do it. Paul, too, in urging a life of constant prayer in Philippians 4:6, says:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

Nothing here about God replying to those requests with a reassuring whisper: the prayer is the asking, and the reassurance is by faith. In this way prayer is about dependence on God, not conversation with God.

I don’t think I’m cherry-picking here. When Daniel’s prayer in Daniel ch9 was answered by an angelic visitation and astonishing revelation (not by God’s “inner voice”!) it is an exceptional experience even for an exceptional prophet. If you can find me one biblical example of teaching on prayer that advocates listening for a reply, I’m happy to reconsider, but I’ve not found one. That makes it an unbiblical expectation, however spiritual it sounds, and one prone to the deception of “the flesh,” or worse still, of demonic deception.

Secondly, John’s gospel describes the Holy Spirit as “the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.” In fact, the Holy Spirit is spoken of as the demarcation between those who are truly saved, and those who are not. Those who have Christ have the Spirit, who is their guarantee and deposit for eternal life, but those without Christ also lack the Spirit, whom the world cannot receive, said Jesus in John 7:39. That’s not to preclude the Spirit’s speaking through an unbeliever (like Annas the High Priest saying that one man must die for the people), nor to deny that it is the Holy Spirit who brings conviction of sin to the unconverted, sometimes dramatically, or even through a dream or vision (witness Paul himself).

But if we believe in the necessity of conversion from Satan’s darkness to Christ’s light at all, then the “demarcation criterion” between the two is communion with God through the Holy Spirit, made possible only by faith in the shed blood of Christ. If we believe that, what on earth are we doing asking unconverted young people to expect to hear God’s guiding voice as they quieten their hearts? Come to that, what is the Alpha Course doing in encouraging both the converted and unconverted to experience the manifestations of God at the Holy Spirit Weekend?

This doctrinal confusion is bound to guarantee unproductive spiritual outcomes that might be lifelong. If God does not make any promise to speak to us, whether by word, mental impression, picture or anything else, as we pray or meditate, then where does the impression that he has so communicated come from? Very specifically, where does it come from in those people who don’t ever go on to become true disciples, which any honest appraisal will accept is a common outcome?

If they are encouraged by Christian leaders to expect to hear God’s voice, and God does not feel bound co-operate with their unscriptural teaching, then the honest young person will have to accept that God has not so favoured them, creating either unbelief in God, or doubts about their spiritual condition, whether or not they are truly converted. Or else, the young person will have to interpret whatever random thoughts or interior discourse they are having as the expected communication from God. In a Christian environment, that purely psychological “output” may well make enough sense to be helpful (“I saw Jesus on the cross”). Or it may be entirely random, and be helpfully interpreted by others (“I just saw a picture of doughnuts.” “Perhaps that means that God wants to fill you with his Spirit, as doughnuts are full of jam…” – come on all you charismatics, you know that happens all the time).

In this way, they are being trained for a lifetime of mistaking their own trivial thoughts for the revelation of the Holy Spirit, perhaps in preference to the undramatic work of studying the Scriptures. This is what forms the basis of hypercharismatic occultism, from false prophecy to deliberately induced “astral projection” to visualise heaven. Imagination as revelation is utterly worthless.

Of course, since the same mistake may be made by the unconverted young person as by the saved, unregenerate sinners are being primed to believe they already have a hotline to God, and therefore are already bound for heaven. A damnable error, perpetrated by their teachers. This may even expose them, without the protection of the real indwelling Holy Spirit, to actual demonic deception. It is hard to see videos of people convulsing and foaming at the mouth at Toronto Airport Vineyard or Bethel without suspecting that the disorder (see 1 Corinthians 14:33) is more demonic than merely psychological.

Those of us with any experience at all of human behaviour will also recognise that, if the key members of your peer-group are hearing weird or wonderful things from God, whether through strong faith or increased suggestibility, then the pressure to conform and make up stuff is almost irresistible, especially in the teenage years. The immediate danger is in knowing oneself to be a fraud (and consequently either feeling an outsider or maybe wondering if the others are faking it too). The more serious danger is that your “testimony” is so convincing to others that you become part of the “inner circle,” which compels you to make more stuff up in order to “save face.”

What if you are then asked to share your experience in church, for adults love to hear how God is at work supernaturally in their kids? The psychology then gets complicated, depending of course on individual personality traits. But it’s dangerous to your soul whether you get used to your Christian life being about lying to others, or whether you cope with the stress by coming to believe your own lies.

There are many examples of the latter: one of the girls who, late in life, owned up to faking the photos of fairies that made them famous, still maintained that they saw real fairies too. Similarly kids who became famous after almost certainly faking UFO pictures found it psychologically necessary to insist on their reality even into old age. One of the bizarre things someone like the excellent Costi Hinn will explain is that although his uncle Benny is well aware he’s a con-man, he still seems to believe in his own anointing by God. Such habits of lying, it seems, foster narcissistic personality disorders.

The true prophet knows the voice of God contrasted with his own. And the ordinary believer begins to recognise when some leading or providence is more than merely natural, though that sense is all too fallible. But if Scripture does not encourage us to expect God to speak to us routinely (and it does not, unless you can show me otherwise), it is because it is not for our benefit to believe he does. In fact, he even puts obstacles in our way, by making the command not to take the Lord’s name in vain (that is to claim he has said something he hasn’t) up there close to the top of the Law of Love. Why doesn’t that clear commandment induce holy fear?

The Bible, then, appears to be quite plain on this issue. The question is, what motivates modern Evangelicals to ignore it and teach impressionable young people to ignore it too, whilst hypocritically holding up the Bible as their sole spiritual authority? I refer you back to the early Baptists and Fifth Monarchism: some human desire came to outweigh the desire to live by the limitations of God’s word.