veryone has unexplained thoughts that seem to leap from nowhere into the mind. (Note: When I say "everyone," I mean believers and unbelievers alike; I don't necessarily mean "every single individual." I've met a few less-than-completely sentient people who seem incapable of any original thought whatsoever. They prolly never get spontaneous notions of anything. Let's leave those folks out of this discussion.)
Most people likewise have a sense of intuition, where at times you just feel like you know a thing is true and you can't give an account for how you arrived at that knowledge rationally. It may even seem like you have ESP, or ESPN2, or whatever. It's a lot like deja vu, only backwards. I happen to think that sense of intuition is probably more rational than we can explain. In any case, I'm quite sure it's not really a supernatural spiritual gift from God, because it has such a poor track record. Besides, I had the same intuitive abilities before I was converted as I have now.
My sense of intuition is sort of like a stopped clock that was designed to measure time in months instead of hours. Once or twice a year (on average) it's right. And when it's right, it can seem quite impressive. I've had some moments of intuition that I could have parlayed into a fortune, if I were the type of charlatan who is willing to claim he has a prophetic gift even when he knows he really doesn't. I certainly have no such gift. For the most part, my intuition is grossly fallible and ordinarily wrong. I don't trust it at all, even though my experience is probably a lot like yours: there are times when I feel compelled to follow my intuition.
To be clear: I usually "feel compelled to follow" my intuition only when I don't have a better rational or sensible idea of what to do. Maturity has taught me to hold off on trusting intuition and try to understand facts and reasons and the potential results of my actions before I act. In fact, I'd say that's what maturity is all about, to a very large degree.But, how do we understand that inner sense, especially when God seems to use it to prompt us to pray, or witness, or duck and run at precisely the right moment? Because let's be honest, here: that kind of thing does happen to most of us from time to time.
As I said in a comment-thread a couple of days ago (see below), we need to regard those occasions as remarkable Providences, not inspired prophecy. God might use a spontaneous thought in my head providentially. In fact, as a Calvinist, I don't hesitate to say that He ultimately controls and uses everything providentially. But that's as true of my sins as it is of the thoughts in my head. God can use them all for His own purposes. The fact that He uses an idea in my mind to achieve some good purpose doesn't make the idea itself inspired.
That's the point we are trying to make in all these various threads about prophecy and cessationism. It's an important point. We're not trying to step on the charismatic air-hose just because it's fun.
So please give these things some serious thought before you react this time.
Four lessons:
- If intuition is fallible (and everyone except the out-and-out-charlatan seems to agree that it is), it cannot be considered "revelation," even when it happens to be uncannily right in an instance or two.
- Since intuition is so fallible—and most would agree that it is actually far more often wrong than right—we shouldn't make much of it.
- Those who think those moments of intuition are God speaking with a private message invariably become extremely superstitious; they foolishly order their lives by their feelings; they commit the sin of trusting too much in their own hearts; and they diminish the more sure Word of prophecy. No one who knows church history, and no one who truly understands the concept of spiritual maturity can deny that Christians who follow the voice in their heads fall into those errors all the time, and it can be (and often is) spiritually disastrous.
- Since our intuitive sense is so grossly fallible, and since every sane, biblical Christian would acknowledge that it's dangerous to pay much attention to it, we should not try to elevate it to the level of a supernatural "spiritual gift." It most certainly does not resemble any of the spiritual gifts—much less the gift of "prophecy"—as we see those gifts functioning in the New Testament.
|
Our erstwhile prophet says, "I can only [testify personally to hearing God's extra-canonical voice] anonymously, for reasons I hope will be clear."
it," he insists, thus most plainly telling us the source was not his own mind. Would it be going too far to re-phrase him as asserting that his book 
10). Has He, well, you know...changed His mind? (I speak as a 
hort post here. Read fast, because it's going to get bumped right away.
Charismatics' narrations of their tongues-experiences, for example, always seem to include an ecstatic element. (Glossolalia is often referred to as "ecstatic speech.") And listen, for example, to our friend Dr. Warnock's response to John Piper's 
y cessationist convictions are 
Carefully check 
But then sometime after my first year in college, I heard Bil's father was seriously ill. Bil's dad was still a relatively young man (younger than I am now) but he contracted a kind of cancer that led to a lingering, painful death. His suffering was ghastly, and the final months of his life were agonizing for the whole family. They were unable to grieve and unwilling even to say their goodbyes, believing they could not acknowledge in any way that he was really dying. They had to make a "positive confession," insisting to one another that he was being healed, and claiming every conceivable hint of improvement as a sign of total healing.
Listen: Amen. I said last week at my blog that the AWANA method of studying the Bible is no good -- not even suitable for children -- and Adrian spells out the reason here well: We were always meant to experience God in powerful ways through His Word. God's Spirit takes the word He inspired and makes it living, active and personal to us as individuals today in the 21st Century. To my knowledge, there are no honest cessationists who would say otherwise -- and if there are, they had better get serious about actually reading their Bibles rather than waving them around as if the Bible was a flag or a big foam "We're #1" finger or something.
Which is fair enough, right? No sneaky ellipses or anything. But here's how Dr. Piper reads the section in question: 
The context of his statement is a reaction against the article in Christianity Today which seems to say that the only way we can make the testimony that God speaks to us today is if we hear a voice saying, "that money doesn't belong to you". Piper dismisses that idea plainly.
f it could be proved to be, as certain cultivated teachers would have us believe, that there is nothing very sure, that although black is black it is not very black, and though white is white it is not very white, and from certain standpoints no doubt black is white and white is black—if it could be proved, I say, that there are no eternal verities, no divine certainties, no infallible truths—then might we willingly surrender what we know or think we know, and wander about on the ocean of speculation, the waifs and strays of mere opinion.
ome minds are strangers to peace. How can they have peace, for they have no faith? They are as a rolling thing before the whirlwind, having no fixed basis, no abiding foundation of belief.
Such uncertainty suits me not. I must know something or I cannot live: I must be sure of something or I have no motive from which to act. God never meant us to live in perpetual questioning. His revelation is not and cannot be that shapeless cloud which philosophical divines make it out to be.
n certain circles of society it is rare nowadays to meet with anybody who believes anything. It is the philosophical, the right, the fashionable thing nowadays to doubt everything which is generally received; indeed those who have any creed whatever are by the liberal school set down as old-fashioned dogmatists, persons of shallow minds, deficient in intellect, and far behind their age. The great men, the men of thought, the men of high culture and refined taste, consider it wisdom to cast suspicion upon revelation, and sneer at all definiteness of belief.
ostmodern wisdom suggests that humility would actually keep us all from ever knowing with any degree of certainty or declaring with any kind of authority that anything is true.
"Nobler" than whom? Than "those [Jews] in Thessalonica." What was wrong with them? They were 
overruled our tradition.
Now, here's David as he's getting ready to unwind Ps 119, and he calls God's word several things: "your word", "your commandments", "your statutes", "the rules of your mouth", "your testimonies", "your precepts".
It may be startling to some people -- like atheists, for example -- to discover that the Bible is a sophisticated text written by literate men by the inspiration of God, but it should not be startling to Christians. And in that, we have to be willing to engage a sophisticated text with some level of literacy and -- if we may say this in circles which demand inerrancy and at the same time a "simple Gospel" -- sophistication.
