“And after that there came a gentle whisper” (I Kings 19:12)
Have you ever had someone say to you, “The Lord told me to tell you this.” I must tell you that I take those words with a grain of salt. I don’t know, perhaps that means that I don’t trust people. Maybe that is because I have experienced those words from someone I didn’t know well, or perhaps didn’t know at all.
When people say something like that it could mean that to them everything is the voice of God, and their relationship with God is contingent upon emotional experiences. That presents the danger of unknowingly living in pantheism. Pantheism is embracing one’s emotions and attaching God’s voice to their own desires, hopes, and dreams, turning them into something spiritual. If to them everything is the voice of God, then there is really no voice of God that they are hearing.
So how do we know when it is really God speaking to us? The Old Testament tells us of a prophet named Elijah, who while on the run from the wrath of Jezebel truly encountered the voice of God. The first thing the prophet heard was the noise of a great and powerful wind tearing mountains apart and shattering rocks. It turned out to be a lot of noise, but nothing else, for we are told “the Lord was not in the wind.” Then after the wind there was an earthquake. The force of that earthquake and the noise it produced must have been an almost deafening sound for Elijah. You would think that earthquake would have been the voice of God, but then we are once again told “but the Lord was not in the earthquake.” Lastly, we are told, there came a fire. We don’t know how large the fire was, or what it consumed. We can only assume that fire must have been accompanied by tremendous heat and brilliant, almost blinding flames. But one last time we are told, “but the Lord was not in the fire.”
Three physical phenomena that certainly caught Elijah’s attention as well as his emotions, but they didn’t seize his heart. Then finally the bible tells us, there came a gentle whisper. That whisper was what lay hold of the prophet. So much so that he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave he was in. It was at that point that the voice of God began to speak to him.
I believe that if God wants to speak to us, he will do so within us through his Holy Spirit. His gentle voice will communicate his will to us. For me, that is why I don’t put much stock in someone else telling me that God told them to tell me something. God can speak directly to me. Not with loud boisterous claims, but with that still small voice he used on the mountain with Elijah.
Darlene