Dreams, Burning Bushes and the Voice of God

In the Bible, people are always being told what to do in dreams and bushes that don’t burn and angelic visits. Not only that, half the time what they’re being told doesn’t make sense. Go sacrifice your only child, the one who’s supposed to grow up and give you descendants beyond count. You’re gonna have a baby even though you’ve never had sex. Go, thou stutter-er, and tell the king of Egypt to free his slaves.

And they always do it. And it works out because it was God talking.

We set these people up as examples to emulate. But in my life I’ve had to learn to stop twisting that into a totally wrongheaded view of my will versus God’s will. A view that says anything that makes sense to me must, because it seems rational, be contrary God’s will. And any whisper in the brain suggesting something I don’t want to do must, by definition, be God’s will.

(I said it was twisted.)

As I get older, this neurosis has less power over me, but it was the focus of my spiritual life for years, most notably when I was battling anxiety. I believe now that it stems from the faulty understanding of Scripture that causes Scripture itself to be a stumbling block for so many reason-minded people.

Being modern people, we tend to take words at face value. Being people of written history, people whose grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents have been literate, we approach the Bible like a newspaper, rather than a compilation of tales and poetry passed down through oral tradition over the course of generations before it was written down. The book And God Said What? taught me a lot about literary forms of Biblical times. The author goes through the forms, most of which are no longer in use–hence our difficulty in making sense of them–and stresses that the point of Scripture is to communicate truths about God, not historical events.

People get really nervous about the idea that you can’t take every word of the Bible as literal, historical truth. We think if that’s the case, is any of it true? I struggle with this a bit myself, in all honesty. But again, that’s a sign that we’re imposing a modern sensibility, formed and steeped in the idea that you must be able to prove something scientifically in order for it to be true, upon people who just didn’t experience the world that way.

I think we’ve all at one time or another wondered, “Why doesn’t God talk to people the way he did in Biblical times?” And although it feels like blasphemy to say it, I can’t help wondering if many of those stories about dreams and burning bushes were less historical events and more images people came up with to try to explain to others how they experienced God’s presence, voice, and guidance. I knew a girl once, angry, broken, seeking and resisting, who sat in an oak forest in the fall and threw a challenge to the skies: Prove it, then. At that moment, an autumn breeze swept a cascade of leaves down and one of them landed on her palm. That was how she encountered God.

Modern audiences recognize that God didn’t literally pick one leaf off a tree and place it in her hand. At the same time, we recognize her encounter as genuine. That’s the form our narratives take today–and we’ve all seen similar stories come through on email and Facebook.

Discerning the right course of action is hard enough without placing unreasonable expectations for clarity on God. We’d all like to have a billboard with our name on it, laying out in black and white the “right” decision. But putting those kinds of expectations on God throws roadblocks in the way of faith. It’s time to stop expecting God to behave the way He does in stories and start paying attention to the ways He does speak in real life.

(This post is updated from one I wrote on my personal blog several years ago. I woke up thinking of it and decided to pull it out and share it here.)