However, as it is written: “What no eye
has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the
things God has prepared for those who love him— these are the things God has
revealed to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the
deep things of God. For who knows a person’s
thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one
knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is
not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that
we may understand what God has freely given us. This
is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words
taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The
person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit
of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them
because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with
the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not
subject to merely human judgments, for,” Who has
known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (II Corinthians
2:9-16)
Do not quench the Spirit. Do
not treat prophecies with contempt but
test them all; hold on to what is good, reject
every kind of evil. (I Thessalonians 5:19-22)
It’s one of those days
when we need to exclude what we are not talking about before discussing what we
are. There are some people who seem to think that every thought that comes into
their mind is from God. I can’t
guarantee that they are wrong, but I do advise caution with making or accepting
such claims. Paul advises us to test prophecies. We tend to think of prophecies
as foretelling the future, but the prophets of old didn’t only tell what was going
to happen. They also communicated the Word of the Lord to the people.
If a prophet spoke of future
events that didn’t happen or spoke what was contradictory to Scripture, they
were to be stoned to death. In order to do this, the people had to pay attention
to the Scriptures and to what the prophets said. In short, they tested the prophecies.
We must be careful that we don’t err in either direction, either discounting
everything as not being from God, or accepting everything as being from God.
But one of the challenges
Christians face is to the idea that we can know anything about what God thinks
about anything. The idea is that God is infinite (true,) other (true,) and
transcendent (true,) and we are not (true.) Based on that, how can anyone who
isn’t insane or evil possibly think they know the mind of God on any subject. The
second question, which is not as often specifically voiced, is whether or not
God can be trusted to not be lying about His will.
What Scripture tells us
is that we can know the mind of God because those who are Christians have the
Spirit as their Teacher, Comforter, and Guide. We may not know it completely or
comprehensively, but between what Scripture tells us, what nature tells us, and
what we have learned as we have walked with Him, we’re not clueless, either.
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