Not Clueless

 

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.