Characteristics of Voice

 

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. (I Corinthians 2:14)

          It used to be that when parents wanted to summon their children in from outside, they stood at the door and shouted. Curiously, not every child who heard the shout responded. The biggest reason is that the summons was usually by name, but even if the names was missed by the hearers not everyone responded.

          Similarly, but even more to the point, all four of the neighbors whose property shares a boundary with mine have dogs. One is a yellow lab, one is a boxer, one is (I think) at least partly beagle, and one may be a Shih Tzu. Mine is a Shiba Inu.  So when I notice that a dog is barking, do I hurry to address the situation? No. Labs and boxers have big dog barks. The beagle-ish dog has a houndy bark. The Shih Tzu is a little yapper, and Grace doesn’t sound like any of them. I think I could even tell my previous Shiba from Grace. In my memory, Honey tended to say, “Rak, rak, rak.” Grace’s voice is more “awoo-woo-woo.”

In the eighth chapter of Hearing God, Dallas Willard asks how we recognize anyone’s voice. He notes first that there is a “quality of sound” involved. This deals a lot with tone and timbre but can also include quality. Big dogs tend to have big barks. Hounds have a sort of baying quality to their bark. Grace doesn’t howl, but there is a howl in her voice.

The second characteristic of voice, he says, is spirit. It may be “passionate or cold, whining or demanding, timid or confident, coaxing or commanding” (p. 174.)  He goes on to explain that God’s voice also has these qualities. He quotes E. Stanley Jones about the quality issue: “the voice of the subconscious argues with you, tries to convince you, but the inner voice of God does not argue does not try to convince you.” (pp 175-176.) He suggests that the characteristic Spirit of God’s voice is one of “exalted peacefulness and confidence, of joy, of sweet reasonableness and of goodwill.”  (p 177.) Jesus surprised His hearers because He spoke with authority so we can expect that His Spirit will also do so.

The third characteristic involves content. This requires prior experience with the person, but if someone were to hear “my voice” discussing polo or a rock concert, they would likely conclude that no matter how much it sounded like me, it was not. On the other hand, if one could have heard my brother’s voice talking about Tchaikovsky, or what can be gleaned from the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, that one could be sure that he was not the speaker.

The content expressed by one’s voice expresses one’s character. To recognize God’s voice we need to be acquainted with that character. But this is where we run into problems, because we sometimes take what Prof. Willard describes as “incidentals” as principles. This was the error made in the scene from West Wing that I’ve shared before. The president cited passages from the Law that the New Testament makes clear are not binding on Christians. Even in the Old Testament, the laws weren’t applied to foreigners unless that foreigner chose to become a Jew. Some of the laws in the Law are incidental to the Jews, and some of them are universal principles.

A second example is when Jesus told the rich, young ruler that the thing that he lacked was to sell all his goods and follow Jesus. If there is anywhere else in Scripture that makes such a demand on the rich, I have yet to find it. That was what the young man in question needed to do. It might be what you need to do. That doesn’t mean it’s what everyone needs to do. God’s voice will never violate the principles shared in God’s Word.

I’ve shared my fourth principle for recognizing God’s voice. If my immediate response is “no, no, no,” it’s likely that the idea is not mine. To this, Dallas Willard adds the sage advice: don’t presume you’re going to get it right all the time.