It is sometimes assumed by modern readers
that when believers in the Bible heard a message or saw a vision while praying,
it was something people perceived with their physical eyes and heard with their
physical ears. If anyone else had been present with these believers when they
heard God speak or received their vision, we sometimes assume that they too
would have heard what the recipient heard and seen what the recipient saw.
Since few if any of us today hear God audibly or in any sense see God physically,
we can easily conclude that the dynamic way in which God intersected with the
lives of believers in Scripture is no longer available to us today.
While the Lord did sometimes interact with
his people in a physically observable way—for instance, when the Lord led the
Israelites in the wilderness—this was not the ordinary way God related to his
people.
God’s ordinary mode of communication, both
in biblical times and today, is to speak and appear to those who have the
spiritual capacity to hear and see spiritual realities (Ez 12:2, Mat 11:15;
13:9-19; Acts 7:51). It is a spiritual hearing and seeing and as such it is a
private experience, given only to the one intended by God to receive it. In
other words, it is an experience that took place in what today we would call
the imagination.
For example, young Samuel heard the voice
of the Lord, but Eli could not hear it (1 Sam 3:2-10). When Daniel received his
vision of a man by the Tigris River, he said that he “alone saw the vision; the
people who were with me did not see the vision” (Dan 10:7). What is more Daniel
referred to the other visions he received as revelations that “passed through
my mind,” implying that they were subjective experiences (Dan 7:1, 15). He
referred to the visions of Nebuchadnezzar in the same fashion (Dan 2:28, 30;
4:5).
The Hebrew words commonly used for “vision”
indicate their subjectivity. The words hazon and hizzayon indicate a unique
kind of seeing, something that is distinct from ordinary physical seeing. Also,
the word for “prophet,” one noted for his receptivity to visions, is hozehl, or
“seer”—one who sees what others cannot see. Prophets see what they see because
they are “in the Spirit,” as John said (Rev 1:10). The assortment of symbolic
images and words recorded in the book of Revelation were not things anyone
other than John could see. They took place in his Spirit-inspired imagination.
The private and imaginative nature of this
spiritual hearing from God is also indicated by the fact that there seems to be
no clear distinction between a vision and a dream. The two are virtually
equated, as when Isaiah spoke of certain nations to be destroyed. He said they
would be “like a dream, a vision of the night” (Is 29:7). The only real
distinction that can be made is that vision generally occurs while one is
awake, while dreams come when one is asleep. Both are internal spiritual
experiences. They both consist of images in the mind. They both take place in
the imagination.
To many modern Western people, of course,
saying the dreams or visions of the Bible took place in the imagination sounds
like I’m denying their authenticity. Therein lies the problem: we often
identify the imagination with make-believe, but ancient people in general, and
people in biblical times in particular, did not. Rather, they generally
understood that the imagination was a means through which God could communicate
with his people. God spoke to his people by “what passes through the mind.”
The total foundational content of what God
wants his people to know, of course, is revealed once and for all in his
inspired Word, the Bible. When God speaks to his people today, he does so not
to add to biblical revelation but to apply it.
While sleeping or awake, God communicated
then and communicates now to those who are receptive to the things he wants
people to hear and see.
He inspires the imagination. God wants to
be known by his people in concrete, vivid, personal, and transforming ways. And
this has never ceased. God is still sending signals, as it were, but we have
too often discredited those signals by writing them off as make-believe. Do you
have eyes to see and ears to hear? —Adapted from Seeing Is Believing, pages
84-86 - Greg Boyd
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