“One of the distinctive truths about the God of the biblical revelation is that he is a speaking God. Unlike heathen idols which, being dead, are dumb, the living God has spoken and continues to speak. They have mouths but do not speak; he has no mouth (because he is spirit), yet speaks. And since God speaks, we must listen. This is a constant theme of the Old Testament in all three of its main sections. Take the Law: “… love the LORD your God, listen to his voice.”¹ And the wisdom literature in the Writings: “To-day, Oh that you would hear his voice!”² There are also many examples in the Prophets. For instance, Israel’s ‘stubbornness’ of heart, of which God kept complaining to Jeremiah, was precisely that they “refuse to listen to my voice.”³ The tragedy inherent in this situation is that what constituted Israel a special, a distinct, people was precisely that God had spoken to her and called her. Yet she neither listened nor responded. The result was judgment: “When I called, they did not listen; so when they called, I would not listen.” One might almost say that the epitaph engraved on the nation’s tombstone was: “The LORD God spoke to his people, but they refused to listen.” So then God sent his Son, saying, “They will listen to my Son,” but they killed him instead.

Still today God speaks, although there is some disagreement in the church as to how he does so. A few claim that he speaks to individuals nowadays directly and audibly, as he did for example to Abraham,⁴ to the boy Samuel,⁵ or to Saul of Tarsus outside Damascus.⁶ Nor should we claim that he addresses us “face to face, as a man speaks with his friend,”⁷ since this intimate relationship which God had with Moses is specifically said to have been unique.⁸ To be sure, Christ’s sheep know the Good Shepherd’s voice and follow him,⁹ for this is essential to our discipleship, but we are not promised that his voice will be audible.

What, then, about indirect utterances of God through prophets? We should certainly reject any claim that there are prophets today comparable to the biblical prophets. For they were the ‘mouth’ of God, special organs of revelation, whose teaching belongs to the foundation on which the church is built.¹⁰ There may well, however, be a prophetic gift of a secondary kind, as when God gives some people special insight into his Word and his will. But we should not ascribe infallibility to such communications. Instead, we should evaluate both the character and the message of those who claim to speak from God.¹¹

The principal way in which God speaks to us today is through Scripture, as the church in every generation has recognized. The words which God spoke through the biblical authors, which he caused in his providence to be written and preserved, are not a dead letter. One of the special ministries of the Holy Spirit is to make God’s written Word “living and active” and “sharper than any double-edged sword.”¹² So we must never separate the Word from the Spirit or the Spirit from the Word, for the simple reason that the Word of God is “the sword of the Spirit,”¹³ the chief weapon he uses to accomplish his purpose in his people’s lives. It is this confidence which enables us to think of Scripture equally as written text and as living message. Thus, Jesus could ask, “What is written?”¹⁴ and, “Have you never read?”,¹⁵ while Paul could ask, “What does the Scripture say?”¹⁶, almost personifying it. In other words, Scripture (which means the written Word) can be either read or listened to, and what it says is what he (God) says through it. Through his ancient Word God addresses the modern world. He speaks through what he has spoken.

And God calls us to listen to what through Scripture “the Spirit says to the churches.”¹⁷ The tragedy is that still today, as in Old Testament days, people often do not, cannot or will not listen to God. The non-communication between God and us is not because God is either dead or silent, but because we are not listening. If we are cut off during a telephone conversation, we do not jump to the conclusion that the person at the other end has died. No, it is the line which has gone dead.

The same state of being cut off from God is often true of us Christians. Is this not the main cause of the spiritual stagnation we sometimes experience? We have stopped listening to God. Perhaps we no longer have a daily quiet time of Bible reading and prayer. Or if we continue to do so, perhaps it is more a routine than a reality, because we are no longer expecting God to speak. We need, then, to adopt the attitude of Samuel and say, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”¹⁸ Like the servant of the Lord we should be able to say: “He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught.”¹⁹ We should imitate Mary of Bethany who “sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said.”²⁰ Of course we have to be active as well as contemplative, to work as well as pray, to be Marthas as well as Marys. But have we allowed the Martha in us to crowd out the Mary? Have we neglected what Jesus called the ‘better’ option?”²¹

~John Stott, ‘The Contemporary Christian’, in ‘The Essential John Stott’, Inter-Varsity Press, 1992, pp. 427-428

Notes

1. Dt. 30:20.
2. Ps. 95:7.
3. Je. 13:10; cf. Is. 30:9.
4. Zc. 7:13; cf. Je. 21:10-11.
5. Gn. 22:1.
6. 1 Sa. 3:4, 6, 8, 10.
7. Acts 9:3-7.
8. Ex. 33:11.
9. Dt. 34:10.
10. Jn. 10:3-5.
11. Eph. 2:20.
12. Mt. 7:16; 1 Thes. 5:20-22.
13. Heb. 4:12.
14. Eph. 6:17.
15. E.g., Lk. 10:26.
16. E.g., Mt. 19:4; 21:42.
17. E.g., Rom. 4:3; Gal. 4:30.
18. E.g., Rev. 2:7.
19. 1 Sa. 3:9-10.
20. Is. 50:4.
21. Luke 10:39.