The Voice of God

Don: When Jesus’s sheep hear the voice of the shepherd—God—what does it sound like? If we tell people God told us to do something, they are usually sceptical. But we all tend to think that if we do hear directly from God, our lives will be richer, better, and easier.

Your ears will hear a word behind you, “This is the way, walk in it,” whenever you turn to the right or to the left. (Isaiah 30:21)

God often seeks to talk with Man in the scriptures. Scripture therefore has many allusions to the sound God makes. For instance:

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:8)

But Genesis does not tell us what the sound of God walking was like. Was it the crackling of leaves? The snapping of twigs? Ponderous, thunderous, footfalls?

Several passages in scripture tell of the sound of God as one of “many waters”—something like the Niagara Falls, or a fast-flowing mountain stream, or perhaps the sound of waves crashing upon the sea shore. They include Ezekiel 43:2, Revelation 1:15, Revelation 14:2, and Revelation 19:6. Other passages tell of the sound of God as the sound of thunder: Job 40:9, Psalms 29:3, Psalms 77:18, Psalms 104:7, and Revelation 14:2. Still others tell of the sound of trumpets: Exodus 19:16, Hebrews 12:19, Revelation 1:10, and Revelation 4:1.

In scripture and throughout history there are stories of people who claim to have heard the voice of God directly. He spoke to Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:9), to Cain (Genesis 4:6), to Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3), to Jacob (Genesis 28:13-15), to Moses at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:4) and on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19:19), and in a still, small voice to Elijah (1 Kings 9:19). With one exception, all of the words voiced by God were in the form of questions.

We hear the voice of God at the baptism of Jesus, when he announced that “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased”, and at the Transfiguration, when again God said “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.” Peter called it “the voice of supreme glory” (2 Peter 1:16-18).

In most of these cases, the voice was clear and unmistakeable. But sometimes, it is not heard with complete clarity and understanding. Samuel mistook the voice of God for that of his mentor Eli. The voice is sometimes less direct and less confrontational than the examples just given. But not always: On the road to Damascus, Saul (soon to be Paul) was struck by lightning before hearing God’s voice loud and clear.

Perhaps the most unusual case is the story of Balaam’s donkey:

But God was angry because he was going, and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the way as an adversary against him. Now he was riding on his donkey and his two servants were with him. When the donkey saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way with his drawn sword in his hand, the donkey turned off from the way and went into the field; but Balaam struck the donkey to turn her back into the way. Then the angel of the Lord stood in a narrow path of the vineyards, with a wall on this side and a wall on that side. When the donkey saw the angel of the Lord, she pressed herself to the wall and pressed Balaam’s foot against the wall, so he struck her again. The angel of the Lord went further, and stood in a narrow place where there was no way to turn to the right hand or the left. When the donkey saw the angel of the Lord, she lay down under Balaam; so Balaam was angry and struck the donkey with his stick. And the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” Then Balaam said to the donkey, “Because you have made a mockery of me! If there had been a sword in my hand, I would have killed you by now.” The donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your donkey on which you have ridden all your life to this day? Have I ever been accustomed to do so to you?” And he said, “No.”

Then the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way with his drawn sword in his hand; and he bowed all the way to the ground. The angel of the Lord said to him, “Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out as an adversary, because your way was contrary to me. But the donkey saw me and turned aside from me these three times. If she had not turned aside from me, I would surely have killed you just now, and let her live.” Balaam said to the angel of the Lord, “I have sinned, for I did not know that you were standing in the way against me. Now then, if it is displeasing to you, I will turn back.” (Numbers 22:22-34)

What can we conclude from such strange stories about the voice of God? Sometimes it is associated with natural sounds such as wind, water, and lightning; sometimes with man-made sounds such as trumpets and harps. It comes out of remarkable sources: A burning bush, a donkey’s mouth. It is often loud, but sometimes still and small. And sometimes it is not heard at all! For example, in the Book of Psalms, David wrote repeatedly about the silence of God:

O God, do not remain quiet;
Do not be silent and, O God, do not be still. (Psalms 83:1)

The entire 44th psalm is a plea for God to say something. David took God’s silence as an apparent rejection of him and his people by God. The Good Shepherd’s sheep—both inside and outside the fold—can hear his voice calling to them individually by name (John 10). Why couldn’t David hear him? Does it have anything to do with free will?—In most of the scriptural examples where God speaks, it is usually in the context of steering an individual away from a wrong path.

David: In all of the instances cited, the voice is external. It seems to me possible that poetic license is at work in them and that the voice was in fact internal—the “inner voice” of God, the spirit, we have discussed so often. This would explain why the voice was accessible to “sheep of all folds”, since everyone is born with the Inner Light/Inner Voice.

The inner voice does have some persuasive power to guide people down the right path, but the individual still has the free will to override it, to ignore it, to smother it in a bushel. This is not to deny God’s supreme power, but it may be that the supreme power acts on a different scale—a divine, eternal scale—to our earthbound, time-bound scale. In the divine grand scheme of things, God’s Word is all-powerful, but that is not true at the local level.

Robin: The examples were all extreme situations where God felt he had to make his voice heard, so we should not be too upset if we never hear from him ourselves (beyond the inner voice). I wonder if the people in the examples were ignoring their inner voice in some matter of great importance and urgency, prompting God to resort to an external voice to get through to them.

Jay: Suppose I were driving my car along a road God desperately wanted me not to take and I suddenly found my car, like Balaam’s donkey, taking a different road apparently of its own accord. I get annoyed with the car for “acting up” and yank the steering wheel to make it go my way. It doesn’t work, so I stop the car, get out and kick the tires in frustration. This happens again, and this time when I kick the tires the car says, through the radio, to cut it out—that God wanted me to go in a different direction. Next day, I go to church and tell everybody what my car said. They look at me as though I am crazy.  As Christians we have no problem accepting equally outlandish scriptural accounts, but how do we recognize the voice of God, accept it, validate it, in the here and now? If we think we hear the voice of God, surely we would want to tell the world about it. I am not sure that authentication matters as much as recognition. There’s no way to authenticate the inner voice, but I think we can recognize it.

David: Scripture perhaps plays the role as surrogate for our inability (because we don’t want to be deemed crazy) to express that we have personally heard the Word of God. By assigning the voice to (say) Ezekiel 3 rather than to a voice in our head or heart or car radio, it somehow is accepted as an authentic audience. As Jay said, there can be no external validation for the inner voice. It is self-validating. You know it when you hear it. Authentication must be inherent in the voice—the Word—of God. If God speaks, how could anyone mistake it unless one were being willfully, wantonly hard of hearing?

Robin: In the scriptural examples, the messages seem often intended only for the recipient, though in some cases the recipient might be expected to report the message to others. Noah is a case in point: He felt he had to pass on the warning of the Flood but everyone thought he was nuts. Perhaps it’s a lesson that we ought not to dismiss as cranks those who claim to report the voice of God.

Charles: If one starts with the principle of a transcendent, eternal, creator God, then all of contingent reality is ultimately just a manifestation of God’s will. The history of salvation has already been written—God’s will will be done. From the moment that Man chose separation from God by taking it upon himself to determine what was good and what was evil, Man’s will was inevitably subject to perversion and error. God is the only ultimate moral authority. It seems we are prone not to hear the inner voice but rather we choose to hear voices that are not God’s. Thus we will never understand unless the truth is revealed to us. As it is revealed, are we willing to accept it of our own free will? In the Garden, there was fellowship and communion, but since the Fall Man’s free will has been predisposed to just the opposite.

Salvation history is the story of God continuing to reveal himself and giving Man the opportunity to choose to subject himself to God’s will—a choice Man consistently declines until the End of the Age, when judgment will occur because God hates sin. How do we know that? It seems to me that the Word created the universe, including Man, and that original Man could hear and understand it. God chose to memorialize his will in the form of the written Word. After the auditory and the written Word came the Word manifested as flesh in the form of Jesus. So the issue may not be one of failing to understand the Word but rather one of unwillingness to submit to it, to surrender to it, to accept it.

To the Christian, scripture is very clear that the way to rekindle the fellowship and communion with God is first, to love the Word, to love Jesus, to accept that Jesus lived and died to re-establish our bond with God; and second, to love our neighbor. It is not at all hard to understand. The problem is that we are fundamentally wired to make the wrong choice. We need to be open to the idea that God will manifest himself, rather than that we can seek him out.

Jay: If we are fundamentally wired to make wrong choices, it seems odd that God would appear to be, at least on the surface, more and more removed from us. As a father, I feel I have to intervene a lot more in my children’s lives when they are young than when they are grown. The younger they are, the less they understand of the world around them, therefore I intervene a lot. Is it possible that Mankind has reached a level of maturity that does not require the Father’s intervention so much?

God’s intervention with the Israelites through Moses was huge. It wasn’t just about an individual but an entire nation. How much of it was God’s will versus the will of the Israelites? If we are so far from God’s will, why does he not seek to close the gap by revealing his will to us?

Charles: I think he does. I can’t pretend to understand all the intricacies of God’s plan (though the attempt to find out might be part of the process of spiritual maturation). If scripture is God’s revelation, then it seems to me clear that the only way to close the gap between our will and God’s is through Christ.

We have a tendency to think doctrinally. It might be easier if we did not all have to accept Christ in order to close the gap. Such a time will come. The Word is clear.

David: One person’s clarity is another’s obscurity. My reading of the Bible in this class confirms my view that the notion of getting to God only through Jesus is true only insofar as it is so stated in English (or Hebrew or Greek or….) What scripture says is in human language but what it means is in divine language, and to me the meaning of the divine language is that everyone has the inherent capacity to hear the voice of someone like Jesus and to be saved even if they have never heard the name Jesus and have never read any human translation of the divine Word. The authentic voice, sound, and Word of God all seem to me to reside in the individual human being, not in scripture.

I am not so sure that we were separated from God at the Fall. Neither, it seems, is scripture, which tells us over and over again that we have an inner light and can hear God’s voice. If so, God never left us; he has always been there. This has been so ever since the Fall, as I read the Bible.

Charles: God grants grace to whomever he chooses. But we cannot get to him by works alone, by striving for what we think is good. God delights in mercy. But it seems to me there is a difference between those who have been exposed to God through Christ yet have chosen to reject the revelation, and those who have not been so exposed. If so, it is possible that God judges differently between people who were exposed to the truth but deny it and those who, through no fault of their own, were not exposed at all. God’s grace will save the latter.

Robin: The Prodigal Son’s father was not the one who left. God did not make the choice to separate from Adam and Eve. Indeed, he instantly set about getting them back.

Chris: In order to recognize something, one must already know at least some of its characteristics. A newborn quickly learns to distinguish its mother in a group of women by her voice. In the Garden, there was no distinguishing to be done since there was only one Father—until Satan introduced a new and conflicting voice, giving Man the problem of distinguishing between the two voices and determining which was the authentic voice of God. Scripture, and especially the life of Jesus, helps us to do that. Both voices—God’s and Satan’s—were hardwired into us in the Garden, and like Adam and Eve we still today face the problem of authenticating them.

Don: The temptation of Jesus (Matthew 4) illustrates that point. The devil sounded just like the Word of God by reciting scripture—the Word of God!

David: Before the Fall, were Adam and Eve able to distinguish between the good voice of God and the evil voice of Satan? How could they, if they had not yet eaten of the fruit? But if they could not distinguish good and evil—between God and the Devil—then how did they behave in the Garden? Were they good or bad before the Fall?

Charles: This brings out the chasms between the literal, the figurative, the allegorical and the metaphorical and so on in scripture. It requires much thought. If Satan is the ultimate example of pride, of being able to live without God, then both voices can exist simultaneously. But we can authenticate the one from the other through the Word of God as written in the Bible. It is not easy, but it is possible. There is even a sense in the Bible that acceptance of the Word trumps even love as the way back to God.

David: Is it “not easy” because in striving for righteousness one is trying to be God? Isn’t the message of Jesus precisely that this is not the way? And is not the message of the Garden that we are incapable of judging between good and evil and should not even try? To claim that we must understand the Word in order to judge between good and evil and be righteous is tantamount to striving to be God. I can see how that would be not easy!

Charles: If one chooses to accept God as the ultimate moral authority and accepts that he has in fact revealed his will through the Word, then to establish the goal of manifesting God’s revealed will and righteousness is not playing God—it is accepting one’s subservient position in the Kingdom of God and recognizing the supremacy of God—the King who makes the rules!   Without that ultimate authority, without a King, then everything becomes relative—nothing is absolute, including morality. The written Word is important because it maintains the absolute. Human pride has difficulty overcoming this barrier.

Robin: Righteousness cannot be earned, it can only be reflected.

David: I think we all agree that we cannot hope to understand the mind of God. If so, then scripture cannot help us except, perhaps, fortuitously, in dribs and drabs here and there. The Daoist has no scripture to speak of; only a trust that there is a Way (a faith that there is a God) and that in the end it is best to follow the Way (God) without seeking to understand it. The Way is to be found (but not to be understood) by listening to the heart, to the inner voice.

Don: We’ll discuss the hearing of two voices in more depth next week.

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