STR Ambassador
March 15th 2004, 02:01 PM
What's Wrong with "Experiencing God"
by Gregory Koukl
I'm deeply concerned about the Experiencing God curriculum authored by Canadian Baptist minister Henry Blackaby. The book has been around since 1994 and has become a Christian best-seller. Over a million Christians have been taught this material in churches all over the country, including Southern California.
There are a number of things in the book about being a Christian and following Christ that I think are worthwhile. It's the main point of the book, though--not the useful side issues--that is the problem, as I see it.
The goal of Experiencing God, of course, is to teach Christians how to experience God. According to Blackaby, this phrase means something very particular. All one has to do is read the back cover of the book to see this quite clearly: "Experiencing God challenges Christians to experience the fullness of a life lived in a fellowship with the loving, personal God. God reveals Himself to each of us in special and exceptional ways, so our perception of Him is unique." [emphasis mine]
On Blackaby's view, experiencing God--and experiencing the fullness of the Christian life--depends on receiving direct, first-person private, special and unique revelation from Him. Experiencing God is replete with examples of such experiences, so there is no confusion about what Blackaby has in mind.
First-person private revelation is a communication from God that is not directly available to other people, even in principle. If you get information from a dream, a vision, or an inner communication from God, that is first-person private. If you get information from a book, like the Bible, that is third-person public. I can read the same book you are reading. Prophecy given in the church is third-person public, even though it is miraculous. Angels appearing to the apostles is third-person public. Even though it also is miraculous, everyone has equal access to it. It's public.
Of course, you can see the value of third-person public sources of information. If you and I are both reading the same Bible and you say it means one thing and I disagree, we can both look at the words in front of us and assess them, trying to come to a clearer understanding of their truth. However, if you have a first-person private revelation, I have no access to it except as you are willing to share it with me. This is why, historically, first-person private revelation has been reserved to a very select group of people: prophets, Jesus Christ, the apostles, or those with unique gifts in the Body of Christ. In each case, first-person private revelation is given to a properly qualified select few who then pass it on to the rest of the church to study it in a third-person public way.
The main thesis of Experiencing God is that this kind of special revelation isn't unique, but meant to be an ordinary part of every Christian's life. That's what it means to "experience God"--receiving first-person private, unique, and special revelation from God on a regular basis. If you are not regularly getting revelation like this from God, then you are not experiencing God in the sense that Blackaby has in mind. And since experiencing God in this sense is "the core of the Christian life" (Blackaby's phrase), if you are not "hearing the voice of God" the way Jesus, Moses, and the apostles heard it (Blackaby's examples), then you are not living the Christian life. You may be saved, but you are not living the Christian life.
Blackaby attempts to make a biblical case by citing verses like John 10 ("My sheep hear my voice") and pointing to examples of Jesus, Moses and Paul, etc.
I will tell you unequivocally, though--and I have studied this issue a lot--this doctrine, as it is taught in Experiencing God, is not biblical. The Bible does not teach that we are each to hear the voice of God, in that sense, as a regular Christian discipline. It does not equate hearing the voice of God with experiencing God or even with knowing God (Blackaby's misapplication of Jesus' words in John 17).
There is no instruction in the Scriptures guiding us in learning such a skill. Further, this notion is not modeled in the book of Acts or anywhere else as a Christian discipline in the way that Blackaby claims. There are some occasions of special revelation, but they are unique on their face. And in virtually every case they are not first-person private, but third person public.
So Blackaby is teaching as a core, principle Christian discipline--what it means to be a functioning, full-fledged Christian--something the Bible never justifies, never teaches, and does not model. This is a serious problem, as far as I am concerned.
In one way this is not surprising. It is fully in keeping with the spirit of the age: relativism, extreme individualism, and extreme subjectivism. Truth is in the experience.
I have no reason to believe Mr. Blackaby is not a Christian, and I think he is very well intentioned. I just believe he is seriously in error here. He is unwittingly causing the church to embrace aggressively the spirit of the age in which subjective experiences are the source of truth, not the revealed Word of God. Though Blackaby expresses a high view of Scripture, I think his understanding of experiencing God seriously undermines it.
I realize that to many people who feel they have benefited from this curriculum, my comments are tantamount to denying the deity of Christ. I'll take it further. I think a lot of people are more offended at me taking exception with something like Experiencing God than they would be if I actually pressed a heretical notion of the deity of Christ. This shows the tragic straits the church is in. I have been called a heretic for taking exception with the idea that we should expect God to talk to us, giving us regular, special revelation for our lives as He lays out His personal plan for us.
Think about what this charge of heresy means. A heretic is someone who denies a doctrine essential to the faith. Those people who think I'm a heretic for saying that the Bible does not teach we can hear the voice of God (in Blackaby's sense) apparently think that such a capability is a core doctrine of the Christian faith, ergo the charge of "heretic" to those who reject it. It's not a core doctrine.
As J.I. Packer has pointed out, this view is at the most no more than 150 years old. This is a new teaching in the church that reflects not the spirit of Christ but rather the spirit of the age: relativism.
This teaching is terribly destructive. I think this book is the most dangerous thing to hit the church since Benny Hinn's Good Morning, Holy Spirit, and it's dangerous for almost all the same reasons. The unfortunate thing is that, while Good Morning, Holy Spirit appealed more to a somewhat fringe element, Experiencing God has found its way into mainstream evangelical churches, groups that are in most ways sound and biblical. Blackaby has unwittingly taken the subjectivism of the age, baptized it with spiritual language, justified it with poor proof-texts, and then presented it as classical Christianity, the standard by which Christians should judge the richness of their spiritual life.
In response, some will say, "Whatever happened to the apostles in the book of Acts should happen to us, too." That's a mistaken way of thinking. Simply because you see examples of special revelation in the lives of the apostles--miraculous events--doesn't mean we ought to expect the same thing in our lives today.
Just take the equation at face value. Why would anybody believe that just because it happened to the apostles it should happen to us? By very definition, apostles were a unique breed. I'm not arguing that there should be no supernatural events in our lives and that God can't speak if He wants to. I'm just taking this statement at face value: "It happened to the apostles, Jesus, and Moses, therefore it should happen to us." That's an incredible leap of thinking, it seems to me. Just because it happened to the disciples doesn't mean it should happen to us.
Secondly, there is no evidence that the church ever modeled this teaching. I went through every single verse in the book of Acts to try to find evidence of first-person private revelation. Do you know what I found? There were only seven cases of first-person private revelation based on the definition I just gave--only seven in the entire book of Acts. Every single clear case of information given, every single one of them, was a vision.
Visions are what's modeled in the book of Acts, not hearing the voice of God, and even the visions are exceptional occurrences. In his book, though, Blackaby is not promoting the ability to see visions. This is not something you have to learn, getting better at it as time goes on. Visions come on their own. Instead, Blackaby contends that we have to learn to hear the voice of God. That is not modeled in the New Testament. It is not there. (By the way, if this is really the core concept of the Christian life, why did it take almost two millennium for the church to wake up to this fact?)
This is a hard issue to talk about, in some ways, because "hearing from God" is a notion accepted by so many Christians as being a normal part of the Christian life that just to take exception with it is enough to question one's salvation, as mine has been on a number of occasions. But though this view is an accepted one, it's also a largely unexamined notion.
It is a reflection in our American culture that Christianity has become excessively individualistic and excessively subjectivistic. People have cashed out the notion of relationship with God almost completely in experiential terms, allowing a curriculum like this to flourish.
I do agree that when you look in the Gospels and in the book of Acts, you see miraculous happenings. I'm not taking exception with the possibility of the miraculous here. The question is not whether God can work miraculously. He can and often does. The question is not even whether God can speak individually to people. He can, He has done so in the past, and I'm sure He still does sometimes even now.
The real question, rather is this: Does the Christian have a right to expect first-person private revelation from God on a regular basis? Is it appropriate for any Christian to claim he has received such revelation? Is this, in fact, what it means biblically to be a fulfilled Christian who experiences God?
The answer is a resounding "no" to every one of those things. The Scripture does not teach this as a doctrine or as a discipline. It does not encourage people to listen for a unique, private revelation from God. In fact, the only word the Bible encourages us to take heed to is the revealed, written, canonical Word of God given by the apostles, a revelation that is third-person public, not first-person private.
I was just reading 2 Corinthians where Paul makes a rigorous defense for his apostleship, his right to speak for God. In John 14:11, Jesus, when he spoke for God, said, "Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me; otherwise believe on account of the works themselves." When prophets spoke for God, they signed their testimony in their own blood. They put their lives on the line for the truthfulness of their claims. It ought to be obvious to everyone that to claim God has spoken to an individual is, biblically speaking, a remarkable claim that requires massive justification. The prophets, the apostles, and even Jesus Himself understood this.
What about the gift of prophecy or the gift of knowledge or word of wisdom? I'll say first of all that I believe in the perpetuity of spiritual gifts, so I'm charismatic in that regard. I am not questioning the possibility of God working through gifted people, like prophets. Yes, I believe such things are possible, biblically. That some are given the gift of prophecy or knowledge is not a debate for me. But should everybody be a prophet, receiving God's word directly? No. But that is, essentially, Blackaby's claim. That's my deep concern.
The problem with invoking the word of knowledge or wisdom in this regard is that the Bible never gives us any information about what a word of knowledge or a word of wisdom is. The text makes passing reference to it and that's it. So we can't be dogmatic about what it entails. It could be quite a number of things and we can speculate about it. What we can't do is assume things we don't know with any certainty about word of knowledge and then apply them dogmatically to the general experience of Christians.
Another way of putting it is, I don't have to answer the question of what a word of knowledge is and how it works in order for me to say that Blackaby's understanding of experiencing God is not biblical. Yet I've had that kind of response many times. I may not be sure about word of knowledge, but one thing I am certain of--and I'm able and willing to defend it: The doctrine of hearing the voice of God is not taught in the Bible. In fact, we see quite the opposite.
Regarding John 10 where Jesus says "My sheep hear my voice and follow me," let me make a couple of observations very quickly.
First of all, John explicitly mentions that when Jesus was speaking here He was using a figure of speech. In other words, Jesus didn't literally mean we ought to hear His actual voice. Indeed, the Jews were already hearing His voice in that sense when He made this statement. His mention of hearing His voice is a figure for something else entirely. What does the figure refer to? The effective call of the Holy Spirit drawing people into salvation.
This ought to be very obvious to anyone looking at the context. The Jews were hearing the words of Jesus but not heeding them. Why not? Jesus says because they were not His sheep. "But you do not believe, because you are not of My sheep. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand." (John 10:26-28)
In other words, Jesus' sheep hear His "voice" before they are saved, they respond to the "voice" and then receive eternal life. Jesus is talking about the call of the Holy Spirit to unregenerate people. He is not talking about on-going conversations with God in which Christians get daily instructions from Jesus by hearing His voice. This is a complete misapplication of this verse.
I realize that many people are going to be upset at what I've said because they have gone through the Experiencing God curriculum and feel they have benefited from it. I do not make the claims I've made here lightly. There are a number of things I see in this material that are serious problems.
First, it presumes a view of God's will that I think is unbiblical, that God communicates His unique desires for each one of us and we are then to follow the blue-print He lays out for us, piece by piece. I deal with this in a four-tape curriculum that Stand to Reason provides called "Decision Making and the Will of God." It is very thorough. You get all of my notes and you can follow my critique verse by verse to see if I'm dealing with the Scriptures accurately.
Second, Blackaby uses very questionable proof texts. Some of his references are atrocious. Even his proof-texting is relativized when he says that the Holy Spirit will show you the true interpretation (i.e., his interpretation).
Third, Blackaby imports completely unbiblical ideas into his argument as if they were biblical. For example, he says that prayer is communication with God and that all real communication is two way. We talk to God and God talks to us. This is false. There are no texts that I know of that suggest prayer is two-way communication. This is a modern definition of prayer, unknown to the biblical text or to the church for two thousand years.
Fourth, Blackaby assumes that miraculous events that seem exceptional by nature are actually to be the norm in the Christian life.
Fifth, Blackaby takes his view of knowing the will of God and hearing the voice of God as features of the normal Christian life. If you don't have this ability, then you are not experiencing real Christianity.
Here is the most serious problem, though. Blackaby does not put it together like this, but I think what follows is a fair conclusion of the effect of his view that will make it clear just how dangerous it is.
Blackaby teaches that Christians ought to hear the voice of God. Now, when God shows Himself in some way, that is called "revelation." When He reveals Himself by speaking, that is called "special revelation." According to Blackaby, then, each Christian should be receiving unique, special revelation from God. That is a necessary part of what it means to live a real Christian life.
Now watch where this thinking naturally leads. On this view, there turns out to be two special revelations. We have the special revelation of the Scriptures, and we have the special revelation of God's unique word to the individual Christian. Both are inerrant, by the way, and infallible. Though the voice of God to individuals is not the same as the Scriptures in the sense that the Bible is meant to be for the whole church and the voice of God is for individuals, the individual voice of God is still a word of God and therefore, of necessity, inerrant and infallible. God is incapable of error regardless of where He speaks.
This sets up an odd situation. We have the infallible word of God in the Scriptures and we have the infallible voice of God to you. There are two revelations of God, but only one of them--the second revelation--allows you to actually experience God. You can't experience God--on Blackaby's definition--simply by knowing the Scriptures and living by them. You need something more. You need a private revelation of God to do that.
Experiencing God does not mean simply following the Scriptures and obeying that which is given to the whole church. You can't reach the epitome of the Christian life by simply obeying the Word. You can only fulfill God's will if you have something more: your own personalized revelation.
Some of you might recognize this as very close to a feature of a second century heresy called Gnosticism.
And for all of the Protestant concern with Catholics about sola Scriptura, one thing can be said of Rome. At least the Catholic Church limits its extra revelation to the Pope, sacred tradition, and the teaching magisterium. It's odd to me that Protestant Christians can vigorously oppose the Roman Catholic Church based on sola Scriptura in one moment and in the next moment teach that it is the birthright of every Christian to get private, authoritative, individual revelation for their own life every day from God. That goes far beyond what Rome has ever claimed.
By the way, what do you think the most profound spiritual movement of the second millennium has been? Would it be fair to say that the Reformation was the most powerful movement of God's Spirit in the last thousand years? Do you know how the Reformation started? It didn't start with Martin Luther hearing the voice of God. He didn't believe in that. It started with a verse of Scripture from the book of Romans, Paul quoting the Old Testament: "The just shall live by faith."
That's the Word of God we are enjoined to hear and to obey and to follow and to study and to know and to apply. That's what causes genuine revivals. Not this un-biblical, 20th century, self-centered notion that every Christian has a divine right to get divine revelation through hearing the voice of God.
For all of its apparent emphasis on God, this view turns out ultimately to be self-centered. It is about one's self; it's not ultimately about Jesus Christ.
*This is an edited transcript from Stand to Reason's radio show in response to a question about the book Experiencing God. It is not meant to be a thorough-going analysis of the curriculum, but a partial and temporary commentary. More information on the issue can be found at www.str.org.
Stand to Reason - Training Christian Ambassadors in the areas of knowledge, wisdom, and character
by Gregory Koukl
I'm deeply concerned about the Experiencing God curriculum authored by Canadian Baptist minister Henry Blackaby. The book has been around since 1994 and has become a Christian best-seller. Over a million Christians have been taught this material in churches all over the country, including Southern California.
There are a number of things in the book about being a Christian and following Christ that I think are worthwhile. It's the main point of the book, though--not the useful side issues--that is the problem, as I see it.
The goal of Experiencing God, of course, is to teach Christians how to experience God. According to Blackaby, this phrase means something very particular. All one has to do is read the back cover of the book to see this quite clearly: "Experiencing God challenges Christians to experience the fullness of a life lived in a fellowship with the loving, personal God. God reveals Himself to each of us in special and exceptional ways, so our perception of Him is unique." [emphasis mine]
On Blackaby's view, experiencing God--and experiencing the fullness of the Christian life--depends on receiving direct, first-person private, special and unique revelation from Him. Experiencing God is replete with examples of such experiences, so there is no confusion about what Blackaby has in mind.
First-person private revelation is a communication from God that is not directly available to other people, even in principle. If you get information from a dream, a vision, or an inner communication from God, that is first-person private. If you get information from a book, like the Bible, that is third-person public. I can read the same book you are reading. Prophecy given in the church is third-person public, even though it is miraculous. Angels appearing to the apostles is third-person public. Even though it also is miraculous, everyone has equal access to it. It's public.
Of course, you can see the value of third-person public sources of information. If you and I are both reading the same Bible and you say it means one thing and I disagree, we can both look at the words in front of us and assess them, trying to come to a clearer understanding of their truth. However, if you have a first-person private revelation, I have no access to it except as you are willing to share it with me. This is why, historically, first-person private revelation has been reserved to a very select group of people: prophets, Jesus Christ, the apostles, or those with unique gifts in the Body of Christ. In each case, first-person private revelation is given to a properly qualified select few who then pass it on to the rest of the church to study it in a third-person public way.
The main thesis of Experiencing God is that this kind of special revelation isn't unique, but meant to be an ordinary part of every Christian's life. That's what it means to "experience God"--receiving first-person private, unique, and special revelation from God on a regular basis. If you are not regularly getting revelation like this from God, then you are not experiencing God in the sense that Blackaby has in mind. And since experiencing God in this sense is "the core of the Christian life" (Blackaby's phrase), if you are not "hearing the voice of God" the way Jesus, Moses, and the apostles heard it (Blackaby's examples), then you are not living the Christian life. You may be saved, but you are not living the Christian life.
Blackaby attempts to make a biblical case by citing verses like John 10 ("My sheep hear my voice") and pointing to examples of Jesus, Moses and Paul, etc.
I will tell you unequivocally, though--and I have studied this issue a lot--this doctrine, as it is taught in Experiencing God, is not biblical. The Bible does not teach that we are each to hear the voice of God, in that sense, as a regular Christian discipline. It does not equate hearing the voice of God with experiencing God or even with knowing God (Blackaby's misapplication of Jesus' words in John 17).
There is no instruction in the Scriptures guiding us in learning such a skill. Further, this notion is not modeled in the book of Acts or anywhere else as a Christian discipline in the way that Blackaby claims. There are some occasions of special revelation, but they are unique on their face. And in virtually every case they are not first-person private, but third person public.
So Blackaby is teaching as a core, principle Christian discipline--what it means to be a functioning, full-fledged Christian--something the Bible never justifies, never teaches, and does not model. This is a serious problem, as far as I am concerned.
In one way this is not surprising. It is fully in keeping with the spirit of the age: relativism, extreme individualism, and extreme subjectivism. Truth is in the experience.
I have no reason to believe Mr. Blackaby is not a Christian, and I think he is very well intentioned. I just believe he is seriously in error here. He is unwittingly causing the church to embrace aggressively the spirit of the age in which subjective experiences are the source of truth, not the revealed Word of God. Though Blackaby expresses a high view of Scripture, I think his understanding of experiencing God seriously undermines it.
I realize that to many people who feel they have benefited from this curriculum, my comments are tantamount to denying the deity of Christ. I'll take it further. I think a lot of people are more offended at me taking exception with something like Experiencing God than they would be if I actually pressed a heretical notion of the deity of Christ. This shows the tragic straits the church is in. I have been called a heretic for taking exception with the idea that we should expect God to talk to us, giving us regular, special revelation for our lives as He lays out His personal plan for us.
Think about what this charge of heresy means. A heretic is someone who denies a doctrine essential to the faith. Those people who think I'm a heretic for saying that the Bible does not teach we can hear the voice of God (in Blackaby's sense) apparently think that such a capability is a core doctrine of the Christian faith, ergo the charge of "heretic" to those who reject it. It's not a core doctrine.
As J.I. Packer has pointed out, this view is at the most no more than 150 years old. This is a new teaching in the church that reflects not the spirit of Christ but rather the spirit of the age: relativism.
This teaching is terribly destructive. I think this book is the most dangerous thing to hit the church since Benny Hinn's Good Morning, Holy Spirit, and it's dangerous for almost all the same reasons. The unfortunate thing is that, while Good Morning, Holy Spirit appealed more to a somewhat fringe element, Experiencing God has found its way into mainstream evangelical churches, groups that are in most ways sound and biblical. Blackaby has unwittingly taken the subjectivism of the age, baptized it with spiritual language, justified it with poor proof-texts, and then presented it as classical Christianity, the standard by which Christians should judge the richness of their spiritual life.
In response, some will say, "Whatever happened to the apostles in the book of Acts should happen to us, too." That's a mistaken way of thinking. Simply because you see examples of special revelation in the lives of the apostles--miraculous events--doesn't mean we ought to expect the same thing in our lives today.
Just take the equation at face value. Why would anybody believe that just because it happened to the apostles it should happen to us? By very definition, apostles were a unique breed. I'm not arguing that there should be no supernatural events in our lives and that God can't speak if He wants to. I'm just taking this statement at face value: "It happened to the apostles, Jesus, and Moses, therefore it should happen to us." That's an incredible leap of thinking, it seems to me. Just because it happened to the disciples doesn't mean it should happen to us.
Secondly, there is no evidence that the church ever modeled this teaching. I went through every single verse in the book of Acts to try to find evidence of first-person private revelation. Do you know what I found? There were only seven cases of first-person private revelation based on the definition I just gave--only seven in the entire book of Acts. Every single clear case of information given, every single one of them, was a vision.
Visions are what's modeled in the book of Acts, not hearing the voice of God, and even the visions are exceptional occurrences. In his book, though, Blackaby is not promoting the ability to see visions. This is not something you have to learn, getting better at it as time goes on. Visions come on their own. Instead, Blackaby contends that we have to learn to hear the voice of God. That is not modeled in the New Testament. It is not there. (By the way, if this is really the core concept of the Christian life, why did it take almost two millennium for the church to wake up to this fact?)
This is a hard issue to talk about, in some ways, because "hearing from God" is a notion accepted by so many Christians as being a normal part of the Christian life that just to take exception with it is enough to question one's salvation, as mine has been on a number of occasions. But though this view is an accepted one, it's also a largely unexamined notion.
It is a reflection in our American culture that Christianity has become excessively individualistic and excessively subjectivistic. People have cashed out the notion of relationship with God almost completely in experiential terms, allowing a curriculum like this to flourish.
I do agree that when you look in the Gospels and in the book of Acts, you see miraculous happenings. I'm not taking exception with the possibility of the miraculous here. The question is not whether God can work miraculously. He can and often does. The question is not even whether God can speak individually to people. He can, He has done so in the past, and I'm sure He still does sometimes even now.
The real question, rather is this: Does the Christian have a right to expect first-person private revelation from God on a regular basis? Is it appropriate for any Christian to claim he has received such revelation? Is this, in fact, what it means biblically to be a fulfilled Christian who experiences God?
The answer is a resounding "no" to every one of those things. The Scripture does not teach this as a doctrine or as a discipline. It does not encourage people to listen for a unique, private revelation from God. In fact, the only word the Bible encourages us to take heed to is the revealed, written, canonical Word of God given by the apostles, a revelation that is third-person public, not first-person private.
I was just reading 2 Corinthians where Paul makes a rigorous defense for his apostleship, his right to speak for God. In John 14:11, Jesus, when he spoke for God, said, "Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me; otherwise believe on account of the works themselves." When prophets spoke for God, they signed their testimony in their own blood. They put their lives on the line for the truthfulness of their claims. It ought to be obvious to everyone that to claim God has spoken to an individual is, biblically speaking, a remarkable claim that requires massive justification. The prophets, the apostles, and even Jesus Himself understood this.
What about the gift of prophecy or the gift of knowledge or word of wisdom? I'll say first of all that I believe in the perpetuity of spiritual gifts, so I'm charismatic in that regard. I am not questioning the possibility of God working through gifted people, like prophets. Yes, I believe such things are possible, biblically. That some are given the gift of prophecy or knowledge is not a debate for me. But should everybody be a prophet, receiving God's word directly? No. But that is, essentially, Blackaby's claim. That's my deep concern.
The problem with invoking the word of knowledge or wisdom in this regard is that the Bible never gives us any information about what a word of knowledge or a word of wisdom is. The text makes passing reference to it and that's it. So we can't be dogmatic about what it entails. It could be quite a number of things and we can speculate about it. What we can't do is assume things we don't know with any certainty about word of knowledge and then apply them dogmatically to the general experience of Christians.
Another way of putting it is, I don't have to answer the question of what a word of knowledge is and how it works in order for me to say that Blackaby's understanding of experiencing God is not biblical. Yet I've had that kind of response many times. I may not be sure about word of knowledge, but one thing I am certain of--and I'm able and willing to defend it: The doctrine of hearing the voice of God is not taught in the Bible. In fact, we see quite the opposite.
Regarding John 10 where Jesus says "My sheep hear my voice and follow me," let me make a couple of observations very quickly.
First of all, John explicitly mentions that when Jesus was speaking here He was using a figure of speech. In other words, Jesus didn't literally mean we ought to hear His actual voice. Indeed, the Jews were already hearing His voice in that sense when He made this statement. His mention of hearing His voice is a figure for something else entirely. What does the figure refer to? The effective call of the Holy Spirit drawing people into salvation.
This ought to be very obvious to anyone looking at the context. The Jews were hearing the words of Jesus but not heeding them. Why not? Jesus says because they were not His sheep. "But you do not believe, because you are not of My sheep. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand." (John 10:26-28)
In other words, Jesus' sheep hear His "voice" before they are saved, they respond to the "voice" and then receive eternal life. Jesus is talking about the call of the Holy Spirit to unregenerate people. He is not talking about on-going conversations with God in which Christians get daily instructions from Jesus by hearing His voice. This is a complete misapplication of this verse.
I realize that many people are going to be upset at what I've said because they have gone through the Experiencing God curriculum and feel they have benefited from it. I do not make the claims I've made here lightly. There are a number of things I see in this material that are serious problems.
First, it presumes a view of God's will that I think is unbiblical, that God communicates His unique desires for each one of us and we are then to follow the blue-print He lays out for us, piece by piece. I deal with this in a four-tape curriculum that Stand to Reason provides called "Decision Making and the Will of God." It is very thorough. You get all of my notes and you can follow my critique verse by verse to see if I'm dealing with the Scriptures accurately.
Second, Blackaby uses very questionable proof texts. Some of his references are atrocious. Even his proof-texting is relativized when he says that the Holy Spirit will show you the true interpretation (i.e., his interpretation).
Third, Blackaby imports completely unbiblical ideas into his argument as if they were biblical. For example, he says that prayer is communication with God and that all real communication is two way. We talk to God and God talks to us. This is false. There are no texts that I know of that suggest prayer is two-way communication. This is a modern definition of prayer, unknown to the biblical text or to the church for two thousand years.
Fourth, Blackaby assumes that miraculous events that seem exceptional by nature are actually to be the norm in the Christian life.
Fifth, Blackaby takes his view of knowing the will of God and hearing the voice of God as features of the normal Christian life. If you don't have this ability, then you are not experiencing real Christianity.
Here is the most serious problem, though. Blackaby does not put it together like this, but I think what follows is a fair conclusion of the effect of his view that will make it clear just how dangerous it is.
Blackaby teaches that Christians ought to hear the voice of God. Now, when God shows Himself in some way, that is called "revelation." When He reveals Himself by speaking, that is called "special revelation." According to Blackaby, then, each Christian should be receiving unique, special revelation from God. That is a necessary part of what it means to live a real Christian life.
Now watch where this thinking naturally leads. On this view, there turns out to be two special revelations. We have the special revelation of the Scriptures, and we have the special revelation of God's unique word to the individual Christian. Both are inerrant, by the way, and infallible. Though the voice of God to individuals is not the same as the Scriptures in the sense that the Bible is meant to be for the whole church and the voice of God is for individuals, the individual voice of God is still a word of God and therefore, of necessity, inerrant and infallible. God is incapable of error regardless of where He speaks.
This sets up an odd situation. We have the infallible word of God in the Scriptures and we have the infallible voice of God to you. There are two revelations of God, but only one of them--the second revelation--allows you to actually experience God. You can't experience God--on Blackaby's definition--simply by knowing the Scriptures and living by them. You need something more. You need a private revelation of God to do that.
Experiencing God does not mean simply following the Scriptures and obeying that which is given to the whole church. You can't reach the epitome of the Christian life by simply obeying the Word. You can only fulfill God's will if you have something more: your own personalized revelation.
Some of you might recognize this as very close to a feature of a second century heresy called Gnosticism.
And for all of the Protestant concern with Catholics about sola Scriptura, one thing can be said of Rome. At least the Catholic Church limits its extra revelation to the Pope, sacred tradition, and the teaching magisterium. It's odd to me that Protestant Christians can vigorously oppose the Roman Catholic Church based on sola Scriptura in one moment and in the next moment teach that it is the birthright of every Christian to get private, authoritative, individual revelation for their own life every day from God. That goes far beyond what Rome has ever claimed.
By the way, what do you think the most profound spiritual movement of the second millennium has been? Would it be fair to say that the Reformation was the most powerful movement of God's Spirit in the last thousand years? Do you know how the Reformation started? It didn't start with Martin Luther hearing the voice of God. He didn't believe in that. It started with a verse of Scripture from the book of Romans, Paul quoting the Old Testament: "The just shall live by faith."
That's the Word of God we are enjoined to hear and to obey and to follow and to study and to know and to apply. That's what causes genuine revivals. Not this un-biblical, 20th century, self-centered notion that every Christian has a divine right to get divine revelation through hearing the voice of God.
For all of its apparent emphasis on God, this view turns out ultimately to be self-centered. It is about one's self; it's not ultimately about Jesus Christ.
*This is an edited transcript from Stand to Reason's radio show in response to a question about the book Experiencing God. It is not meant to be a thorough-going analysis of the curriculum, but a partial and temporary commentary. More information on the issue can be found at www.str.org.
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