Once awhile ago, I had a conversation with someone that went something like most of the conversations I have when I someone who thinks they are a “prophet:”
- They introduce themselves.
- They are a little all-too-eager to tell me what they do and what they are called to do.
- They then feel the need to try and give me a “word.”
Over many years of discernment and many years of watching a steady decline in the quality of what we consider genuine “word,” I note there are certain standards that people always say:
- I am filled with the Holy Ghost (duh).
- God has “so much ahead for me” in one form or another (duh).
When I don’t respond the way they want, I usually throw something in the mix for good measure. Something that states financial concern or other issues, to which the response is always the same: “Money is coming your way. I just heard that.”
Oh you did, did you? What a coincidence!
Sigh.
To me, it’s boring. These so-called prophets and people with prophetic gifts are reading me and my spirit, not telling me what the Spirit has to say. They do not know about silence, needed to hear from God rather than only reading the room.
Understanding the need for silence
We are so conditioned to watch people and to tell them what we think they want to hear that we have no depth or perception to actually see or say what God wants to say to them. We are in our own way, rejecting the true prophets and entertaining the ones whose messages fill us with false hope and make us want to run around the room. Time and time again, we respond the same way to messages that are vague and misleading. They are meant to read us in a clever mind game rather than genuinely discern the heart of God and lead us to a better place.
Revelation 8:1 says: When He opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. (GW) This passage, often perplexing to scholars, took on a whole new meaning when I started studying it in terms of prophetic time. In terms of prophecy, it covers a period of about 43 years. In my commentary, All That Is Seen And Unseen: A Journey Through The Book of Revelation, I talk in depth about the significance of the approximate 43-year period of time (which yes, means all those end-time chasers are wrong on their timelines) whereby heaven is silent, prophecy seems mute, God seems distant, and heaven seems still, watching and waiting for what comes next. Whether we like it or not, silence is part of the process. If we don’t stop talking, we can’t hear God.
Are we in a silent period?
I don’t think it’s foreign to assume that we are, in some semblance, in a period of time that resembles the silence of heaven. It’s not that God is completely mute, but hearing from Him is difficult. In our deeply psychological world, deception comes easily. We think if we watch people carefully enough, in the same way that psychics do, we can tell someone something completely vague and turn it into a “word from God” as we supplement details and people are able to read our spirits rather than hear from the Holy Spirit. We think being over-eager, personable, extremely interested, and going what appears to be “above and beyond” will substitute for the true Spirit’s move in our lives, replaced instead with a psychological head game.
Heaven has no choice but to be silent. We’re so good at manipulation, God steps back. God can’t have any part in the means or methods by which people are not discerning Him, but trying to discern His people. It doesn’t mean that God does not speak or has nothing to say, as I will speak on in a moment…but it does mean that the methods by which God’s true people are speaking are not ordinary, nor are they common…nor are many of them even eager to speak.
The Sound of Silence
Disturbed is not my favorite artist, but I love their transformation of The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel. Their deep vocals and stunning black and white music video makes it about more than its original context. (I’ve heard a few different theories on the original meaning of the song, one of which came in the wakeful hours following the shooting of John F. Kennedy in 1963.) Here, I’m looking at the reality that sometimes we hear the sound of silence on spiritual matters because we haven’t attuned ourselves to hear God in a proper context.
We embrace the noise of church: loud music, drums, lots of enthusiasm, and messages that throw us into fits of emotional ecstasy. Even more traditional churches respond to louder, upbeat songs and enthusiastic outbursts of their own sort. We cry, we run all over the room, we scream and yell and cheer, only to find ourselves in the same exact situations and places all over again, every time.
There are many of us dealing with an authentic “sound of silence” in our lives as we look down the corridors of our churches and dream states and see things that just don’t seem to measure up with what people tell us about God. It begs me to ask the question: are the people giving us words really hearing from God? Is it nothing more than what I spoke of earlier, where people read our spirits and respond to our behavior, believing such is God speaking to them?
A Biblical lesson
In the Bible, the people of God received many messages from God. Very few of those messages would make any of us fly around the room at warp speed. They are intense messages, reprimands for idolatry and injustice, leveling for hypocrisy and practicing false worship, and calls to repent. In the Old Testament, it was usually Israel, God’s own people, who received these messages. Very few people had experiences where they went to heaven to come back and report what was going on, and even fewer started conversations with the words, “Thus saith the Lord.”
Amos 3:7-8 says:
Certainly, the Almighty Lord doesn’t do anything unless He first reveals His secret to his servants the prophets. The lion has roared. Who isn’t afraid? The Almighty Lord has spoken. Who can keep from prophesying? (GW)
Why is this relevant? Because the people of the Old Testament also thought themselves “spiritual.” The book of Amos proves there were many so-called “prophets” running around with messages much like the ones we hear today. It was so bad, Amos didn’t even want to be a part of the “school of the prophets.” There was so much corruption and so many false words, Amos couldn’t bring himself to be a part of the order of his day. In our day and age, we have the opposite issue: people refuse to submit in order and run renegade, each with their false words. We shouldn’t be so shocked or rattled by things. The prophetic point is to be so deeply in the heart of God, that prophets are able to rightly explain and discern what is going on in the world and provide explanation and hope for God’s people.
Needing a genuine word
Yet I, like so many others, sit at points in my life and hear only a sound of silence when I need a genuine word from the Lord. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t always hear for ourselves. (This proves that God’s gifts are genuine and that we aren’t just using them for ourselves.) I don’t need to hear I am going to live long, that this is just the beginning (which over 20 years in, I don’t think that even makes sense), or that money is coming my way. I need to hear what God has to say to me, in this moment, in this hour, in response to where we are.
Hope in divine word where we least expect it
In the song, The Sound of Silence, there is a particularly interesting line:
And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was forming And the sign said “The words of the prophets Are written on subway walls And tenement halls And whispered in the sounds of silence”
In this interim, while we deal with the false and the true, sort out wheat from tares (if the wise and foolish virgins prove anything, at least half of the prophets are tares) in a period of heavenly silence, it’s not that God stops speaking or revealing. It just comes in different forms and in different ways, through things we’d never consider and from people we don’t consider. We find it in subtle ways: through signs that only we understand. In words from people we barely know and would never consider. It appears as we look for messages in odd places.
Maybe these messages aren’t found in church, watching as those words are found in places and people we wouldn’t consider worthy of giving God’s Word. The word demands we are more attentive, more careful when we feel that we have a word of knowledge, wisdom, or prophecy for someone, and that maybe even we, ourselves, find a new way to present our message in our era of silence.
Things will one day change; periods of silence do come and go, and seasons do shift. For now, we pray, we believe, and we listen for God’s voice in the midst, in the different and challenging, and in the concepts that change our very perceptions of who we are and what it means to be church.
Oh yeah, and…in the meantime…we wait…in the sound of silence.
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