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IS THAT GOD'S VOICE I HEAR? #2
TRUTH ON EVERY CHANNEL
Young Arthur was born into a religious home — a big
one — with ten kids living under one roof there in Edinburgh. Dad was
a civil servant working hard just to make £240 a year, but Arthur's
mother still managed to send him to Hodder, a good Jesuit prep school
in Lancashire. But two years there, and another two years at the Jesuit
secondary school, Stonyhurst, seemed to have had anything but the desired
effect on Arthur, and by the time he was done with Stonyhurst in 1875,
he had pretty much dumped the Catholic faith and even Christianity itself.
"I'm an agnostic," he told everyone, and he moved over to the
University of Edinburgh to become a doctor.
There in med school he happened to meet a Dr. Joseph Bell, who seemed
to have the most keen, logical mind this young medical student had ever
encountered. Bell could study a patient's chart, read through his medical
history, and come up with the most amazing deductions.
Well, Arthur's career as a medical doctor didn't last very long because
he soon discovered he could make more money writing stories. In 1887 he
wrote a fictional little piece called A Study in Scarlet, and the main
character was a detective with those same great skills of deduction as
his mentor, Dr. Bell. For that first Sherlock Holmes mystery, Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle was paid just £25, but it eventually turned into quite
a pleasant living for the creator of Messers. Holmes and Watson of 221B
Baker Street.
Well, why do we bring up Sir Arthur here on the radio? Besides the fact
that we happened to notice that it's his birthday today — May 22, 1859?
After his departure from Catholicism and the Christian faith of his childhood,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle decided to embrace the world of spiritualism. At
the age of 57, after exploring the psychic world for years, he made up
his mind to spend the rest of his life advancing that cause. He wrote
on spiritualism; he traveled all around the world promoting it. One internet
site we visited reports:
"Spiritualism became Conan Doyle's religion
and his driving force, taking him to Australia, America, Canada, and South
Africa for lecture tours which he recorded in various biographical studies."
He visited spirit mediums and attended séances,
and sometimes faced ridicule when he ended up being deceived by some charlatan.
But until his death in 1930, the world of the occult was the core of his
faith system.
Well, I think you can understand why that story ties in with our radio
series title, IS THAT GOD'S VOICE I HEAR? It's really elementary, my dear
listener . . . that God can't communicate through the Bible, which condemns
spiritualism, and also communicate through spiritualism! The Bible might
be true, or spiritualism might be true, but they can't both be true. You're
not going to hear the voice of God coming to you through the 66 books
of the Bible, and also hear His voice coming through a séance or
through a phone call to a psychic hotline.
You don't have to read very far in the Word of God to find out that one
thing you won't find in spiritualism IS the Word of God. It's just not
there. Notice these plain words from Isaiah chapter 8:
"When men tell you to consult mediums and
spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their
God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?"
You can go back just a couple of Bible books to Ecclesiastes,
where we find this very plain warning about trying to contact the dead:
"For the living know that they will die,
but the dead know NOTHING."
Now friend, for the 14 years that Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle was active in spiritualism, what sorts of forces was he in contact
with? I wouldn't like to say for sure, but you and I can both rule out
two things: he wasn't in touch with heaven, and he wasn't in touch with
the departed dead. To my way of thinking, that leaves only the dark forces
of Lucifer's armies, and it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to know that
God's children don't want to go anywhere near such forbidden territory.
This really brings us to another point we should explore . . . because
friend, I hope and pray that you're wise enough to stay within the safety
of the Bible's boundaries and away from the New Age world of spiritualism.
But all of us read books that sound good. We see inspiring documentaries
on television. Our mailboxes are stuffed with Christian magazines. The
internet is bursting at the seams with spiritual revelations that people
are eager to share with you. And face it, I'm right here on the radio
too, Mondays through Fridays, and again on the weekend, hoping you'll
study the Bible with us, hoping you'll send in for a Discover Bible Course,
inviting you to go to church this weekend. How can we know that this river
of religious thinking that washes over us day and night in our media-intense
world . . . how can we know that we're hearing God's voice and not those
of an army of false teachers? As we wondered aloud yesterday, how can
we know that the dream we had last night is really coming to us from heaven?
I mentioned once before on this program how one of our staff members got
invited as a guest on a live religious radio call-in talk show. Now that's
exciting! Here on the Voice of Prophecy, we have a few weeks of buffer
between our studio sessions and when you hear the program, but on this
particular program they were going to fly without a safety net and just
answer calls as they came.
Well, the very first caller wanted to share her recent dream. And she
launched into this story about beings of bright light, and journeys to
heaven, and how God had showed her this new truth and that new truth and
on and on she went. It was very nice and it was very sincere and it was
very, very live.
And when it was all done, the program host and our Voice of Prophecy staff
member had to very graciously thank the lady for her call . . . and ALSO
then gently point out that when dreams say one thing, and when the Bible
says some other thing, it's the Bible that we believe. Not our dreams.
If you have a dream tonight where your grandmother, who died back in 1991,
is able to send you a message, that dream isn't just not from heaven —
it's dangerous heresy. Because even the most devoted Christian saint who
goes to sleep in the Lord isn't able to communicate back to you from beyond
the grave; the Bible says so.
Someone sent us a book a few years ago entitled Mary T Reflects on the
Other Side. And for 211 pages, the author writes some very beautiful things
about the afterlife and the wonderful existence people have on the other
side of death. But listen, friend. I don't have to read the book to know
that it's wrong, and I don't have to die to know that it's wrong. All
I have to do is to read my Bible to know that it's wrong.
Now, this doesn't mean that we should throw out every book except the
Bible. Or reject every preacher who isn't named Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,
or Paul. We have a thought-provoking book here at the office entitled
Surprised By the Power of the Spirit, by Dr. Jack Deere. And he writes
about some of the signs and miracles and charismatic manifestations happening
today in the Christian world. What's it all mean? By what means does God
communicate here in the 21st century? And I love the safeguard provided
by just one sentence found in the very first chapter.
"God [can] speak apart from the Scriptures,"
he writes, "though NEVER in contradiction to the Scriptures."
The Lord may choose to communicate to you today through
a billboard. Or a web site. Or just the promptings of your conscience.
Heaven has a multitude of ways to reach a lost, restless world. But friend,
if your conscience says "A" while the Bible is saying "B,"
then it's your conscience that needs reinterpreting, not the Bible. The
Bible is always God's voice speaking; the conscience is only God's voice
speaking when it agrees with the Bible voice. I've met people, and so
have you, who could exaggerate and lie and cheat without the slightest
pangs of guilt, even though the Word of God expressly states that lying
lips are an abomination to the Lord.
So where do we turn when we absolutely have to know we're hearing from
heaven? Only one Book comes with that ironclad guarantee. Lots of books
and magazines and web sites are filled with words, but there's only one
sure Word. We mentioned yesterday how the book of II Peter tells us how
the Bible came from God Himself, and just two verses earlier we find this
comforting reminder:
"And we have the word of the prophets made
more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light
shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises
in your hearts."
"The one light you have in a dark time as
you wait for daybreak," says The Message paraphrase. And friend,
thank God for that one light!
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