I am sorry that I haven't posted sooner. I have written a thousand posts in my mind - they just never got put to paper. I don't normally write anything of a personal nature here but as you know from my private emails, my step-granddaughter was christening recently. Reading over the programme for the christening, and the call-and-response of it all, with the parents promising the raise her to love the Lord, I found myself hoping very much that it is true. My step-son doesn't have any faith of any sort in his background but his partner does.
Okay, so on to the possibility of modern day prophecies. You say that you are given to "feelings" and "nudges." It is absolutely Biblical to believe that the Holy Spirit guides the church. We are promised that this is so so I believe it is so. However when I speak about prophecy I don't put the guiding of the Holy Spirit to the individual in the same league as outright prophecy, particularly as it pertains to the end of the world or the second coming of Christ.
I don't know if I ever told you that my grandmother had visions on two occasions - and since to me she seemed completely devoid of imagination and ego, being a pragmatic Mennonite grandmother, I still see no other explanation. She wouldn't have invented it because I just don't think it would have occurred to her. And she had no need to feel "important" since the church I grew up in at that time, didn't have any of the charismatic type things (hadn't even heard of them) like speaking in tongues, miraculous healings or visions. I think she would never have told them to a pastor because any Mennonite pastor in our particular branch would have told her that she only "thought" she saw something.
And to the best of my knowledge, besides maybe my grandfather, she only told me and my mother about these two visions. The first time she had a vision she was in her teens and was milking the cows in the pre-electricity days, in winter, when the day is short. Her father had been sick for several months. In the barn, the lamp only lit part of the aisle in the barn. My grandmother was turning away from a freshly milked cow to milk another cow, when she saw as clear as day a coffin in the middle of the barn. She blinked, in her version of the story, and it remained there. She told herself it was a shadow, and milked the other cow before looking at the place but when she did, it was still there. And she "knew" that her father was going to die. That was the connection she made then and her father died the following day.
Her other vision came in her seventies. My grandfather wasn't home and my grandmother had lain down for a nap. She woke up "suddenly" and saw on the dresser opposite her bed, a tombstone on which she could see one of her children's names engraved with the date of birth and that day as the date of death. She immediately got on her knees to pray and stayed there until my grandfather got home. That evening, she got a phone call from the spouse of the child to the effect that the child had tried to commit suicide and very nearly succeeded. On the verge of unconsciousness, she had picked up the phone and called for help.
See, as long as my grandmother isn't having those kinds of visions on a daily basis, and as long as they make theological sense, I accept that. It is a form of prophecy in the sense of "this is what will happen or this is what could happen" but it is not a prophecy of the world ending on June 28th, 2008. It doesn't put her ego at the center of things, the way that I think it is important on the basis of national pride for some American Christians to want to see America playing an important prophetic role, and therefore make 'prophecies' out of wish-fulfillment, as if they've decided that God had to have made a mistake in forgetting to let the world know that, by Joe, America is specialer than other nations.
My grandmother's visions neither add to the Bible, or take away from it. They don't lend themselves to speculation or wild interpretations or book tours in order to publicize the private warning of God to an individual. And I'm sure that my grandmother isn't mentioned in the Bible. Most people aren't. There's no ego trip there. She didn't get up and think she was some sort of new prophetess. She got up and made chicken noodle soup for supper, crocheted some more of the hideous (much as I hate to say it) afghans she was forever giving us, her grandchildren.
But as far as prophecy about world events, I do think that those days are over. Your last question about how just because the US isn't mentioned in the Bible, that there are no possible, Christ-centered prophecies possible in this day? Yes, that's exactly the way I see it. I don't believe that a brand spanking new prophecy not in the Bible canon is at all possible in this day and age.
However, I still want to qualify that a little further. There are prophetic passages in the Bible that are vague, that make vague references to nations, that could still include the US (and Canada). In many of the prophecies, the prophets are told that the vision is sealed until the end of time. What seems vague now, may yet become clear as the Day of the Lord approaches, and then, in retrospect, it could be that we will wonder why we never saw it before.
Just like the prophecies of the coming messiah - the suffering messiah and the reigning, messiah made no sense to the apostles before they were fulfilled, there are prophecies that may have the US playing a major role but because the US is not named as in "The Lord saith unto the US of A", we don't know. One thing to keep in mind about prophecies is that the Lord himself didn't enlighten the apostles as to how he could be both the suffering messiah and the reigning messiah who would put all nations under his feet. They were as confused about that as anyone.
When Jesus rode into the holy city on a donkey and people proclaimed him king, they thought, surely now he will send the Romans and Herod, his pawn, running for the hills. But they were thinking in human terms and on a human time frame - God's way is far more complicated and far longer.
When Abraham was promised children too numerous to count, he surely must have anticipated an encampment full of children with his wife Sarah, in his own life time. He never would have interpreted that promise to mean year after year of waiting, only to have only one child with his wife Sarah.
I think maybe that God sometimes doesn't explain his promises in greater detail because our hearts would break under the burden of years if we knew just how long (in the way we measure time) it would be before the promise found its fulfillment. Abraham and Sarah could hope year after year, for quite a lot of years, that that would be the year of a child. Hope kept them going. Then, when their bodies were old, and a certain resignation had set in and without a doubt, they must have thought that whatever God had meant, they weren't going to have any children. But at the end of their lives, it wouldn't have hurt nearly as much as it would have at the beginning, to think that they would spend so many years childless.
Would the hearts of all the new Christians have failed if Jesus had told them that they wouldn't be seeing him for at least two thousand years? I think the "hope deferred" might well have killed the church before it got started. Instead, by telling us that only God knows the day and the hour, each year, Christians have allowed themselves to hope that this is the acceptable year of the Lord and the year of our redemption.
Hope is a wonderful thing. I don't know how humanity could have endured what it has already endured without hope. But that amount of space also means we must be careful not to let our hopes take on the aura of prophecy, and led people away instead of to Christ.
Even so, marantha, Lord Jesus.
Layla
No comments:
Post a Comment