Does God only speak through the Bible?
There's one main problem with thinking that God has nothing left to say to you, but it does get a few things right.
As part of Hear from God in 40 Emails (or Less), we’re exploring the four views of how God guides us: absentee God, helicopter God, cool God, and free-range God. You can read the introduction here.
Imagine a best-selling author who is about to have his first daughter.
He’s a skilled writer, and he decides to write his child a letter. For the next nine months, he writes down everything he wants his child to know about life in the world, covering every possible scenario his daughter might encounter.
As the due date nears, he realizes that what began as a mere letter is now long enough to be a book. There are stories from his life. It has a few family rules to keep in mind. There are nuggets of advice. There’s family history. There’s even some poetry.
He rushes to get it published so that others can enjoy it, too—calling it, Notes to My Daughter About Life, Death, and Everything In-Between. It’s published in multiple translations, and it’s expected to sell millions of copies.
The day before she’s born, he gets his hands on the first copy of the book. He hands it to his wife and says, “Read this book to our daughter before bed every night. Then, when she’s old enough to read, give her a copy of her own. It has everything she needs to know.”
Then, he leaves—with a promise that one day he’ll visit but never to be heard from again.
His daughter might grow up treasuring the book as one of her most prized possessions, but, more than anything else, reading it would make her long for a real relationship with the father who wrote it.
The Absentee God
This might be how you feel about God.
He’s an absentee God. In the Bible, he’s already written down everything you need to know about life, death, and everything in-between. Don’t expect him to call, and don’t break anything while he’s gone. He might be an absentee father, but at least he left us a good book to read until he gets back.
Dallas Willard calls this the “it’s all in the Bible” view of hearing from God, and it’s more common than you might imagine.1 Even if you say that you believe he’s involved, you live like he’s absent from your life in any meaningful way.
If this is your view of how God guides, check the concordance or do an Internet search for the topic you’re looking for, look up the verse, and you have your answer.
On the grid, the absentee God is the low personal guidance and low freedom view of how God guides us. Why? It’s low personal guidance because you’re not getting any words beyond what he’s generally said to everyone, and it’s low freedom because it’s basically nothing more than a list of rules to obey. It’s all right there in black, white, and sometimes, red.
What the Absentee God Gets Right and Wrong
God has, in fact, left us most of what he wants us to know about life in the world in the Bible. If your first instinct when you’re making a decision is to check what the Bible says, your instincts are right. It’s the primary place we ought to go to hear God’s voice.
That’s why Paul wrote to Timothy, “All Scripture is inspired by God, and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (1 Timothy 3:16-17). The Bible lays out God’s “general will” for your life, and it would be unwise to expect to hear from God in other ways if you haven’t first grown accustomed to the sound of his voice in the Bible.
(And, in the final part of the H.E.A.R. Framework, we’ll explore how to hear God in the Bible and how it forms the boundaries for anything else you might hear God say.)
Maybe, you’ve seen the ways that hearing God’s voice has been abused and you’d prefer to just stick to what he clearly says in the Bible from now on. If God only speaks in the Bible, you’ll most likely avoid some of the mistakes others have made when they claimed to hear God’s voice but got it wrong. It's a relatively safe view of how God speaks.
I get it.
At its best, this view honors the Bible—but, the problem is that it doesn't honor the Bible highly enough. Dallas Willard says, “Our reverence for the Bible must not be allowed to blind us to the need for personal divine instruction within the principles of the Bible yet beyond the details of what it explicitly says.”2
By limiting the possibility of experiencing God’s personal guidance to the people whose stories are told in the Bible, we’re living as if the world of the Bible describes a world that’s different from our own. That’s not what the Bible teaches, though. “The Bible, all of it, is livable,” Eugene Peterson says, “it is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-Created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole.”3
The main problem with the absentee view of God is that it leaves out the possibility of a real relationship with God—a relationship that includes not just talking to God, but hearing from him. Yes, God has written us a book, not as a substitute for relationship, but as an invitation to relationship. The same God who spoke to those in the Bible can speak to you now.
As Scot McKnight says, we ought to have a “relational approach” to the Bible. “Our relationship to the Bible,” he says, “is actually a relationship with the God of the Bible.”4 The words on the page are intended to lead us into a relationship with the Person behind those words.
In the comments, let me know: What do you think this view of God’s guidance gets right and wrong?
Surprised by the Voice of God
If you’ve ever held this view of God, you’re not alone.
Jack Deere was a seminary professor who, at some point, had settled into the belief that God no longer spoke like he did in the Bible—a view that is popular among the Bible scholars in his circles. In his words, “The Bible replaced the voice of God in my life. I even taught my students that God no longer speaks to us outside of the Bible.”5
In practice, he had an absentee God for much of his life—until he began to encounter trustworthy people who seemed to have credible experiences of experiencing God’s voice and guidance in ways that included, but weren’t limited to, just reading the Bible. As a result, he studied the Bible for himself and found that there’s absolutely no reason to think that God doesn’t still speak to us today just as he did then.
It changed his life, and that realization might change your life, too.
In the next email, we’ll explore what the “helicopter God” view gets right and wrong about hearing God.
This is email 6 out of 40 in Hear From God in 40 Emails (Or Less). Start with the first email.
Dallas Willard, Hearing God, 74.
Dallas Willard, Hearing God, 79.
Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, 18.
Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet, 101.
Jack Deere, Why I Am Still Surprised by the Voice of God, 242.
So good!