CHAPTER 50 – “Principles of Immanuel”
God must come to us, to give us the best possible chance of understanding Him. Not only in the ministry of the Holy Spirit to every person, inspiring and judging us in fair-togetherness, but even more directly than that, more obviously as a Person than that, more able to reveal the truth of His character in action we can see, not merely hear in our hearts.
That doesn’t mean we necessarily will understand what is happening; we might still make our own honest mistakes about it, or we might still try to fudge our way around it to protect some inflamed sense of our own self-importance.
But this leads to a number of questions about the act of God I am now considering: what should I mean by God coming to us, each of us, personally, in this manner?
Well, there have been odd tales, throughout history, all over the world, about encounters with Someone. We have dreams. We see things.
But it doesn’t take much thought to understand that such appearances, while perhaps important to us individually to one degree or another, aren’t enough to accomplish what God wants to do for all of us.
The sceptic will rightly say that these tales, taken altogether (and often even taken individually) are a garbled mess. Almost anything can be made out of them.
I am not saying they don’t serve, and haven’t served, some good purposes. But the paradoxical truth is that they are too individualistic, even assuming a proper understanding on the part of the recipients (which is assuming a lot!), to be a universal special revelation. They don’t have the best sort of trustworthiness.