Like the ideas for many of my blog posts, this one began with a conversation with a friend—in this case my buddy Steve. I was sharing with him that I was having a really hard time with the fact that another dear friend of mine not only didn’t get raised from the dead, but that I had a dream the morning of his funeral where he did get raised and when I woke up it took me a minute to realize I had been dreaming. A total mood killer. for the happiness I was waking up with. Anyway, I was telling Steve what God had shared with me about the situation, and how it was the first time in a long time that God told me something different than He normally does in dead raising situations (God always tells me the same thing—what a great job I’m doing, whether they return or not). Steve reminded me of something I knew but had forgotten, and something we have talked about on other occasions—that there are rules in play that may have permitted God to tell me something different this time than He normally does. I get this is an odd concept for most people, so let’s talk about the rules of speaking with God.
Whenever I talk about spiritual rules and laws, most people get offended. I wish it wasn’t true, but they do. Often, people seem to equate the existence of spiritual rules as being the same as living under Old Testament Law, the law of Sin and Death that Jesus came to set us free from. And maybe to some degree they are either the same or related. Its possible. But more to the point, when Jesus died and rose again, physical laws like gravity and rules of Newtonian Physics didn’t cease to exist—so why do we think spiritual ones would just vanish? For those interested in a deeper discussion of spiritual mechanics and how they influence our lives (and how we can use them for spiritual growth), pick up a copy of my book The Power of Impartation—I go fairly in depth on the subject there. For now, however, I want us to focus on one specific area, the rules that govern our interactions with God.
It sounds weird to think there are rules that govern how we interact with God, but there are. For example, Number 12:6-8A says, “he said, “Listen to my words: ‘When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the Lord.'” God clearly explains how with most people God communicates in certain ways—riddles, visions, and dreams. However, because Moses sees God’s form, there is something different about how God can communicate with the man, so God does it face to face with him. Why does that matter? It isn’t because God isn’t interested in talking clearly to us—it’s because there are rules that dictate how the interactions can occur. Why else would there be prophecies about how one day in the future we would all be taught by God directly instead of through prophets and teachers (Isaiah 54:13; Jeremiah 31:33–34; Hebrews 8:10–11 and mentioned by Jesus in John 6:45)? It is because God wants to talk to us this way but can’t. At least not yet, not fully how He would like to, but we’re headed in the right direction.
Where else do we see this? All over the Bible. God has very specific things He wants to accomplish, but because there are rules that I don’t even entirely understand, He has to have angels give messages, sometimes cryptically, to have people do things they don’t entirely understand—things that probably would go more smoothly if God would just speak more directly and clearly. And many of us have had similar situations, right? Where God tells us something vaguely, or gives us a cryptic warning dream that we only manage to interpret with the benefit of hindsight, rendering the warning entirely useless. I mean, if God really cared, wouldn’t He give us a warning we can understand easily? He would love to because God is kind and loving and good. But He can’t, because of the rules.
God is limited by a combination of things. Often there are limits to what we are able to hear based on our current capacity and ability. Jesus mentioned this in John 16:12-13 saying, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. 13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.” Jesus had more He wanted to tell them, but was limited by their capacity to bear, handle, or manage what He wanted to tell them. The same is true with you and me, and it limits what God can tell us. That is why God takes us from one level of truth to another. He might tell one person something that is true to a certain degree, and then years later as they grow in things spiritual God then says something else that might seem contradictory at first to the previous thing God had said—but God was not lying to the person. Rather, he was sharing one level of truth and when the person grew and was able to handle more, God could share a deeper truth. We see the same thing often with denominations. God will move people from one denomination to another as He is growing them because of the truths that they carry and the depths God wants them to grow into.
God is limited in some ways by the level of demonic resistance. Or maybe, instead of saying God is limited, it might be more accurate to say that our receiving capacity is limited in what messages do and don’t arrive to us successfully. Daniel is a great example of this. In Daniel 10, the man Daniel received a very troubling revelation, and then received an interpretation in a vision, and then he began to fast and pray because of how troubling it was. An angel shows up 21 days later but explains that he was sent the same day Daniel began to pray and seek an answer, but that a demonic prince, a fallen Beni-elohim, the prince of Persia, opposed him as he traveled in the spirit to bring the message, and Michael the Archangel, another Beni-elohim prince had to come and fight on his behalf so he could get the message to Daniel. The spiritual battle over revelation is actually pretty intense at times, and those who do inner healing and deliverance know this to be true. Sometimes during a session all spiritual communication simply shuts down as the enemy tries to prevent all revelation from coming through, and if persistent enough, usually the believers praying will break through and the revelation that brings freedom will begin again. It isn’t that God is unwilling to release freedom, but that the battle is real and the enemy sometimes go into overdrive to stop the communication.
I don’t claim to understand all of the reasons why these things are this way, but I do understand they are this way. There is something really good that knowing this does for us though. Because we now understand the underlying problem, we can do something about it. In the case of demonic interference, we can continue to pray, fast as necessary, and break through the demonic blockades. We can do things to enhance our own weight-carrying capacity in the spirit so that God can release more to us. Fasting and praying in tongues consistently are two good ways to do this, but not the only ones. We can also make sure to not just ask questions of God, but change the questions and change the way we word them and ask them. There is something about how we ask questions that sometimes frees God up to answer them differently. Maybe it’s that asking different questions bypasses ways the demonic were blocking them. Maybe it’s that asking different questions lets God answer them in a way we are already prepared to handle them. I don’t know why it works—I just know that it does. Sometimes there isn’t anything different we can do and we simply have to grow into a new place before we can get different communication from God. Whatever the reason, there is a reason, but as we remain steadfast and persistent in drawing near to God, we can trust that He will draw near to us and that our communication will grow deeper, clearer, and better over time.
