HEAR THE VOICE OF THE LORD
Some religious leaders like to say “hear the word of God” when they read and teach from the Bible. Their inspiration for this exhortation comes from scriptures that say “hear the word of the Lord”. They piously represent to their congregations that whatever they say with their natural mouths is the equivalent of words spoken by the mouth of God. Both they and their congregations are deceived.

The deception arises from the common practice of interpreting the Hebrew word “dabar”, which primarily means speech, saying or utterance, to mean the written, literal word of God (i.e. the Bible) and rarely as the spoken word or speech of God. Thus for Jews and Christians alike, righteousness hinges on literal interpretation of the Bible — not on hearing God’s spoken voice.

This wrong understanding of “word” as the written word of God is the reason why, throughout this website, we have introduced scriptures that clearly communicate God’s commandments to listen to his voice and contrast them with what religionists think he wants them to do based on their literal interpretations of the Bible. Those literal interpretations lead people to establish religious doctrines with various rules of things that people should and should not do.  Indeed God does instruct his people to do all the ceremonies and laws mentioned in the law of Moses. But he also says in many other places that those ceremonies and laws that call for physical (i.e. fleshly) activity are only symbols, parables and shadows of the spiritual works he really wants.

STUDY TIP: See God’s Written Word and God’s Spoken Voice for understanding of the difference between fleshly, religious activity based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and spiritual worship based on hearing God’s voice. Also see Religion is Flesh in Motion for understanding of flesh.

It is critical to understand the characteristics of flesh because God says that all the works of the flesh are like filthy garments in his eyes.

Distinguishing between what God says he wants in one place and what he really wants is difficult but not impossible. People who begin and end their study of who God is and what he wants his people to do with literal interpretations of the Bible have stumbled over The Law: A Stumbling Block.

One of the key stumbling blocks found in religion is the common belief that only trained, gifted religious leaders have the ability to hear God’s voice. Maybe these leaders really believe that they have that ability and maybe they don’t. But the important reality is that they represent to the religious world that they can and do understand the Bible. And since they claim to understand God’s word, people assume that those leaders who make such claims also know and understand God. This is a wrong assumption. Religious leaders know only a very little about God but they do not know God himself because they are not able to read and interpret God’s spiritual qualities from what they read. They have worldly knowledge of God but they do not have spiritual knowledge. They have superficial knowledge of God but not deep, intimate knowledge of God.

STUDY TIP: See TWO KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE for more about intimacy with God.

A second critical reality is that religious followers believe that religious leaders have knowledge of God and that they can reliably communicate what God says to the masses who do not have the same kind of knowledge of either God or the Bible. And so we find that whenever a leader can convince followers that they can trust that he or she hears from God and correctly interprets God’s written word, we have the ingredients of an Institutional Religion that will practice Commercial Religion and most aspects of Defiled Religion.

In God’s eyes, what effectively happens is that the followers make religious leaders to be gods and idols. Of course they are not wood or stone idols, but they are idols nonetheless because they insert themselves as mediators between God and men. Since there is only one mediator between God and men, leaders and followers both stumble over the mistaken belief that listening to the voice of a human is the same as listening to the voice of God. The way we see it, people who believe this and apply it in their religion are Old/First Covenant religionists because they do not possess the New Covenant ability to hear God’s voice that informs them about the symbolic meanings found in the literal Bible.

New Covenant disciples reject this Old/First Covenant belief and replaced it with faith that God has written the law on their hearts and that they no longer need anyone to teach them. Having such faith the key to understanding the difference between the literal, written words of the Bible and their symbolic meanings.

This difference points us to the difference between faith and flesh: