DISCIPLES LEARN FROM GOD’S SPIRIT
It is a point worth repeating: God uses natural, familiar, worldly things to represent spiritual truths. This fact presents several challenges to people who say they love God and trust him.

These are only a small sample of the kinds of issues with which serious disciples must wrestle. They are among the great matters of faith with which people must wrestle in order to please God. It is absolutely necessary for religious people to ask such questions because the answers determine their covenant status. New Covenant disciples have already begun to ask these questions and have found some answers that will inspire them to keep searching. They are entering the Promised Land. Old/First Covenant religionists, on the other hand, choose to enter the wide gate that leads to destruction. They will settle for a grossly simplified, literal view of God and trust others to teach them about him. They are wandering in the wilderness of religion. They think they are on the way to the Promised Land but they will never get there until they cease practicing Defiled Religion and begin practicing Pure Religion.

Few religionists would like to be told that they are wandering in the wilderness or that they have not entered the Promised Land. That is because they are very secure and comfortable in their religious beliefs and practices. The problem is that those who do read the Bible strive to understand it in its literal terms. They think they understand God and his ways because they can extract the literal meaning from parts of it. That creates a false confidence (i.e. deception) that they know the truth. They do not search for the symbolic meanings sown in the literal language. They read the law leads to death and from that devise and practice religious laws that are not able to impart life.

This shocks us at first but it makes sense when we remember that God says we shall have no other gods before him. But we must keep in mind that always listening to human mediators who presume to speak for God (e.g.  prophets, pastors, rabbis, etc.) elevates those human mediators to the status of gods. Neither Jews nor Christians will easily accept that getting instruction on spiritual matters from other humans is wrong, much less evil, because doing so is part of the long-standing tradition of religion that they follow. But tradition does not validate religious practice. Rather, the traditions that are created and practiced by religious people actually transgress and invalidate God’s spoken word.

Occasional learning from reliable teachers is good and is encourage by God. But if they are false prophets and if we look to them as our only or primary source of information about God and his ways, we effectively give them godly status. That may seem like a radical view, but it makes sense when we consider that God’s ideal is that we listen to his spirit — not to religious leaders. That is why he says we should not put our trust in man.

STUDY TIP: See Religion is Idolatry and Religion is the Kingdom of False Prophets for more about trusting people for instruction instead of trusting God. Also see this link for guidance on how to identify false prophets.

True disciples do not put their trust for learning about God in other humans. True disciples do not fit the common definition of a disciple as someone who trusts and follows a leader.  New Covenant disciples will trust other New Covenant disciples for teaching, however, because New Covenant disciples will not set themselves up as false prophets (i.e. idols) to be served or followed by immature religionists who are willing to pay for instruction.

The ideal spiritual model for learning about God that we see in the New Covenant does allow for teachers, but genuine New Covenant teachers will always deflect people away from themselves toward God. Like John the Baptist, they are always decreasing in visibility while the invisible spirit in them (i.e. the New Covenant) increases. They will teach others to study and learn about God while trusting that God will teach new disciples directly by his spirit. And they will not engage in any form of Defiled Religion, Institutional Religion or Commercial Religion. Furthermore, they will encourage others to stop serving all other gods.

In God’s way of thinking, those who trust that God will teach directly by his spirit have faith. This applies to both teacher and student. And those who prefer to receive instruction through a human mediator do not have faith. The proposition is that simple.

STUDY TIP: See God’s Written Word and God’s Spoken Voice for learning from God’s spirit. Also see How to Hear God’s Spoken Voice.

Those who elect to learn directly from God’s spirit make the right choice, but they also set themselves up for difficult, but not impossible challenges. It is work, but it is good and acceptable work in God’s eyes. They must not just read for literal content but must study to show that they are qualified to receive spiritual content. God calls these kinds of learners/disciples, and his plan is to populate the world with them.

We know that God wants disciples. But a disciple is not just a follower, a disciple is a learner. In the Old Testament a disciple is one who is taught. But a true disciple is one who is taught by the spirit of God and not just by a human teacher. While there is a place for human teachers, Godly disciples must be careful that they do not listen to false teachers and false prophets who prophecy lies, speak of false peace and teach out of the imaginations of their own evil hearts.

True disciples, being able to discern good from evil, are wise enough to avoid learning from false teachers. True disciples rely, for the most part, on the spirit of God to teach them. Beginning with the Bible, they are more self-taught through intense study that includes questions about the difficult, mysterious parts. They understand that God speaks through symbolism and listen for him to explain those hard-to-understand parts rather than seeking out understanding from a human teacher who is not a true disciple. In other words, it is accurate to say that they are taught by the spirit of God speaking to their hearts while reading the Bible. In effect, they are listening while they are reading. Their natural, intellectual mind is reading words on a page and trying to make sense out of those words while their spirit is listening to God’s voice for the truth found in the symbolism of those words.

The best way to explain the differences between the written Bible and God’s voice spoken to our hearts is to point out the obvious fact that humans have always had a hand in what the Bible says. Going back to the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bible authors were challenged to give verbal, human expression to messages of truth that came to them by the voice of God speaking to their spirits. That challenge still exists for contemporary New Covenant disciples who are compelled to teach what they think God is saying to them.

STUDY TIP: Anyone who has ever listened to the voice of God knows the difficulty of converting spiritual concepts to human language. It is like the miracle of making something out of nothing. It is also like speaking in an unknown language. You know what you know, but the words necessary to communicate what you know to someone else come hard. It often feels like babbling in Tongues that others (especially Old/First Covenant religionists) cannot understand.

We have constantly struggled with this challenge while writing content for this website. In our studies, we read scriptures that have one meaning in their literal sense and then try to report the symbolic, spiritual interpretations of those scriptures as we receive them from God’s spirit. It often takes many trials to reduce the truth to words that make sense on a page.

Sometimes these symbolic meanings come relatively easily, but mostly they come hard. Having received Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding about a spiritual concept from the spirit, the truth of a scripture circulates, sometimes races, through our mind as we experience joy and excitement over the fact that God has chosen to favor us with truth.

But then comes the challenge of trying to convert that truth to human words in a way that captures the truth accurately. At times the process is excruciatingly painful. We try to say it one way and then another. Sometimes we must leave what we know and come back to it a later time trusting that the human words will come. When they do come we write them down best we can and often we come back several times to reword them so that they make human sense without distorting the spiritual content.

We go through this process with confidence that what we have received is from God. The way we see it, God has given us to understanding because we have humbled ourselves with the admission that we do not understand either the literal words of the Bible or the symbolic meanings they represent. We do this by honestly telling God  that we do not understand what he is trying to say.

We ask “what does this mean,” and then we try to relate one scripture to another that contains similar words or concepts. We don’t just tell God that we don’t understand and then wait for him to give revelation. Rather, we search and keep on searching elsewhere in scripture for clues that will explain the spiritual meanings of difficult scriptures. Sometimes the meanings come right away, but most often they come much later. But they do not come unless we continue searching for the meaning.

STUDY TIP: See STUDY, Study for Discipline, and Study Tips more on how to learn the symbolic meanings of scripture. Also see Bible History for understanding of how the Bible was written.