The essence of the open vision God has given us is the gospel of His Son and He wants to reiterate it, further it and establish it in many ways, many times and by many means, dreams and visions included. God’s communication with His people is vitally needed, He is not dumb nor should His people be deaf. Dreams and visions are a powerful means by which He speaks. However, a word of warning at this point, we are not talking about the popular teaching of visualization, that exercise of the imagination by which well intended believers are instructed to picture things with the free use and stirring up of their own mental images. What we mean by dreams and visions is the free and unbidden revelations that come from God alone and in the context of living in communion with Him by His Spirit. There is a vast divergence between these two, the former is psychic, that is, of the human soul and the latter is the authentic activity of God’s Holy Spirit as a result of His indwelling presence in the life of a believer.
The place of origin of each is entirely different, visualization is sourced in a person’s own being, the result of a struggle to engage with the things of God, project them to himself and then to the church, in contrast, true vision comes from the deeps of God. One of the major dangers so obvious when you consider these differences is that if things begin in the visualizing power of the human soul there is the serious possibility of the involvement of other spirits interfering and impressing false visions on the unwary. Another peril of the use of these human powers is that inevitably there will be distortions of some kind or other present in the perception, the vision, the discernment, the knowledge and even the apparent wisdom and they will lack that enabling power that comes from God needed to obtain their fulfillment.
The well-intentioned soul, be it of pastor or anyone else in the church, for that matter, cannot be the point of origin for the visionary seeing and hearing necessary to carry God’s people along in spiritual life. Here lies a dimension of confusion that concerns the exercise of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the churches too. Strictly speaking authentic gifts are only possible when they are the result of the combined activity of the Three Persons of the Trinity in and through the lives of those living in harmonious fellowship with God and with one another. (1 Cor 12 v4-7) They have their rise in God alone and not in the natural faculty of imagination and although at times that natural power might become involved it is entirely secondary and frequently, if indulged, can inhibit and confuse what God is doing. I would like to describe two visions and dreams, one I received and the other I read about. The very clarity of God given dreams and visions means that they remain with us and are not forgotten; they contain that prophetic, eternal quality that abides and affects us still.
One received in a meeting forty years ago was of a cloudless azure sky overarching a sea the surface of which was covered with waves in gentle movement. Bobbing up and down in this expansive ocean was an empty bucket; a graphic picture that I can still see now. Almost immediately an interpretation was given the weight of which was ‘tip up your bucket, be filled and sink to the depths of the ocean of God’s life, you are not to just enjoy the surface of things.’ That spoke right to my heart and has been relevant to me all my days and shall be too. Recently I read an account of a dream involving a bucket. Apparently the person who received this unsought revelation from God (though I am sure his heart aching for truth) woke from his dream in a real sweat. He was a student at a theological seminary at the time (he is now a writer of very edifying Christian books) and his dream centered on a bucket sitting on the edge of a swimming pool.
Poking out over the rim of the bucket was a large head, obviously attached to a dwarf-like body enclosed inside the bucket, tiny legs and arms and torso but this large head clearly visible. Suddenly a normal person who happened to be walking by kicked the bucket into the pool and the deformed person although freed from the confinement of the bucket flailed around in the pool, sinking steadily because of the disproportionate size of his head and his useless little limbs! The dream has a humorous element and is it not wonderful that God can speak in such a way, using such means, mingling great seriousness with humor and pictures involving matter of fact things like buckets and incongruous figures like this? Probably the interpretation is obvious to you, it certainly was to the intelligent, zealous young man who received it. He realized the disproportionate nature of his education in the Bible seminary, so much head knowledge, he had read and absorbed so many books, theology, doctrine and ideas but had not flourished in love towards God and his fellow, he had neglected prayer and service and was deformed in his spiritual life as a result.
Actually, modern educational methods promote this misshapenness and we have all suffered as a result. We must all respond to a dream like this with its powerful message by reconsidering our lives to see whether we are all doctrine and no practice, or all practice and no intellectual understanding, or all service and no worshipfulness and so we could go on for the atrophied limbs and over developed, disproportionate life is so awfully possible in a whole number of different permutations. It would be true to say that the thrust towards ‘wholeness’ we see in the world is an instinctual reaction against the distortions of several centuries in which the education of the intellect has been enthroned to the detriment of the more intuitive and imaginative dimensions of mans soul.
However, man shall not find the remedy in himself, it is not self-correction that will accomplish the transformation but incarnation. Wholeness comes from God alone through His Son as He indwells us by His Spirit and no other way.
