Voice recognition

I actually know a guy who because his nightmares stopped when he started sleeping with his new girlfriend thought it was a sign from God that she was the one for him. You may think that dumb, but we are capable of some dumb stuff, and many of us have done stuff like that. Satan knows of our inborn desire for the supernatural and the mystical, and he will oblige.

You may find the above example easy to case. Here's a harder one, from God's graduate degree program. Paul and company were going out to pray in Macedonia when a girl started following them, crying, "These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation" (Acts 16:17).

It would need more sophistication than most people have to recognize that one as a ploy of the devil. Or it would take a lifestyle of walking by the Spirit, as we are all bidden to do (Galatians 5:16). Why would Paul silence someone who is proclaiming the truth? Some say it was because the girl may actually have been saying that Paul was proclaiming a way, not the way of salvation; the Greek may not be clear here. That would be a clever way of undermining the exclusiveness of the gospel.

Others say it is because, although her proclamation was true, it would damage the gospel for Paul and the disciples to associate themselves with a woman who was known to do divination from black arts rather than from God.

I thought of another possibility. If a person followed me around all day repeating a phrase proclaiming Christ, soon I would discover that I wouldn't be able to entertain a complete thought in my head for the distraction. We are commanded to take captive every thought to Christ. Even God-noise can work against that.

I am amazed at how in touch Hezekiah must have been with the Spirit to be able to understand that the bronze serpent (Numbers 21) had to go. It looked good; it had served its purpose well in the days of Moses; and Jesus himself referred to it favorably when talking to Nicodemus (John 3). But Hezekiah discerned that the artifact was beginning to be a stumbling block, a focus of worship, religious furniture, a good luck charm. (The church lovers of tradition would have had his head for its removal in our day.)

I once asked a godly woman how she was able to know when it was God speaking to her and not her own imagination. She said, "It takes spending copious amounts of time with Him." She explained that if I spent a lot of time with her, talking to her and listening to her, after a while I would know her voice from a pretender's. She's right about that.

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