Video Transcript: How Not to Discover God's Will

Video Transcript - How not to Discover God's Will (Dr. Feddes)

Chapter Eight, verses 19 through 22. I'm going to continue with a number of messages on understanding the future or refusing to try to get into the future. And knowing God's guidance and will in our lives. Last week, we saw that we don't know what the future holds. We don't even know whether we're going to be alive tomorrow. And so dangerous for people who have a kind of a secular mentality who think they can plan everything and control everything. God says, No, you can't. You don't know whether you're going to be alive tomorrow, let alone what's going to happen. So whatever plans you make, and you should make wise plans, you should always say, Well, if it's the Lord's will, we're going to do this or that that's how we're going to make our plans always subject to God's possibilities and to what God has planned for us. Now, besides kind of a more secular temptation to think we manage everything with any reference to the supernatural realm at all, there is kind of the opposite danger of going to this supernatural source and that supernatural source and yet another one, to try to figure out what's going to happen and make things work for us. 

This is a great temptation for God's people of Israel, it continues to be a great temptation to be not satisfied with the kind of guidance that God provides. And to be curious about things that God doesn't tell us and to just use our own methods and our own sources in the supernatural realm, to try to get at what the future holds and what we ought to do. Let's listen to Isaiah, the Word of God speaking through his prophets, someone may say to you, let's ask the mediums are fortune tellers, and those who consult the spirits of the dead with their whisperings and mutterings, they will tell us what to do. But shouldn't people ask God for guidance? Should the living seek guidance from the dead. Look to God's instructions and teachings. People who contradict His word are completely in the dark. They will go from one place to another weary and hungry and because they're hungry, they will rage and curse their king and their gods. They will look up to heaven and down at the earth, but wherever they look, there will be trouble and anguish and dark despair. They will be thrown out into the darkness since the reading of God's Word and God always blesses His Word to those who listen. If you really want to know what the future holds, and make a good decision, you've got to have guts. Sheep guts that is if you consider how many in the ancient world made their decision. 

Even many kings would not make a decision or take a step toward battle or make a major policy change. Without guts, they would open up a sheep and they would have their experts haul out the liver and sometimes part of the intestines and find out what those sheep guts were telling them to do. This is sometimes called hepatitis skippy, and much of the writing that we have from the ancient world, on the clay tablets and parchments is devoted to guts to telling you scientifically, if you examine a sheep's liver, what it means and so this is one such map of a sheep's liver with some writing corresponding to what the various bumps and various features of that sheep's liver mean. And if you're a king, or if you're a wise man or a major decision maker, you had better know what your liver is telling you. And and many, many ancient artifacts we have some of even I don't know if it's true because I haven't studied at all, but some have said even a majority of the ancient texts that we have, are telling people how to know the future, and how to make decisions based on getting that secret knowledge of the future. Here's another such tablet, a little more writing a little smaller diagrams of the guts. But nonetheless, the way of finding out now I thought, you know, for a general audience, it would be better to portray the tablet's and the old inscriptions rather than the actual gooey sheep guts. So you can be grateful for that this morning. But this was very common for centuries and centuries a very common way of finding out the future and making good decisions. 

A general or a king would simply not go into battle. Until he had examined the omens and had his experts take a close look at the various innards of animals. And many of these people had a lot of training on what those innards were supposed to mean. Now, this is just one type of effort to discover divine plans. We're going to look at a few of them today. And I don't want it just to be a history lesson, but rather also to understand why it is that people are so eager to find out what is going to happen in the future, and so eager to get a supernatural way to make the right decision. One general overall method was seeking signs and so you would dig into animal guts or you'd throw arrows down in a certain way or you consult household gods of idols and you had various techniques for finding out what they wanted. Another way of finding the future and of directing your decisions was to watch the stars. And this is one that is still very common today. consulting horoscopes, astrology, ways of figuring out your future based on the movements and position of the lights in the heavens. 

So another general mounted with a lot of different wrinkles on it was fortune telling. You might look at the liquid in the bottom of a cup that somebody had drunk from and find out what that liquid was telling you. or read tea leaves or tarot cards or widget boards are a crystal ball or just crystals in general, that's pretty popular still today, palm reading, you look at the lines in their hand and that's telling you about the direction of life and so on. And then there is the kind of thing specifically mentioned by Isaiah in chapter eight, asking spirits, channeling spirit guides in the supernatural realm or Having seances where you try to get in touch with dead people, and they will give you insights that the living can't find out on their own. These are all things that were very common that still are common in a variety of ways. And God very furiously forbids. He says those who do this are in the darkness, they have no light of day, and they're headed for everlasting darkness, if they don't change. Let's look at a little more detail at some of these and also, not just at the ancient practice, but at some of the ways in which those things might still be practiced today, seeking signs.

There's something comforting about not having to make a decision yourself and just consider all the factors and then decide what seems wisest. It's nice to have a silver bullet or a magic message that just tells you what to do and gives you the degree of confidence that this is the thing that's going to bring you good luck. And that is going to work out the way you want. Ezekiel 21:21 talks about the king of Babylon and how he decides who he's going to invade next, for the king of Babylon will stop at the fork in the road at the junction of the two roads, to seek an omen, he will cast lots with arrows, he will consult his idols, he will examine deliver. So one way of finding out and he wasn't gonna be satisfied with just one way you kind of wanted to triple check, so that he made sure this was an ironclad good decision. One was to take a bunch of arrows and just kind of fling them and however they came down. If they came down in a certain manner, it would tell you to go this way or to take this approach. And if they came down in a little different manner, you'd take that direction instead. 

And this wasn't just true of the king of Babylon. The casting down of arrows, or of arrows as a kind of lot was a method for finding your direction. Another way was to have your various idols. And again, we don't always know exactly how they would do that. Our famous Greek when was the Oracle at Delphi, where you'd go and try to get a message from the gods. But there were many other ways to where you'd ask gods or goddesses for their direction and their priests or various omens would show you what to do. And as we've already mentioned, animal livers or intestines in the careful study of those would tell you what to do. So if you said a king is going to invade because he's got guts, you wouldn't necessarily say he was doing it because he was so brave, but because the animal guts told him to so he's just doing what any sensible King would do, is doing what the guts Tell him to do. Now we have to be aware of just saying, boy, that was dense. That was so dumb why would anybody believe that? 

Well actually lots of people in lots of cultures over thousands of years believed that and Christians still sometimes have their own ways they might not get into animal anatomy for their guidance but some of them will use their Bible in more of a seeking signs way then and absorbing God's wisdom throughout the whole book, rather than seeking God's wisdom just flop their Bible open and put it on a text. And so if a girl is wondering, boy, I wonder you know about my dating life and she flops it open in her hand finger lands on the word Jonathan says why I know a guy you know maybe God's telling me Jonathan's the man for me, you know, or you know, it's my her shell hash bash, you probably do it, you know, flop to a different verse because she doesn't know anybody by that name. You know, the old story of course, about the person who was seeking guidance and they opened their Bible and plunked it down and landed on Judas, went out and hanged himself. And sorry, I didn't like that very well. And so they did it again and came up with go down and do likewise. They didn't like that very well. So I did it again. And I said and what do you do quickly? Well, this you know, that's the extreme approach to seeking divine guidance by just waving your finger around and plunking it on some verse somewhere in the Bible, but unfortunate you could even use the Bible, as stupidly as someone digging around in sheep guts. God does not intend us to just be flopping around in the Bible looking for some coincidental name that sounds like something that might have something to do with our life now. 

The Bible is to be understood as a total communication from God not as a little set of fragments that can be used kind of like omens for guidance, some people have what are called promised boxes where they'll have a lot of different Bible verses in a box. And they'll kind of pluck at random a verse out of that box when they're looking for a particular word from God that day, or for particular guidance on what to do. Once again, randomness in approaching the Word of God is not a vast improvement. On pagan practice, at least you have a chance of landing on a verse that might be helpful for you that's better than digging around in animal innards. But the fact is that if we misuse even the Word of God itself as just a way of snooping around infection around four signs, bypassing the exercise of a mind saturated in the totality of Scripture, and a mind guided by the Spirit of God, and just looking for that random silver bullet that tells me what I got to do on this occasion, so I didn't have to think about it anymore, or make my own decision, then. 

Well, you've got guts, not a great idea. You need to really be a person who's not just looking for this or that sign, but someone who really has the mind of Christ, as you search the scriptures in their totality, and then seek to be a person whose character and modes of thought become more and more like the thoughts of God and the thoughts of our Lord Jesus Christ, that's really closer to how God guides us than by just dropping a sign into our lap, here and there. Another practice, which you know, isn't literally from looking inside, but instead looking up to the skies, has been watching the stars and again, this goes way, way back. Some of the masters of it were the ancient Babylonians and one accidental byproduct of it, by the way, were some very important advances in science. They wanted to understand the positions of the stars because they believed that the supernatural realm and the divine beings had relations to the stars and also to us and that you could see something of your future and of your life plan. In the stars. You didn't necessarily have direct access to the creator's realm, but you could see some of his plans and figure them out through your techniques of studying the stars, you needed to know where the various planets and stars were going to be. And it's no accident that the ancient Babylonians were some of the best astronomers around who kept some of the best records about the positions of the stars and the nature of the calendar, and so on. Even taking practices can sometimes turn out to have some good byproducts because they really did learn quite a bit about astronomy, while they were trying to figure out how the stars rule our lives. 

What the Bible reveals about the stars is quite different. In fact, the way God describes creation is taken by some modern scientists to be way out of kilt because God describes this in that and then he kind of tosses off on the fourth day, I made the stars also, as you know, it's important that he made the stars but it's kind of almost one little phrase in a very big account when in fact, the universe is filled with billions and trillions of stars and it's so vast and, and the earth seems like such a little speck. But for the original readers, the stars were getting a demotion. Instead of being the things that revealed what God was up to, and controlled our lives, God made the world God made you Yeah, he made the stars too. And they're a display of his splendor of his power of His Majesty. They are not a clue to what's going to happen to you next. There is one case that we know of in the history of the world where God used a light in the heavens appeared to be a star to direct people and it was no accident perhaps that they were coming from the east. Perhaps they weren't even doing what they were supposed to do. But those pagan magi, those wise men, were searching the heavens and God in His mercy gave him the sign that led them to Lord Jesus. But just because God gave some searchers for God, a sign in the heavens wants to lead them to Jesus. 

The baby Jesus in Bethlehem does not mean that he arranges all the stars to tell you what to do next in your own life, or that the date that you were born, under the Zodiac and so on, determines what happens to you next. And nowadays, the Zodiac and people signs are really quite a big deal. I know some Christians, people who grew up in the church who paid pretty close attention to this kind of thing. Because let's face it, God is not as exact sometimes as the horoscope sometimes the horoscope is pretty vague, as well, but at least it's directed at You and your birthday. And it kind of feels like it's meant for you personally. And so you can get stuff from a horoscope, perhaps that the Bible doesn't tell you maybe baloney, but it's still stuff that the Bible doesn't tell you. Now, when we think of all that, what does God say? Well, again, going back to what God says through the prophet Isaiah, and he's speaking to Babylon here. 

He says, Let your astrologers come forward. Those stargazers who make predictions month by month, let them save you from what is coming upon you. Because you've been looking at the stars as though they control your destiny. I'm God, I control your destiny, and you babylon and have been very, very bad. And disaster is about to come on you and all those stars you've been looking at are going to do you any good. astrology started with the assumption that the gods reveal their wishes and their plans in the arrangements of the stars and God says, I'm the only God there is, and I don't reveal my plans and arrangements in the stars. I reveal it through my words. And through my speech, you can look at the stars and marvel at what I've made, but don't look at the stars as a way of searching for what your future holds or what decisions you ought to me. In case you think I'm just yapping about ancient history, it should be pointed out that 45% not just 45% of kind of silly or low IQ people 45% of first year university students believe there's something to astrology, I'll never forget a number of years ago when, when I was at a conference near Harvard's campus, and I went to a bookstore right at the entrance of Harvard's campus. And this bookstore was just filled with New Age stuff on techniques for discerning this and that in the stars are for getting in touch with spirit guides and this and that On Oh yeah, they did have one shelf on Christian spirituality. And that whole shelf on Christian spirituality was New Agey, supposedly Christian stuff. But this was, this was the bookstore at the bastion of American intellectualism. And evidently, it was able to stay in business. 

So let us not suppose that they educated in our own society, ignore such stuff or that the powerful do when Nancy Reagan who had a great influence on her husband, President Reagan, would sometimes be thinking about planning his calendar and what he ought to do next, she consulted horoscopes. When Hillary Clinton, wife of the former president and maybe a hopeful to be a future president was thinking about what to do, she would try to be in touch with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt. Okay, we have not left all This in the far distant past, we need to be very aware of that and we need to be aware that it can be a very great temptation for us because we want to know, we want to know some stuff that God doesn't tell us, don't we. And if he's not going to tell us, we'll try to resort to something else or somebody else who will tell us. And then of course, there's fortune telling, there's kind of the stereotypical or TV version of fortune telling. There's also people who just have their own crystals or they get them at various stores. PT Barnum said, Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

You know, he thought you could sell, you can sell stuff and the sale of crystals or the sale of palm reading and fortune telling men that you just drive down the street sometime and you see these little shops and these little signs that you can get your future read to you can get your fortune read to you and it's nothing New. Divination is a word that is sometimes used for the attempt to tell the fortune and find out the future. You see a reference to it from Joseph. It's actually in his case, Joseph is pretending, Joseph. This is not Joseph's father Jesus but Joseph back. Long before Jesus, the son of Jacob, when Joseph was in Egypt and was second in command in Egypt, his brothers came. And one of the things he did was frame them. He put his own silver cup in the sack of his brother, Benjamin. And he was trying to test them, you know, to see how they're going to react when he's really putting the screws to them and making their life miserable because they done some tough stuff to them to him and he wanted to find out if they change, but at any rate, he has this cup, put in the sack. And then How's his right hand, man? Go and search the sax And finally, what are you doing? 

Don't you know that my master can discover stuff by dividend And he says, This is the cup my master drinks from and also uses for divination. Now we know that that's not actually true at all. But it was part of the ploy that Joseph was using. He actually received messages from God and God illuminated those dreams for him, but, but the cup, he says, He says that because this was a common practice, they would take the cup. And if you drank from that cup, then they look at the liquid that's left in the bottom of the cup. And if you knew what you were doing, you could look at that liquid in the bottom of the cup because of the cup and touch the person's lips, and that liquid had properties all its own. If you studied that liquid carefully, you could find out what was going to happen to that person. Liquid in a cup 10 wonderful ways of telling you that and if liquid didn't work, there's always tea leaves. 

If you can't look at the team, look at the tea leaves. And that's another way that people say, you know, we've seen Do this we've got our methods, and they're the market for tea leaves fortune towering. It has always been very profitable tarot cards is another I don't want to get into all of these in great detail for one thing, because I don't want to give the devil too much advertising or tempt. Some people think, oh, if it's forbidden, I get more fascinated by it. But at any rate, tarot cards, ouija boards ways of asking for guidance or asking for what's going to happen next, to determine things that God hasn't told us, we're going to use our own methods, crystals crystal ball, I think I mentioned once I was in an airport waiting to fly back after speaking at an event and I'm in the airport and a couple is sitting there and they're dangling some crystal and I wasn't quite sure what they were doing. But I was so close. I couldn't help overhearing them. And he says, Well , ask if we should move in together.

The Crystal said yes. I'm not sure how they said yes with the crystal saying yes, they should move in together. And then the crystal said, well, they said, well ask it if we should buy a house. And the crystal said yes. And then they will ask if we should buy the house before December or not. And they said, it says yes. And they weren't quite sure. So this last one again. It said no. And so they weren't quite sure what their crystal was telling them about the timing of buying their house. Now, of course, if you consulted the Bible, and asked, should we move in together the answer be no, unless you're married. You know that that's the clear answer to the Bible, but the crystal was telling them what they wanted to hear. And sometimes when you go to people who have a crystal ball or other methods of fortune telling they'll spend stuff some of them are, of course, total charlatans and fakes. Some who seemed to get results have already done a little research on you. And they find out some things about you and then speak a few names or something from your background so that it'll make it seem like they understand you personally, we shouldn't discount completely the possibility that every so often, they might even be for real, to a degree, not for real in the sense that they're giving you good stuff that's helpful from God, but that they might be getting some sort of message from the supernatural realm. 

But in most cases, of course, you need to have all the more reason to get out of there as fast as you can with your life. And so, if the choices are either between being a total fake or controlled by the demonic realm, those aren't really great options. There are better options that God gives us. And so fortune telling is something the Bible very, very, very strongly discourages, and condemns. And then there's asking spirits. One famous story of asking spirits was King Saul, King Saul had been anointed to be king of Israel. He had served as King of Israel. He had his ups, he had his very serious downs. And in disobedience to God, God had stopped communicating with him. And the prophet Samuel had stopped telling him words from God. And then Samuel eventually had died. So obviously, then Samuel, the prophet wasn't even around anymore. So Saul, having offended God was no longer getting direct guidance on how to conduct his kingdom through God's prophet. And Saul has a big, dangerous battle coming up on Gilboa. And he's going to be facing the Philistines, and he wants guidance, and he wants to know what's going to happen. And so he decides, he needs to hear from God's prophet that the only problem of God that really knew what he was doing at that time was Samuel, and Samuel is gone. And so Saul makes a journey to Endor. 

He's actually how to decree out in keeping with God's laws that nobody is supposed to be a witch, or a medium who brings up dead spirits, but he's desperate. And so he has some of his people find out a witch who's still in business, and he disguises himself and he goes to her. And he says, I want you to bring up a spirit for me. And she's, well, Saul's got a rule against that. So I'm not in that business. But he kind of insists on it, and I suppose offered a lot of money as well. And so she agrees to go along with it. And she's, she says, well, who do you want me to call up? He says, call up Samuel. Oh, instantly, she says she sees through his disguise and she knows that he's Saul says oh, we're just trying to kill. It's a no brainer. So, she does her thing. And Saul says, What do you see? I see an old man coming. And what's he got to say?

He said, Why are you bringing me up? and tells him that he'll be dead by tomorrow night. Now that was an encouraging message, wasn't it? It's hard to know what happened in that Samuel's spirit really came back to bring one last message of judgment from God or not? If it really was Samuel, he still was not supposed to be trying to consult with the spirit of the dead. If it wasn't Samuel and was a deception, he's still got something that didn't exactly give him courage to go out there and face the Philistines on the next day. But But this asking of the spirits of the dead is something that has been with us for as long as humanity has fallen into sin. One reason that people want to hear from the dead is simply in some cases that they miss departed loved ones and they wish they could have a conversation with them again. And so they'll go to almost any measure with almost any charlatan who says, Hey, I can put you in touch with your deceased loved one. That's one of the attractions of hearing from the dead. But another one is simply if you can get in touch with dead spirits who might have knowledge of reality from their position outside of the world of the living, they might know stuff we don't and if we can find out from them, then we're curious and ask them sometimes desperate and ask Saul was desperate. He had been had to had to hear from Samuel, even though Samuel had stopped talking to him even before he died, and was now dead. 

He just had to hear from him and, and leverage that information out of him. Well, some information is not meant to be had, some methods of getting information are forbidden by God and asking dead spirits is certainly one of them. Do not practice divination or seek omens, do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritus for you will be defiled by them. One king who was notorious for this was manasseh manassa sacrificed his own son in the fire. That's not exactly a testimony to His goodness and righteousness, but that's just part of the list. He's the kind of guy who sacrifices his own son in the fire is also one who's practicing divinations, sought omens and consulted mediums and spiritists; he did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger. These are symptoms of utter paganism and paganism kills babies, if that will make your future better. I don't need to comment too long on how many unborn babies have been killed in our society so that people's future can be made better but is it any accident that occurs in the same society. It is falling deeper and deeper into these means of divination and consulting with spirits and finding out from the dead what they think. Sometimes it's not even an attempt to contact the spirits of the dead. In some versions of New Age religion, there is a channeling of spirits where you seek to get in touch with a spirit guide. And it might not necessarily be a dead person, it might just be someone from the supposed angelic or spirit realm. This is a very deadly practice. 

Because, again, if you think you're getting a spirit guide, God has said don't go after lesser spirits such as Angel, a holy angel of God is not going to come to you every time you ask for a message from God sometimes would send an angel with a message but never in response to somebody asking for a message from an angel. The kind of angels who come at your beck and call and guide you are the fallen kind The evil spirits, and those who claim to be channelers of messages from the realm of the spirits are in the service of Satan and of the Fallen spirits. And the Bible tells us we've got to avoid that. So here are four kinds of categories of pagan attempts to discover divine plans. We need to be aware, aware of those and be aware of them, and be aware of ways that Christians might have of doing somewhat similar things without even realizing it. So the seeking of signs to bypass the actual exercise of wisdom and consulting in God's word, watching the stars fortune telling in its many forms, asking the spirits these are absolutely forbidden by God. I mentioned some of these and if you want to read more about that, finding the will of God has an excellent chapter on some pagan practices, some of the biblical descriptions of it, some of the things that people have resorted to you'll notice the title of the book finding the will of God, the subject title is a pagan notion. Maybe I'll say more about that next week how Christian have views of finding God's will. But misunderstanding what that will be and how you go about finding it. 

We'll look at some of the more Christian ways of attempting to do that, in a future message, the Lord willing, but at any rate, this is a very helpful book of showing how pagan practices have gone and sometimes how we have more in common with them than we realize. At any rate, Isaiah said, the people who do this, have no light of dawn. And in fact, darkness is reserved for them. The people of Israel, the 10 tribes went into captivity, in large part because of such things. They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless. they bowed down to all the star hosts and they worshiped baal. They sacrifice their sons and daughters in the fire, they practiced divination and sought omens. And so themselves to do evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger. So the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them from his presence. What a terrible and sobering thing the Lord was angry with them and removed them from his presence. Nothing worse can be said, than to have God angry with you and be removed from his presence and his pleasure. And those 10 tribes were never gathered again. Well, how about getting God's guidance? Isaiah eight let me just remind you again what it says: Someone may say to you, let's ask the mediums and those who consult the spirits of the dead with their whisperings and letterings. They'll tell us what to do. 

But shouldn't people ask God for guidance? Shouldn't the living seek guidance from the dead looking at God's instructions and teachings? People who contradict his word are completely in the dark. You want to look to God. And if God doesn't tell you, then you need to be satisfied with not knowing okay? That's one of the hard things in life but living with loose ends. Living without knowing because God hasn't told you is part of life. And God is not telling you your whole future. God does not tell you what to do with every decision that you want to make and remove all risk from it. He tells you His commandments for how to live in love, and to do what is right before him. He gives you his wisdom we've been reading in our Bible plan, the Book of Proverbs, but he does not tell us to consult all these other means if we're not satisfied with what he has shown us. Bruce Waltke says when we seek to find God's will, we're attempting to discover hidden knowledge by supernatural activity. If we're going to find his will on one specific choice, we'll have to penetrate the divine mind to get his decision. Finding in this sense is really a form of divination. And he says there were some forms of divination that were allowed, especially under the Old Testament. The ones we've just talked about weren't allowed. There were a few that were allowed. We'll talk about them in a future message a little bit and whether some of those are still applicable for us or not. But trying to find out a specific choice by probing into God's mind things that he hasn't revealed in the Bible, or through wisdom and observation is a form of divination. He says in the New Testament gives no explicit command to find God's will. It says, Here's a way to know God's will and to do it. 

And it's almost always talking about God's moral will of living before the Lord according to His commands. The New Testament gives no explicit command to find God's will, nor can you find any particular instructions on how to go about finding God's will. God's will, in this case, meaning what individual decision to make in a particular circumstance. If you're talking about God's Will as God's commandments say, the 10 commandments are there. You've got 66 books of Scripture. But when it comes to what I do in this situation in an area the Bible hasn't told me the Bible doesn't tell you, you gotta find something out that way. And it doesn't tell you how to go about finding that out either. So what do we do? You know, we've heard a lot about what we're not supposed to do. What do we do? Well again, God warns what not to do and then tells us what to do. Let no one be found among you who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft or cast spells, or who's a medium or Spiritist or who consults the dead. Let me just say very briefly, those of you who are really fascinated by the whole flood of vampire stuff, and fascination with the paranormal, and all that stuff, that's, that's, you know, floods, the CW and all kinds of the youth oriented networks and the youth oriented books. You're playing with fire, okay, you get a fascination with the realm of the dead and with the whole vampire thing.

Be careful what you play with anyone else? Does these things are detestable to the Lord, the nation's you will dispossess and listen to those who practice sorcery or divination. But as for you, the Lord your God has not permitted you to do so the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me, says, Moses from among you, you must listen to him. God is going to speak to his prophet, and God did speak through various prophets in the Old Testament. And then this passage is quoted in the New Testament as a prophecy of Jesus, the final prophet, the one you must listen to, you must listen to the Lord Jesus Christ, He is the wisdom of God made flesh and God promised that he would send this profit and this profit would make fully clear all that God wants us to know of him and of His will for us, and and the pattern and character we have and of God's way of salvation. And when he says, I am the Way and the Truth and the Life, listen to him. 

When he says, Whoever believes in the sun has Life wherever it is not believe in the sun does not have life. Listen to him. Listen to God's prophet because he is life, don't listen to the dead. And when you listen to God's Prophet, and listen to the Word of God, you listen to the Lord Jesus, you listen to the Word of God recorded in the Bible that is given. Then also part of that word and part of your overall life as a Christian is wisdom. We're reading the book of Proverbs in our Bible reading plan. Proverbs is full of God's wisdom. And to do right and to make good decisions is not a matter of the message dropped in from the spiritual realm about your particular decision. When you said to God, okay, drop down from me the message from above on this one, there is no substitute for going after wisdom, get wisdom, get understanding, do not forget my words are turned away from them. 

Do not forsake wisdom and to protect you Love her and she will watch over you. The beginning of wisdom is this: get it though it costs all you have to understand. Does that sound like you can just kind of muddle through life and all of a sudden you want a tip from the supernatural so you say, hey God, hurry up and give me a tip. Now, I'll know I'll make good decisions on the big things if I just asked for a quick tip from God. Get wisdom, get understanding. And that means saturating yourself in the Word of God, saturating yourself in those wisdom portions of the Word of God such as proverbs and James as well. But getting wisdom and then observing listening to others understanding the world and the situation that you live in. There is no substitute for getting wise. I instruct you in the way of wisdom and lead you along straight pads hold on to instruction Do not let it go guard it well for it is Your life, wisdom, Jesus Christ, the wisdom of God, the wisdom of the Scriptures, and then a mind that is informed and saturated by the wisdom of God and guided by the work of the Spirit of God, as he helps us to think like Christ, have a character like Christ. 

And then we're going to make decisions like Christ, not by just having a direct pipeline, but because His work in our life and His word in our life is so much a part of who we are, that we start to think and to decide like He does. 

Let's pray together. Your Lord, we pray that you will spare us from the temptations of desiring to know what you do not show us or trying to probe into the hidden things, and using occult methods to do so. We pray that we will delight in your revelation. We thank you for your word in the scriptures. We thank you for the Word made flesh in our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you that you are not a God. Who just hides himself but that you make yourself known to us and you make known to us all that you want us to know. And so Lord, let us be satisfied in that great revelation and let us continue to attend to it to take it to heart. We pray, Lord, that if any of us have, have wandered into other paths, that our minds are being corrupted or that our desire to make decisions are being corrupted by means that are unworthy of you and of your gospel and of your guidance, that you will move us to repent. We pray for many in our world around us who don't know Jesus, who don't know the truth of the Scriptures and haven't been paying attention. We ask father that you have mercy on them that you will rescue them from the deception and darkness of many pagan practices. And bring them Lord into contact with your truth and with your love and with your goodness and with your life. Lord, save us from consulting the dead on behalf of the living and instead, Lord, help us to really live in you and define your living words. work in us for Jesus' sake. Amen.