Imagine your spouse walks into the kitchen one day and says, “Honey, I’m going to the lumber store. God told me to build an ark.”
Imagine the day Zipporah was cooking over the campfire, and her husband Moses ambles in from the wilderness. “Listen, I was out with the sheep today when I saw this burning bush,” he begins. “So pack up the kids. We’re heading to Egypt so I can lead the Hebrews out of slavery.”
“Sure, Moses! Get washed up for supper.”
Now that thousands of years have passed, it’s easy to believe that God really spoke to the famous characters of the Bible, instructing them step-by-step through the course of ancient history. We don’t question that they heard the voice of God.
But someone making that claim today may be laughed at or locked up. In countless news stories, people have sworn that God told them to perform some ridiculous stunt or even commit a heinous crime.
So we may feel a little uncomfortable telling our friends we are guided by the voice of God, even in these days when stories of angels and near-death visions reach the mass market. We are likely to doubt our own experience of God.
How Do We Know When It’s Really God?
Mahatma Gandhi said, “God speaks to us every day only we don’t know how to listen.”
The Bible makes it sound so easy! Moses had his burning bush. Adam and Eve met God strolling through the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening. Isaiah had visions, and Samuel heard God calling his name in the middle of the night. Paul was struck blind and heard a voice from the heavens.
Jesus taught that God is within, always present. Clearly, the Bible’s vivid descriptions of hearing God’s voice represent intuition. Moses, Paul and the others might also have had dramatic mystical experiences, but they certainly had an inner knowing, an inner voice.
Yet so many inner voices demand our attention! How do we know which one is God and which are the old tapes? Fear? Ego? Anger? The lonely child?
Mary Manin Morrissey, in her book Building Your Field of Dreams, says we can learn to recognize God’s voice the way we would a good friend’s on the telephone, with the first “hello.”
You Can’t Escape It!
Some people are able to start at this point. Their deep inner knowing, their communion with God, steers them through life, and they trust it completely.
Others experience more doubt and struggle, questioning whether they’re on the right path, whether they’ve heard God correctly. They don’t yet feel the resonance of God’s voice as distinct from all the others.
But here’s the good news: God won’t give up. If we are destined to carry out some divine idea, we won’t be able to shrug it off.
For me, God doesn’t just whisper within. If I’m supposed to get a message, I start to see it and hear it everywhere—books, sermons, television shows, conversations with friends.
I’ve never seen a burning bush, but I believe God communicates through nature too. I have been greatly comforted by sunrises and exhilarated by thunderstorms. Who does not feel hope at the sight of a rainbow?
There’s no escaping divine instructions. We can ignore them, laugh at them or argue with them—maybe for years. But I believe God will nudge us until we build that ark or get those slaves out of Egypt.
In the end, the only choice is to trust. God’s voice may speak to us in a garden, thunder at us on a mountaintop, call our names in the night, or whisper from within.
But God won’t go away. And hearing the voice is useless unless we heed it, trust it and step out in faith.