“God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking Voice” (Tozer, The Pursuit of God, 2013, p. 72). “For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast …The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the thoughts of His heart through all generations” (Ps. 33:9,11).
“This word of God is the breath of God filling the world with living potentiality. The Voice of God is the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken” (Tozer, 2013, p. 72). The Lord “speaks.” He speaks through creation, He speaks through dreams and visions, He speaks through others and through circumstance. But He is always speaking that which conforms to scripture. For the scriptures are the absolute and eternal Word or, Voice of God, in written form. “A voice says, “Cry … The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isa. 40:6a, 8). And Jesus, who only spoke what He heard from His Father, clearly testified that “it is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (Jn. 6:63). So, if God’s words are “spirit and life” then how can they be captured in a book? That is a wonderful question. Many have sought to know and understand God by reading the Bible, but they have come up empty. Why? Well, as Paul says, “we are setting these truths forth in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the [Holy] Spirit, combining and interpreting spiritual truths with spiritual language [to those who possess the Holy Spirit]. But the natural, nonspiritual man does not accept or welcome or admit into his heart the gifts and teachings and revelations of the Spirit of God, for they are folly (meaningless nonsense) to him; and he is incapable of knowing them [of progressively recognizing, understanding, and becoming better acquainted with them] because they are spiritually discerned and estimated and appreciated” (1 Cor. 2:13-14). I love the way the Amplified Bible expressed that. So, the Bible is a spiritual book. In other words, if we read the Bible like it was written in stone thousands of years ago, and is therefore out of date, then it will not “speak” to us. It will not carry the “speaking Voice” of the Holy Spirit because we will be reading it as if it were a human writing done many, many years ago, and stuck in time.
But both the Father, and the Son (the Word made flesh), said in both the Old and New Testaments that the scriptures were of Divine origin and came directly from the mind and mouth of God: “For the word of God is living and active…” (Heb. 4:12a). And “all Scripture is breathed out by God…” (2 Tim. 3:16a). And since “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24, emphasis mine) and “worship” doesn’t mean singing, but means a way of living for God, then it means that the Holy Bible is actually not a “printed Book” but instead, is a “spiritual” Book, written in time and space but not subject to time and space. Therefore, the Word of God speaks to you personally, and eternally, in every generation, communicating the “exact” same message as it did to those in the first century.
Therefore, “I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. [When one believes that] a silent God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished lapsed back into silence again forever … However, the facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak … [So] the Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech. [For] it is the infallible declaration of His mind for us put into our familiar human words” (Tozer, 2013, pg. 77-78). There are many of God’s children who have great faith in God’s eternal “speaking” Voice in scripture. And at the same time there are those who have faith in a “Book” carrying old locked up truth, and who teach as though those words are not “living and breathing” but are still the foundation of our faith. But when one teaches that the Bible, as in the Book “itself,” is the power, instead of the God who breathes still through the living pages of the eternal Word, they lack faith to receive from God. So, the power of the scriptures are “powerful” not so much because they are written on paper, but because they are breathing His speaking, creating, life changing, cosmic Voice to those who have ears to hear.
Are you “hearing” His Voice?
Aletheia: Truth in the Darkness 