Revelation Before and After Jesus

Some time ago (September 5, 2005) Adrian Warnock wrote an excellent entry on the need for a Christian experience in the present (hat tip: Peter Kirk). As usual, whether I agree or disagree, Adrian does a fine job of presenting his position, and in this case, I do agree.

He continued that entry with another that discussed the nature of revelation both before and after Jesus. To get a clear picture of Adrian’s position you will need to read more than I can quote here, but the following should give the general flavor:

Such a widespread outpouring of the Spirit cannot ever be purely for Scripture-writing and authenticating. If “all flesh” can prophesy, it is inevitable that they must have something by which to judge those words, for they cannot all be of equal weight or authority. In fact, Jesus was the last true Prophet in the sense of being authoritative and inerrant in everything He said. So where, prior to Jesus, authority rested in a few people who prophesied, but did so inerrantly, in the new era authority rests solely with Jesus and operates through the Scriptures, but the Spirit is poured out so that “all flesh” can prophesy whilst those prophecies are to be judged by the authoritative revelation contained in the Bible.

Now again I agree with the bulk of Adrian’s post, but here toward the end I think he displays the normal discomfort, and possibly a little confusion that I often hear from charismatics when dealing with revelation. What is the relationship between a word of prophecy spoken today and scripture? How authoritative is a word spoken by a present day prophet?

Now I’m bound to differ with Adrian in that I don’t believe in Biblical inerrancy. Thus I cannot see the difference between ancient and present day revelation as being either inerrancy or the convenience of writing that word down. I have discussed these issues previously in my pamphlets What is the Word of God?, and Spiritual Gifts: Prophecy. Today I’m not going to try to respond to Adrian point-by-point, but rather simply state how I believe we can view God’s revelation consistently before and after Jesus.

As I see it, for Christians Jesus is the focal point of all revelation. All of our understanding of God centers on the revelation that came through Jesus Christ. Hebrews 1:1-4 tells us that there were various portions of revelation that came in various ways before that, but that Jesus is the ultimate revelation. We understand the scriptures by looking through the lens of Jesus. In practice, I suggest applying the two laws–love for God and love for one another–to any application of scripture. If you cannot hang it all from those two laws, then perhaps you need to reconsider.

Since I stated that I don’t believe in inerrancy, let me also state what I do believe. Once you have found what God is saying to you in scripture, that is always true. Over the years I have had a number of people tell me that they can agree, but they aren’t sure one can discover what God is saying through scripture. So I add a second statement. It is possible to discover what God is saying to you through scripture. This differs from inerrancy in that I believe that the specific command and more importantly the form of the command or other revelation that God gives is conditioned by the audience as well as by the speaker. Thus God could give a command that would be right for a particular set of people at a particular time, but might be very wrong at another. The principle behind the command does not change, but the command changes. What is to be revealed ultimately does not change, but the way in which it is presented does.

(I’m going to discuss this issue a bit more in the next couple of days. On my Participatory Bible Study blog I’m coming up on the flood and wish to discuss violence in the Bible. Some of the violent episodes provide a good basis on which to discuss revelation.)

I don’t think that nature of revelation changes. In other words, before or after Jesus, if the Spirit is speaking to someone, what the Spirit says is always true, even if it may be adapted for the audience. Current day revelation and Biblical revelation are both focused through Jesus Christ, and may be tested by Jesus Christ.

But what about written revelation? What about a standard by which to test current revelation? Here there is a great difference between the Bible itself and modern revelation. The Bible has been tested and retested by Christians over a long period of time and over a large geographical and cultural range. We don’t have to ask whether it is authoritative each time we pick it up because that has been tested. This is not due to a difference in how revelation occurred in Biblical times, but rather to the fact that we only have that selected sample. If we lived in the time of Elijah there would be plenty of prophetic speaking, or at least claims of it, and we would have to test it just as we do today.

When someone says, “Thus saith the Lord” or something similar in worship we definitely do have to ask that question. In fact, I believe that the charismatic movement is in some serious trouble even now because we often fail to test the spirits. We are more than anxious to accept each new prophecy of wonderful things to happen just around the corner, but we are much less anxious to engage in the discipline of thinking and testing. But the problem is with testing.

Similarly, the reason we have no more scripture is not with any difficulty in writing it all down, but rather because we do not have a unified body of Christ that can accept new scripture. It doesn’t mean that the new revelation is less true. It is merely less accepted.

Words from the Lord, while the message they convey is true, can also have different ranges of applicability. Scripture is generally of the most universal applicability. What God says to an individual may only be applicable to that individual.