Experiences or God’s Word?

Dearly beloved of God, we must be convinced by the Word of God if we are to be truly convinced of our hope in Christ and our gathering together unto him.

God provides us with revelation truth; it is not the result of any man’s thinking or his ideas, his theory, or his experiences – it is revelation knowledge that came from the mouth of the One True and Living God, which He revealed to holy men of God and had them record it. His Word is truth.

It seems that more and more people magnify their experiences over the revelation truth of God’s Word.

Experience is no guarantee for truth; experiences must always be weighed against the truth that God reveals in His Word. As a matter of fact, if we are led by experiences instead of God’s Word, we may be led down quite a different path. This experience is documented from Genesis 3 to this very day.

For example, God reveals that the dead are dead and that the only release from the grave will be by Christ when he comes. See I Corinthians 15:20-23.

“For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing.” “Whatsoever thy hand finds to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” Ecclesiastes 9:5 and 10.

There is only corruption and decay in the grave; it brings man into a worse state, not a better one. If God had not provided a release from death through Jesus Christ, no one could escape it.

Compare this revelation truth from God with what spiritualists teach.

Spiritualists believe that the dead are not really dead; they believe that they are alive in heaven and that they can communicate with us. They go to a séance, and through the help of a medium they “communicate with the dead”. They have an experience, but it leads them further away from the One True and Living God. They are seduced by what they experienced.

How do I know? The Word of God reveals that the medium is a necromancer, one possessed with a familiar spirit, a devil spirit that impersonates the dead. The people in a seance may see an ectoplasm form that emanates out of the medium, and they may hear a voice speak to them that sounded like the person when they were alive. The devil spirits that speak through the medium are familiar spirits, lying spirits, and deceiving spirits. The devil spirits put on quite a show and the experience convinces the people that their loved one is alive.

Don’t take my word for it; take God’s Word for it. Read Leviticus 19:31; Deuteronomy 18:9-14; I Chronicles 10: 13 and 14, which gives us God’s perspective on Saul and the witch of Endor recorded in I Samuel 28: 7-ff; Isaiah 8:19 and 20 and 29:4.

God had Isaiah write: “And when they say to you, Seek to the mediums and to the wizards who peep and mutter – should not a people seek to its God, [rather than] for the living to [seek] the dead? To the law and the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no dawn to them! Isaiah 8:19 and 20: The Interlinear Hebrew – Aramaic Old Testament

So much for trusting experiences over the knowledge of God. If people would believe what God says they could not be seduced. God says that the dead are dead, and they will remain dead until Christ provides them release from it at his coming.

We have hope in Christ because God determined it, he planned for it, He willed it, He desired it for us, and He prepared it by the good pleasure of His will. We have the Word of the Lord revealed to us in I Thessalonians 4:15-18 concerning Christ's coming for the Church of the grace of God.

If in this life only we are having our hope in Christ we are more to be pitied than all men.

Dearly beloved, our hope in Christ is not a fantasy or a myth, it is a certain future reality; a future reality that we anticipate because we are in Christ. As surely as he came the first time, he will come a second time to save and redeem those that confess Jesus as Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead.

We should anticipate his coming with great joy in our hearts, beloved.

When will he come? No man knows, not even the Son. I can tell you this; Christ will come “in the fullness of time”, the same as he came the first time. He will come at the time that God has determined, and he will come by the power of God, and with the authority He has given Christ to fulfill what He has promised.

Dearly beloved, experiences come and go, but the Word of God lives and abides forever.

Our Father’s watch in the heavenly realm is set according to the purpose of the ages that He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Tick tock, tick tock…. Christ is coming, dearly beloved; we should go by the revelation truth that God reveals in His Word, not by experiences.