A Few Thoughts

As I lay in meditation today, my mind, as it often does, drifted off on a tangent. The tangent, however, I feel is an important one.

I found myself thinking back on this week and a conversation at lunch which had turned, as it often did, to religion. We spoke of many things, but one of the most interesting was the idea of speaking in tongues. Several of my lunch crew had been to services where they witnessed the occurrance and spoke of what an awesome experience it was to know that God's Holy Spirit was there in the room with them. I realize that for them, it was a very deeply spiritual moment and I do not wish to take anything away from it, but for some reason it bothered me. There was an initial reason, but also an underlying reason that this experience they had concerned me.

Initally, my question was: "If God wished to speak to His people through someone, why would He do it in such a way that no one could understand Him?" Thinking more on this question, I could not come up with one instance in the Bible where God spoke to His people, either directly or through a prophet, in which He spoke in a language they could not understand. It seems to me that this would be an extremely poor manner in which to get a message across.

And then another thought struck me: Sending a message in such a manner that the recipents can't understand it is not only poor communication, but it's also very confusing and frustrtating for the recipient. Nearly the moment that thought hit me, another occurred in the form of a verse from First Corinthians: "For God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints. "

So, my conclusion was that God wouldn't try to communicate with people in a way that no one understands. Now, that isn't to say that God isn't speaking to the person spouting what sounds like gibberish on a deep, personal level that only they understand. To me, it just means that the message maybe isn't meant for everyone.

The second thing that bothered me about the description of the experience was a phrase about how they "realized that God's Holy Spirit was in the room at that moment." Again, I'm not trying to take anything away from the experience. They spoke of it with all the awe due the Creator and I know it affected them quite deeply. In fact, I didn't even realize that this particular phrase had bothered me until my mind drifted over this conversation during meditation today. So, I started analyzing: Why did this phrase bother me?

I took the phrase and turned it over a few times in my mind. I knew full well what they meant: That here was the physical proof that God was in the room with them and made His presence known. Okay, so that shouldn't bother me because, let's face it, that has to be an awesome experience. After turning it over a few more times, I realized that it was an implication of that phrase that bothered me.

The phrase, while spoken innocently enough, implies that at some point God's Holy Spirit wasn't in the room and that there would be a point in the future when God's Spirit would leave the room. Now, there's a thought I don't like. I don't think God pops in and out like that. He's here. He's always been here and He'll always be here. He's not here when He feels like it and gone when He doesn't. However, I do believe that there are times when we get so far off track that God has to make His presence known in a very real way because otherwise there's no way we're going to "get it".

I think that's all for today. I'm out.

Falx