Advent Day 6

The Challenge of Revelation

Matt 1:20 -21 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

Ignorance of the Law, they say, is no excuse. What they mean is that everyone is expected to have a reasonable understanding of the laws of the country. It gets worse though, because if it can be shown that you definitely knew about a law and blatantly disregarded it, you are doubly guilty. Jesus said, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” (Lk 12:48) I simply remind us of this, because an interesting challenge arises behind what was happening here.

The challenge is, if God has spoken to me, dare I disregard what He has said? You see, here is Joseph who, as we said yesterday, is a good man, a righteous man, who desires to do the right thing before God, and now he’s being told to take Mary as his wife. Does he have to do this? No, there are choices before him, because he does have a free will. Will he disregard this dream when he wakes in the morning, putting it down to a guilty conscience over Mary, or even the cheese he ate last night? Or will he simply do what he was told in the dream by God.

Ah! Now there’s another question that might arise in his mind. Was that really God speaking through that dream? Does God speak through dreams? Does God ask me to do things that I feel uncomfortable about? Does God speak? There’s a whole issue here about the possibility of God speaking. Well, the Old Testament gives hundreds of examples of God speaking to people, so the last question is answered. Does God speak through dreams? Well, why shouldn’t he?

The truth is that God speaks through a whole variety of ways. He can speak through dreams, He can speak through the circumstances of your life, He can speak through the words of the Bible as you read it, He can speak through other people to you, He can speak through your conscience, and He can speak by a quiet whisper in your mind. Nevertheless the question so often arises in us, was this really God speaking? One check is to ask, does it conform to what we learn of Him and His will in the Bible, but that does mean we need to know it quite well. We can also ask about the fruit or the effect of it: does it bring, love or peace to us, does it draw us closer to God? Are we left with a sense of God’s love for us and does it leave us in a closer walk with Him? Having answered all those questions positively, we’re still left with a response of faith. We can’t be one hundred per cent sure, and so we have to step out, trusting it was God. That is faith.

That’s what confronts Joseph here. This is the challenge of revelation. Is this really God and will I trust Him and respond positively to it? For Joseph it was a major life turn around if he was going to do that. This wasn’t just a quiet intellectual assent; this meant a total change in life, but then that’s what God’s after for us. When we step out like this we find we’re plugged in to a completely new world, the world of God, the world of goodness, the world of blessing. That’s what is at stake here!

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