Episode Transcript
Hebrews chapter 12 verse 10 the title of message is the way God speaks.
The way God speaks.
God has been citing his grievances against Israel in the previous verses and chapters of this book.
Most recently God told how Israel was like a merchant who used a dishonest scale to weigh his merchandise.
They were dishonest toward their neighbor and toward their God.
They had made a covenant with God to worship him alone, but they served idols and corrupted the truth that God gave them.
There was no excuse for Israel's behavior, especially when you consider how God had taught every one of them the statutes of his word, and he warned them against departing from it.
Israel wasn't acting out of ignorance.
They were acting out of obstinance.
Israel knew better because God had spoken unto them.
God said if you look here now in Hebrews 12.10, he said, "I have also spoken."
The fact that God had spoken to Israel made their sin more grievance.
We hold people to a higher standard who know better, don't we?
It was bad enough that the pagan nations were worshiping idols, but it was far worse for Israel to worship them because they knew better.
God had spoken unto them.
He had given them his word so they could know and do the will of God.
God gathered that nation together at Mount Sinai when he delivered them from Egypt.
He gave them his word.
Exodus 20, verse 1-3 says, "And God spake all these words, saying, 'I am the Lord thy God which hath brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.'
They had seen the works of God.
They had heard the voice and words of God, yet knowing that truth they still served false idols made by the hands of men."
If you have a pen, underscore the words, "I have."
"I have."
Put an extra line under the word "I."
Now underscore the word "spoken."
Spoken, reducing this down to its most basic message that God is giving.
God says, "I have spoken."
God speaks to his people.
God didn't create man and then leave us to stumble in darkness.
God has spoken unto us.
The fact that the God of all creation has spoken to us so that we can actually hear words from the mouth of God by our own ears is a marvelous reality to me.
Words communicate our thoughts.
Right now I've got all these thoughts in my head.
And so my mind takes these thoughts and it reduces them to words.
It assembles them into an intelligent pattern.
And then through my tongue it conveys my inner thoughts to you.
The words you're hearing me say right now are communicating outwardly what I'm thinking inwardly.
So understand that you're not hearing my thoughts directly.
Aren't you glad people can't hear your thoughts directly?
I am.
Rather my spiritual thoughts are passed down to my physical tongue which expresses them to you in a language you can understand.
I have spoken to you by my tongue and God has spoken unto us, look back in your text, by the prophets.
By the prophets, the tongue of God.
As you use your tongue to speak to people so God uses his prophets to speak to people.
Prophets are the instruments of God's communication to men.
And a prophet is someone who speaks by inspiration of God.
As my tongue doesn't come up with its own words, it doesn't.
My tongue lays silent.
It lays still in my mouth until the thoughts of my head convey to that tongue what to speak.
The tongue can't think on its own.
The tongue conveys my inward thoughts.
And as a prophet is like a tongue, my tongue doesn't come up with its own words, but it speaks the word I give it so a prophet doesn't speak his own words, but speaks the words that God gave him.
This is what inspiration means.
It literally means that when the prophet is speaking, it's as if the breath from God's mouth is speaking through that prophet.
God said, "I have spoken by the prophets."
The Bible is not the words of man.
It is the word of God given by the agency of man.
Take your pen and circle the word "by."
B-Y-by.
I have spoken by the prophets the first time we find that Hebrew word translated by is used in the book of Genesis chapter 1 verse 2, which says, "And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon."
That word "upon" is the same word translated by in our text today.
Darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And then the Spirit of God moved upon, there's that Hebrew word again, the face of the waters.
Isn't that something?
God's Spirit spoke by the prophets.
Darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Then the next thing you know, the Spirit of God is upon the face of the deep, moving upon the face of the deep.
Now I want you to watch when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, God spoke.
Watch this.
Watch this together now with Genesis 1, 2, and 3 going together.
"And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, 'Let there be light.'"
And there was light.
The Spirit moved and God spoke.
The Spirit moved and God said, "Here's a kingdom truth this morning."
God's Spirit performs God's work according to God's word.
God's Spirit performs God's work, "Let there be light," according to God's word.
Understand, as God's Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, so God's Spirit moved upon the tongue of the prophets.
I'm going to repeat that again.
As God's Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, so God's Spirit moved upon the tongue of the prophets.
Write this down to your notes, your margins.
2 Peter, chapter 1, verse 21.
Peter says, "For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
As the Spirit of God moved upon the face of those waters, and God spoke, and light came, so the Spirit of God moved upon the tongue of the prophets.
God spoke, and light came."
The Bible says, "The entrance of thy word gives light."
Just like the earth, Brother Doug, when we were born, darkness was upon the face of these people.
Darkness was upon the face of the earth.
Darkness was upon those of us who were dead in our trespasses and sins.
But then the Holy Spirit of God came, and He spoke through the prophets.
He moved upon the prophets, and God spoke, and light came, and then those prophets spoke to us, and then light came to us.
The darkness has fled, the light has come, and we now walk in the light of the risen Lamb.
Praise His name.
When the prophets spoke, God's Spirit moved upon them, and God said, "I have spoken," look back in your text, "and I have multiplied visions."
Visions were God's way of giving His Word to His prophets.
A lot of times they think, "Well, how do they know what to speak?"
God would give them inspired visions.
The Apostle Paul spoke of being called up to the third heaven.
They were given visions.
They were given things that they could see, and that God relayed to them, and then they wrote down what they saw and heard in those visions.
God said, "I have multiplied visions."
Again, visions were God's way of giving His Word to his prophets.
Genesis 15, verse 1 says, "After these things, the Word of the Lord came unto Abraham in a vision."
See how that works?
God gives a vision to Abraham, and through that vision, God's Word comes to Abraham.
So look at the vision now.
"After these things, the Word of the Lord came unto Abraham in a vision, sang."
The visions were for the purpose of communicating God's Word.
The visions were not for the purpose of entertaining the prophets, but informing the prophets, saying, "Fear not Abraham, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward."
So, Brother Richard, how does this vision work if God's speaking?
Well, let's say Abraham receives this vision.
Well, as Brother Shepherd would stand in front of me and speak to me, so I'm not just hearing a voice in the dark, God would give a vision, and Abraham would see an image of God, a portrayal of God in some form, speaking to him.
However, God wanted to communicate that just as God spoke to Moses in the form of a burning bush.
So, in some form, God spoke to Abraham in a vision, and he said these things unto him.
So, God was telling Israel through Hosea, "I've spoken to you.
I've multiplied visions."
Numbers 12.
Numbers 12, verse 6.
And he said, "Hear now my words.
If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream."
Now, we know what dreams are.
We go to sleep.
We've got these images coming in our head.
They're not real in the sense that it's not what we're actually seeing with our eyes.
But God's communicating to us in a way we can understand.
It's like a dream.
They would see something, and God would communicate to them, and they would see God through this vision, or see his angel, or however God was portraying himself through this vision.
And he said, "I will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream."
Now, these visions, or these dreams, are not like the dreams we have today.
They're different kinds of dreams or visions.
They were inspired dreams.
So, don't go to bed and have a funny dream, or a profound dream, or a scary dream, and think, "Oh, God was speaking to me in a dream."
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not like that.
He uses the word "dreams" here to help us understand how he communicated.
Last week, my son Abel's here this morning.
Last week, I dreamt that me, my youngest daughter Grace, and Abel were all being held hostage.
And we were trying to escape in an old Subaru station wagon.
I mean, that was pretty vivid, pretty intense stuff.
I was trying to get them out of there.
Our captors took a nap.
And I'm trying to gather my son and daughter up in an old Subaru station wagon and get us out of there.
Aren't you glad that God doesn't speak to us in dreams like that?
Could you imagine me getting up here and preaching to you, coming up with some kind of weird message from a dream like that?
What a bunch of nonsense we would be teaching people.
That would not be God's word.
That would be my imagination, you see.
You see, God's dreams to the prophets were different than the dreams we experience today.
They were God's inspiration to the prophet, not the prophet's imagination from his own fallen mind.
People have always dreamed from one generation to the next people dream.
But God doesn't always give inspired visions.
There's a difference.
Dreams continue.
Inspired visions do not.
First Samuel chapter 3 verse 1.
First Samuel chapter 3 verse 1 says, "And the child Samuel ministered unto the Lord before Eli, and the word of the Lord was precious in those days.
There was no open vision."
The word of the Lord in the days of Samuel was precious.
That means it makes something precious, it's a rarity.
So at the time that Samuel was there, God's word was precious because what had previously been written by prophets that God spoke to in the visions was all the word of God they had.
God was not speaking through prophets at that time at all.
There was no open vision.
Now there's a difference between a vision and an open vision.
That's why that adjective is there.
That Hebrew word open there has the idea of a child breaking through the womb into the world.
Child's in the womb, child doesn't experience the world, but when that woman gives birth, the child breaks through, and now what was on the inside has come out on the outside for all to see.
And that was an open vision, that you had God's word in heaven, not communicated to man, but through the tongue of a prophet.
God's word would break through from heaven to earth, through the agency of that prophet.
That was an open vision, and during the time of Samuel there was no open vision.
Samuel was not speaking during that time.
We know when we learned like next door this morning, after the prophet Malachi, there was no open vision for 400 years until John the Baptist came.
Then God spoke through John the Baptist.
Then God spoke through Christ.
Then God spoke to his apostles, and now there's no open vision.
We now go by the words that were spoken.
The word of the Lord is precious in this day.
So in that period of time people were dreaming, but God wasn't speaking through those dreams.
There were visions, but there was not an open vision.
God was not breaking through to mankind to give him his word.
Now people can say, "Well, I received a vision from God," and they say that all the time today.
But that doesn't make them a prophet just because they say they are.
God speaks at limited times through limited people, and God speaks at limited times through verified people.
God always verifies a prophet.
Deuteronomy chapter 18 verse 21 through 22.
Deuteronomy 18, 21 through 22.
God says, "And if thou say in that heart, how shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?"
In other words, if someone says, "I have a word from God," and they say it, how are we able to say, "That wasn't from God"?
God says, "How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?"
God says, "When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken.
But the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously," that means on his own will, "thou shalt not be afraid of him."
In other words, don't fear that prophet.
Don't even listen to that prophet.
Give that prophet no respect, no attention whatsoever.
And a few years ago, and I've mentioned this before, but it was amazing to me that a few years ago, during the time of COVID, a prophet said that he had received a vision from God.
And he began to tell people all the things that God said would come to pass in that vision.
And I remember someone asking me at my time, "What's your opinion on what this man is saying?"
I said, "Well, let's wait and see if it happens."
If it doesn't happen, he's a false prophet, because we just read.
God said, "You won't know how they didn't speak for me.
If they say something's coming to pass, it doesn't come to pass."
They're speaking presumptuously.
They're lying.
They're speaking on their own.
They're not speaking for me.
And guess what happened?
It did not come to pass.
Nothing he said came to pass, which means the prophet had spoken presumptuously.
He is a false prophet.
He spoke in God's name, but did not speak with God's words.
God always verifies his prophets, the latest of whom were the apostles.
The apostles worked miracles.
The apostles.
Peter would walk and a shadow would overpass someone, and they were healed from their diseases.
God always verifies his prophets.
And by verifying them, that's how Jesus said, "If you don't believe me, believe me for the works sake, because the works I'm doing are the works of my father."
What was he saying?
God's verifying me here.
I come up, I take someone by the hand, I raise them from the dead.
If God is working through me, who can give life but God?
Nobody can give life but God.
So if God is working through me, shouldn't you understand God's speaking through me?
God verified Jesus.
God verified John the Baptist, and John performed no miracle at all.
How do we know?
Because John said, "There's coming one after me.
He's the one preferred before me.
He's the Lamb which takes away the sin of the world."
And guess what happened?
John hadn't even passed off the earth, and there he says, "There's a Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world, the one I told you about."
And then God testified of Jesus.
"This is my beloved Son, whom I am well pleased with."
You know what God was doing with John?
He was my prophet.
Here's my son.
Now hear him.
He's verifying his prophets.
Anyone that just pops up out of the blue and says, "I had a dream here.
Let me tell you something."
Listen, they're speaking on their own.
God always verifies, he speaks at limited times through limited people, and he always verifies the people he's speaking through.
He speaks to his prophets, and he speaks using similitudes.
God said he had spoken through his prophets.
Look back in your text now.
And used similitudes.
Man, we're learning a lot this morning about God's Word, aren't we?
Similitudes is when God likens one thing to another.
We see this all the time in Scripture.
All through the Old Testament.
Those Old Testament shadows of Christ were similitudes.
Similitudes teach us spiritual truths by using physical things that share common similarities.
Let me say that again.
Similitudes teach us spiritual truths by using physical things that share common similarities.
For example, Jesus' relationship to his church is similar to a husband's relationship with his wife.
God using Moses to deliver Israel from Egypt was similar to how God would use Jesus to deliver us from sin.
In the book of Hosea, the book we're studying this morning, Israel being unfaithful to God was similar to an adulterous woman being unfaithful to her husband.
Look back in Hosea 3.1, just for an example of what we have seen in the book of Hosea, you'll understand what God is saying.
In Hosea 3.1, God told Hosea, he says, "Then said the Lord unto me, 'Go yet, love a woman, be loved of her friend, yet an adulterous, according to the love of the Lord toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods and love-flagons of wine.'"
See how God was comparing Israel?
He was saying, "Israel, you're unfaithfulness to me.
I love you, Israel.
I've joined myself to you, Israel.
You're like my spouse, an adulterous woman cheating on the husband who loves her."
That was a similitude that God used.
By using similitude, God paints a graphic picture for us to help us understand and appreciate the deep spiritual truths he wants us to know.
There's little that is more exciting to the people of God than to see Jesus in the Old Testament.
Would you agree with that?
My goodness, that's so exciting.
And to glean the truth that we see from the foreshadowing of Christ in those Old Testament similitudes.
And you know, you can know of a surety this morning that when we stand, whether it's me or Brother Shepherd here in this pulpit, or whether it's a Sunday school teacher teaching the children, and we take God's Word and we point out to you the amazing pictures of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament.
That's not our imagination.
That's the similitudes that God has given to us through the prophets upon whom His Spirit has moved.
Jesus came.
Using similitudes, Jesus called Himself the Good Shepherd.
Jesus called Himself the Vine.
Jesus called Himself the resurrection and the life.
Jesus called Himself the door, the way, the truth, and the life.
Jesus called Himself the bread and the wine.
Being a prophet, Jesus called Himself by many similitudes, and then being our Savior, Jesus fulfilled them all.
So I'll close by telling you this this morning.
Jesus is compared to many things, but nothing can be compared to Jesus.
Father, we thank you so much for your precious Word.
We thank you for this amazing insight that you gave us through Hosea, how you taught us, how you teach us.
Thank you for moving upon the prophets.
Thank you for moving upon the dark waters.
And thank you most of all for moving upon us and saying to us, "Let there be light."
And through your cross, there's light.
In Jesus' precious name we pray.
Amen.
