How to Make God Shut Up

The Promise of Divine Guidance

Too many, too often, and too fickle; all these 'too' phrases refer to people who give lip service to the idea that God directs their lives, but who don't have a heart-belief that God desires to make His divine guidance available to them personally. The tendency is to yank some of Paul's writings about the 'hidden wisdom' of God and use them as their virtuous excuse for being clueless. Of course, there is no virtue in taking verses wildly out of context.

There is plenty of scripture that promises divine guidance. I will list three:

The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things. John 14:26

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. John 16:13

But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him. 1 John 2:27

Elsewhere, scattered throughout the Bible are "helpful hints" that can make it easier to hear God: getting quiet before Him, listening with expectant faith, waiting patiently, guarding against a hard heart, completing the last thing He told you to do, asking with confidence, but mostly, you need to believe that God has something to say. You'll never have a good conversation with anyone, the Lord included, if you don't believe that he or she has something to say that will make listening worth your time.

When God Pulls Back

Even though God has promised to guide us, it is possible to provoke Him into pulling back. In the case of the runaway bride, it seems that nearly every time God tried to say something to the mother of the bride, Gwen was throwing some objection back in His face. The house wasn't nice enough, the car wasn't new enough, the dog shed too much, the whining over this, the grumbling over that, complain, complain, complain.  God does not listen to complaints forever. It appears that He stopped talking to Gwen while she kept  going on with her keen detective skill in finding faults.

It is important to remember that conversations are two-way dialogues. That should be obvious, but this post isn't about not being able to hear God; it is about when He stops talking. If you have been reading this blog all along, you will recall that there came a point when God stopped talking to the Israelites about entering the promised land. Instead, He said in effect, "I've had it with your doubts and complaints! You can just sit here in the desert for forty years." In Numbers 14:27, God labeled it flat-out "evil" —How long shall I bear with this evil congregation who are grumbling against Me?

It isn't that God didn't want to give them divine guidance; it was that they would not accept it! Jesus ran up against a similar wickedness in His earthy ministry. The scribes and Pharisees had become chronic fault-finders, more interested in voicing their complaints then in listening to what Jesus was saying. We can read about Jesus' lament over Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37, 38

 37 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. 38 Behold, your house is being left to you desolate!…

 It is a pretty devastating punishment for complaining to the point of failing to recognize the coming of the Messiah. And I certainly am not implying that Gwen's rebellion was on the same level—she never physically picked up a rock to stone Joe! Nevertheless, she did help to kill his worth in KatieLyn's eyes. She did reject the man that God had sent to be her son-in-law. And she did promote a degree of desolation such that KatieLyn had no house of her own, but was still living with her parents at thirty. So even though it was at a lower level, the same kind of spirit was at work in Gwen to reject the person God had sent.
 
By the end of His ministry, Jesus had followed His own advice. He did not try to talk to the Pharisees. His public speeches were largely given as parables and metaphors."Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet..." Matthew 7:6
Because of their attitude, God stopped talking to them.

The Lesson
God will not force people to listen to Him.