Can Seeing Help You Believe?

Tom: Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. We’re going to pick up where we left off last week as we continue to discuss chapter 10 of Dave Hunt’s out-of-print book Beyond Seduction, and chapter 10’s title is “Is Seeing Really Believing?” Now, Dave, give us some background on your purpose for asking that question. Is seeing really believing?

Dave: Well, that’s what people often say: seeing is believing. If you don’t see it, you can’t believe it. That’s not logical, it’s not biblical. Have you ever seen truth? Have you ever seen justice? Have you ever seen holiness? So, there are things that you can’t see that you would have to believe in. I’ve never seen eternity; I’ve never seen God: “No man has seen God at any time, He dwells in a light that no man can approach unto.” So, seeing isn’t believing. I mean, you can’t say well, unless I see it I won’t believe it. That was a problem with doubting Thomas, you remember? He said, “Unless I put my fingers into the nail prints in His hand and thrust my hand into the spear wound in His side, I won’t believe.”

Jesus appeared, you know, He wasn’t conjured up, it wasn’t some vision, it was really Jesus, literally flesh and bone, and Jesus said, “Okay, stick your finger in here in my hands and thrust your hand into my side; be not faithless but believing,” and Thomas falls down and says, “My Lord and my God.” Jesus said, “Thomas, because you have seen, you believe; blessed are those who have not seen yet have believed.”

Tom: That’s John:20:29Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
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Dave: Right, and the Bible tells us that we walk by faith, not by sight, because, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4, he said: “We look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.” So, I guess, Tom, we could ask the question—I don’t want to get heavy here, but—how do you look at things that aren’t seen?

Tom: Well, Jesus said to the Jews of his day, “Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not?”

Dave: But they could see Him standing in front of them and they could hear Him talking with their physical ears, so there was something beyond that they were not seeing and that they were not hearing.

Tom: Well, Dave, that’s what I really want to discuss today. There’s some depth to that. What exactly does hearing mean, biblical hearing, mean and biblical seeing…what is that?

Dave: This is a place where skeptics and critics jump in, you know, and say, “Well, you guys, you believe in something that isn’t even physical, you haven’t touched it, you haven’t seen it,” and so forth. But all through the Bible, for example, Jesus uses physical terms to illustrate something that isn’t physical. He said to the woman at the well, “You drink of this water you will thirst again; you drink of the water I give you, you will never thirst again.” Did He have some special water blessed by a priest or something? No, He’s talking about something beyond the physical.

Tom: I grew up Roman Catholic and I was taught that we were eating the flesh of Jesus when we took communion, when we took the Eucharist—same thing there.

Dave: Now, we’ve got another problem. Now we are saying that there is nothing real except if it’s physical. So, in order to feed upon Christ…well, for example, we feed upon the Word of God. Jeremiah said, “Thy words were found and I did eat them.” Does that mean he tore pages out of the Bible and chewed it down and swallowed it? “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” No, words are not physical, actually, there is something beyond the physical, and I think most scientists today—when I was in school quite a few years ago, the physicists and chemists, or whatever, they believed that everything was physical. Now they know that that’s not true—thoughts are not physical. As I mentioned, when I say “justice,” what does it smell like? What does it taste like? How much does it weigh? What does it feel like, you know? It has nothing to do with the five senses. So, when I am having a conversation and I say, “Well, can’t you see what I’m trying to say?” I’m not talking about physical eyes; I’m not writing it on the blackboard. Even if I wrote it on the blackboard—supposing I wrote “truth” on the blackboard—four or five letters—is that truth? No, so we are talking about something beyond the physical.

So when the Bible says—what does it mean to see? Hebrews 2 says: “Now we see Jesus, made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death…” and so forth. Well, it doesn’t mean with your physical eyes; there is something far beyond that. It means with the understanding, with the heart, the seeing of the heart, the hearing with the heart. So, when Jesus says, “You don’t hear me,” He’s not saying you can’t hear my physical voice, you know, vibrating in your ears—“You do not hear what I am saying.” So, when Jesus said, “He that hears my Word and believes on Him that sent me…” [John:5:24Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.
See All...], He doesn’t mean simply…if you had a recording of Jesus and you listened to it, that would somehow, magically, transform you. No, you have to hear with the heart, you have to hear with the understanding—it actually means heeding what He has said: understanding and heeding what He said.

Tom: Dave, this really pushes the envelope a bit because the kind of hearing and seeing then that you are talking about has to be by faith, and is that open to anybody and everybody? In other words, things that are laid out in Scripture—can anybody understand it just by reading it? Can they see by faith? Can they hear by faith?

Dave: They can believe the gospel. They can believe that God exists. They can understand from the universe around them.

Tom: General revelation.

Dave: “The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament shows His handiwork”— that’s to anyone, and, in fact, Romans 1 says, “They are without excuse, for when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God…” And it says that “the visible things of this universe reveal the invisible attributes of God.” So, anyone can know that God exists, and they must—God holds them accountable for that—from that witness of creation that He has given them, and everyone can know right and wrong; that’s in the conscience. Conscience? What’s conscience? That’s not a physical thing, right and wrong, that’s not physical, ethics, morals—that’s not physical, it’s a concept that we have. And so, Romans 2 says, “God has written His law”—not to keep the 7th day Sabbath, but the moral law: not to lie, steal, murder, and so forth. He has written that in every human conscience, okay? So we can all know that.

Now as far as knowing what 1 Corinthians 2 calls “the deep things of God, the things that are spiritually discerned,” you are not going to understand…the Bible will be a puzzle if you’re not born again by the Spirit of God and indwelt by the Spirit of God, and you don’t have the Holy Spirit revealing the truth of God to you, you will puzzle over the Bible, and much of it won’t make sense.

So, can any person receive spiritual truth? Yes, up to a point, the point being enough to meet God and allow Him, then, to give you a new life, the Holy Spirit to indwell you, and then you begin to understand the other things. When God says, in the Old Testament, You will seek for me and find me…”—I think we quoted this last week—“when you search for me with all your heart.” We don’t go running around…maybe if I could just get in a space ship and find God somewhere in the universe—remember, that was Yuri Gagarin, the first so-called astronaut of the Russians—he was up there pretty high, and he came back and he said, “Well, I looked all around up there, and I didn’t see God.” Oh, that made the atheists feel really good. “Look, he went up there into space and he didn’t see God.” No, that’s not how you see God, because God is something beyond the physical, and if we try to make a physical image of God we’ve really gone astray.

Tom: Yuri Gagarin did say that, but then there was a comment, supposedly, by a little girl who said…

Dave: That was in a classroom in the Soviet Union, in those days. The teacher was talking about this and saying, “Well, Yuri Gagarin, he went up there and he didn’t see God; there is no God.”

And a little girl, I think eight years old, raised her hand and said, “But was he pure in heart?” Because the Scripture said, Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” So here again we are talking not of a physical seeing but of a spiritual seeing.

And I know, I mean, I’m a bit older than you are, Tom, probably older than most of the people listening to me, and I can remember the days when—“Oh, if it’s not physical it isn’t real, I mean, what’s this nonsense you’re talking about?” Well, we now know that that’s not the case. Real things, actually, are invisible to the physical eye. You have never seen energy. I’ve never seen an electron. But we know they are there, we can see the evidence—although we don’t know what energy is. Energy is a physical thing that you can’t even see. Space—I don’t know what space is. We don’t know what time is, we’ve got all kinds of theories about it. Space is curved, space isn’t empty, and on and on we could go.

So, Tom, we have enough evidence—the greatest evidence is prophecy fulfilled to prove that the Bible is God’s Word. Hebrews:11:3Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
See All... says, “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God.” God spoke it into existence; there is no other way to explain it. Now, God proves Himself to me in so many different ways that when He says something like that, that I couldn’t understand, things that are made were not made out of anything visible. He didn’t make the universe out of something, He spoke it into existence. I find that impossible for me to comprehend, and yet I know it has to be true. Just like, Tom, I find it impossible to comprehend that God always is. He never had a beginning, nobody appointed Him to be God, He just is God. That blows my mind. No beginning? Always is? My mind snaps when I try to think of that, but I know it must be so. Now, when God proves enough to me and then He tells me something that I can’t grasp fully, it’s not irrational. He’s not going to tell me something that’s totally irrational, but it’s something beyond my comprehension, then I believe what He says because He has proved Himself.

Tom: Dave, as you mentioned, there is a certain point that somebody needs to come to Christ in order to understand the things of God, the Word of God, and so on, and the Scripture lays that out very clearly, as you mentioned, in 2 Corinthians. However, what we are seeing today in the church is that they are sort of pushing the envelope. Those who profess to be Christians are saying, “Now wait a minute, there is a way to hear better, there’s a way to see more, and those sometimes involve techniques.” Last week we addressed a few of them, particularly the imagination and visualization. Now, when we want to hear from God, don’t we get in the way when we try to bring something of our own, either a methodology or my own imagination? Am I not polluting what God is trying to reveal to me with my own thoughts and ideas?

Dave: Exactly, you are, and, Tom, it really is distressing. I’m thinking right now of a book by Calvin Miller, very popular author—it’s called, The Table of Inwardness, and you know, I haven’t looked at it in years, but as I recall, chapter 7 begins with these words: “One door opens into the world of the spirit: imagination.” Then he goes on and talks about if you want to get in touch with Jesus, imagine Him right there, get a clear picture in your mind. I may get this a little backwards, Tom, because I am just going by memory from many years ago, but he says: “I delight to the sunlight glinting upon His auburn hair.” Then he says: “What? Do you disagree? His hair is darker than that? Well, have it your way—it doesn’t matter what He looks like, just so He’s real to you,” you know, everybody’s got their own Jesus.

Now Tom, that is not even rational and if the critics would ridicule that, I would be on their side. What is the point, then, of visualizing an imaginary Jesus, and thinking that this is going to help you get in touch with the real Jesus? And, you know, we could go back over things again that I don't want to and our listeners don’t want to, but it’s like pictures of Jesus. What is the point of having a picture of Jesus on my wall? That’s not even what Jesus looked like then and it certainly isn’t what He looks like now in a resurrected, glorified body.

So, it’s like—you were a Catholic, Tom—it’s like the Catholics have so many pictures of Jesus as a baby, He even appears in heaven as a baby. That doesn’t seem to bother them because if you think that a wafer is Jesus, and you ingest Him into your stomach, then I guess Jesus could be most anything, flitting about on the astral plane as a baby, along with Mary, appearing, you know, at Fatima, Our Lady of Fatima, with a little baby Jesus floating on a cloud and saying: “There will be no peace in the world until this world is devoted to the immaculate heart of my mother Mary” and so forth. Jesus is not a baby anymore, He is in a resurrected, glorified body.

Nor is He today like He looked, even if you could figure out how He looked as He walked the dusty roads of Galilee. Paul said: “Though we have known Christ after the flesh, and henceforth know Him no more.”

So, Tom, if I’m going to go to my imagination I’m going to try to recreate, I think I mentioned it the other day, —I was talking about this and the pastor came up to me and said: “Well, but when I pray, I visualize myself in the presence of God and I find it really strengthens my faith.”

I said: “What? How can you visualize yourself in the presence of God? You’ve never been there. You don’t know what it looks like! Furthermore, “God dwells in a light that no man can approach unto, whom no man has seen nor can see.” You are deceiving yourself, conjuring up some scene that isn’t real, and then you are basing your faith upon that? No, there is a deeper revelation of God to my heart, His truth, His holiness, His purity, His love—these are not physical at all.”

Tom: Dave, you wrote: “We begin to understand better why Jesus ended each letter to the seven churches in the Book of Revelation with these words: ‘He that hath an ear, let him hear what the spirit saith unto the churches…’” and of course that’s Revelation 2 and 3, you know, at least seven times.

Dave: Well, Tom, what did that mean? The Spirit was going to come and talk to them with an audible voice? I’ve heard many people say that. “Well, if God would talk to me with an audible voice, then I would believe.” It’s not the audibility of the voice; it’s whether you understand and whether you believe and are willing to submit to what He says. So, the Spirit is speaking. How does the Spirit speak? Through the Word of God. Now, somebody could get the idea, oh well now, let’s see if we can’t find out how can we get the Spirit to speak to us? Well, if you put your hand over your third eye and you go into your alpha levels or something—this is what people try to do.

Tom: Learn to be a prophet, learn to hear from God.

Dave: Yeah, then you might get it. No, the Spirit speaks through His Word, and we are to meditate on the Word of God day and night, and this is how we get to know God.

Tom: So, obviously, the Bible offers no techniques for getting in touch with God and anything that comes along like that, really, should be avoided; we should steer clear of those things.

Dave: Absolutely. This is the world of the occult. You see, God does not bend to our techniques. God is not far away from man or, you know, not seen or heard by man because man is lacking some technique. God does not need techniques to communicate with man. He’s communicated—I mean, this Bible, wow! That’s a huge book, several times as large as the Qur’an. Now when you understand everything that God has said in there, then maybe you could ask Him for another revelation. But He’s not giving revelations in addition to His Word because the Word is complete.

So, anybody that has a technique—Look, demons will honor a technique. Somebody visualizes Jesus— you are not going to cause the real Jesus to come from the Father’s right hand to appear to you to be your private counselor or whatever, but if something appears, and it does—and, Tom, you know, we’ve quoted Christian leaders, pastors, who said, oh yes—I remember one pastor in particular, and I won’t mention his name, but he said, “Well, I learned this from Rosalind Rinker, and when I visualized myself back in the playground as a little boy about 8 years old, and then I visualized Jesus coming along, you know, beside me, and He was going to help me and deliver me in this difficult situation that has troubled me ever since from my childhood, and then he said: ‘And suddenly, this Jesus took on a life of its own, began to say things and move and act. I was no longer causing this with my imagination.” Well, he made contact with the spirit world, but he made contact with a demon—that’s the tragedy and demons are perfectly willing to masquerade as Jesus Christ. If you are willing to accept that, then they will come along and deceive you, but you are not going to cause the real Jesus Christ to come and appear to you.

Tom: Now Dave, twenty years ago, a little more maybe, when we wrote The Seduction of Christianity, we addressed these things. You mentioned Calvin Miller—we addressed him in the book. Certainly last week we talked about Richard Foster, and so on, the ideas of visualization and so on. What worries me— those approaches, those techniques, have changed a little bit, but basically they are the same, visualization and so on. But now they’ve got a new energy as they are presented now as the contemplative approach. Richard Foster and Renováre, certainly an individual promoting that, but we’re seeing it from many, many people today. The emerging church, you will find elements of this in The Purpose Driven Life, and so on, but again, these are techniques; this is the use of the imagination, this is trying to go deeper with God, but they are very dangerous.

Dave: Trying to go deeper with God by helping God out with my imagination is the wrong route. My imagination is not sanctified. My imagination could conjure up whatever. We quoted last week, Jeremiah:13:10This evil people, which refuse to hear my words, which walk in the imagination of their heart, and walk after other gods, to serve them, and to worship them, shall even be as this girdle, which is good for nothing.
See All...: “This evil people, that follow the imagination of their heart, they don’t heed my words.” And then if we went to chapter 14:14, He’s speaking of the prophets of Israel—He says: “They prophesy out of their own imagination, I haven’t spoken to them, I didn’t call them, I didn’t reveal anything to them, but they are coming up with something out of their own imagination.” So, my imagination is not good. Now, you mentioned, as an architect, engineer, whatever, certainly that’s a legitimate use of the imagination. But we don’t use the imagination to get in touch with God or to come out with revelations from God.

Tom: Dave, we have to close here, but you wrote: “The history of religion is the tragic tale of those who are morally and spiritually blind and deaf, yet who devise rituals and symbols in an attempt to ‘see’ God and ‘hear’ His voice and benefit from His power through means that the Bible condemns as idolatry and divination.” We’re going to address that next week.