THE WORD AND THE SPOKEN WORD
Let us Pray
Father, we say thank You for this week so far and this series.
Thank You for teaching us about being Your friend. Thank You because You help us pay the price of friendship with our time.
Thank You for the kind of shift happening through all of this.
As we take the next class today, open up our hearts once again.
We hear you.
Teach us Your truth and help us to walk in it.
Amen.
In our last class, we talked about being friends with God. We established that God does not desire to remain a stranger to us. He wants us to know Him, to walk with Him, and to grow in our relationship with Him.
But this brings us to a very important question: If God wants us to know Him, how then does He communicate with us? How does this God who desires to be known make Himself known to us?
We have established that God is a speaking God. We have also established that we are not meant to live our entire Christian lives depending on other people to tell us what God is saying. So today, I want us to examine something important.
It is one thing to believe that God spoke. It is another thing to believe that God still speaks. And it is yet another thing to believe that God can speak to us, as He did of old and that we will hear Him.
Many of us have no difficulty believing the accounts in Scripture. We believe God spoke to Abraham. We believe He spoke to Moses. We believe He spoke to Samuel, David, and the prophets. We believe He spoke through Jesus.
But when the conversation shifts to God speaking to us today, something changes. Even for those of us who hear God, some of us still put limitations on how we hear God.
I know people who say:
"The only way I hear God is through dreams."
So many limitations that we have drawn up.
My dear siblings in Christ, Adam heard God walking in the garden, Ezekiel was awake in his visions. There are no limitations to how God speaks to us. He will do so in different ways (I will get to this properly as we move forward).
There are also people who believe that everything God wants to say has already been said in Scripture, and that He no longer communicates beyond what has been written or speaks to people personally.
There are also others who believe God still speaks, but they are convinced that they cannot hear Him for themselves. They need a pastor, prophet, or another spiritually mature person to tell them what God is saying.
And some believe God speaks today but have no idea how to distinguish His voice from their own thoughts, feelings, or desires.
I will be laying some foundations for us as we consider three connected dimensions:
The Word: Christ Himself, the eternal Word of God.
The Spoken Word: What God utters, declares and has spoken, including what He has preserved for us in Scripture.
The Speaking Voice: God’s personal, living communication with us by His Spirit.
Please note that these are not three competing things. We are looking at the Word who reveals God, what God has spoken, and the God who continues to communicate with His people.
THE WORD
I need us to pay really close attention as we walk through this, for it is where every other thing in this course will flow from. If we miss it here, we've missed the entire course. So please, stay with me closely.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
[John 1:1 NKJV]
I need us to pay attention to this.
In the beginning was the Word.
John doesn't begin by telling us that the Word was created. He says, “In the beginning was the Word.”
John was going to write his account of the Good News of Jesus, and this is where he starts. Remember that the book of Genesis (the Bible, more like) literally begins with this same opening: "IN THE BEGINNING."
But the beginning John speaks of here is quite different from the beginning in Genesis. Genesis spoke of the creation of the world. This was the beginning it introduced.
But John was pulling the curtain back further.
When the beginning began, the Word already was. He takes us to the beginning and shows us something that was already there:
“In the beginning was the Word.”
When the beginning began, the Word already was.
Before the heavens and the earth came into being, the Word was.
Before there was light, the Word was.
Before anything that was made came into existence, the Word already existed.
The Greek word used for "was" here is "ēn," which implies continuous and ongoing existence in the past.
He didn’t say the Word was made in the beginning. He said the Word was.
This carries Jesus beyond the starting point of man’s understanding of God.
So it means that if I want to understand God, I will not merely look at the accounts from Adam. I will go back to the beginning, the one that has The Word.
Please pay attention to this because it changes how we understand the Word of God.
When we hear the expression the Word of God, our minds can immediately go to the Bible we hold in our hands. And rightly so, because the Scriptures reveal God’s Word to us. But John takes us beyond the idea of words written on a page. He reveals the Word as a person.
The Word is not merely something God said. The Word is someone John identifies as God, who was with God and who became flesh.
Jesus is God's revelation of Himself.
The Passion Translation in John 1:1 calls this "Word", "The living expression of God Himself."
The Word : God revealed in human form.
The Word: God expressing Himself to mankind.
The Word: God’s way of telling the world about Himself.
God wanted to tell man about Himself, and the only way He could do it was through Himself.
God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; [Hebrews 1:1-2 NKJV]
At various times and in various ways spoke to the fathers by the prophets in time past.
First, if your expectations for God speaking to you mean He has to do so through a prophet, you are still living in time past.
You are stuck in an era that doesn't exist.
Again, this doesn't mean God will not speak through pastors or prophets. This is just not the restricted means of communication.
In these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son.
If you have a NIV Bible and you open it, you will see this chapter titled:
"God's Final Word: His Son."
The TPT records that beginning as "Jesus, the language of God."
Do you know what it means to say something is final? Like after Christ, nothing else o. There is nothing else God wants to speak that He has not spoken, and what He has spoken is Christ!
My God!
There is only one language God speaks, and that is Christ.
God's Final Word!
When we say something is final, we are saying it brings something to its intended conclusion. It is the decisive word. There is no further word needed to complete what has been said. And this is the language Hebrews uses to introduce Jesus.
Look at that scripture well, and you will see the writer is showing us a movement in the way God has revealed Himself. The prophets spoke, but the Son is the culmination of God's revelation. The prophets brought messages from God, but in the Son, God has made Himself known.
I need us to sit with what this means.
God's final Word is not a sentence. God's final Word is a person. His Son!
God's final Word is Christ.
Now, does this mean God has nothing else to say to us since He has spoken IN His Son?
Nooooooooo. Far from it!
It means that God has revealed Himself decisively in His Son. Nothing we believe we hear today can improve on Christ, replace Him, or introduce a different revelation of who God is.
There is no revelation of God beyond God Himself revealed in Christ.
God has spoken, and what He has given us is His Son.
Christ is the language in which God has made Himself known.
Jesus said in John 14:9:
“Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”
He was not saying that He was the Father. He was declaring that the Father was being revealed through Him. The invisible God was making Himself known.
So, we cannot claim to have received a revelation of God that contradicts the God revealed in Jesus.
Everything we 'hear' from God must be held against Christ as a mirror.
Let me explain what I mean.
If somebody says, “God showed me something,” or “I had a vision,” or “God told me to do this,” the first question cannot simply be, Did you hear a voice? Did you see something? Did you have an experience?
We must also ask: Does this reveal the God we see in Jesus?
Does it agree with what God has revealed about Himself?
Does it reflect His character?
Does it stand in the light of Christ?
If this stands against the character of Christ,
if it negates what God revealed Himself as through Jesus,
then we need to bin it.
I've seen pastors say they had a revelation/vision, and all of it is filled with self.
That's not Christ.
This is our first prerequisite for everything we see or hear.
If it cannot come from Christ, then it didn't come from God.
We cannot say, “God told me,” and then use that supposed communication to justify hatred, pride, manipulation, or something that contradicts His revealed character.
And this is very important because we are not trying to discover a different God through divine communication. We are learning to know the God who has revealed Himself in Christ.
Your experience, dreams or visions are not bigger than the program.
Your experience does not validate itself.
The first means of validation is Christ.
It doesn't matter how long you have been a pastor or how long you've been seeing accurate visions. I am saying your experience is not the validation.
Again, this is a prerequisite for hearing God.
If you don't start here, one day you will hear demons, and before you know it, you will do babaláwo work.
I am not even joking. I have seen people start and fall off.
The problem is in this very first part: THE WORD
People don't know Jesus, they just get familiar with Jesus.
There was a time the reigning thing was that if you are a new believer, we would advise you to start reading the Bible from the book of Romans. Me too, I was part of the people teaching this 🙈🙈🙈
About 10 years ago, the Holy Spirit corrected me.
He told me to go back to the Gospels.
Go and read about Jesus.
Till today, I read the Gospels up to twice every year.
And He added something to it for me:
Pay attention to the words of the man in red ink.
In certain translations, you will see that the words of Jesus are written in red ink.
How many of us have noticed this in our Bible?
When you read the Gospels very well, you will understand the character of Jesus.
You will know the things He can say and the things He can't say.
Oh! You will know.
My siblings, I tell you that this rule of thumb is also how I select my pastors.
If I see you in the spirit that I am following you, I will still listen to you and use The Word to validate you.
Nobody is above the program.
You owe it to yourself to learn and get this part right.
Starting next week, we will be studying together one of the Gospels.
I will give full details at our meeting tomorrow.
Again, it is a prerequisite.
I beg you, if you are not interested in studying the Word, this is the part you drop out of this school. Everything else will be a waste.
This is not a school of divination, we will get it right.
As we go further in this class and begin to talk about the spoken word and the speaking voice, keep this in front of you.
Now that we have established this:
God has revealed Himself in Christ. His final Word is His Son.
We cannot claim to know God in a way that contradicts the God revealed in Jesus.
Let's take this further.
THE SPOKEN WORD
Now, if Christ is God’s final Word, what does this mean for the words God has spoken: the ones inside the Bible?
Please stay with me for a moment. Don't worry, I'm not trying to confuse you.
We have established that the Word is not merely something God said. The Word is someone. Jesus Christ, the eternal Word, the revelation of God Himself.
But we read through Scripture and also encounter God speaking.
We see His words, His declarations, His instructions, His promises. We see Him revealing His mind and making His will known.
Do we then discard all of these because the writer in Hebrews says it was in time past?
We'll be breaking this down so we understand how these things come together.
When God speaks, He is making Himself known.
He is sharing with us His mind. And He does so from the fullness of who He is.
When we journey through Scripture, we will see God speaking to different people in different ways, at different times, and for different purposes. But in all of these, we see that His communication is not detached from making Himself known to humanity.
Every instruction, every promise, and every miracle had a deeper agenda. When God healed the sick or conquered an army, the physical act was never the end goal. The miracle was a signpost pointing to the identity and heart of the One performing it. God has always desired intimacy with humanity.
In fact, if we look at all of the Old Testament carefully, we will see this hidden in every part. God always signs Himself inside every miracle or sign. There was a knowing of God differently in all that He did.
And this is why we cannot afford to read the Bible as a storybook filled with different stories.
It is indeed a tale of ONE STORY: the story of God's love for man and His ultimate sacrifice to redeem him back to Himself.
And Scripture buttresses this.
Every single time God acts, He ties His voice and His actions directly to His identity. Even when He is healing or doing a miracle, the goal has always been to make Himself known.
I will walk us through a few Scriptures briefly.
“And God spoke to Moses and said to him: ‘I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by My name LORD I was not known to them.’” [Exodus 6:2-3 NKJV]
Seeeeee!
God doesn't just go to Moses and issue a directive.
He starts by introducing Himself and lets Moses know that you will now know me in a different way than your fathers before you.
“And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them.” [Exodus 7:5 NKJV]
When the Lord plagued Egypt, the goal was for both Egypt and His children, Israel, to know.
When the Lord appointed Israel as His chosen people, it was so they would know Him and make Him known to the nations.
Even when God told Israel what to do and gave them commandments, God was not merely giving Israel instructions for living. He was revealing Himself to a people He had brought into covenant with Himself. He was letting them know the way of life that IS here.
And this is important because God did not choose Israel simply so they could enjoy the privilege of being chosen. They were also to be a people through whom His name and His ways would be made known among the nations.
They had to know it first, even though it came to them as instructions and commandments.
God’s desire to make Himself known was never limited to one person or one generation. We see this thread continue throughout the Old Testament.
Again and again, we encounter this expression: that they may know that I am the LORD.
The day we begin to see this, the Scriptures stop being a collection of isolated accounts and begin to unfold as one story.
A story that leads us to Jesus.
Now, I need us to remember where we started.
Hebrews 1:1–2 tells us that God spoke in times past to the fathers through the prophets, and that in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son.
The writer in Hebrews is not telling us that everything God said before Christ has become useless. He is showing us that God’s revelation has reached its decisive culmination in His Son.
What God revealed in different ways and at different times finds its fulfilment and fullest expression in Christ!
The Spoken Word (The Bible) finds its fulfilment and fullest expression in The Word (Jesus).
So if you will look at the Spoken Word, you have to look at it from the lens of THE WORD too. That is the only time it makes sense.
We will pause here for today and take questions to make sure we understand all we have learnt today.
Questions
Question 1: How can we look at the Spoken Word through the lens of THE WORD (Jesus)? Give examples.
Answer:
Let me break it down for us.
When we say we should read the Spoken Word (the Bible) through the lens of the Word (Jesus), we mean that we read the Scriptures and pay attention to how they find their fulfilment and fuller meaning in Christ.
For example, in Exodus 12, God instructed the Israelites to kill a lamb and put its blood on their doorposts so that their households would be spared when judgment came upon Egypt.
“Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Pick out and take lambs for yourselves according to your families, and kill the Passover lamb. And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. And none of you shall go out of the door of his house until morning. For the LORD will pass through to strike the Egyptians; and when He sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and not allow the destroyer to come into your houses to strike you. And you shall observe this thing as an ordinance for you and your sons forever. It will come to pass when you come to the land which the LORD will give you, just as He promised, that you shall keep this service. And it shall be, when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice of the LORD, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households.’ ” So the people bowed their heads and worshiped.” [Exodus 12:21-27 NKJV]
I will jump ahead of myself and tell you that the reason God asked them to keep it as an ordinance for their children was so it would make sense when Christ came.
Let me come back a bit.
“For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.” [I Corinthians 5:7 NKJV]
Christ, our Passover.
What was being shown in the book of Exodus was how God delivered His people from judgment through the blood of a lamb.
Would it have been sustainable to consistently kill a lamb and put its blood on doorposts?
The lamb was killed, and the Israelites were spared that night. But that was not the end of the story.
The Lamb of God had always been in the picture, even though Jesus had not yet come in the flesh to accomplish the redemption we now have in Him.
The Passover in Exodus was pointing us towards something greater. And when Christ came, He became the fulfilment of what that lamb represented: man exempted from destruction, but now eternally.
Let's look at another example.
In Exodus 16, God provided manna for the Israelites to eat in the wilderness. They were hungry, and God gave them bread from heaven to sustain them.
But when we get to John 6, Jesus refers to this same event.
He tells the people that it was not Moses who gave them the true bread from heaven, and then He says:
"For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” [John 6:33 NKJV]
Then He goes ahead to make this statement:
"And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.” [John 6:35 NKJV]
I am the bread of life. He who believes in Me shall never hunger.
Remember, the Israelites were instructed not to save manna for the next day. They had to gather fresh manna each day, trusting God to provide for them.
While the manna was real food from heaven that sustained them in the wilderness, through the lens of Christ, we see something greater.
We see the eternal sustenance God has made available to us in Christ, those of us who believe. The manna sustained their physical lives for a time, but Jesus, the Bread of Life, gives us life that goes beyond physical sustenance.
So, when Jesus says, “He who comes to Me shall never hunger,” He is revealing something far greater than having food to eat. He is showing us that in Him, we have the life and sustenance our souls need.
Question 2: Oftentimes, I have scriptures drop into my mind, or when studying a particular verse, it is highlighted.
I usually jot it down, meditate on it, and pray to find out why, but sometimes nothing happens afterwards. In times like that:
1. Do I have to dwell on it till I get something more?
2. Just read and meditate on it?
3. If I do 2 and don't get anything more out of it, should it be a point of concern?
Answer:
So, when the Lord reveals a Scripture to us, sometimes there are no hidden revelations of mystery to it. Just the richness of the Word itself.
Allow yourself to meditate on it until it comes alive in you.
Sometimes it will give you hope on the spot or an answer. And sometimes it may just be a Scripture that needs to be stored inside of you for an appointed time.
Your job is to stay on the Word. What comes out of it belongs to God.
1. Do you have to dwell on it till you get something more?
If you feel led to, then yes. If not, return to it as Scripture, pray for the Spirit to breathe life into it, and leave it at that.
2. Yes, you should absolutely read and meditate on it, with a fresh and open mind, even. Read the passage in its context, consider what it means, and reflect on how it applies to your life. Then pray for understanding to know why you got the Scripture.
3. No, you should not be concerned if you don't get any extra word. Sometimes understanding comes over time; sometimes the Scripture simply nourishes, teaches, corrects, or reminds you of what is already true.
I will bring our class to a close here today.
Let us Pray
Dear Lord,
Thank You for Your Word.
Thank You for THE Word.
Thank You! We are grateful
Help us take in all that You have taught us. Help us know how to apply them.
As we go back to meditate on the teachings so far, let Your light shine upon our hearts and expand these words.
We look forward to all You are set to do in our lives through this.
In Jesus name.
Amen.
