An exploration of modern-day revelation by someone who experienced it directly.
I spent 10 years in the word of faith movement, and the next 25+ years studying theology as an amateur, to avoid ever being deceived again, and am now trying again to get a master's in theology. This time from The Masters University, the gold standard for the theological circles I travel in.
I have had 25+ years to try to reconcile what I saw in the charismatic movement, in my life and others lives.
It took me a while to come up with "all" the answers, but often the real trick is to know the right questions to ask.
I had to come to grips with the fact that I had seen a lot of stuff, not much in the way of miraculous healings, but a lot of other unexplainable stuff, including one person I met who gave a credible testimony of going to Heaven.
So how do I reconcile that with my cessationist point of view? Or how can I even defend becoming a cessationist at all, when I have seen a lot of stuff that is obviously supernatural?
To begin, I define cessationism as primarily denying modern day revelation from God. Stated in the positive, I affirm the sufficiency of Scripture. I also deny anyone has the gift of healing today. But I affirm that God still does miracles and His hand is directly involved in all Christian's lives through divine providence, and frequently in visible ways.
I am going to walk you through the things I have seen and show what I now believe is a consistent Biblical viewpoint for them.
Let's start with some of the things I have personally seen, and credible testimonies from people I have known personally.
This testimony comes from a dear sweet young woman who privately told us her story. She was in a car accident, suffered head trauma, and was in a coma for a few days. When she awakened, she told the amazing story of her heavenly journey. She had also suffered minor brain damage and needed some therapy to regain some of her cognitive and motor skills. But you wouldn't know that unless she told you.
In heaven she saw vibrant colors, and the colors had meanings, purple was the color of royalty for example, and in the heavenly throne room there were three thrones, each a tiny bit shorter than the next, indicating the Spirit who was under the Son and the Father's authority, and the Son was under the Father's.
Theological analysis:
Theologically, the Bible is clear there is only one throne in heaven, as only one member of the trinity has a body, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. When the Ancient of Days sits on the great white throne, it will be Jesus Christ that we see. This is a false view of the Trinity and clearly unbiblical. Subordinationism is also an ancient historical heresy that most Christians of today are likely unaware of.
When I heard that woman's story though, I knew nothing of sound doctrine, only years later did I have a chance to think through what she said with the mind of Christ (which is a mind informed by Scripture and sound doctrine).
There are huge numbers of heavenly visions today, virtually all of them contradictory, and most are easily dismissed like the one above by having some contradiction to the Bible. Paul himself firmly denied all heavenly trip reports by saying that a man is not allowed to speak of such things. You would think that would be enough to settle the issue, and it is, for anyone who is submitted to scriptural authority.
Practical explanation:
So then how do we explain such things. My take is to use Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is most likely the best one. While I cannot peer into the spirit realm we can come to fairly good conclusions if we just apply a little common sense that is informed by scripture.
The woman was sincere, was not travelling around making money or reputation off of it, it was a private story she mostly kept to herself.
The first possibility is it is demonic, but I don't believe demons are stupid enough to be flooding us with vast amounts of contradictory visions of heaven. However, I do believe demonic deceptions capitalize on the gullibility afforded by belief in extra-biblical revelation.
So I believe this vision is best explained as a simple hallucination, brought on by a near death experience and head trauma. It is understandable that if someone was to hallucinate (meaning have a very vivid dream), they would dream about what was important to them, namely Jesus Christ.
As for other visions of heaven I believe they fit into two general categories:
The first vision was from someone I knew who had a drug overdose and was in a coma and almost died, so pretty much everything I said about the heavenly vision can be said here. There was however no testable theological content, just Jesus showed up and I had warm fuzzies in my coma.
The second one was a homeless guy I knew who liked to stare into candles and hypnotize himself into visions and dreams. He described a Jesus who was mad at him for doing the candle thing, whose disapproving frown (as He never spoke) told him to choose between Him (Jesus) and these candle seances. Yet the guy still continued to do the candle thing. I think this one is self-refuting without really needing much explanation.
So, for visions, a rather obvious pattern has arisen don't you think?
This is a vast subject, and this stuff is all over nominally cessationist denominations, but I'll give a few examples. Some are seemingly legitimate and some are comically bad.
I have had strong mental impressions myself, some worked out, and some didn't.
I am convinced that intuition and confirmation bias can explain most of it.
You get a mental impression that works out well, and you spend the rest of your life telling people God told you something, your own personal miracle, I've had a few too.
But the mental impressions that didn't work out are forgotten. Confirmation bias hard at work.
I still get strong mental impressions from time to time, but I attribute them to myself, my intuition. Human beings are all capable of intuitive thought, and some do it more and better than others. Assigning those intuitions to the value of "God said" is the mistake we make.
Theology:
Revelation from God is strictly regulated in scripture. In the mosaic law false prophecy is a sin that carries the same penalty as adultery, homosexuality, idolatry, and murder, namely death.
God takes false prophecy very seriously, something we all ignored in the charismatic movement. We thought "test the spirits" meant something like a consensus vote, or just validate it against our (virtually nonexistent) knowledge of Scripture. But it means apply the mosaic law test. The New Testament does not abrogate what came before because prophets cannot do that. Meaning the test for a prophet has not changed.
The test for a prophet is predictive inerrancy, and theological inerrancy, one cannot overturn anything that came before. Nobody has passed this test since the apostolic era. And history is filled with many who tried.
It also stands to reason that if God gives a test for a prophet then God must give testable prophecies to validate said prophets. Untestable prophecies that lack sufficient depth of content to be testable are an automatic fail. They must contain highly specific information, and the prophet's theology must not deviate from Scripture in any way.
It is also true that the average Charismatic knows so little theology that it is laughable to think they are qualified to test things by Scripture. The poor woman with multiple Trinitarian heresies in her single vision is a pretty good example.
Furthermore, the test in the OT and NT is a corporate test, the whole church and their best theologians are expected to examine the theological content to determine if someone qualifies as a prophet. It's what the Bereans did, and what they were commended for, they tested things against the OT, because that was the Scripture they had.
Personal private revelation is not a category that even exists in Scripture, yes, some people got some, but they were recorded and were ultimately made visible to all of us.
I will grant that once a prophet has passed the test, that some less testable things could be spoken, but in general all prophecy is for the body, and the prophetic record of any prophet accumulates in the public record, for public scrutiny and understanding. That has aways been the purpose of prophecy.
I knew a couple who whenever the husband wanted to do something the wife didn't like, she would pray about it, and come back a week later and say she thought God was leading them to do something different. She did it often enough I started feeling sorry for the man, and was kinda glad I wasn't married to her. Six months later he left her. None of her prophecies were predictive, they had no testable content whatsoever. What a disaster that was.
I saw an ex-bethelite (on Justin Peters) describing the worst prophetic fail he had ever seen. He ran a ministry at Bethel Church where they would go out and give spontaneous prophecies to people on the streets as they felt led. One was given to a woman saying that God knew she was doing something new in her life and that He affirmed and blessed it. She responded that she had just become a wiccan, and was very excited and grateful that God had delivered that message to her. That's an EPIC FAIL right there. Note that lack of any testable content there either, it was vague enough to be something any modern psychic could have come up with, little more than what you could get from a fortune cookie.
I know of a woman who tried to kill her husband with a knife during a domestic dispute. He was fast enough to avoid her attacks and was not injured. After she calmed down she started saying ever so innocently "Oh I don't know what came over me". She was instantly pronounced demon possessed and they searched desperately for a solution to her "problem". Personally, I think she should have won an Oscar for that act. Once you've known a few really good liars in your life, coming to such conclusions gets a lot easier.
But it got stranger, her husband prayed desperately for a solution to her demonic problem and managed to groan out the word "suitcase".
They searched their house and found some old voodoo stuff in her dead mother's suitcase in the closet. They took those items out back and burned them. Problem solved right? This one had actual testable content, but it fails on the false theology side of things.
In case you don't know about what they believe, that incident had every false theology about demon possession of Christians wrapped up in a gift box with a nice bow on top. I have a whole article on this to analyze that theology here:
My take is she got away with attempted murder with the age-old and time-tested excuse "the devil made me do it". It's a very popular excuse in charismatic circles. Allow me some (more) sarcasm, and I'll admit to wondering if that man is still alive today. The really terrible thing is she apparently had demonic help with her alibi with that "suitcase" thing. Consider this an example of how dangerous false prophecy can be.
False religions are laden down with little false miracles confirming their stuff too. Lying signs and wonders are not your friend, and will not lead to the truth.
This is one of the saddest tales I have to tell. I was a deacon at a small church, and our pastor was caught plagiarizing most (2 out of 3) sermons for the entire 10 years of his preaching ministry, by reading verbatim (sometimes with a few interspersed extra comments) another man's sermons as his own.
When caught, he appointed his own yes-man to lead the deacon disciplinary committee, the youngest, and least loyal to Scripture guy we had. He liked to quote from a catholic monk St. Francis of Assisi "Preach the Gospel, and if necessary, use words." That's the social Gospel.
When it was observed we as deacons had no authority and an elder should oversee the process, that pastor found a friend of his from another church to fill the role.
The fix was in, such obvious conflicts of interest were shocking, the whole process was manipulated and a complete sham.
Then there was the letter, he wrote an apology letter to the pastor whose sermons he had been using, it was comprised of about three sentences. All he said was that he had been accused of plagiarism, and he had used some of the other guy's materials in his sermon prep. Now that pastor publishes both his sermons and a full commentary series on the NT. They are intended to be used in exactly that way. So the guy wrote him back and said he did nothing wrong. Nothing was in the letter about preaching most of his sermons verbatim over a 10 year period was there. Our guy waved that letter around like he had received a pardon from God. The dishonesty was shocking. The guy who wrote those sermons is on record as having denounced plagiarism as a terrible sin.
I was the sole dissenting deacon on the disciplinary committee; I was the only one who saw this as a disqualifying sin. I was called a pharisee, unloving, and blamed for disturbing the unity of the Church, by people who had so little knowledge of history, they didn't know those arguments are commonly used by false teachers to deflect criticism of their doctrines. I watched a whole room full of deacons whom I had served with for years, choose a manipulative con-artist man over God, in the name of love no less.
At the final meeting when he was reinstated (and last one before I left that church), he said, "I knew you were going to do that, God called me into the ministry". It turned out also, that he had zero training, he had just decided he was going to be a pastor one day, after losing his previous job, and got some other pastor to give him some minimal training. No time spent as an assistant pastor, no seminary or formal training of any kind, no experience developing the skills and discipline that it takes for the hard work of producing a sermon every week. The pastor who trained him, told him that the preaching ministry was not one where you would ever say anything new, everything that needed to be said had already been said, he called it a "beg, borrow, or steal" ministry. Well, our guy certainly took that to heart didn't he, and he used that story to justify his actions to me.
And lastly, as he viewed himself as fully exonerated, he talked about bringing charges against those who had originally accused him. Does that sound like a repentant man to you?
He was, in retrospect, totally unqualified to rightly divide the word of God, or to be in ministry at all. He had profaned the pulpit and ignored the requirements for an elder in the Church in favor of his personal "calling". The sermons he used were all from a cessationist pastor, he even read sermons from the pulpit preaching against hearing voices in your head. But his life told a different story, and somehow, he saw no conflict there.
God had different plans however, the young adults in that town heard about what had happened and spread the word. 18 months later that church shut down due to lack of attendance. Around that time he was arrested for domestic violence against his wife. Yeah, you read that right.
He eventually recovered, though, years later he went into IT, my field, good choice. I'm hoping the arrest was a one-time event, by a man who had hit rock-bottom and had an outburst and was otherwise decent. And that it was a wake-up call for him.
I always had hope for him, God doesn't shut down most false churches, the fact the Lord disciplined him meant He still loved him. So, I hope there actually is something of a good ending in there somewhere.
One woman was extolling to me the wondrous things she found in the book of 1 Enoch (an apocryphal book that has been popular on social media lately). Not long after she was chasing every apocryphal book she could find. She developed an obsession with "Bibles" in denominations around the world that have extra books in them, I hear of one that has 80+ books in it.
Her belief is there is more stuff from God than the 66 books. My response is the more books those other denominations have, the less discernment they have, and the worse their theology will be as a result.
That same woman earlier in her life got stiffed for $40, only to have someone knock on her door a week later and say God told them to give her $40. Literally he insisted, "just take the money", no explanation, and left after it was done. In part that led to her love affair with the book of Enoch and the other apocrypha.
Note the miracle was predictively testable, but was content-free theologically, so still untestable Biblically. He never even said which God. Miracles like that serve only one purpose, to make you vulnerable by opening you to the possibility of extra-biblical revelation. Untestable content doesn't mean there isn't a test involved though. Meaning you are the one being tested.
I will confess that long ago (last century) I gave large amounts of money to prosperity preachers because I believed "God told me to". Only years later did I find out they were deniers of the Trinity. On Trinity Broadcasting Network no less. Even in my wildest days in Charismania, I knew that a trinity denier was not a Christian. In retrospect, that financial loss is its own punishment too, richly deserved IMHO. And by the standards of the hundred-fold anointing, God still owes me three million bucks, so far no dice, still waiting... It occurred to me once that simply applying truth in advertising laws to the word-of-faith movement would go a long way towards shutting it down.
A lot of people only ask God's guidance for trivial things, they don't risk much, so they don't get harmed much, at least in this life. But the people who take it seriously (as I did), almost always end up getting harmed by it.
In fact, when I was in charismaticism, I recall being irritated by those people that I called "the dabblers". It was clear to me they didn't really believe they were hearing from God. They were just participating socially to be cool, but risking nothing. That wasn't real faith to me, they were just dabbling in it. And of course, because I took it seriously, I was one of the ones who got burned. And that was also the method God used to rescue me from that movement.
That's why I am writing this too, to sound the warning to others. And let this be a warning to pastors too, if you care for your flock, the ones who take it seriously are the ones most likely to get harmed.
In charismaticism we were taught to look for confirmations of our "words" from providential events.
Obviously if you ever had a word you weren't sure about, you are by definition a false prophet, and if ever a confirmation failed to happen, then by definition you have been confirmed to be a false prophet. No prophet in the OT or NT ever doubted they had the word of God, not even the false prophets struggled there from what we can see. The fleece was a method to inquire of God, that was used once, and from that they dubiously derive the confirmation test. No command or approval of the use of fleeces for anybody else is given in Scripture.
Sadly, I did all of those things for years, never once did it occur to me how unbiblical it was until someone pointed it out to me. More on confirmations later.
I am a mathematician, and if someone tells me that there is a 1 in 1000 chance of something happening and that proves that their "miracle" is real. I hear that one out of thousand times that event is guaranteed to happen and they are the one out of thousand to see it. Do you know the people do all kinds of things at God's leading, including delivering groceries to random houses God told them to. The thanks they get is "proof" they got it right.
Delivering groceries to random houses in poor neighborhoods is likely to score hits much higher than 1000 to 1. And needy people are highly like to say thank you and just take the groceries, so it becomes a self-fulfilling mutual unwitting con-job when both parties are simply being polite and one is happy to accept free groceries and avoid offending the deliverer.
But there are some things that fairly obviously require a supernatural explanation. So how do we explain that?
The trick to getting a good answer is asking the right question. And asking it in the right way.
So, I asked Scripture (which is the right way), what is the purpose for all these things? Why do You God allow it? As a Calvinist I know that all things (including evil) have a purpose, and are ordained by God, and finally, I had asked the right question: the scriptures came to mind almost immediately.
Deuteronomy has the clear test of a prophet and how to deal with false prophets, it also gives us the purpose of false prophecy:
deu 13:1 " If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder,
deu 13:2 and the sign or the wonder comes true, concerning which he spoke to you, saying, ` Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them, `
deu 13:3 you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the Lord your God is testing you to find out if you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
deu 13:4 " You shall follow the Lord your God and fear Him; and you shall keep His commandments, listen to His voice, serve Him, and cling to Him.
deu 13:5 " But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has counseled rebellion against the Lord your God who brought you from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery, to seduce you from the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil from among you.
So we have all our answers, false prophecies and visions are tested by their predictive content, and their theological content. Both must be inerrant, and testable.
And the purpose of false prophecy is (drum roll please)...:
This is the main conclusion of this document.
We have learned from Scripture the purpose of false prophecy and false miracles, to test us, to see if we will follow them. Paul reaffirms this in the NT, declaring false teachers (that were causing factions in the Corinthian church) had the necessary purpose of separating the true believers from the false ones.
The NT has even more warnings, if even an angel from heaven preach another Gospel, do not listen to them, and lying signs and wonders are repeatedly warned against.
Notice again that Paul affirmed that false teaching is necessary. False prophecy, false teaching, and counterfeit miracles all have a purpose, and it is a necessary one.
The next major conclusion, is all those people who say "God told me", or who have conversations with God are simply making God an imaginary friend in their heads (as we were all trained to do in charismaticism), or worse are inviting in something dangerous.
Consider that these imaginary friends more closely resemble what the Bible calls familiar spirits than God's communication in Scripture.
God simply does not communicate this way, with errant fallible communication methods. And if they are wrong, they commit the multiple sins of false prophecy, of worshipping their own imaginations as God, and possibly of consulting with a familiar spirit.
Continuing on to more conclusions, what does Scripture have to say about this?
This wildly popular phrase seems based on Jeremiah (23:33-39) in the King James Bible where the "Burden of the Lord" is a literal translation of the Hebrew, and in most other translations is seen as "Prophecies of the Lord" or "Oracles of the Lord".
The sad part is there the LORD (YHWH or Yahweh) is denouncing false prophets, and He pronounces eternal doom on those who say "the Burden of the Lord" after He has commanded them to not prophecy falsely. Notice how it reads when you realize that every instance of "LORD" below is actually YHWH (or Yahweh) in the Hebrew:
jer 23:38 But since ye say, The burden of the LORD; therefore thus saith the LORD; Because ye say this word, The burden of the LORD, and I have sent unto you, saying, Ye shall not say, The burden of the LORD;
jer 23:39 Therefore, behold, I, even I, will utterly forget you, and I will forsake you, and the city that I gave you and your fathers, and cast you out of my presence:
jer 23:40 And I will bring an everlasting reproach upon you, and a perpetual shame, which shall not be forgotten. (KJV)
So all you folks out there that like that phrase, that's what God has to say about it. He pronounced eternal doom on those who did it. False prophecy is something that provokes God's wrath like nothing else. I do believe this is a forgivable sin, but those who are unrepentant of such things are on dangerous ground.
In my charismatic church, we had home cell groups, where we gathered weekly and usually bragged about whatever miracle God had done in our lives that week. But when I had a dry spell, it felt like God wasn't active in my life, like something was wrong.
I joined an ex-charismatic support group when I left, and we all reported the same thing, emotional highs, with crushing lows in between. The comparisons to drug addiction were too obvious to miss.
The Devil punishes his followers while pretending to bless them.
In a way, it was living by sight, we called it faith, but it was just the opposite.
The cure ultimately was two things, to understand the nature divine providence, and to affirm the sufficiency of Scripture.
God is fully in control at all times, He rules all, and makes all things work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. And to know that even behind the scenes, when you can't see it, He is still working. Charismaticism (especially the word-of-faith movement) teaches the opposite: you have the power of God, and it's up to you to use it, and it's your fault (through lack of faith) if things go wrong. It's a cruel, exploitive theology.
Scripture is fully sufficient for all our needs, chasing after things outside of Scripture isn't advanced spirituality, it's spiritual adultery, and the sign of a heart that isn't right with God.
Living by Scripture alone is a much more peaceful existence. And trusting in Divine providence allows you to live knowing you are constantly being carried by Him even though you can't always see it. You don't have to seek miracles, although you can appreciate them and give Him praise when you see them.
This is living by faith, possessing the substance of things unseen. This is true faith, to not need to see miracles to be happy and know He is caring for you. I still see them though, all the time. Our God is a miraculous God, all you have to do is look with the eyes of faith to see Him providentially orchestrating everything around you and in other's lives.
I can't tell you how many times I heard this in Charismania (mostly from Jesse Duplantis, but maybe from Paul Crouch a few times too):
The quote:
"A man with an experience is not at the mercy of a man with an argument".
The quote paraphrased by me:
"You can't tell me words of knowledge aren't real, I've had them, so there, phooey on yooey!"
The quote restated in theological terms:
"My experiences are a higher authority of truth than Scripture."
Now that last one I never heard until I came out of the movement and realized in horror what I had been doing.
All those Biblical warnings about lying signs and wonders suddenly had a lot more meaning to me as I realized I had been duped by those very things.
Once someone allows experience to trump Scripture and become their truth authority, wittingly or unwittingly, they are standing on very dangerous ground.
There is nothing new under the sun, and this issue is not new, so we have lots of good quotes to choose from that predate the Azuza street phenomenon, we can trace this back centuries, to try to awaken people to the fact that this stuff isn't new at all. This has been an ongoing battle for a long time.
In a more general sense, all this is simply mysticism, seeking after ecstatic and mystical experiences and believing that is the highest form of experiencing God. Virtually every religion has their mystics, and some of them are explicitly mystical, such as Hinduism.
In the late 1900's and early 2000's, John MacArthur warned against following intuitions and falsely prophesying to yourself. He wrote three books warning against Charismania: "The Charismatics", "Charismatic Chaos", and "Strange Fire". (According to him) the first was a theological discussion, the second exposed the false practices, and the last was a defense of the true ministry of the Holy Spirit (I have read them all). "Charismatic Chaos" was criticized for wrongly highlighting some of the more "fringe" zany practices. My reaction was quite different, he didn't describe the fringe, he described the mainstream. The word-of-faith movement is the dominant viewpoint in charismania. In my case I wondered how did he (MacArthur) know with such a high-level of accuracy what I had seen go on in my daily life. His choice quote (he has said it many times with slightly different words, this is an amalgam, but every word here he has said):
"Charismatics commit reverse blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, instead of attributing God's miracles to Satan, they attribute Satan's miracles to God".
While that may not be exactly the unforgivable sin, it's close, and it's pretty bad. You don't want to be doing this.
In the 1800's, Charles Haddon Spurgeon - the prince of preachers, in London England - with his dry British wit, said (in reference to the enthusiasts of his day):
"They say they have the Word and the Spirit, but I am content with the Scriptures alone, thank you very much, and I am not so sure the spirit they think they have is the spirit they think it is."
Some say the finest (and certainly the most famous) sermon ever preached on American soil was Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God".
Jonathan Edwards led the Great Awakening and had many Pentecostal-like experiences in his meetings. At first, he was positive about them, but by the end of his life he wrote against them in several ways. Here is my favorite quote from him on the subject:
"I can think of no faster way to surrender control of the Church to the Devil than following after mental impressions attributed to God."
He also wrote a book near the end of his life on true vs. false revival, and his take was anything that leads us away from Scripture, and away from holy living is not from God. Remember the controlling wife who justified it with "God told me", or the woman obsessed with the apocryphal books? Both fail Edwards' test.
I confess I prayed for a long time for Jesus to show up when I was a word-of-faither. This guy got my wish, but he did something very different from what I would have done:
The great puritan Jonathan Flavel (in the 1600's, also British), after a day of prayer and fasting had a vision of Jesus Christ and said:
"Avoid Satan! I know no image of Christ but the Scriptures alone".
And the image did indeed flee (avoid means "get away from me" in that context), a direct fulfillment of the Scripture "Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you".
Notice his complete commitment to the sufficiency of Scripture, it saved him from demonic deception.
John Calvin (in the 1500's) said (in his institutes - the first systematic theology ever written):
"The desire to know the secret counsels of God is wickedness."
He was specifically warning about wanting to know exactly what people ask their imaginary friends for, God's mystical guidance in day-to-day things.
Now let's talk about providential events, which includes the confirmations we talked about earlier.
There are lots of legitimate miracles here, I affirm them all. Such as divine appointments, and God arranging things for the benefit of His people. When you've been a Christian long enough, you get used to God taking care of you and orchestrating your life.
But, we have a popular phrase today "when God closes one door He opens another." And as I mentioned, in Charismaticism we were taught to look for confirmation of our "words of knowledge" in providential events. It wasn't hard in most cases to find something that we could make do with.
In charismaticism we also used fleeces. Asking God for a specific sign. Usually, the sign wasn't that specific and never involved a miracle like the OT fleece did. The absence of any warrant for Christians to use fleeces in the New Testament didn't stop us either.
I affirm that providential events occur often enough in the favor of the Christian that you get used to God taking care of you, but Scripture has a blanket ban on interpreting events as signs of God's will for our lives. We have no more right to do that than to say "God told me...".
Reading providential events is simply superstition, it brings back the black cats and omens of the Middle Ages and repackages them for modern times.
Scripture expressly bans interpreting omens, using divination, and consulting with familiar spirits - aka imaginary friends - (Deu 18 10-12). You would think that would be enough to stop people, but it isn't unless people are taught correctly.
deu 18:10 " There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, (NASB)
deu 18:11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. (KJV)
I admit I had to use two different translations to get "omens" and "familiar spirits" in there. As both those words have a variety of translations. But I hope the point is made. Let me say that again, reading providential events for God's will is expressly banned in Scripture, trust instead in Scripture alone and the God-given wisdom that comes from studying it.
Next, we will explore how to do this correctly.
John MacArthur has a wonderful little book out called "Found, God's Will".
He states the obvious (but is not obvious at all to a charismatic), that if you are living a life submitted in love and faith to God, you are free to do whatever you want, as your motivations for all your decisions will be out of love for Christ and to bring God glory. God guides your footsteps, but not in a way you can be directly aware of. Simply walking by faith in God's providence and doing your best to not compromise scripture is always the best path forward.
The sufficiency of scripture was one of the great cries of the reformation. It was part of sola scriptura (Latin was the language of scholars back then), or scripture alone (now in English). It denied all authorities and revelation outside of scripture, and there were many such claims then, just there are now.
All those people, so proud of their personal revelations, do not realize they are attacking the sufficiency of Scripture, and declaring to God like spoiled children they aren't happy with what He has given us, they demand more.
Let me give you seven points of the doctrine of scripture, every one of these has been attacked by false Christians and unbelievers. All of these points have been ably defended by great Christian scholars. And they are all vital, lose one, and you lose everything, the Christian faith has no foundation without them:
The verbal plenary inspiration of scripture, God got exactly the words on the page He wanted. In the originals.
The Bible is inerrant, free from error, God cannot lie.
God directly vests scripture with His authority by holding us accountable to its words.
Scripture speaks plainly, and the meanings are understandable to all, no private interpretations are allowed.
We use the grammatical historical method, meaning scripture is interpreted plainly, in the historical context it was spoken. All scriptures have one meaning, but have the potential for many applications. As MacArthur says, only the correct interpretation is the word of God, incorrect interpretations are just someone's opinion.
The text has been accurately preserved over history, and the canon (which books are part of scripture) stands firm today. This is a researchable topic for those who wish to learn (as are all these topics), there are good reasons why the canon is what it is.
The capstone, this affirms that all revelation has ceased, and that scripture is fully sufficient in that God has said everything He deems necessary for the Church age. Giving up the sufficiency of Scripture by allowing for any kind of extra-Biblical revelation is fraught with peril.
The sad truth is that people crave extra-biblical revelation because they are unsatisfied with scripture alone. Put simply, their hearts aren't right with God. But we all have hearts that are easily tempted by these things, and these false teachings prey upon those desires and victimize the people that fall for them.
The sufficiency of scripture was a major doctrine of the reformation and is as important today as it ever was, and it is under attack even in evangelical circles. The attack has seemingly escaped the charismatic world to become mainstream in much of evangelicalism today. But like all such attacks, it isn't new, it's always been going on, and each generation has to fight the battles anew.
God takes false prophecy very seriously, and it has the harshest possible penalty in the mosaic law. In Jeremiah, Yahweh thunders out pronouncements of doom on those who do it. Why? Because this pollutes the central touchpoint between us and God, namely divine revelation.
I find myself wondering if any church has ever disciplined anyone for false prophecy, I am pretty sure they would for all the other capital offenses I mentioned from the mosaic law. My heart breaks for those who are harmed by these false doctrines.
I wanted to end by summarizing all this in the positive: