Dreams, the voice of God...
God is speaking to everyone, every day.He speaks through his creation,and through the many circumstances of life. He speaks through the conscience He has given us. And He speaks through His voice in a whisper or through a neighbor, or at times with crashing thunder. But when he wants to reveal his secrets and guidance for our growth and healing, he speaks directly to his own while the mind is still, the eyes are closed, there is silence and all the physical senses are shut down.
That is why God had to put Abram to sleep to receive guidance which led not only to his receiving his personal destiny, but to the destiny of a people. Abram's mind could not comprehend what the wise and eternal God had for him. He was afraid of the nations surrounding him. He figured that God could no longer give him a son, and wondered how he could ever gain the land that God had promised him, so God made Abram fall “into a deep sleep”. Then God spoke to him without the interference of Abram's conscious reasoning, and told him about his descendants hundreds of years hence and the great nation that he would found. Abram listened and acted upon the dream.
When Joseph learned that Mary, the one to whom he was engaged, was pregnant, his rational mind told him that she must have been involved with another man and the law demanded that he give her up and let her live with that man. But when Joseph was asleep, the voice of God superseded the reasoning of Joseph and in a dream told him that a miracle had happened and that Joseph had been given the high privilege of caring for the Messiah of Israel.Had Joseph followed the reasoning of his mind, and the conventional cultural wisdom, he would have been forgotten and never heard of again.
Even Peter, the leader among the disciples of Jesus, the one filled with the Spirit of God who preached so powerfully that 3,000 came to Christ in one day, who later raised the dead and was delivered from prison by an angel, the man of such faith, had to have his mind changed by God's voice in a dream. His mind was so set that he could not believe God’s plan for the Gentiles. When he had gone to pray, God had to interfere with his religious and cultural prejudice and put him into a trance, a deep sleep, and reveal to him how He planned to use him to open the door to all the rest of the world.
What have we missed by neglecting the dreams we have been given? A dream ignored is like an unopened letter waiting for us to discover its great secret. The mind is a great gift of God, but when it is elevated above God and His voice, it's power becomes an idol that is limited, fruitless and disappointing. When God wants to reveal his secret steps to fulfill our destiny, he uses the mind not only to gather all the information that the five senses can pick up and reason can decide, but he reveals all the great impossibilities which the mind cannot comprehend. The dream may show us how the sun, moon and stars will bow to us, how the great image that we have built will come crashing down, how this little clump of clay that is our self, will fill our destiny, and cooperate with God's plan for us. The dream is the opening to the land of impossibilities coming true, affecting not just the individual, but those around us.
Herman Riffel