Actes 21:4

And finding disciples,…who said to Paul, through the Spirit, that he should not go up to Jerusalem.

Conflicting inspirations

How timid is man, how fearless is God, about Scripture contradictions! The disciples at Tyre “say to Paul through the Spirit, that he should not go up to Jerusalem.” Yet he goes. And when he goes, those who have heard the prohibitory voice of inspiration, say, “The will of the Lord be done.” The one was the Divine voice of prudence; the other was the Divine voice of courage. Who shall say that either of these voices is not Divine? Would Paul have been guilty if he had followed the one? Was Paul guilty because he followed the other? Some great principles are here illustrated.

I. The communications of God are never designed to supersede man’s thought or judgment. “The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets,” i.e., the man is responsible for the management of his own inspiration. He must so order it, that its utterance shall not provoke ridicule nor cause confusion. The principle is very clear and comprehensive. Whether it be a point of doctrine or duty, God never so speaks as to take the matter out of the hands of the man himself, as an intelligent and responsible being.

1. St. Paul has to decide whether he shall go or not to Jerusalem. God puts before him the suggestion of prudence. “There is special peril in this journey. It will cost thee years of imprisonment, and imminent risk of death. Go not.” God “proposes” the alternative of caution. Counsels of prudence are from the Lord. Words of loving friends, bidding you spare yourself over-exertion, premature decay, may be from the Lord, and, like the words of these disciples, have a right to be pondered and to be prayed over.

2. But let no man say, God has but one voice. Having proposed counsels of prudence by the voice of man, God proposed counsels of courage to the inward ear of His soldier. “This journey, though it be full of peril, has in it, also, the fulfilment of thy desire to preach Christ in Rome. This journey, though it cut thee off from other evangelistic journeys, yet has, in its undiscovered future, epistles which shall make thee the theologian of generations yet unborn. Judge thou if thou hast courage for it, and if thou knowest Me to be faithful--go.” In these things, “God proposes, man disposes.”

3. How often is this alternative propounded; the same suggestion of love, the same suggestion of heroism--and both from God. Could we but realise to ourselves the alternative voices, Go, and Go not--the loving permission to forego toils and perils too great for us; and then the grander instinct, “What is life but a moment? up, and be doing--live for God, live for eternity”--could we but realise these alternative voices as alike voices of the Spirit, how should we rid ourselves, in a moment, of that which makes our decisions so unhappy--the idea, namely, that God has but one voice, and that if we mishear that one, we shall be “beaten with many stripes.”

II. This inspiration of conduct is also the inspiration of Scripture. Can a man open his Bible at random, and draw, from the first text which he lights upon, the very truth of God concerning any one doctrine? Is there not a “saying through the Spirit,” which yet, taken alone, would be both misleading and contradictory to another “saying”? Who will pretend that the utterances of the Bible are always and everywhere absolutely uniform? Where is the heresy which cannot fortify itself by a text? Where is the reader who might not err, if he stayed not to compare scripture with scripture? True theology is the residuum of these comparisons; pondered for ages, and at last agreed upon by the churches. Yet, even now, not so agreed upon as that an individual man can dispense with the pondering. We must go through the process, each for himself; listen for the first, for the second, and for the third voice of the Spirit; and not till then, nay not even then, be so certain of the conclusion as to condemn him who thinks that he has heard a fourth voice or a fortieth. Revelation is not a thing of exact definitions and stereotyped formulas. It is God speaking through men, to men, variously constituted and circumstanced, and each speaking in his own character, through the medium of his own faculties, and in all the movements and activities of a real and changing life. (Dean Vaughan.)