Heath Lambert: Our guest this week is Dr. Keith Palmer, a Fellow with the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and the associate pastor at Grace Bible Church in Granbury, Texas. We’re here talking about the issue of mysticism. I asked the question at the beginning, is God speaking to me? And that is because so many times, Christians will say things like, “God told me.” Or, “I think God is saying to me…” And when we talk about those kinds of statements, we put that under the category of Christian mysticism.
Keith, what is mysticism?
Keith Palmer: Well, in Christian circles, mysticism is the practice of seeking communication from God and ways apart from, or in addition to, the Bible. In popular forms, mysticism might mean seeking to listen in silence for God’s inaudible voice or equating certain emotions, feelings, or impressions as God’s direct personal communication or perhaps looking for circumstantial signs that supposedly represent God’s direction or counsel.
Heath Lambert: So it’s Revelation; we’re looking for signs and words outside of the Bible. That’s what mysticism is. Why is that something that Christians should be concerned about? Or should they be concerned about it?
Keith Palmer: Yeah, Christians should be greatly concerned about this movement because mysticism really attacks or it erodes, and then eventually undermines four essential doctrines of historic biblical Christianity. First, mysticism challenges the sufficiency of the Bible. Really, mysticism is a direct attack on the sufficiency of God’s Word. Mysticism assumes the Bible’s insufficiency and hence promotes the need for Christians to seek communication and guidance from God apart from or in addition to the Bible. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 teaches that the Scriptures are adequate to equip the believer for every good work, and 2 Peter 1:3 reveals that Christ’s sufficient power as mediated through the Scriptures provide everything that a believer needs for life and godliness. So the belief that God is communicating beyond His Word, violates the command not to add to Scripture and undermines sufficiency.
Secondly, mysticism challenges the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I once did a Bible study with my children about how the Holy Spirit is different than the force from the Star Wars movies. I did that study because Christians today tend to see the Holy Spirit as a feeling or an impression or even an emotion that believers are somehow supposed to sense and then follow as God’s supposed communication. The truth is that the Bible reveals that the Holy Spirit is a person. He’s the third person of the Trinity who is eternally God with the Father and the Son. And He communicates using words and language, not feelings or impressions. The Bible shows that the Scriptures are the means by which the Holy Spirit communicates to believers today, and then the Spirit gives believers the ability to understand the Bible—what theologians call illumination—and then gives them the power to obey the Scriptures. So that’s another challenge from mysticism.
A third challenge of mysticism is that it challenges biblical decision-making. This is very concerning because mysticism creates unbiblical methods and means for believers to make decisions, such as following internal impressions, looking for signs, or striving for inner peace. But the Bible teaches that the entire moral will of God is revealed to the believer through the Scriptures and that the Bible provides sufficient guidance as the believer is diligent to study it and prayerfully apply it to his or her life in dependence upon the Lord, with the motive of glorifying Him.
And finally, mysticism challenges the practice of prayer; biblical prayer. In fact, mysticism actually redefines prayer as a two-way communication conduit where believers are taught to listen for God as well as to speak to Him. In contrast, the Bible is clear that prayer is a one-way communication by which Christians communicate with God. In Matthew 6, when Jesus was asked by the disciples to teach them to pray, He said nothing of listening to God, only speaking to Him. In fact, there is no passage on prayer in the Bible that teaches that believers should listen for God. Historic biblical Christianity has always taught that believers speak to God through prayer and God communicates to believers through His Word. The voice of the Bible is the voice of God to the Christian. So, Christians should be greatly concerned because mysticism challenges these four essential doctrines of Christianity.
Heath Lambert: Okay, so that is what the problem with mysticism is, the problem with receiving these words and signs from someplace outside the Bible. For Christians that are concerned about that, as they should be, what are some popular places where we see this among Christians?
Keith Palmer: Well, probably the main place we see that is in popular Christian books and even some older works from Christian mystics of past generations. Particularly books on spiritual disciplines, communion with God, prayer, and books on decision-making are especially prone to mysticism. These are really the areas where we tend to see it. Prayer, as we mentioned—defining it as a two-way communication road—Christians are taught to listen in silence in unbiblical ways, usually through their own feelings, and emotions. It’s very dangerous to equate a certain feeling with the voice of God but that’s what’s happening. Books on decision-making—believers pursuing God’s guidance for decisions using unbiblical means like impressions or signs. We see it in counseling, actually. As a pastor, I’m grieved to learn about people making life-altering decisions of enormous magnitude through unbiblical means.
We had a lady come for counseling one time, and she said, “I just feel like God is leading me to divorce my spouse.” Now that statement could simply reflect a gross Biblical ignorance regarding how God communicates and guides, but it could also point to a more serious problem. Mysticism can actually make God a theological trump card to justify a person’s ungodly choices or unbiblical desires. And because God is being used in this way, it’s very difficult to challenge, and yet, that’s the task for biblical Christians in ministry to others trapped in the lives of mysticism. We point them back to the inspired, inerrant, and sufficient Bible as the sole means by which God has revealed His will and thus the place where believers should be looking for God’s guidance and direction.
Heath Lambert: So true story, just last week, talking with a man, a Christian man who loves Jesus, loves the Bible, and he is deeply torn about a job decision. He’s got [to make a decision about] a place where he’s going to work. He is completely stunned right now, because he says, “I have no clear direction, God hasn’t told me what to do and I can’t make a decision until God makes it clear to me which road I should take.” So, here’s a guy who’s paralyzed with indecision, he’s waiting on this message from God, and he’s insistent, “I’m not going to make a decision until God makes it clear to me until God tells me what to do,” he said. This is not a man who wants to undermine the sufficiency of Scripture, he’s not sitting here trying to think about undermining the Holy Spirit, prayer, or any of those important things that you mentioned. What should we say to men and women like that when they say those things in the course of our life?
Keith Palmer: I think it’s a very common problem and a person in that situation is particularly vulnerable to the false promises of mysticism. I think that’s a great time to take a brother like that and open the Word of God and explain how God reveals His moral will to us through the pages of Scripture and then prayerfully seek His wisdom to apply that. I think that story reflects a common misperception that God is going to tell us exactly what He wants us to do in every situation when the biblical truth of decision-making and how God reveals His will is that He gives us the sufficient principles found in the Bible and then calls us to prayerfully apply those in wisdom to that situation. That may mean that there may be two, very good, biblical, God-honoring choices, and it’s up to him [the man] in the wisdom of that moment to decide how he can honor God the most. But I think the error behind that dilemma is the assumption that God is going to tell us exactly how to make every actual decision that we ever have instead of seeing the Bible as sufficient, and what many writers called the way of wisdom for decision-making.
