HEARING THE VOICE OF GOD - A PERSONAL ASSESSMENT

It was sometime in the summer of 2010. My university was on my third-year first-semester break, so I had come home for the holiday. A young, vibrant choir boy who had learnt about "new creation realities" in my campus fellowship and wanted to be a better Christian, I prayed fairly frequently during that time. 

One afternoon during that holiday, I was praying and meditating in my room about how to become more "spiritually mature." I whined to God about how I was not growing spiritually, how I wanted to "do more exploits" for the Kingdom. And suddenly, I heard a voice telling me these exact words: "Spiritual maturity is gradual!" Exactly like that! It was so vivid, I thought somebody else was in the room, and I got up and turned around. It really was that vivid to me! It wasn't a special, earth-shattering voice. It was, rather, a very human-like but reassuring one. I surmised that it was God who had spoken to me and thanked him for answering me. 

I am not making this up. I really experienced this that year. 

Many years later, in December 2014, I was studying the book of Romans, as I often did. It was around 9 p.m., and I was sitting on our balcony upstairs while listening to my YouVersion NIV audio Bible. I got to verse 10 of chapter 5, where it says that if God could reconcile humans to himself through his death while we were still enemies, then we will be much more saved now that he is alive and has made us his friends.

Immediately I read this, I had a vision where I saw myself at the foot of the cross where Jesus was crucified. It felt like I saw all my sins upon him. I felt his love vividly and strongly. Then a voice spoke to me (paraphrased): "Son, the greatest revelation of myself that you can ever have is a revelation of my love for you."

I remember these two experiences like the back of my hand, and I suppose any Pentecostal Christian reading this will also be familiar with such experiences, since they tend to be common in Pentecostal circles. 

When I became an atheist, I wondered why I had those sensory experiences if they were not veridical. Now, I just might have an idea. 

In hindsight, I have come to understand that the human mind is capable of conjuring the most vivid of sensory illusions. These illusions tend to play into one's psychological context—beliefs, culture, and so forth. I now see that the ones I had happened that way because of my religious commitments at the time. I expected to hear God speak and would unconsciously form sounds in my head that I would attribute to God. I eventually figured out that I was the one doing this from a simple line of reasoning: in both cases, I had divergent theological views, and what I heard each time aligned with the views I held at the respective times. There was no way I could have heard what I heard in 2010—that "spiritual maturity is gradual"—in 2014 because my theological view of spiritual growth had changed from a works-based to a grace-based one. So it really was my mind doing the talking. This is not to say that I was wrong at one point or the other. There is disagreement on what it means to be "spiritually mature" among Christians. Rather, the fact that I had these experiences of God telling me in 2010 something that I believed to be false in 2014 suggests strongly that it was not God speaking but my mind conjuring voices with respect to the theological paradigm I was operating in.

Auditory sensations of such voices are fairly common in the general populace and do not necessarily point to mental illness [1][2]. It is no surprise, then, that they are common among Christians. Christians can have relatively infrequent auditory sensations of what they report to be divine voices, oftentimes within the context of prayer [3]. 

Does any of this refute the phenomenon of God speaking? Not necessarily. Rather, it sheds more light on the nature of divine revelation through sensory experiences. For me, it explains neatly why various Christian traditions and denominations all have very divergent sensory experiences of God, the Holy Spirit, or angels speaking to them with messages that often conflict with and sometimes even contradict one another. Invariably, it seems to me that it is no more than their minds unconsciously playing tricks on them. 

Unfortunately, several people have committed atrocities based on the belief that God is directly commanding them to [4][5][6]. An audible voice is a source of delight to believers, but clearly, it can also be a source of real, avoidable pain and disaster in the world. This is why scepticism regarding such sensory experiences is very important. 

Perhaps it is high time we began to teach people about not trusting "voices" in their head but following the light of reason and evidence alongside genuine conversation with real, rational, clear-headed fellow humans, not gods or spirits.

NOTES

1. Saskia de Leede-Smith, Emma Barkus. "A comprehensive review of auditory verbal hallucinations: lifetime prevalence, correlates and mechanisms in healthy and clinical individuals". https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23882203/

2. Louise C. Johns et al. "Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Persons With and Without a Need for Care" https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/40/Suppl_4/S255/1873600

3. Christopher C H Cook, Adam Powell, Ben Alderson, Angela Woods. "Hearing spiritually significant voices: A phenomenological survey and taxonomy". https://mh.bmj.com/content/early/2020/12/06/medhum-2020-012021

4. "God told me to kill boys, says mother" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/god-told-me-to-kill-boys-says-mother-54427.html

5. Satanic’ group tortures pregnant woman, six children to death https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/01/satanic-group-tortures-pregnant-woman-six-children-to-death/

6. Nigerian pastor arrested for impregnating 20 women in his church https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2979585/Nigerian-pastor-arrested-impregnating-20-women-church-claims-God-commanded-sex-daughters.html