HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 1, 2024 – Private revelation, we’ve been warned, must first pass the spiritual smell test, which is that it must agree with scripture. If you’ve received a word that is not in agreement with scripture, it’s either a test (which means you have to disregard it) or you got your spiritual wires crossed and heard from a demon rather than from God. In either case, whether a test or a demon, whatever you received you need to trash.

Unless, of course, you’re Jesus.

Jesus’ entire ministry was based on private revelation from God that was seemingly not in agreement with scripture. Mind you, the word Jesus received didn’t overthrow scripture – Jesus himself said he’d come to fulfill scripture, not to abolish it. But where scripture said to love your neighbour and hate your enemy, Jesus said to love your enemy. And where scripture said to give your wife a bill of divorce and be done with her, Jesus said that what God has joined, you shouldn’t tear apart, and that divorce is valid in one circumstance only (i.e., the one his earthly mother and father demonstrated just before his birth). What Jesus did was to reveal the Word that had been wallpapered and painted over with doctrines of man. Sure, you can get a divorce, but only under this one circumstance, and sure, you can love your neighbour, but you have to love your enemy, too, or you’re no better than the hypocrites.

The entire New Testament is private revelation. Does it conflict with earlier scripture? At times, yes, though in letter only, not in spirit. If the Bible were an orange, the OT would be the aromatic and bitter protective peeling, and the NT would be the sweet and tender flesh. We need to peel off the OT to get to the NT, but neither the hard outer peeling nor the soft inner flesh would be able to exist alone, as one complements the other. They both say: “I’m an orange!”, but in different ways.

Jesus was crucified because he allegedly blasphemed God by rewriting parts of scripture. In so doing, he wrote himself into it (or so he was accused), but what he was actually doing was peeling the scriptural orange. He was saying: “Look! There I am!”, but only those with an appetite for Truth could taste Jesus both in the zest of the OT peelings and the juice of the NT flesh.

We born-again believers thrive on private revelation, which is another term for prayer. If we’re not getting private revelation from God on a daily basis, we’re not praying, and if we’re not praying, we’re not doing our job. How else but by prayer are you going to find out what God wants you to do on any given day? How else are you going to find out your marching orders and your mission? By reading tea leaves or your daily horoscope? Do you think Jesus pored through the temple scrolls every morning to find out what he should do for the day? No, there’s no mention of Jesus ever doing that. What we do read in the NT is that Jesus constantly ran to God in prayer, and that God laid out for him whatever he needed to do.  Jesus was then free to agree or to reject whatever God had laid out for him, but we know that Jesus always agreed, even when it seemingly contradicted scripture. He said: “I always do that which pleases the Father”, and God said of Jesus: “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”

We always need to agree with whatever God lays out for us and we always need to listen to Jesus. We also always need to run to God for direction, advice, guidance, comfort, and companionship. This course of action will likely contradict what the world wants us to do, and it may even at times seem to contradict scripture. But the seeming contradiction to scripture is an illusion only. When scripture says we should honor our mother and father as a Commandment, but Jesus tells a guy that he should skip his father’s funeral (“Let the dead bury the dead”) and immediately follow him, was Jesus advising his wanna-be follower to break the Commandment by dishonoring his father? Of course not. He was simply reminding him to think righteously – that is, as God thinks, not as man thinks.

The guy wouldn’t be dishonoring his father by choosing to follow Jesus instead of attending his father’s funeral, but he would be dishonoring God if he said he wanted to follow Jesus and then turned back to tend to the cares of the world. The decision to follow Jesus is a one-time offer only. You don’t put your shoulder to the wheel and then later decide to unyoke yourself to tend to private matters. You choose God and Jesus over everything and everyone and prove your choice by staying the course regardless of worldly expectations and pressures.

The New Testament isn’t a rewriting of scripture but a deeper reading of scripture – a call to live by the spirit rather than the letter of the Law and to think as God thinks not as man thinks. Jesus perfectly exemplified this in being a lowly Nazarene of dubious parentage and no formal learning. He didn’t lean on his own or the world’s devices; he leaned on God through perpetual private revelation (“pray without ceasing!”) and a core understanding of God’s Word. We, as Jesus’ followers, are to do the same.