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oh, i love octopuses!
which one were you?
i was the one who didn’t have the dream. to be honest, the comment on cheese was something i added when doing the cartoon… at the time i said nothing, but was a little perplexed. the same bloke told me i had to have children and that it was not an option not too… i was touring with this guy and others on a tour bus going from gig to gig in europe. nobody else seemed to know what he was talking about either. fantastic musician though… the best in fact. i quite liked him, although culturally we were poles apart.
I’m glad my dreams have become less weird once I left puberty behind. No more nightmares of being late for gym class with a 3 weeks old t-shirt. But then again I hardly eat cheese …
Was he a jazz player?
Did the octupus predict a Germany win?
robb. he could certainly play jazz. he was an ace brass player and ace percussionist of south american origin… other than that, i best say nothing.
linus… i don’t know how long an octopus lives, but if 16 years isn’t too long then it could be the same one. no, hold on, the weymouth/german octopus is much younger… so no.
Shame. I’m not surprised the octupus was a good percussionist though. Eight limbs is a definite advantage in that regard =P
linus.
ah ha! i’ve just got robb’s joke above now. i’m not that bright am i!
Funny!!
Prophetic people are scary, but sometimes they are right on the money!
I’ve learned to ‘test the spirits’ – if something they say bears witness with what’s going on in my heart, I take it as a confirmation.
If it doesn’t, I put it on the shelf and see if there’s any confirmation – maybe they are the initiatory point in God trying to tell me something. 9 times out of 10, it was spurious.
But I believe that if God could speak through an ass (Baalam), he can speak through my unbelieving friends, self-appointed prophets, and even the pastor
love it, that stuff used to happen to me all the time, then i went to bible college and it stopped. go figure.
Odly, when I went to theological college this sort of thing went up!
someone once invited themselves round for tea, a couple! and sat Sha and I down and said God had told them in a dream that we were to buy their house, we were delighted and naturally thought ‘bargain’ until they told us it was £67,000 please, mega LOL
this was about 20 years ago and we couldn’t even afford to eat at the time, I was honestly tempted to say I too had a dream and in the dream a pair of chipmunks gave me your house for free and as a bonus your car as well.
fyi, we didn’t buy the house, it was the wrong colour.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about something which happened at the church attended by the Christian Union at a particularly high profile university. Somebody stood up in a service and said “I have a message from God”. The leader said “Your message is not from God — please sit down and be quiet”.
Whether this actually happened or not (I can well believe that it did happen — it’s that sort of church), it does raise the question of what a church leader (or anyone else, for that matter) should do when confronted by a self-declared prophet. On the one hand, it is their job to discourage people who have delusions of grandeur and think they have received messages from God when they haven’t. On the other, if the leader hasn’t heard the message, how can they be sure that it isn’t from God?
I am sick to death with “God said” people.
At the age of 15, i went out with an older, more spiritual guy than me cos he he said that God Said we were going to get married, i thought, “oh, thanks a lot God, this guy annoys me in just about every way!
And then at the age of 21 “God Said” through the mouths of many, that our baby, who the doctors all said was horribly sick, would be born healthy and perfect, God Said…
God Said people can bog off.
I think God really likes the direct approach. He will tell YOU to do things. If you don’t, then he may tell other people to tell you to do stuff.
So, if someone tells me God told him/her to tell me to do something and I’m sure I’ve never heard this from God before then I’m rather suspicious …
DGS, if I make predictions about the future, sometimes I am ‘right on the money’. How can I share my prophetic talents? I assume people would take my occasional correct predictions as “confirmation”?
There are several examples of dubious prophecies in the Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass (a textbook on how NOT to behave). Adrian thinks that God says to him “Buy a tree-frog and call it Kaiser Bill”. He writes this on a piece of paper and leaves it in his pocket. His wife finds it months later, and, quite reasonably, thinks he has completely lost it. Another example: a friend tells Adrian that he has received a “picture”, and Adrian thinks “Why do I never receive pictures?” Perhaps because he isn’t quite as mad as some of the other people around him?
Now for something more serious. Suppose you received a message telling you to kill a member of your family. Would you think it was from God? Would it even occur to you that it might be from God? I doubt it — almost certainly you would react in one of two ways, depending on how paranoid you were feeling: either you would regard the message as crackpot and ignore it, or you would regard it as hate mail and tell the police.
But that is precisely what happened in the story of Abraham and Isaac. No wonder people have theological problems with that story.
‘God Said people can bog off’ (chris) love it!!!
and rebecca (21) made an interesting point about the story of Abe & Issac.
Paul also told us to be careful in discerning whether ‘prophesies’
are true….
so we give the ‘god-said’ folk the chance to test if their inner
sense is right… a good way I’ve seen is to check with a minister
before speaking out loud…
I suspect that the best way to work with ‘god-says’ situations is
to take it more seriously when God says something to me…
something for me, not someone else, to do something…
I usually find I can then start to explore if this ‘god-says’ is God
saying or just me wishing/fearing…
and I always find that prophesy will promote our God not the
prophet (look at how foolish Jeremiah looked at times)…
but don’t rule ‘god-says’ out … although in the particular cases that Chris (#18) mentions “Bog off” seems a perfectly rational response!!
>> JF: DGS, if I make predictions about the future, sometimes I am ‘right on the money’. How can I share my prophetic talents? I assume people would take my occasional correct predictions as “confirmation”?
1. New Testament prophecy is a little different than OT – predictions of the future not really what it’s about, though that’s not out of bounds. For e.g., see 1 Corinthians 14:3
“But he who prophesies speaks edification and exhortation and comfort to men.”
Edification, exhortation, and comfort are the main purposes of NT prophecy.
2. Rebuke may also be seen as part of the role of Prophecy.
3. In fact, much of the prophetic in the OT was rebuke, not future telling (except for foretelling future destruction if they did not repent). A great example is Nathan rebuking David for taking Bathsheba and having Uriah killed.
4. By ‘confirmation,’ I mean that you already sense God speaking that to you in your own heart. That is, you ‘bear an inner witness’ to what is being said.
A funny story about evangelist Rice Broocks. I heard him talking about a church that was really more about emotion than really inviting God to be present. He said one of the members stood up and said “Thus sayeth the Lord, I am here.” He said he wanted to stand up and say “Thus sayeth the Lord, no I am not!” LOL.
>> WULF: I think God really likes the direct approach. He will tell YOU to do things. If you don’t, then he may tell other people to tell you to do stuff.
I agree, but we sometimes need confirmation if we are not sure, or encouragement if we are afraid, or rebuke if we are hard hearted.
way back then my flat mate used to pop into my room and tell me what demon’s i had – that worried the shit out of me at the time, even though I knew she was wrong, I still worried I might have some demon lurkin somewhere – I tried so hard to only feel warm, kind thoughts towards them and they were bullying me!
i know better now
I think the difficulty is that people (being a mix of the sublime and ridiculous)sometimes manage to be ‘spot on’ with this type of prophety/ dream/ vision stuff, or else really, really not. I’d be reluctant to say it’s all nonsense on the basis of some bad practice; there’s PLENTY of daftness in every area of Church, but i still want to be a part of it! I’ve seen examples of this being done WELL, and it can be amazing to sense that God actually cares. Also, for me it’s important to hang onto a supernatural aspect of God – gives me hope!
Ah, cephalopods. Are you sure you weren’t dreaming about P.Z. Myers?
TRiG.