This season has presented us with so many people having visions and dreams, and everyone truly believes their spiritual encounters are coming from the Holy Spirit. Only these visions and dreams are all over the place—either contradicting each other or a repeat of the evening news.
God doesn’t contradict Himself, and He doesn’t copy the news media. Some of these visions and dreams seem to have a wrong spirit on them altogether. They either carry a spirit of fear, or a foreboding spirit, or they reflect a paranoid conspiracy mindset. These visions and dreams do not seem like they are coming from a pure place, and we have to go back to some basics to get this back. We need purity. We need purity in the prophetic.
Any belief that holds us more strongly than the truth of His written Word will bend and distort His voice accordingly when it comes.
“Therefore speak to them and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Every man of the house of Israel who sets up his idols in his heart, and puts the stumbling block of his iniquity before his face, and comes to the prophet, I the Lord will answer him who comes according to the multitude of his idols” (Ezek. 14:4).
What does it mean that God will answer an Israelite “according to the multitude of his idols”? When Ezekiel made reference to idols, he was referring to the vile practices of worshiping other gods in addition to worshiping Yahweh.
We can envision the wayward Israelite going off somewhere, perhaps to a shrine they have built at home or to a designated temple nearby, and then performing some kind of prayer, offering or ritual to a false god. No matter where they paid homage to a physical idol, this verse made it clear that the idol ruled them from the altar of their own hearts.
As a result, anything that God chose to say to them became shaded, influenced and voiced over by the idol.
Most Christians would not dare worship another god in this manner. Still we all have biases, personal bents, preferences and opinionated beliefs that were never written by the author, Jesus Christ. Our biases, our thinking and our preferences are not God’s thoughts.
Remember, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. His ways are higher than our ways (see Isaiah 55:8). We have to be disciplined to lay down all of our preferences, opinions and biases at His feet to truly hear or see the Lord’s voice with purity and to prophecy a pure word from the Lord. {eoa}
Jennifer Eivaz is a minister and international conference speaker with a heart to equip the church in the supernatural and for raising up passionate and effective prayer. She is a regular contributor to Charisma online and The Elijah List, has been featured on several Christian television shows, hosts the popular podcast Take Ten With Jenn and has authored several bestselling books, including Seeing the Supernatural and Glory Carriers. Jennifer released her fourth book, Prophetic Secrets, in August 2020. Jennifer lives with her husband, Ron, and their two children in Turlock, California, where she serves as an executive pastor at Harvest Church.
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