King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream. The King made this statement. A dream from God is different from normal dreams. It is more vivid than other dreams. If this is the first time that you have had a dream you think might be of God, then you will not be able to benefit as of yet from this way of knowing if your dream is from God because it is, however, to be seen if the dream comes to pass. However if you are more familiar with dreams from God, then think about the other dreams you have had that have come to pass.
What similarities does this dream have with others that you have been given by God? There are two vivid accounts of this at work in Acts chapter 9 and One is with a man named Ananias who God told to pray for Saul of Tarsus for healing, and the other was with Peter being told to go and preach to the gentiles. If you follow these four simple steps, you will be able to determine if your dream is from God.
About the Book
This article is about learning how to tell if your dream is from God. It is not an offer for dream interpretation. Everything in the world is always changing and becoming. Then, look inside your mind, to mathematics, logic, shapes, abstractions. They're among the ideal forms, fixed inalterably in the universe's structure. Among the temporal and the passing, notice something else: If it exists, and once did not exist, it was created somehow. The dialogue's main speaker, after whom the Timaeus is named, surmises that there must be a divine creator who makes the world according to a blueprint of preexisting forms.
I learned about Plato's forms from my first philosophy teacher, Ken Knisley, a taxi driver who occasionally taught elective classes at my high school. He had untamable curly hair and a matching beard, ringed with the beads of sweat brought on by his full-body gestures. We all live, says Plato, as if we're prisoners in a cave. There is a fire at our backs, casting the shadows of objects on the wall before us.
Truth is something we're unaccustomed to seeing; we see just shadows.
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Visible, transitory things are reflections of an invisible reality. What, then, would happen if a prisoner of the cave escaped and climbed up into the sunlight? There, he finds an entirely new kind of light, blinding him at first. With time, though, the prisoner looks up from the shadows and objects and reflections to the sun itself: He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold.
That sun stands for the Good, the highest of the forms, whose light shines on everything that is True, with a capital T. It was in Ken's classes that I first felt the tug of exalted ideas. We read philosophers supposedly too difficult for us, and he pushed us to give an account of ourselves in terms of them. Some days, he would forget the assigned text entirely and, in amazement, tell us stories about his toddler son. He taught the pleasure and the payoff of thinking, and the responsibility each of us has to seek out undying truth. I had a job to do, to ure out the universe for myself.
The philosophy that Ken offered was one of meaning in the face of meaninglessness. Instead of biblical salvation, we learned about Greek drinking parties and German angst. Mention of God would sneak into our discussions only because of how the existentialists mourned God's death. These readings certainly suited my emotional state.
For one homework assignment, I composed a distortion-drenched, power-chord song on my guitar to accompany a passage from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. When I put my recording in the cassette player, Ken leaped to the front of the room and started reciting the text with appropriate vigor: Some years later, I learned that Ken had died of cancer without much warning. Later still, I came across a makeshift online eulogy, tacked to the comments of a blog he had started in his last days. A friend of his captured a bit of Plato's eternal forms when she wrote there, "Some conversations, some ideas, really deserve to continue, even when the person who started them Ken would have liked that.
But he also refused the consolation of pure ideas. He titled the blog's first and only post "No Abstraction. Plato may have looked to ideas beyond, too, but he did so in this-worldly ways. He wrote down his philosophy in dialogues, conversations among people seeking after truths together. For him philosophizing was inseparable from the love between fellow seekers, between student and teacher, and among friends. Through discussion, one's soul investigates itself. It thinks about thinking.
By reaching for eternal ideas, beyond the cave of the material world, human souls can touch divinity. A conversation among philosophers is a council of gods. That was another thing I learned first from Ken: He taught us what was in books, but he also made us his friends. The off-topic talk about his son was on-topic after all. Near the end of his life, Plato lost faith in the utopian projects that had brought him to Sicily; the Syracusan kings turned out to be irredeemable tyrants.
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His final, unfinished book, the Laws, describes a city that would be "second best" to perfection, though more realistic in practice. Socrates, who appears in most of Plato's dialogues, is absent in the Laws.
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It's noticeable, and unsettling, as if Plato felt that the teacher of his youth-capitally punished on the charge of impiety-might disapprove. While his earlier books tended to handle the traditional gods ambiguously, even playfully, here they have a very serious job to do. Plato tells us, in chapter 10 of the Laws, that the root of all crime in society is disbelief in the existence, attention, or integrity of the gods.
One of the first recorded instances of proof for divine beings, it seems, is as a correctional device. Speaking on behalf of civic order, Plato's Athenian Stranger sounds tired and impatient. He complains, "Who can be calm when he is called upon to prove the existence of the gods? Who can avoid hating and abhorring the men who are and have been the cause of this argument? Still, Plato allows, "the attempt must be made. His first two arguments for the existence of the gods are terse and hurried; the first is from the order of the natural world, and the second is from the fact that people of all cultures seem to be in general agreement.
In the first place, the earth and the sun, and the stars and the universe, and the fair order of the seasons, and the division of them into years and months, furnish proofs of their existence; and also there is the fact that all Hellenes and barbarians believe in them. Later on, the Athenian Stranger unveils a more detailed argument, which relies on the nature of motion. There are ten kinds of motion, he explains, but only one, the motion of a living soul, doesn't depend on being moved by something else.
A soul-the soul of an immaterial god-must therefore have been the first motion of all. Actually, there must be at least two such souls: When you believe in such gods, you can't help but believe in the city's laws too. For the earlier Plato, arguments about the gods were a matter of pleasurable, rational speculation, a conversation among philosophers. Here, proofs are servants to the social order. But the underlying idea is the same: As FrederickCopleston puts it in his canonical history of philosophy, "'Atheist' means for Plato, first and foremost, the man who denies the operation of Reason in the world.
What's more, in the eyes of his own society, it was Plato who could seem like an atheist for exchanging the meddlesome gods of the poets for law-abiding, reasonable ones. But others, in the centuries to come, would conclude he must have had inspiration from above. When I was in middle school, my parents decided that we should begin taking family trips to Europe. Planned summer activities were unfortunately a doomed proposition where I was concerned; I hated every summer camp I was ever sent to, and being stuck with my parents, together with whichever grandparents could come along, was sure to bring out the brat in me, and it did.
Each trip had some special significance. Paris, for one, gave my mother a chance to revisit the years she had spent in France studying medieval French epics. Germany, I found when we got there, was my father's turn. He had taken German as a student and spent a summer hunting down in situ altarpieces by the medieval sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. He was able to show me why, at a fortuitous exhibition in Munich: His choice to go there, and to learn that language, was especially rebellious for someone coming from a post-Holocaust Jewish family, as he did, that avoided buying German-made things.
The idea of a trip to Italy came from my father's mother, but a last-minute medical mishap prevented her from coming. In Florence, Venice, and Rome, we did what you would expect; we went to a lot of museums and churches. The churches were especially a problem because there was one around every corner, and it was hard for everyone but me to resist going inside.
It turned out, though, that my parents were really good at visiting churches. They stayed away from the tour groups and found some piece of art that even I would have to admit was interesting, especially when one of them explained it to me. They were still always too slow. But even through my boredom I got the message: Something about this is important. The day in Italy I have the hardest time forgetting was when we went to Vatican City, mainly because of its unpleasantness.
The crowds were overwhelming-thousands of people from who-knows-where who mostly only care to see the Sistine Chapel, yet have to soldier through nearly the entire Vatican Museums on the way. Until, that is, they find something that catches them, something they've seen in books a million times and are pleased and surprised-once they push through the huddle of others around it-to encounter the real thing. One of those is relevant here. Among the many heroes of ancient thought that the fresco gathers under marble arches, Plato and Aristotle stand at the center.
They are side by side, with the younger Aristotle slightly to the fore of white-bearded Plato. They speak with their gestures. Plato holds the Timaeus to his body and points his right index finger to the sky. Aristotle, who was once Plato's student, looks back at the master and, balancing his Ethics outward against his thigh, holds the palm of his hand toward the earth.
This is the standard caricature of the two prototypical philosophers: Plato sought truth and order in the utopian clouds, while Aristotle cataloged marine life on the shores of the Aegean. For both, however, the cosmos is basically rational, mathematical, teachable, and learnable. They preferred clear argumentation to epic poetry and believed in a truth higher than the gods of temples and legends. The job of their philosophy was to seek after that truth, that universal reason. They had no scripture, bishops, or savior, yet still their God would land them in the heart of the popes' palace centuries after they had died.
The foundation of Aristotle's philosophy is the system of logic that, for almost two thousand years, provided Europe with its definition of reason. His best-known principle is the syllogism, the basic unit of deduction and proof, whereby a conclusion can be safely and inescapably drawn from accepted premises. Take the simple example that philosophy students inevitably encounter:. This kind of reasoning promised to escape the flaws of human bias, frailty, and confusion, lending authority to all that he wrote.
If he can be trusted with logic, why not trust what he says about the universe? Building on the logical works are Aristotle's theories of physics and what came to be called metaphysics-literally, "what comes after physics. Like Plato's Laws, Aristotle begins with a meditation on movement in the world.
One thing moves another. Moving things form a chain reaction of causes and effects and effects becoming causes, a churning and eternal cycle. There was no beginning; motion cannot have come from nonmotion, he reasons, so the universe must always have existed, always in motion. But every motion has to be caused by something. Wisdom, says Aristotle, is knowledge of causes. The sequence of things causing other things cannot be infinitely long, however, even if it goes on eternally; you can turn a chain necklace round and round your neck but only because it has a finite number of links.
Aristotle held that an infinite number of anything is impossible, for any number of things will still be less than infinity. Besides, if you start counting infinitely many causes away, you'll never reach the effect. So if there's a finite number of causes, one of them has to be first, and it holds all the others in place.
To stay on your neck, a necklace needs to have a clasp. The journey upward, through the sequence of causes he finds in the world, brings Aristotle past the stars and planets. He takes them to be the eternal gods hinted at in the myths of tradition, going about their orbits in perfect order, forever. When he reaches what moves them, the journey comes to its destination: He wonders, in a tangent, whether there could be many such beings 47 or 49, or maybe 55 but concludes not, repeating a line from the Iliad: This unmoved mover isn't simply the finger pushing over the first in a line of dominoes at the beginning of time.
This mover-call it God-is the whole purpose of the whole game, through all eternity. It's the final cause of everything, though never by physically, materially acting on the world.
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As every domino falls, this is the overriding reason, the gravity. While "all other things move by being moved," Aristotle explains, the first and final cause isn't moved by anything else, even while it moves everything. It "produces motion as being loved. This is a God mired in the daunting system of the theories, definitions, and assumptions of Aristotle's entire corpus, veiled from the uninitiated like the secrets of a mystery religion. There can be no friendship between people and God, and there is no need to bother with prayer or worship.
Though Aristotle describes God as a soul something like human souls, it doesn't condescend to commune with us. Though it acts as the benevolent governor of the natural order, it offers no hope of special miracles.
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What, then, does God do? The most perfect thing one could do, says Aristotle: But God can't think about just anything. This perfect God can only think about what is perfect. At least so far as we mortals can know, this God is proof and nothing else. The Gospel of John, written toward the end of the first century, starts out this way: These peculiar phrases caught me with their poetry and what I could make of their meaning.
Recalling the first words of Genesis, the act of creation, the language of John's Gospel implies that the whole fabric of the universe is reason, language, and logic-what the Greek philosophers were talking about. I kept reading more and more from the Bible and its exotic promises. Good News Translation The repetition of your dream means that the matter is fixed by God and that he will make it happen in the near future.
Holman Christian Standard Bible Since the dream was given twice to Pharaoh, it means that the matter has been determined by God, and He will carry it out soon. New Heart English Bible The dream was doubled to Pharaoh, because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass. JPS Tanakh And for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice, it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass.
Jubilee Bible And that the dream came unto Pharaoh twice, it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass. American King James Version And for that the dream was doubled to Pharaoh twice; it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass. American Standard Version And for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh, it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass.
Brenton Septuagint Translation And concerning the repetition of the dream to Pharao twice, it is because the saying which is from God shall be true, and God will hasten to accomplish it. Douay-Rheims Bible And for that thou didst see the second time a dream pertaining to the same thing: