Silly Points of Note

When Encounters Do Not Really Count

Your encounters with God, no matter how epic they may have been do not translate to mean you will make it as far as He is concerned.

Now the bible is filled with people who had epic encounters with God and His messengers from John who got the message that makes up the final book of the bible to Adam whom God came down to daily. Yet how the lives of these people turned out leaves us to come to the conclusion that becoming a success or failure in the eyes of God is not dependent on how epic the encounter.

Encounters have their place but every encounter where you seem to cross that bridge that divides the spiritual from the physical can best serve to lead you on the path you are meant to walk. They do not guarantee that you will make a success of that walk.

One of the very first people to have such divine encounters was Cain. He was brooding over the fact that God seemed to have taken to the gift his brother brought over his. He had an encounter with God.

"And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him." Genesis 4: 6&7

This was an encounter but it did not do much to stop the brooding, which eventually led to the murder of his baby brother.

It may be that he did not take having a conversation with God as anything, which could be a possibility especially when you consider how close God was to Man during those early days. Indeed this also applies to current times especially to those who grew up knowing the reality of the existence of God and of Him interacting with us.

In the case of Balaam, he did not just have an epic spiritual encounter; his donkey was made to speak to him after saving his life three times. If salvation was dependent on the degree of the encounter, i.e. how epic the encounter was or if it were just a function of encounters, Balaam would not have perished. The encounter he had would have been enough to not just save him but also make him even more pious and spiritual.

The mistake that is easy to make is to look at the encounters of people like Paul the Apostle, Peter, Jeremiah, Daniel and the likes and assume that we as individuals will naturally be on that train. We do not count ourselves amongst the Cains, Balaams, and the whole of Israel that had a most epic encounter with God in Egypt and the wilderness.

It is very easy to take the exception to be the norm. The people that had encounters with God that went on to change for the good or continue in the walk to a successful end did it because they walked with the right spirit. That is, the issue was not the encounter, but they had the right spirit, which meant that if God had approached them without such an epic encounter, they would have still made it.

The Centurion that told Jesus to heal his servant already had enough faith in Christ for Him to heal his servant, he did not need Christ to come to his home to do it.

There are people who validate themselves based on their encounters. This is a dangerous path to take because it does not make you anything more than what you are. The standards of spiritual acceptance and success have nothing to do with the number of encounters you had but your walk with God.