How Do You Know a Dream is From God

And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, the Magi returned to their country by another route. - Matthew 2:12

As Larry Dove pointed out on Sunday, the Magi who visited the newborn Jesus ghosted Herod. The ruthless King had wanted these foreign visitors to scope out the potential threat of the ‘King of the Jews’ and to report back. But they never went back. Instead, God visited them in a dream and warned them.

Sometimes Christians can get a bit obsessed with God speaking to them in dreams or visions or with clear words and directions. It can feel convenient for God to speak like that, because then we don’t have to do the hard work of figuring out what to do with our lives. We don’t have to do the hard work of facing the complexities of our world. It makes it easy if God just tells us what to do (especially when those things line up with what we wanted to do anyway but needed justification for!).

The Old Testament is full of condemnations of false dreamers - those who leveraged their ‘God talk’ to protect injustice and the status quo. In fact, all but one of the uses of the word ‘dream’ in the prophets is to condemn those would use dreams as an excuse to baptize their own self-interest.

So there’s a tension here - how do we know when it’s ok to hold on to that God-given dream and when are we just making it up?

I wonder if our short text for today from the Christmas story might lend us some insight. These Magi have been on a pilgrimage for probably months - with great personal sacrifice in terms of both finances and facing danger along the way - all because it was their best read of the current times that God was doing something in Bethlehem. So they were truly, sacrificially committed to following God… and it’s at that point (not before) that they get the dream. I wonder if God’s dreams come AFTER a lot of hard work, sweat, and sacrifice - instead of to spare us from it.