Perhaps it is my imagination, but there seems to be a growing need among followers of Christ to draw sharp separation between what the Bible teaches and human experience. These Christ followers see no issue with interpreting the Scriptures to align with human experience rather than the reverse. For these folk, if human experience contradicts biblical teaching, then experience is to be preferred.
Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield is quoted as saying, "When the Scripture speaks, God speaks." Even if one does not take this at face value, it is insane to suggest that the Scriptures do not reveal the Word of the Living God. If we think that, then faith in Jesus Christ is meaningless.
That said, experience can be as real as Biblical Truth is real. In fact, experience often precedes doctrine. What we make of it, however, is a different elephant. Experience is malleable. It can take whatever shape in which it occurs, or in whatever way we want. So experience has a crack through which the water held back by the dam . . . leaks!
Yet, when Jesus died on the Cross, that was an experience. When Lazarus was raised from the dead, that was an experience. When God divided the Red Sea, that was an experience. Gravity is something we experience. If you accept Warfield's notion that the Bible speaks for God, then the events of which the Bible speaks, actually happened in human experience.
When someone makes a statement regarding his or her experience with God, or that God may have spoken to them, we are under no obligation to believe it to be true. Our disbelief, however, does not define the truth or error of it. God is still God. He can do whatever he pleases, insofar as He does not contradict himself. Self-contradiction is not a part of the character of God as He has revealed himself in Creation, or in His Word.
So, experience has the need to be vetted. It may be the hard evidence of reality, but decisions based on it has the potential to lead one in the wrong direction. I've known people who say, "God spoke to me and told me (fill in the blank)!" If God told you something that contradicts what he has already said, then you can be advised: whoever, or whatever spoke to you, it was not God. The exigency, therefore, by which one confirms the integrity of experience is none other than the Scripture itself.
-- PDM
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