Can God interact with us outside of the Bible? I believe he can.
God can do anything logically possible to do and that is accord with His holy, truthful, just and loving nature. What does He say, though, in His word we should expect as a common experience of Him? Do you want such an experience if it isn't sensational, flashy, overtly supernatural? A lot of Christians don't. They want God to act like a circus monkey, doing neat miraculous tricks for their "spiritual" excitement.
Sometimes I see things, or witness some kind of interaction in my life.
Believers can become astonishingly superstitious in their desire for God to "do something." If they see three blue cars in a row, God did it; if they hear the same phrase three or four times in a day, God did it; if they were thinking of a peanut butter sandwich and a commercial for peanut butter appears on t.v., God did it. You will find nowhere in Scripture, however, God resorting to these sorts of superstitious means to communicate Himself to His children. If God wants to reveal Himself to you directly, He won't use coincidence to do so. When He revealed Himself to others in the past, He used burning bushes, a cloud leading His people during the day and a column of fire doing so at night, angels, prophets, visions, fire and brimstone from heaven, the ground opening up and swallowing the wicked, and so on.
If he wants to get a point across to us, do you think he can make something cross our paths, knowing that you will see it?
God says in His word that every day, by His Spirit, He will:
- convict you of sin (
John 16:8)
- teach you deeper spiritual truth (
John 16:14; John 14:26; 1 Corinthians 2:10-13)
- strengthen you in times of temptation and trial (
Ephesians 3:16; Romans 8:13; Philippians 2:13)
- form in you godly characteristics (
Galatian 5:22-23; 2 Corinthians 3:18)
- discipline you (
Hebrews 12:5-11)
Anyone can fake speaking in tongues, or even fake a "miracle" (ala Todd White and the leg-lengthening fraud), or drop to the ground and convulse, having been whipped up into an emotional/psychological frenzy. But a truly changed life, a life of genuine self-sacrifice, humility and peace, a holy, gentle, wise life is something else altogether, impossible to counterfeit except, perhaps, in the most superficial of ways. But it is this life, not the hysterical, sensual one so many believers are craving, that God offers to us and in which He reveals Himself.
What has happened to Christians that they're wanting such pitifully small and weak "manifestations" of God? I suspect that it has a lot to do with wanting to make God accessible in the way the rest of the material universe is to us: through our physical senses. But God is a Spirit - that is to say, immaterial, without substance (except in the Incarnation) - and His Spirit, the Holy
Spirit, interacts with us on a spiritual level, in a spiritual way, that is quite apart, mostly, from our physical senses. The more we try to see God through coincidence, or perceive Him in vague feelings and impressions, or "hear" Him as a voice in our heads, the less spiritual our effort is and the less of God we're actually experiencing. All of these means cater, not to our spiritual selves, but to our physical, fleshly, sensual selves and to the degree they do, they prevent a real, spiritual experience of God.
Galatians 5:17
17 For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please.
Galatians 6:7-8
7 Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.
8 For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.
Romans 8:5-8
5 For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.
6 For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace,
7 because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so,
8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.