Do you know Gods plans for you? Trying to test God? Now why on earth would we want a lexis to fall out of the sky? People can get hurt by that and even killed..
I'm sure you know what I mean. Say a person wants a Lexus LS series. Asks God to give him this car. And then says to God that Jesus said that all he has to do is ask for anything in his name and He will give it to him.
That would be testing God..
But whenever we see someone wanting to understand the scriptures, within the NT, we see someone defering to an apostolic authority. Like as I said before, when the Ethopian asked the apostle Phillip to help him understand Isaiah. The Ethopian asks
“How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. - Acts 8:26-40
As well as with regards to Timothy and Paul. The apostle Paul expounded the scriptures to many people, many of which were Gentiles, who needed help.
And thus in scripture like the Ethiopian, we would ask "how can I understand this unless someone helps me". And thus we look to the apostles and the apostolic fathers, successors of the apostles, councils, and the apostolic deposit, and look at the interpretations and explanations these persons God has sent who can help us understand better. Sadly we do not have the living apostles to have direct recourse to, but they have left us an great apostolic deposit for us, both written and oral. So when we look at and read the apostolic deposit and tradition of the apostles and their successors laid down, we essentially
"invite Phillip over" to help us understand. When I read something like the "Catena Aurea" with the scriptures I cannot help but feel the apostles behind me guiding and helping me along to understand like how Phillip did with the Ethiopian.
I think in a way, we have become arrogant. We think we can understand the bible by ourselves and are too prideful to ask others in a position of God given authority for help. This is one of the things that I believe is so harmful with sola scripture, because it is so closed off to everything else, that none of the tools needed to help someone understand scripture is ever used. And there is so much patristic information one can use. But sadly because of this idealistic doctrine they thrown away or ignore a enormous tomb of wealthy information simply because they refuse to admit that they need help to understand scripture and can never do it by themselves.
Nowhere in scripture do we see someone saying that they will just pray to God to understand the scriptures and receive understanding by direct revelation. In most cases when people are confused or within error, God sends a prophet, apostle, early father, bishop, deacon, or something related to help them. God usually gets personal, and in order to do that, he send persons who are inspired by the Holy Spirit so they can direct to them on a human level. Direct divine revelation and understanding is an extreme rarity within scripture and was only directed towards the highest of the patriarchs, like Moses on Mount Sinai, or Elijah and his altar before the Pagan one. These people had direct revelation from God in an extreme rare way. Out of all the millions of people during the times of the Deluge, God only directly talked to Noah. So I think we have to agree that direct divine revelation is a very rare thing.
I remember reading in Church history about this King who writes a letter to Jesus(I think the kings name was Abgarus). And this king said Jesus could come to his town and be protected and have refuge there. Jesus wrote him back saying that he could not come because he had to fullfill his mission. But that He would send someone to his town after his mission. Later someone from the 70 did come to his town. And he performed miracles and healings for his whole town, cured the king of his diseases and baptized his whole family(If I can remember it was one of the apostle's Thomas's disciples of the 70, Thaddus I believe his name was called)
God answers the prayers of His people. Where did Sunlover express that God is some kind of ATM? In the scriptures we see God answering mans prayers all the time.
