Dreams and visions appear regularly throughout the Bible. This ebook looks at how they come to us, what they are, and how to discern whether they are from God or the product of last night's pizza! It has many insights that will prove helpful in understanding what dreams are all about.
Excerpt:
The Bible clearly shows that the Lord communicates to people through dreams, visions and even trances. For example if you remove the dream sequences from the beginning of Matthew's Gospel you greatly impoverish its supernatural impact. There are seven references to "dreams" in the New Testament, and five are found in the first two chapters of Matthew.
By and large modern Biblical students in the West regard the interest in dreams and visions as primitive and as unhealthily subjective. Where the Church has ignored this gift, the enemy has stepped in and provided the world with a counterfeit view of interpretation. The unsaved have eagerly lapped it up through psychology (Freud, Jung, etc) and the New Age movement.
Fifteen or twenty years ago we may have had to work hard at convincing Christians of the God-given reality of dreams for our modern era. But today it's more or less a waste of time to attempt to persuade people to believe in dreams. Why? Because many Christians are regularly experiencing dreams and visions today, and they need no convincing of their divine origin.
What we do need is good Biblical criteria for discerning which dreams are from God, and which originate either from our own soul life or demons. Coupled with this we require a reasonably good understanding of Biblical typology and symbolism, in order to correctly interpret these dreams. So discernment and interpretation of dreams seem to be the key need for now.
This manual cannot possibly provide all of this, but I have attempted to help with the process of laying a good foundation for learning about dreams and how to interpret them. My own conversion was through a dream, so I am convinced of their reality and importance. However my greatest concern with those who refer a lot to their dream-life and use dreams for guidance, is in the area of too much subjectivity. There is a real danger of falling into deceit if you become too enamoured by your dream-life supposing that nearly all of your dreams come from God.