Tag Archives: Signs

Omens and Portents

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Hey guys, can you help me out a little? The last few weeks I’ve experienced an omen. Or maybe it’s an auspice. A sign. Could even be a miracle.

That’s the trouble, you see. I don’t know which. And even if, with your help, I manage to work it out, I still don’t know what it all means.

You see, there I was in my favourite coffee shop waiting for my cappuccino to cool a little. I happened to look over at it and saw two dead flies floating on the surface. So naturally, I called over the server and said – you know what’s coming – ‘waiter, there’s a fly or two in my drink’. Now whether the flies had been getting it on with each other and decided the froth on my coffee was a good place to do it, I don’t know, but it led to their demise: death by conjugal drowning.

I got a fresh coffee.

Skip forward a few days and I’m about to have a nice glass of Merlot in my favourite Italian restaurant. There on the top, just after it’s been poured, is a solitary swimmer, another of God’s blessed little creatures backstroking its way around my glass in ever erratic circles. After I paraphrase the old joke again, the waiter removes the glass, fishes out the drunken fly and returns my wine. Or maybe he poured a fresh glass. Who knows.

And then – yes, you know what’s coming – a few days after that I’m having another cappuccino in a third establishment when another of the little blighters tops itself in my drink. That’s three times in only a few days. I mean twice would be a coincidence but three times! As Ian Fleming almost said, ‘once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern’. There was a pattern to my flysome encounters, and we know what a pattern means: it means a pattern maker! An intelligence behind this series of unfortunate events. But which? And what did they all mean? A pattern has to have meaning! What was the message I was being sent from the supernatural plane?

Was it an omen? A portent? A sign from above? Was God telling me something? If so what? Maybe you guys can help.

I just realised though that there’s a Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, who might be trying to communicate with me. (Is there a Lord of the Slugs and a Lord of the Flatfish too? Logic dictates there should be… but I digress). In the Word of God (Mark 3:24 etc), Beelzebub is none other than the devil in disguise, an alter-ego of old pal Satan.

What’s Satan/Beelzebub trying to say to me by directing flies to land in my beverages? I really need to know. If only these all-powerful supernatural types could be a little clearer.

All in the Mind

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Blog 368 (2)

Christians dispute that those who saw the Risen Jesus after his death were merely experiencing hallucinations or ‘visions’ in their own heads. Despite the fact that the only first-hand eye-witness report we have of a resurrection sighting is of precisely this nature – Paul’s, in Galatians 1.16 where he says that the Risen Christ was revealed ‘in’ him – Evangelicals in particular insist that Jesus rose physically from the dead and was seen by numerous ‘witnesses’.

And yet, in the two thousand years since he supposedly ascended into Heaven, no-one has seen Jesus in his resurrected, physical body. This doesn’t stop believers today claiming that they experience him in ‘real’ ways. As the old song goes, they walk with him and talk with along life’s narrow way. Or they think they do.

Back when I was a Christian I used to hear Jesus speaking to me. He’d create a thought in my head, telling me to act in a certain way, to speak to some lost soul about him, for example. At the time I was convinced these promptings were really ‘the Lord’. How could they not be? I had his Spirit living inside me, a sure-fire way of experiencing the living Jesus. His presence felt very real, as it does still for millions of Christians. What greater proof of the resurrection could there be?

In fact, Jesus’ ‘voice’ was no more than the vague recollections of Bible verses I half remembered. The sense of his presence I felt was a trick of my own mind, conditioned by hours of sermons, Bible reading and the mutual reinforcement provided by fellow-believers.

I never actually visualised Jesus, though many claim to. They see him in burnt toast or cloud formations; they dream about him or think he has visited them in the night, standing at the foot of the bed. Some have near-death experiences when (they imagine) they travel to Heaven and are welcomed by his outstretched arms. Others ‘know’ he has rescued them from calamity, or purposely sent them a sign (by leaving a Bible unscathed after a storm destroyed a house, as happened this week in Indiana.) Still others, a mite more credibly perhaps, have a sense of Jesus being present in a wishy-washy mystical way. He seems especially real when they’re caught up in the ecstasy of worship or a mighty and wondrous healing is being staged taking place. What a blessing! After all, didn’t Jesus promise in Matthew 18.20 that ‘when two or three are gathered in my name there I am in the midst of them’? (Probably not, but Christians believe he did and that’s what matters.)

My point is this: if this is how Jesus ‘manifests’ himself today – in whispered messages, inner-visions, emotions, dreams, blessings and ‘signs’ – and if these are enough to keep today’s believers convinced he lives again, then isn’t it likely that this was exactly how his earliest followers experienced him after his death? Not as a real, physical body but in these same ‘spiritual’ ways, conjured up by minds deep in the thrall of religion? If illusions of their own imaginations are enough to persuade the susceptible of the Risen Lord’s presence today, then surely they were more than enough to convince a handful of superstitious zealots in the first century.

I mean, just look at Paul.