Acts 18:9-10 “Now the Lord spoke to Paul in the night by a vision, "Do not be afraid, but speak, and do not keep silent; (10) for I am with you, and no one will attack you to hurt you; for I have many people in this city.”
In the next example quoted above our Lord Jesus appeared to the apostle Paul in a dream, and encouraged him to continue preaching the gospel in the city of Corinth. Our Lord gave Paul both a word of wisdom and a word of knowledge in this dream. The word of wisdom was the Lord’s instruction for Paul to preach the gospel in Corinth. And the word of knowledge that the Lord gave Paul was that the Lord had many people in that city and that no one would hurt Paul there. Again we see that this dream was very simple, in which Paul received clear guidance and instruction from the Lord.
John 16:25 “These things I have spoken to you in figurative language; but the time is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figurative language, but I will tell you plainly about the Father.”
In both the accounts that we have looked at in this section the apostle Paul was not looking to the Lord to give him a dream so that he could know the Lord’s will for his life. Dreams from the Lord always occur sporadically, and never as a result of believers seeking guidance through this method. A dream from the Lord falls into the same category as a vision. In fact it is the lowest of the three levels of visions i.e. dreams, trances and open visions, listed from lowest to the highest level. And so, just as saints cannot request visions from the Lord, neither can they request dreams. I have had a number of dreams from the Lord (which scripturally ties in with my age, “your old men shall dream dreams”) and never have I sought a dream from the Lord. In my ministry, I have also found that there are times when dreams are relatively frequent, and then no dreams occur for over a year or even longer. Notice that I mention dreams in connection with ministry. Because one who is called to the office of prophet and has the gift of discerning of spirits operating through their ministry, will experience visions and dreams more frequently than saints not called to the ministry. So what about dreams requiring interpretation? We see many of these types of dreams recorded in the Old Testament, such as the dreams that Joseph and Daniel had. But there are no incidents of this type of dream recorded in the New Testament. There are numerous visions recorded in the New Testament, and of those, there are only two recorded that required some form of interpretation. The vision that stands out most prominently in this category is obviously the book of Revelation. The other incident recorded is the vision that the Lord gave to Peter, regarding the sheet let down from heaven showing him all sorts of creatures, and the Lord’s instruction to him to “kill and eat” and what God had cleansed he must not call common (Acts 10:10-17). In this incident, although Peter did not understand the meaning of the vision straight away, the meaning became very clear to him as events unfolded directly after this vision. And so we can see that outside of the book of Revelation, there is only one vision recorded out of many, which required some form of interpretation. This will be the case with dreams as well. Saints who receive dreams from the Lord, will mainly have simple dreams that are clearly understood (as in Paul’s case), and very few dreams that require some form of interpretation. And if they do have the occasional dream requiring interpretation, then the interpretation will be clearly given to them by the Lord soon after they have had the dream. There is no gift of the Spirit called, “the interpretation of dreams”. And under the new covenant the Lord has not placed Josephs in His church to interpret dreams that people have had. The reason for that is because in the above quoted passage of scripture, our Lord taught us that in the church age He would speak plainly to His disciples and not figuratively.
Michael E.B. Maher
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