Were those who saw visions in the Bible hallucinating? Were they mentally ill? In my previous article on this series looking at visions and dreams, I wrote that biblical visions were not a kind of ethereal and immaterial experience. Rather they were full-orbed, multisensory experiences, often involving the actual presence of heavenly beings (angels and/or persons of the Godhead) and sometimes other elements of heaven.
That is, God revealed truth to his prophets through supernaturally intruding heavenly realities into the experience of the prophet in this world or creating physical realities here through which to speak to him.
Once we recalibrate our thinking about visions to understand their physicality we notice the Bible does not seem to distinguish as sharply between visions and appearances of the Lord or his messengers (so-called ‘theophanies’ or ‘angelophanies’ or ‘Christophanies’) as we do.
Such appearances also were highly physical, weren’t they? The angel who appeared to Manoah burned up his offering (Judah 16) and the theophanies of the Lord on Mt Sinai to Israel and as a pillar of cloud and fire (Christophany?) were not just visual. They were objective, physical, and public ‘visions’.
In my last article we considered Abram’s vision of the smoking pot which is usually regarded as a theophany but is also explicitly called a vision. And we saw that Isaiah’s vision of the Lord on his throne is a kind of Christophany and Paul’s vision of the resurrected Jesus is explicitly so.
More important than terminology here is the recognition that these supernatural visual experiences are common in the Bible and have shared features indicating they were multisensory, supernatural, full orbed physical phenomena. It is difficult to find the language to use to describe them adequately just because of their supernatural and often explicitly heavenly nature.
Alan Thomas
