In his 2005 interview of Dr. Sam Waldron, Tim Challies, asked Waldron on how Cessationists understand God’s guidance in our life. Challies asks,
How is the issue of guidance, how God speaks to us, how God guides us through life, how does that differ between a strict cessationist versus someone who believes in the continuing gifts?
This is such an important question as most Christians who have not studied this issue are prone to be like Charismatics, having a purely providence-centered and subjective decision making system. So how does the Non-Charismatic understand God’s guidance in life? Waldron believes in Word-centered decision making, where God’s guidance on each situation is claimed on the basis of the revealed precepts and principles of the Word of God. Waldron also challenges how Continuationists can be intense on the written Word when they believe there is genuine revelation out there besides that. He feels a Cessationist is going to have a more exclusive emphasis on the guidance of the Word of God in his life, its principles and precepts, than a Continuationist can easily have.
Here is Waldron’s answer.
I think that one of the missions of the biblical pastor is that they must be warning people against that kind of subjective, what you might called providence-centered, decision-making. The Reformed faith gives us the raw materials and commits us to the raw materials of a very objective Word-centered decision-making course. First of all, it tells us the great distinction between God’s secret and revealed will or between the decretive will of God and the presumptive will of God. We are not to base our decisions on any kind of assumed understanding of the decretive or secret will of God. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God and the things that are revealed to us and to our children that we might do all the words of this law.” So our decision-making has got to be firmly grounded on the preceptive will of God.
When I teach on this subject I tell people that it is like a pyramid. The bottom is prayer, of course. We need prayer for the Spirit to help us understand the Word of God. Then there are the precepts of the Word of God right there at the foundation too and then also there are the principles, what I call the principles of the Word of God, which are not so much the direct commandments - “thou shalt,” “thou shalt not” - but the priorities or principles that the Bible inculcates: membership in the local church and the importance of daily prayer and Bible reading. You may have a hard time finding a specific command “thou shalt read your Bible every day” or “thou shalt never, under any circumstances be a member of a local church,” but those things are clearly biblical priorities. Then after you get through all those things there is a place for providence in the sense of what providence has already set as limitations. God doesn’t want a blind man to be a test pilot. If it makes you sick to hear about medical procedures over the dinner table, like it does me, clearly God did not aim you to be a doctor of medicine. And then I go from the whole issue of providence to finally talking about preference and there is certainly a biblical place, when all those other things are already set, to think about what your preferences are because those preferences often reveal what your gifts are. So you’ve got prayer, precept, principle, providence and preference. It’s a nice little outline anyways.
You can read the entire interview here :
