God Doesn't Whisper Part 2

The Assumptions Behind Hearing from God Outside Scripture

Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that you and your family are doing well today. I wanna thank you for joining me. This is the second of a three-part series on Jim Osmond's new book, God Doesn't Whisper.

And Jim, in our first installment, we were just giving an overview of the book, the subject matter at hand, how God does and does not speak to us today. And in this episode, we're gonna talk about some of the assumptions that people have, specifically that I need to hear the voice of God, I should expect to hear the voice of God, and there is a way for me to learn how to hear the voice of God.

And then we're gonna talk about some of the practices, like a still, small voice, and a verse jumped off the page as I was reading the Bible, those kinds of things. So let's begin with the assumptions that, first of all, the assumption among most evangelicals, almost all, is I need to hear the voice of God.

Yeah, that's the first assumption. In fact, I deal with three of them in the book. First, I need to hear the voice of God outside Scripture. I should expect to hear it because Jesus has promised it in John 10, 27, my sheep hear my voice.

And so many evangelicals take that as a promise that God has promised to speak to us. And if you're not, as we talked about in the last episode, if you're not hearing those whispers, and he's not speaking to you, then maybe you're not his sheep, or maybe there's something wrong with your relationship.

So that's the assumption that goes behind some of their assertions that God is speaking to us in whispers, nudgings, and promptings. And then the third assumption is that I can learn to hear the voice of God outside of Scripture.

So the first one is that I need to hear the voice of God outside Scripture. So basically the argument that HBG teachers make is that life is filled with all kinds of decisions that we have to make, decisions about which house to buy, which college to attend, which church should I go to, which ministry should I give to, how much should I give, who should I marry, what job should I take, all of this, what city should I live in?

Life is filled with thousands of decisions, many of them, maybe even thousands of which we make each and every day. And so they would say that we can't possibly be obedient to God in making all of these decisions unless we're following God's individual and specific will and revelation in each one of these decisions.

So if we can't be, if I run the risk of being disobedient to God in choosing which church to attend or which college to attend or which ministry to support, if I run the risk of being disobedient, then I need to wait for God to reveal specifically to me which one, which decision I'm supposed to make, what I am supposed to do in a given situation, and that I need to, this is the assumption, be quiet, listen, still myself, still my heart, and wait to hear the voice of God before I make any decisions.

So Henry Blackaby, for instance, in his book, Experiencing God, says that church leaders and Christians need to wait and slow down, wait, and listen for God to reveal those things and not take any action until we have some clear direction from God about which direction we should go, which decision we should make, because if we jump out and we do something without God revealing it to me, to us, we might jump out in disobedience and do something that God would not have us to do.

So instead, we should be quiet and we can't make those decisions and we can't move forward in life without God revealing those. And so that's the assumption. And then, of course, the follow-up to that is if that's what God has promised to give to us, if that's what we need to hear from God, then how do we do that?

They would look at the Old Testament prophets, they would look at all the ways that God spoke in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and they would say that these become models then for how we are to hear the voice of God today.

So Moses needed to hear the voice of God, Samuel needed to hear the voice of God, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, David, Solomon, all of these men were guided by God's specific direction for their lives, and they become models for us by which we are able to hear the voice of God, because as Charles Stanley would say in his book, How to Listen to God, we need that personal direction just as much as any of the Old Testament prophets or the apostles needed that personal direction.

We can't get along without it. Robert Morrison talks about how he can't pastor a church. He wouldn't know how to pastor a church, he wouldn't be able to pastor a church obediently to God if he didn't have the nudgings, the promptings, and God whispering in his ear specific directions in how to pastor a church.

So that's the assumption, that we need this. This is something that we need outside of Scripture, that Scripture, and again, we come back to the sufficiency of Scripture, that Scripture is not enough.

God has not, this is the assumption behind that, is that God has not provided everything we need for life and godliness.

Why John 10:27 Is About Salvation, Not Private Revelation

So I need, I expect, and learn how to hear.

Yeah, the expect one, the second assumption, and I devote a chapter to each one of these assumptions, and I show in the book how these HBG teachers, Charles Stanley, Priscilla Schreier, Beth Moore, et cetera, how they make this case that we need to, that we should expect to, and that we can learn to hear the voice of God.

I should expect to hear the voice of God, that assumption, that comes down to, we are promised in Scripture that God is gonna speak to us. This is what they teach. They would say that John 10, 27, my sheep hear my voice, that's Jesus' promise, that if you belong to him, he will speak to you.

Priscilla Schreier, in one of her books on hearing the voice of God, and she has a prolific amount of material on the subject, one of her books, she says, this is God's promise to you, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Assure, I think she says, assures the chair that I'm sitting in, I know that God will speak to you, because he has promised to do so. And so in that chapter, I deal with that passage, particularly John 10, is that really a promise from Jesus that he will speak to his people, his sheep?

In the sense of what they're describing, the whispers, impressions, nudgings from heaven for day-to-day decision-making.

So let's talk about John 10, 27 a little bit. I mean, it seems very clear. Jesus says, my sheep hear my voice. So is that not saying that we, of course, we are Christians, we are sheep, and so should we not be hearing the voice of the shepherd?

Yeah, and the context is key there, because you will hear HVG teachers quote that verse, always without explaining the context.

So John 10, 27 to me is the most concise and comprehensive verse in scripture about hearing God. It is when Jesus says, my sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me.

Yes, in fact, for most Christians who would quote that verse and say, yeah, I hear from God, because Jesus promised his sheep would hear his voice, I would bet you that 99 out of 100 of them could not tell you what context that is in, or what Jesus is dealing with in the context.

If you just said to them, exegete formulae of context, or explain the context, they wouldn't have a clue what Jesus is talking about. They would say, well, he's just talking about his sheep hearing his voice, isn't he?

Well, he is, but John says in that chapter, John 10, that Jesus was using a figure of speech, and he says, John says, this figure of speech, the Pharisees did not understand what Jesus was talking about.

This goes back to John chapter nine, actually, where that whole incident starts with the healing of the blind man back in John chapter nine. At the end of John chapter nine, a lengthy chapter in which the Pharisees persecuted the blind man and his parents for Jesus' healing of the blind man that was outside the temple.

There's no chapter break in the original, so nine and 10, they follow, 10 follows right after nine, and it's the same, at the end of chapter nine, Jesus is rebuking and confronting the Pharisees. He's calling them out for being false shepherds of the sheep, basically, for opposing his work and the works of God and not caring for the sheep that were under them like they should have.

So then in John 10, we get the good shepherd discourse. It's to the same group of Pharisees Jesus is speaking as to in John chapter nine, but he is reproving them and rebuking them for their unbelief and for their wickedness, and so he draws this contrast between the hirelings and the fake shepherds, the thieves and robbers who come to steal and destroy, and the good shepherd who then lays down his life for his sheep.

Then Jesus draws a contrast between his sheep and the Pharisees, and he says that his sheep will hear his voice, they will come to him, he will give them eternal life, and they will never perish. That is the promise.

So that promise, my sheep will hear my voice, is not my sheep will receive personal revelation and daily decision-making, but my sheep will hear me. When the shepherd calls to the sheep, the sheep come to him.

So you have in John chapter nine, this blind man who, being born blind, which is an illustration of spiritual blindness, he is born blind, Jesus heals him, heals the spiritual blindness, and by the end of John chapter nine, that once blind man is now worshiping him as the Messiah and as his God.

And of course, this infuriated the Pharisees. So then Jesus is describing to them that this man was one of his sheep. This man came to him, he gave to him eternal life, he will raise him up at the last day, they will never perish.

And so the idea of hearing Jesus is according to John chapter 10, a figure of speech that Jesus was using. So Jesus was using a figure of speech to talk about not receiving personal revelation for decision-making, but he was using a figure of speech that described him as the shepherd calling his sheep to him for salvation.

And his sheep hear his voice, they come to him for salvation, he saves them and he secures them everlastingly. That is his promise. Now he says to the Pharisees, you do not believe in me because you are not my sheep, you do not belong to me.

And Jesus describes this group of people that are his sheep as those whom the father had given to him, John chapter six, John chapter 10, and John chapter 17. Those are the ones the father had given to him, they are the sheep.

So the Pharisees were not his sheep, Jesus said, I laid down my life for my sheep. And he says to the Pharisees, you don't belong to me, that's why you don't believe. He doesn't say that if you believed, you would belong to me, he says the reason for your unbelief, the reason you remain hard-hearted and unbelief in spite of seeing all the evidence and the signs is because you don't belong to me.

And the reason you don't come to me, and the reason you won't embrace me, and the reason I don't give you eternal life is because you don't belong to me, you're not my sheep. My sheep hear me, they hear the summons of salvation.

That's what the hearing the shepherd is in John chapter 10. It is the summons of salvation that the sheep hear, not because they have some innate ability in themselves, but only because the father has given them to the son.

And therefore, because they are the father's love gift to the son in eternity past divine election, the father then, the spirit calls them to the son and the father draws them to the son and his sheep come to him.

There's parallels there between the argument and the issues dealt with in John 6, 10 and 17. So that's what John 10 is dealing with. It is not us hearing God's whispers and tuning in to the right frequency.

It is the sovereign shepherd summons us to salvation and he draws his sheep to himself and gives every last one of them eternal life and keeps them secure because they are a love gift from the father to the son.

That's John 10. And he holds us in the next couple of verses, verse 28, 29 says that Jesus holds us in his hand and then says, no one is able to snatch them out of my hand. No one is able to snatch them out of the father's hand.

And so he wraps the hand of the father as it were around that of his own. And so there's eternal security. So this is the effectual call of the gospel. Before we're converted, before a person is saved, before our conversion, we were sheep, but we were lost sheep, right?

Lost sheep and we're out there in the pasture of life, grazing with our heads down, minding our own business. But then all of a sudden we hear a voice. We hear a call, we hear the call of the shepherd and we perk our heads up and we go to him.

This is what we sometimes refer to as the effectual call of the gospel. The shepherd calling his sheep to himself. And it's a terrible trivialization to reduce that text down to something as trivial as God telling you where to go to have lunch one day when it's talking about the new birth.

So it's a beautiful, majestic passage of scripture, a terrible mishandling of it to reduce it to something as menial.

Yeah, trivial and banal as that idea. And there's three passages in John that all are parallel to each other. They are three, we're not just talking about verses, we're talking about extended chapters, John chapter six, John chapter 10 and John chapter 17.

Three entire chapters that are all addressing the same issue and that is this group of people in the gospel of John that Jesus describes as being given to him by the father. All that the father gives me will come to me.

The one who comes to me, I will certainly not cast out. I've come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me that of all that he has given to me, I lose none of them.

So he talks about his own sovereignty and power to save every last one whom the father has given to him from eternity past. We don't give ourselves to God. We don't do anything to get ourselves into that group.

We don't do anything to get ourselves out of that group. Jesus in those three chapters is describing the sovereignty of the shepherd to save, sanctify and secure those people whom the father has given to him everlastingly, perfectly and completely forever and to secure their eternal blessedness.

It is the security of the sheep that is in view in all three of those passages. The subject line runs parallel. The language runs parallel. The same group of people is being described in each one. And to take that majestic description of the glory of the triune God saving a people for himself, for the enjoyment of the son, for all of eternity and turn it into, I had a hunch in my heart that I should give cookies to the neighbor lady is such a vain abuse of scripture that anybody who teaches that John 10, 27 should refer to hearing God's whisper.

Anybody who teaches that should not be in a pulpit and should not be teaching scripture at all, period. They cannot, you cannot trust somebody who cannot even get the written word of God right to tell you how it is you're supposed to discern and interpret impressions and whispers when they can't even take the clearly revealed written word and get it accurate in its context.

Don't trust those people to tell you how to hear, how to interpret nudgings and promptings.

Right, yeah, you don't have to be a Greek scholar to know the meaning of John 10.

No, no, it's absolutely plain. Right, absolutely. So that's the second assumption I should expect to hear from God outside scripture is if God has promised that he gives us those kinds of revelations.

And he has given those that promise. And some would say, well, Moses heard from God, Abraham heard from God, Elijah did, Elisha did, shouldn't I?

Yeah, there's something that all those men have in common. That is that they were all men uniquely gifted in the redemptive plan of God in the making of his covenants or in the fulfilling of his covenants to his people.

I think it's a little bit more than just vainglorious to suggest that you and I are on the par with Elijah, Elisha, Moses, Abraham, David, et cetera. That is just, I mean, man, talk about an ego trip.

Those men didn't expect to hear from God. They were uniquely called and God's revelation to them was out of the ordinary. But scripture does not promise that just as God spoke to Moses, he's gonna speak to us.

That's right.

One of the fundamental problems is that many people make is they read something that is described in scripture and they automatically think that what is described is also prescribed.

Right, or they read this concentration that we have in scripture of God's miraculous workings through 6 ,000 years of human history. And they read it as if all of this took place in a week and a half.

And that therefore we should expect such a concentration of miraculous events, personal revelations, prophets every day as if this was the common thing that God has always done through all of human history and that there's something unique about Kootenai Community Church that we don't have 15 prophets standing up on a Sunday morning and all prophesying the word of God.

And we don't have miracle workers off in the corners doing things. They assume that that concentration of miracles and supernatural activity was taking place quickly and it didn't. These things are spread out over all of human history.

Why Samuel, Elijah, and Gideon Are Not Models for Hearing God's Voice

Okay, so what about learning to hear God's voice? Because there's a lot of books out there that purport to be able to teach you how to learn how to hear the voice of God. Is this not something we can just learn how to do and the more we grow in Christ, the more mature we become, the more sensitive we'll be and the more accurate we'll be in tuning in to the right frequency and hearing God speak?

Yeah, this is the assumption that they make. They usually point to 1 Samuel 3 with Samuel and they say Samuel had to learn how to hear the voice of God. Charles Stanley makes much out of that in his book.

Priscilla Schreier has an entire book devoted to exegeting. I use that term in the loosest possible way. And by exegete, I mean not at all. 1 Samuel 3, trying to make the case that Samuel was just a young boy and he had to learn how to discern the voice of God.

There's nothing in scripture that says that hearing the voice of God is a skill, a discipline, or an ability that can be learned because even Samuel in 1 Samuel 3, he didn't have to learn how to hear.

He heard God's voice. He just didn't understand whose voice it was because as the text says, the word of the Lord was rare in those days. So Samuel heard his name clearly. He understood what was being said.

He thought, in fact, it was so clear and discernible and he understood it so well that he thought that Eli in the next room, Eli? Eli, yeah. Yeah, Eli in the next room. That Eli was the one who was giving him the call, that he was calling.

So Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, you called? And Eli said, no, it wasn't me. And Samuel didn't assume that God was trying to speak to him. Samuel didn't try and discern the voice of God. He didn't need to learn the discipline of hearing it.

He just needed to be, he just needed to understand that contrary to God's normal activity of that day, he was uniquely calling Samuel as a prophet to the nation of Israel. So he didn't learn how to hear the voice of God.

There's nothing in scripture that says, here's how you hear the voice of God. There's no chapter that delineates, here are the five things you need in order to hear God's voice. And even though these HBG teachers, Stanley, how to listen to God, Priscilla Schreier, how to discern the voice of God.

I mean, the number of lists go on and on. The list of books go on and on of people who claim to give you some ability or insight into how to discern the voice of God and all the ways in which God speaks.

And there's nothing in scripture that gives us any kind of detail like these authors promise on how to hear the voice of God. To put it simply, if God is not speaking, you are not going to hear him. And if God is speaking, you are not going to miss him.

Okay, dear ones, that point that Jim made is so good. I want you to, I'm gonna play it again. Listen to what he says again, and maybe write this one down.

To put it simply, if God is not speaking, you are not going to hear him. And if God is speaking, you are not going to miss him. So if God is not speaking to you, there is no discipline. There is no skill you can cultivate.

There is no quietness you can submerge yourself in to hear from God if he is not speaking to you. And if he is speaking to you and wanted to get something across, it would be just as obvious as it was to Abraham, Moses, or Elijah, or Samuel, that it was God who was speaking.

And nobody in scripture ever had trouble discerning what God was saying. Nobody ever said, I think the Lord may be telling me, I sense or I feel personally, this is what Matt Chandler does.

Prophecy, Hunches, and the Absence of Biblical Guidance for Hearing God

So let's talk about what prophecy is and what prophecy isn't. The thus saith the Lord, look right at me, is over. Look at me. When this text is talking about prophecy, it's not talking about the way Jeremiah prophesied or Isaiah prophesied, no, no, no, that's closed, that's canonized, so you will never prophesy in a way that's on par, equal to, anywhere near the inerrant, infallible word of God.

That's closed, shut, and so the best you've got, the best you've got is the humility to say, I think the Lord would have me lay this before you.

That's right, I feel that the Lord might be speaking to me, telling me this, this is all I can sense inside of my heart. Nobody in scripture ever talked like that. No prophet of God ever says, you know, I got a hunch that God might be trying to tell us X, Y, Z.

Saul didn't get up off the road to Damascus and say, I kind of got a feeling that the Lord wants me to stop persecuting Christians. I don't know what gives me that idea, but I just got this hunch. I had a premonition, I had a hunch.

That language is not used in scripture whatsoever.

I tell people, if you have to wonder whether or not God spoke to you, he didn't. That's right, yep. He didn't, and it's interesting that in the New Testament, let's just take the New Testament. You have the four gospels, the record of the life and ministry and teachings of Jesus.

In the Acts, you have the birth and spread, growth of the church and the spread of the gospel. You've got the pastoral epistles, you've got Romans, you've got loads and loads of instructional doctrine and theology and how to organize a church and qualifications for elders and how to deal with conflict, how to deal with discipline.

Revelation, you've got eschatology and all these things. Nowhere, is anywhere in the Bible, is there any instruction on how to discern God's voice? That's right. So all of these people like Charles Stanley and Priscilla Shire that are writing these books, so apparently there is a need for these individuals to tell us how to do something that the Bible itself, God himself apparently saw no need to instruct us how to do.

Yeah, because God doesn't need to try and be heard. He doesn't need us to try and hear him because he has no inability or difficulty in clearly communicating when he wants to speak. God doesn't whisper.

Yeah, it's like somebody should write a book. That's a great title for a book. He doesn't whisper and he doesn't try to say anything. He doesn't try to get his message across. God speaks and he has the power and authority to assure that the person to whom he is speaking understands who it is that is speaking and understands exactly what it is he is saying.

One of the more common phrases that we hear amongst people who believe in the HVG, hearing the voice of God theology and belief is that God speaks to us in a still small voice. This is so common, so ubiquitous.

Walk us through. What is the still small voice thing?

The Still Small Voice in 1 Kings 19

Well, the still small voice is vague enough in scripture that you can almost attach any methodology to it. That's why I begin that section on critiquing that methodology with that phrase because people will use the still small voice to refer to anything from something that somebody else said that was they're standing near somebody in a restaurant, somebody says something and they think, oh, maybe that's the Lord trying to get that message to me.

Should I be overhearing that? That could be the still small voice. The still small voice might be a prompting, a hunch, an impression, a strong desire, an inclination to do something, a name that pops into your head, some random thought you have while you're eating a taco and watching Jeopardy.

It could be a Jeopardy question itself. That might be the still small voice coming through Alex Trebek. It's so general and vague as to include almost anything that somebody who wants to read a sign or the voice of God into something, they can just claim that as part of the still small voice.

Well, the language comes from 1 Kings with Elijah. After Elijah's confrontation with the prophets of Baal and he's going through a very difficult time, he's in depression, he feels like he's the only one that is left in the land of Israel that has not bowed the knee to Baal.

And he finds himself at Horeb, he's in a cave there and the Lord comes and there's these three manifestations, the wind, the fire, and the earthquake. And the Lord is not in any of those. And then the Lord speaks in what the NASB calls the still small voice or the sound of a silent whisper.

And it is a vague Hebrew phrase that is only used one time in all of scripture. And it describes an audible sound that Elijah heard that sounded like a whisper, it sounded like a breath or a wind, a breeze, a still silent whisper.

It's kind of a still noise. And Elijah left the cave and went out and then the Lord had a conversation with him at the mouth of the cave. So they take that reference to the sound that Elijah heard and they say, that was just the Lord whispering to his heart, speaking these revelations in his heart.

And they take the still small voice and they blow that up into a hundred methodologies that they attach to that phraseology. And all it is in Elijah's case was something he heard outside the cave. It wasn't something he heard inside his brain or inside of his heart or soul.

It was something external to him, external to his location actually in the cave. And he went out to hear what God was going to say to him outside the cave. So it might be that the Lord was speaking audibly outside the cave and Elijah couldn't hear it because it was a low tone.

And so they went out to hear the voice of God, which was emanating from outside the cave. That might be it. Or it might just be a reference to some sort of a natural breeze-like phenomenon that was going on outside the cave that caught Elijah's attention and he walked out.

But it was at the mouth of the cave that he had a clear discernible conversation with the Lord as any prophet in Israel might have in a quotable sense. The Lord said, quote, the word of the Lord came to Elijah.

In fact, in the life of Elijah, that's the pattern. The word of the Lord came to Elijah and said, and then he gets a clear revelation from God. This happens over and over and over again in the life of Elijah.

Even after the incident with the still small voice, it happened in the life of Elijah. But HVG proponents and theologians take that phrase still small voice. They wrestle that from the context. And then they use that phrase to build an entire theology of divine revelation upon this obscure, once used phrase to describe something that we're not even sure exactly what it is, rather than all of the very clear indications of how Elijah received revelation.

The word of the Lord came to Elijah and said, quote, that's how prophets heard the voice of God. And that's the pattern in the life of Elijah. The still small voice is not the pattern. And yet guys like Dallas Willard make a lot of the still small voice.

Priscilla Schreier, Beth Moore, Charles Stanley, they talk about the still small voice and they use that to make that example of Elijah into a model for everybody. And it's not a model.

Gideon's Fleece and the Abuse of Signs

Right, exactly, exactly. What about we hear people say, well, I've got some big decision I've got to make and I don't know if I should choose A or B. And so maybe I should put out a fleece and there's different iterations of that.

I know Charles Stanley has spoken before about when he was a young man, he had a big decision to make. And he said, Lord, if you want me to do this, and I don't recall off the top of my head exactly what it was, but if you want me to take this course of action, let me see two shooting stars tonight.

And sure enough, he was out walking and he saw a couple of shooting stars. And so he discerned that as God's will. And he, of course, ties that to Gideon putting out a fleece. So Lord, if you want me to do this, make this happen.

Two shooting stars and they use whatever it is. Lord, if you want me to take this job instead of this other job, then let there be a bluebird sitting on the bird feeder in the morning, something like that.

And they base that off of Gideon's fleece. So is Gideon a model for us?

Yeah, Gideon was a judge in the land of Israel. And the Lord came to him and told him that he wanted to use Gideon to raise an army and to deliver the Israelites from Midianite oppression. Now, the Lord clearly communicated his plans to Gideon on more than one occasion.

So Gideon knew exactly what the Lord wanted him to do. The revelation was clear. Gideon did not misunderstand the Lord. What Gideon needed was some courage. He needed a backbone. He asked for the Lord to make, he put out a fleece at night and asked for the Lord to make the fleece dry and the ground around it wet.

And if he did that, which was obviously a supernatural miracle because when the dew fell, it would fall on everything and make even the fleece wet so that the fleece was bone dry and the ground was saturated with dew.

That of course was a sign. Well, Gideon didn't take that sign as an answer in itself. He still did not believe God and trust God fully. So he asked for a second miraculous sign. And the Lord, instead of snuffing out Gideon's life, which you deserve for doubting God like that, he actually gave Gideon the second sign, which was that the next morning that the ground be dry and the fleece be soaking wet.

And the Lord allowed that to happen as a proof again, that Gideon was to deliver the Midianites. And the Lord had to stiffen up his spine even a little bit more later on when he brought Gideon down into the camp and heard the Midianites talking about, two Midianite soldiers talking about a dream that they had that Gideon interpreted to be God's clear revelation that the Midianite camp would be destroyed by the Israelites.

So Gideon clearly understood what the Lord wanted him to do. He wasn't trying to make a decision. He was testing God to make God show by supernatural sign that he was actually going to deliver Gideon.

So Gideon was doubting God's word, not trusting God's word. And then the signs that Gideon asked for were supernatural signs, quite different than seeing two shooting stars. Sometimes you can sit out at night and see 10 or 15 shooting stars over the course of an evening, but that's not what Gideon asked for.

He didn't ask for things that commonly happen. So people who use fleeces, I challenge them, if you're gonna use a fleece, use a fleece, make it supernatural. If you're gonna ask God to make you choose between A and B, then say, if you want me to do A, then cause this table to levitate.

If you want me to do B, cause those chairs to levitate. And whichever one you cause to levitate, I'll take that as a sign. But people don't do that. They usually put out fleeces that they can interpret in such a way as to get them to do or allow them to do what they really wanna do to begin with.