By Barry Rosenfeld
Part 1 Part 2
“When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?”(Numbers 12:6-8)
Difference between dreams and visions
The main difference between dreams and visions is that the person seeing visions is completely cognizant of their thoughts, while with dreams, although they may be predictive, the person is not awake. Another fundamental difference is when a prophet in the Bible has a vision or is given a message about things to come in the future, he knows that he is being shown the future. In a dream, the dreamer is not only seeing the future, he is experiencing these events as if they were real and present. They also differ in that in visions the prophet is being told what will occur while in a dream the dreamer is experiencing the future which is still indeterminate and open to change through the exercise of free will. Things are not set in stone. The Talmud teaches that without interpretation a dream is like “an unread letter.” This means that the dreamer must act on his dream to make it a reality. Left to itself it will not necessarily occur. (aish.com)
In the Bible, visions occurred in which angels or heavenly messengers appeared openly to the prophets and told them of things to come. The first chapters of the book of Ezekiel describe such an event when the prophet saw visions of God (Ezekiel 1:1) who told him that He is sending him to the house of Israel. At the time, Ezekiel was a priest having been exiled to Babylonia. Of particular note is Ezekiel’s description of the coming Third Temple which is yet to be built but will be constructed prior to the final coming of the Messiah.
Dreams occurred when the receiver was asleep. A good example is when Joseph dreamed (Genesis 37:5) of his brothers’ sheaves of grain bowing down to his sheaf.
In the New Testament God used visions and dreams in connection with Yeshua Jesus and his ministry on earth. For example, an angel appeared to the priest Zacharias in an open vision (Luke 1:5-23) to tell him that his prayers had been answered and that his wife Elizabeth would have a son, John the Baptist the forerunner of Yeshua. When Joseph heard that Mary was pregnant he was about to divorce her but God sent an angel in a dream telling him that this pregnancy was of God. After the birth of Jesus, God used dreams two other times to direct Joseph, once to warn him to take Jesus and Mary to Egypt because Herod was about to kill Him, and a second time to tell Joseph that it was safe to return to Israel. In Matthew 27:19, Pilate’s wife tells him that she had a dream telling her that Jesus was innocent and that Pilate should have nothing to do with the case. On the road to Damascus Saul/Paul (Acts 9:1-19) had an open vision of Jesus who appeared to him, leading to his acceptance of the Messiah of Israel.
Then there is Peter’s vision (Acts 10:9-15) in which he is told that that which God calls clean cannot be unclean, preparing him to visit Cornelius who himself had had a vision telling him where to find Peter, so that he could hear the Good News and be saved. Paul had several visions which served to direct him on which path to take in his ministry to the Gentiles, while John’s Book of Revelation is almost entirely an account of a vision that he had while imprisoned on the island of Patmos.
To be continued …
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Jerald Gainous says
Thank You once again . Awesome Lesson!