Dreams in the Old Testament: Divine Communication
The Firestone Files: Letters to My Grandchildren — Dr. Chris L. Firestone
August 10, 2026 · Episode 50 · 1:19:54
https://drchrisfirestone.com/episode/dreams-in-the-old-testament-divine-communication/

Transcript is auto-generated from YouTube captions and lightly formatted; it may contain errors.

But the most significant ones may have their origins beyond our own inner resources, beyond even the collective unconscious of all the imperfect beings in the world. All right, everyone. Well, welcome back to the Files. So excited to be moving on here to the fourth episode on dream interpretation. We've uh made it so far through our initial lecture where we laid things out and talked about the importance and significance of dreams. We also talked about being modern people who are living in a secularized age where society has divided the sacred and the secular.

And those of us who are, you know, religious adherence Christians who believe that this world is more than meets the eye, um, you know, but we've been trained in the universities are still subject to this idea that maybe dreams either aren't that important or if they are somewhat important, they're pretty much regulated or and relegated to the individual. ual to our own conscious life or unconscious life or some manifestation of the human condition. And this kind of humanism is common parlance and it leads us to think that maybe dreams aren't all that important.

And in the first lecture we talked about how that secularized world view came about in the 19th century uh first through the left-wing Hegelians and then through the you know the the free thought society and it was really taught in universities throughout the 20th century this whole revisionist history that um persons and great minds of the past who appeared to be theists who appeared to be Christians were really only kind of tongue and cheek and they really didn't mean it. What they really meant was that science and reason and moral relativity and uh all of that were the uh were the ways in which you know reason led us.

Um but as we saw in that first lecture there's reason to doubt that whole narrative and now we're looking at a new set of possibilities. However, in the issue or in the area of dream interpretation, lectures two and three really zeroed in on the philosophical trajectory, if you will, after Emanuel Kant. You see, Emanuel Khan did something and we tried to point this out in those previous lectures that here to four hadn't been done and that is to look at reason itself and its contributions to our experiences. And when he did that, he well, I don't want to say it's inadvertently, but it to the psychologists, it seems like Kant inadvertently opened up the door of possibility for dream interpretation.

He didn't think it could be done like a science uh because he thought that those things were hidden from us and they weren't open to repeated experimentation. But as we saw in uh particularly in lecture three when we looked at Vilhelm Bunt, we saw a thinker there who said no maybe we can do some studies uh empirical studies to get at reaction times, judgment times, consideration times and all those sorts of things. And we could begin to creatively come up with some empirical ways of trying to understand the human mind and to understand therefore dreams uh based on our analysis of the human mind. This is precisely what we got in lecture two with Freud and Adler and Jung.

Very clever ways of understanding our dreams as if they were only emanating from us. And so that was a that was a big uh a big moment there if you will where we looked at those various ways to interpret dreams and those were all I argued in lecture two those were all Kantean forms of dreaming. Um they they Kant didn't think you could quite do it that way but as many of the Germans would note in German universities to understand Kant is to transcend Kant.

Paul Tillix once said this actually in one of his writings he said we all tried to do that and that's exactly what these German and uhh Austrian psychologists try to do transcend Kant by analyzing the unconscious and in the case of Jung of course the collective unconscious and you know that's what we saw in lecture two in lecture three we had a couple of fellows there u Kelvin Hall and Fritz Pearl who really didn't follow the transcendental contian stream. They were more sort of wedded to the empirical studies or the studies of immediate experience um that come more directly out of Wilhelm Vunt's work. And so we looked at those contributions.

Well, that brought our study to a close. There are other figures we could have studied in lectures 1, 2, and three, but those I think are a good sampling of uh the kinds of thinkers after Kant who helped us to interpret dreams and to interpret them better and to understand better where they're coming from. Now, all of that, of course, is under the assumption that there's no third party involved here. It's the dreams and there's us. But there's no external forces per se that are at work here.

By the time we now uh get back what I'd like to do now is get to the Bible because the biblical worldview as we're going to see here today and then again in the next lecture is a totally different view that this world is a unified world. It is both a physical world and it is a metaphysical world. It is a natural world and it is a supernatural world. And this unified understanding of the human condition and our place in the world uh is a totally different worldview than that which those postcontians um ever envisioned. And so I think it's worthwhile to go back to the Bible to see how they interpret dreams there.

And one of the things I hopefully you're going to to notice here is that dreams are a multiaceted multi-perspectal experience that happens to every one of us. And there are various ways in which one might approach them. And so by the time we get out of the Bible and into uh at least the sixth lecture, who knows? Maybe we'll go seven or eight.

Who who knows? But I'm looking at lecture six. possibility of just talking about how do we then develop a method for interpreting dreams going forward now that we have a more unified understanding of the human experience. So that's what we're working for today. We're going to focus on the Old Testament and its employment and and sort of you know archives of dreams and then the next lecture we're going to turn to the New Testament and look at its uh understanding of dreams and their significance and that will of course give way hopefully in lecture six to uh some some some good ideas about how we might appro approach interpreting dreams.

Well, I mentioned to you that uh one of the uh books that I'm going to be focusing on here, let me go ahead and show this to you. This is Seymour Russell's book uh Bible Dreams. I utilized this book because it it really quickened in me when I first taught um dream interpretation, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago. um really the significance of dreams in the Old Testament. But his way into that was to first do kind of what we did, and that is to look at the age we're living in and why dreams aren't being focused on, why they aren't being interpreted, why they aren't really even being celebrated within our culture the way they once were.

Um and he asked the question right at the beginning of the book and I perhaps this is what has prompted this whole approach of mine. Do dreams emanate entirely from our own consciousness? There's a quote there on page 29 that I thought I'd read to you because I think it's it's super helpful. Is it too much, says Russell, to say that dreams, perhaps not all dreams?

But the most significant ones, may have their origins beyond our own inner resources, beyond even the collective unconscious of all the imperfect beings in the world. This argues Russell in the opening chapters of his book is the mindset of our biblical ancestors that they took kind of for granted an assumption, a belief that our dreams were more than just a collection of a remnants of our waking life. that there's something something or someone speaking to us. One of the things Russell does in his book is he uses an example. This actually the very next page in the book on page 30. Russell talks about playwrights and their call for their audiences to suspend disbelief.

And he's basically asking us, I think this is a great point that Russell makes. He's basically asking us to suspend suspend our disbelief in the potential potency and communicative act that is a dream. He's not saying to suspend logic, but to picture yourself, he says, as a wanderer in the woods. So, if you go over to page 30, it's another quotation I thought would be helpful for us to set up this discussion of the Old Testament dreams. Because if you're like me, I found those first two interpretive uh uh uh efforts by uh first the conteans and then the uh non-contans there in our last two lectures to be pretty persuasive that is I learned a lot about my dreams.

The question is, did I learn everything about my dreams and all of my dreams? And I think Russell wants to say absolutely not. Um, let me go ahead and read this for you because it's interesting that it's a tiein with um with one of my dreams in the earlier lectures. He says, "Do not set aside your skepticism. Envision yourself instead as a wanderer in the woods. Here there is no set path. There is no logical way to proceed. Every tree is interesting and each leaf is worth is worthy of consideration. The darkness is interrupted by occasional clearings and by the light that reaches the forest through the natural breaks in the foliage. As wanderers, we proceed.

As dreamers, we enter the forest. It may be that along the way, we will discover a greater respect for the positions taken by our biblical ancestors. Those whose consciousness of reality was less dependent on analysis and definition and whose understanding of themselves and their religion was enriched by the world of dreams and visions as much as it was by the outer garments of cause and effect. Obviously, Russell gives us this interesting metaphor saying that when you're considering your dreams, it's like wandering in the woods. And sometimes you have this occasional clearing where there's light and there's understanding.

And with a couple of the examples of my dreams that I've shared with you in previous lectures, you can see how the light bulb went on for me wandering in the dream dream world. You can still have moments of insight, self-reflection, and uh kind of eureka moments that uh can change the course of your life or those you who who uh who you you love or your community or whatever. Uh they can they can be that kind of profound. And so uh you know the dream I had, the Jack in the Box dream, I was wandering the woods and I came upon a hut that had light, that had insight.

And of course the dream took an interesting turn. But little did I know when I was sharing that dream or I failed to remember this that uh that really is a metaphor for all of our dreams. uh the the the wandering through the the the thoughts and the sort of eclectic way in which dreams sometimes come about can in fact yield insight, can in fact um be something really important to our lives. So that's where we want to go. You know, a lot of this stuff that we've talked about so far has been enlightening. It's come out of the enlightenment, but it hasn't been exhaustive.

I guess that's the argument I want to make here. It's not exhaustive and the Bible teaches us that and hopefully your own dreams will teach you that that at the end of the day they are not reducible to just accidental collocation of ideas and experiences that you've had in the waking life. No, there's something more going on. And that's the argument I want to make here today and use the Bible to sort of help quicken within us that reality.

Okay. Um well, we have the sacred secular divide and then we have this notion that maybe there is a spiritual condescension really in our dreams that these things come to us from a reality that we don't have immediate access to except through perhaps the eyes of faith. And um and so I think Russell's point that I that I took to heart when I first read the book and then of course been refreshing myself on the contents of that book. Bible dreams are the conduits the sort of bridge the pathway I don't know what the right metaphor here is the aperture through which the sacred and the secular may well relate to each other through which God intervenes with this world.

And so wouldn't that be interesting? You have the eyes of faith that help us to move throughout life to see truth rightly and so forth. But dreams have a kind of a lucid component to them that allows for um the bandwidth to be increased in our interaction with the spiritual world. This is not unique to the Hebrews by the way. uh Russell makes this point that we see in a number of ancient texts, you know, the epic of Gilgamesh being one example, we see we see dreams occurring in for the ancient uh mind certainly in Asia Minor and in Palestine and the the area surrounding Israel.

um they understood that messaging and interaction was happening in our dreams and so they didn't kind of have the sacred secular divide like we do today. In fact, they were kind of unified. They saw all these dreams kind of out blending into the waking life. And um and that's kind of fascinating. And so, um, we want to, uh, ask ourselves, can the Bible help us to bridge this gap? I mean, and that's kind of what I want to look at with you here as we approach the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, this time around to see whether or not it can help us in this regard.

Okay. Well, let's let's begin to uh get ourselves into the scriptures, into the Bible here. And um the way I'm you know, I've been looking at and toying with a variety of ways of handling dreams in the Old Testament. First of all, you need to know dreams are all over the Old Testament. Conservatively, I don't know, there's 20. There may be twice that many, maybe more that are represented in the Old Testament. We're going to focus in this uh this podcast really on some of the major ones because dreams aren't just periphery kind of side notes to the biblical narrative. Dreams are happening at crucial junctures in the story of Israel.

And in my life, they happen, they seem to happen at crucial junctures um in your narrative. And I guess that's my first suggestion that one of the things that the Bible's going to teach us here is that dreams are not only per uh uh uh anti-periphery. They often times, the most meaningful of them happen really in times of crisis and in times of uh um deep reflection and consideration of your position in the world. And so this is what we find when we look at our first one. Now I'm going to be marching here through the major characters. So we're going to look at Abram.

We're going to look at Isaac. We're going to look at Jacob. We're going to look at Joseph. those four figures in particular. We're also going to talk a little bit about Solomon and a little bit about Daniel, all the major figures. I mean, not all of them, but I mean, you know, the pillars, if you will, of of um of uh you know, Old Testament faith. And so, they're all going to be involved here in our conversation. So, we're going to focus first on Genesis. that's where they're the most obvious in the sense of being important to that narrative. And um and so we want to look at those. And I've broken down the Genesis um dreams into an elective set. There's there's no sort of one category you can put these in. So the initial um dream of significance happens to Abram in Genesis 15. And this is a well-known passage.

Why is this a crisis? Why is this a big moment for for Abram? Well, you'll recall that in Genesis 12, we get the Abrahamic uh covenant. And you know, he's going to bless uh I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse and all the people of the earth will be blessed through you. A pretty fabulous promise to uh Abram very early on. By the time we get to chapter 15, he's become old and he does not have an heir.

And so he is kind of uh I wouldn't say beside himself, but his faith is being stretched certainly. And um might be worth just reading a little bit of this. And the reason this is so kind of fascinating to me is that it begins with a vision. It ends with a dream. And in between you have this kind of I don't know what you'd call it, realism or pseudo realism. I'm going to call it a trance state that he's in in the middle. So, we have this, if if I'm right here, he has a vision, a trance, and a dream. One happens inside his tent, the other happens outside his tent, and then the last one inside his tent.

Again, some interesting stuff going on here. So, here's where it begins in 15. If you got your Bible, you might want to pull it out. I am not going to do this like a biblical scholar. I'm a philosopher. I'm interested in dreams. I'm interested in philosophical and theological approaches to dreams. But if you want a deeper analysis of these passages, don't take that from me. Uh we're just looking at how dreams project themselves in the Bible and why they're significant for us today. So, um I just want to do that one caveat here. One side note because uh don't get your final interpretation of scripture from a philosopher like myself.

There are people a lot smarter than me that work on these things. But I am very intrigued and I've read these passages. I've studied the importance of dreams in the Bible. And so hopefully that's going to be insightful for you as you search the scriptures for yourself. Okay, here's uh um 15 verse one onward. It says, "After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision."

"Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward. Don't be afraid, Abram. I will protect you." But Abram said, "Oh sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless, and the one who will inherit an estate is Elazar of Damascus?" And Abram said, "You have given me no children, so a servant in my household will be my heir." And so you see Abraham Abram giving him a kind of some giving God some push back on this. He's like, "Look, I'll protect you, but will you protect my children? I don't even have any. How can you possibly protect me and my legacy, says Abram, when I'm getting old now?"

You know, it's almost like it's almost like it's too late. You know, a little passive aggressiveness by Abram here. And then it says here, "Then the word of the Lord came to him. This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir." He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars, if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be." So we have this statement of uh protection at the beginning. Then we have a little bit of push back from Abram and then God says I will provide you with a child. You won't go childless. And notice there he took him outside to give him that word of provision. So first he's inside with a vision.

Then he goes outside apparently to look at the stars in the heavens and count them. And then he seems to be somewhat in a translike state here because Abram believed the Lord and he credited it to him as righteousness. He also said to him, "I am the Lord who brought you out of and the Calaldanss to give you the land to take possession of it." And so he's kind of reminding Abram of his faithfulness to him. But Abra Abram's not not going down easy. in verse uh in verse 80 he says, "Oh sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?"

He's he sounds like an awfully modern person in the in this passage where he's asking the question of knowledge. Notice he's moved away from sort of the metaphysical and and faithladen, you know, posture of faith or trust and he's moved to this posture of almost like a philosopher. How can I know? So the Lord said to him, "Bring me a hepher and a goat and a ram each of three years along with a dove and a young pigeon." And so it goes on here. He is in the middle of the night apparently with the stars shining overhead. And he asks him to bring a bunch of animals and to make a sacrifice.

and he cut them into two and arranged the halves opposite each other. The birds, however, he did not cut in half. And there's all sorts of sort of theological implications here. I'm not going to go into those, but the bottom line is this sacrifice creates the possibility that God can sort of seal his covenant with Abram. Kind of a royal land grant, if you will, in the ancient world. And all of this is happening in this state of having just been in a vision being in a sense guided outside to see the stars and to gather animals and to prepare this sacrifice. And then notice this in verse uh we're looking at verse 12.

As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated 400 years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. So here we move from this promise of protection to his promise of provision in the sense of a son and to to to to keep things all well with Abram.

And then he has this prophecy about being taken as slaves and that God would see to it that uh he uh that they make it out of there with great possessions and are once again established as a people. Well, that's the uh you know that's an there's at least three features of that I think you should keep in mind here. It's the initial dream that sort of gives rise to uh the sort of seal of approval, if you will, on the Abrahamic covenant. It is a little bit incidental. He's not doing anything other than living his life and visions and dreams are kind of happening to him as he is questing asking God to follow through on his promises.

And the third thing I think to note here is that it's kind of an well I think Genesis 12 in in combination with Genesis 15 is kind of an international uh dream that this will make him a great person but he'll bless the entire world. God will bless the entire world through Abram and his descendants. And so we have these features that come screaming out to us in visions and dreams. Really important. I mean, it's hard to uh under uh it's hard to overstate the importance in the story of Israel. This passage in Genesis 15. Um okay. Well, that's Abram. Now, let's scoot over again.

There's a lot more we could cover here, but I'm not going to do that. But I want to focus on some of the key uh points here before. I was going to jump right to Jacob, but I do need to mention uh Isaac here because Isaac doesn't appear to have any dreams. Um and that's an interesting fact because we have this sort of um incidental dream. Not I don't want to say incidental in the sense that it's accidental or it doesn't matter. It just sort of happens to Abram. Isaac doesn't seem to have any dreams recorded.

He does have a theophony of significance where God appears to Isaac and he um warns him not to go to Egypt and he reaffirms the uh Abrahamic covenant and he really recommends he just stays in the land. And so those things are shared with Isaac in uh Theophony. But examining that passage in uh in in chapter 26 of Genesis doesn't really reveal dreaming at all. Doesn't appear to be happening at night. Doesn't appear to be uh him in a dreamlike state. And so clearly Abraham is dreaming. Isaac is not dreaming. And so one of the takeaways from my analysis of dreams in the Old Testament is that no two are the same. I mean so a pretty eclectic thing. It really is like Seymour Russell mentions like it's wandering in the forest. There's no kind of one way in which dreams impact biblical characters.

What matters is the meta story, the meta narrative going on of the people of Israel. What matters is their own personal character and so forth. I mean, there's theories as to why Isaac doesn't have dreams, but everybody else seems to. uh one is is that that uh traumatic incident where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac and that he had a I don't say it was a epiphany or something in that experience that made dreaming irrelevant for him going forward. Um it I mean there's a lot of sort of I don't know secondary reasons why people I have have theorized that Isaac didn't have dreams that everybody else seemed to have.

But at least one reason we've noted here is that no two persons in the Bible dream alike? They all kind of dream. Isaac doesn't seem to have any significantly uh of of enough significance to record them in the scriptures. Interesting point. Okay. Well, let's move on to Jacob then. Jacob gives us another type of dream. And I'm thinking particularly here of Genesis 28. So, if you got your Bible and you're following along with me, feel free to look at Genesis 28. Um, this is verse looks like verse 10 um to 21 or so. This one is interesting because um again, Jacob is in turmoil. He's in crisis, which is seems to be a time to have significant dreams.

Um and what's his crisis? Well, his crisis is basically that he has stolen um Esau's birthright and his and and um Isaac's blessing. And so that doesn't uh that doesn't make Esau happy. And he's out for blood. And so um Rebecca, Isaac's wife, the mother of Jacob and Esau, tells Jacob to flee until Esau's anger subsides. And so that's what we have here is a condition with Jacob in a sense running for his life. He's headed, ironically, I don't know if this is ironic or what, but it's certainly interesting. He's headed to Heron, and I think this is Rebecca's brother who still lives there. You'll recall, if you go back, uh, that Abram came from Heron and was called to the promised land. So, here is Jacob going as it were uh running for the hills and headed back to um friends, family of people that they had known long ago.

And now it was time for him to uh to to run back there because Esau is of course out to get him. Now, in the middle of this running, there's a lot of unknowns for Jacob. He doesn't know how he'll be received. uh he doesn't know if he'll even get there with the potential of Esau pursuing him. It's a very difficult time of fleeing and running. And he employs, and this is a term I think Russell uses, but I've heard it used elsewhere before, he employs some spiritual technology. You might say, "Spiritual technology? What? What in the world does that mean?" Well, this is where we get our first dream incubation, at least the one that's apparent.

And so, in verse 28, listen to what this says. This is interesting. Different sort of dream altogether. Let me pull this over so I can read it. Jacob left Beersa and set out for Heron. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven and angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord, and he said, "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, and the God of Isaac.

I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north, and to the south. All the people will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you. Notice there's kind of a parallel thing going on with the Abram's vision. God is promising protection, provision, and he's making prophecy here about what will happen in the future regarding Jacob and his descendants. Fascinating uh dream. And this is what I called an incubated dream. Apparently, there are places in the ancient near east that were known by Hebrews and others apparently that if you went there, you were going to be spoken to through a dream or you could be or increase the likelihood that you would be.

And he goes there and he takes a stone. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream. I mean, that's what it tells us right here in Genesis 28. Um, if you're looking for that, it is verse 11 um and 12. And so, really significant. Apparently, there are places where you can go to enhance the communicative properties of your dreams. Really kind of cool. if you can find those kind of places. I mean they would be very popular Airbnbs for sure. Um and apparently there are such places. I haven't really pursued that angle in life.

But man, this makes me think maybe I should try it sometime. I think first of all we need to get a handle on our own dreams right where we're at. We're going to talk about that in lecture six. But clearly in the Bible there dreams are important. They're significant. They have a kind of a value that the ancients took quite seriously and there were apparently places to go and rocks at those places that you could lay your head upon and dream. Uh then it it goes on in that passage verse 16. When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it. He was afraid and said how awesome is this place. There is none other this is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven. So his incubation is complete at this point. He uh he goes on to say I we should build a temple here.

Takes this rock. It's going to be the cornerstone basically of this new temple because this is a place where you can meet God. And so fascinating account. Clearly the dream to Jacob was far more significant than um we typically think of dreams. And so that's I think something worth considering. All right. Well, we have that incubated dream of Jacob. Jacob's going to come full circle by the end of Genesis where he'll have another dream that sort of bookends the entire book of Genesis. And that is fascinating because it again is a kind of has a kind of interesting parallel with Abram's initial dream and the final dream of Jacob.

Before we get to that one, I I want to I would be remiss if I don't mention Joseph, who well, he might he might be even more, you know, uh significant in terms of dream interpretation than even his father Jacob. Um he seems to have more knowledge about dreams than anybody else in scripture. Uh of course maybe except for maybe Daniel, maybe Joseph and Daniel. If you were if you were a dream interpreter and you could have the skills of two people in the world, Joseph and Daniel would probably be the two that you would want to look at. Um, let's first uh approach uh Genesis 37.

And Important to note here, um, dreaming happens at usually, um, moments of trial and of stress and so forth. The first one noted here in Genesis 37. However, this is the one dream it that doesn't seem to have any stress associated with it at all. This is Joseph's dreams um when he was 17 years old apparently or somewhere like that. He's definitely a teenager and he has these dreams where let's see here. See if we can find one. Yeah, Joseph, a young man of 17, was tending the flocks with his brothers and sons and his father's wives. And he brought their father a bad report about them.

Now, Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, and he apparently had given him this multicolored coat. And it says here in verse five, Joseph had a dream. When he told to when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, "Listen to this dream I had. We were binding a sheath of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheath rose up and stood upright while your sheath gather around mine and bowed down to it. His brothers said to him, "Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?" And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said.

Then he had another dream and he told it to his brothers. There's something here. You know, I'm I'm advocating that we start sharing, you know, collecting our dreams, thinking about our dreams, sharing them with others. Uh, but maybe not every dream. Joseph probably would have been wise to keep these to himself. Uh, but he didn't. He had another dream and this time the sun and moon and 11 stars were bowing down to me. He says clearly to this culture dreams have great currency because the brothers took him quite seriously. They hated him for it and they conspired against him of course and they end up you know seizing him, throwing him into a pit, selling him off into slavery. And it also says in the scriptures here that the brothers gave no heed to what he was saying. Try to recover from this Joseph. how are we going to be bowing down to you? You're going to be a slave and we'll send you off to some other land.

That'll keep you at bay for a while. Um but his father, uh Jacob, it says it says that his father keeps the matter in mind even though he kind of rebukes Joseph for well, I don't know if he's rebuking him for the dream or for sharing the dream. Probably a little bit of both. but he's old enough and wise enough to know I better keep this thing in mind because you never know when it's going to come around full circle. Okay. So, um dreams in this case have a great currency. It's clear in the culture they're not playing games with these things and not kind of we dismissed them.

They took them quite seriously. The father who's kind of the oldest and wisest among them, he definitely keeps them in mind. And thirdly, they lead to action and they lead to all sorts of action and um you know particularly with the brothers they take matters into their own hands. Okay. Um we can press on in Genesis um we we this is one if that first dream of Joseph's was kind of without any cares in the world totally different situation.

now that he's thrown into the pit, he's been taken as a slave, he's he shows up in Egypt, and um at first it goes pretty well for him, but then he has the incident with Piper's wife and she kind of pulls the wool over the eyes of the pharaoh and um and uh Joseph's in trouble again. He's gets thrown into jail and he's left there to rot basically. Now, while he's in in in in jail, he meets a couple of other people who've been thrown in jail for reasons we know not know why. The cup bearer, some some translations call him the butler. The cup bearer of the king and the baker are also in prison with him.

So, here we are in Genesis 40. Really, it's verse five onward. We see that the cup bearer and the baker both have dreams and uh they're kind of similar dreams, but there are important differences. We see that in verse 5. Let's see if I could read that for you if you've got that. We're at Genesis 40 verse 5. Um it says after they had been in custody for some time, each of the two men, the cup bearer and the baker of the king of Egypt were being held in prison, and each had a dream the same night, and each dream had a meaning of its own.

When Joseph came to them the next morning, he saw that they were dejected. So he asked Pharaoh's officials who were in custody with him in his master's house,"Wh are your faces so sad today? We both had dreams and they weren't able to interpret them." And then Joseph says, "Well, hold on. Don't dreams an interpretation of dreams belong to God?" Immediately Joseph reminds these two that not every dream has a humanistic interpretation. Joseph's assumption is that God alone can interpret these dreams. And so he asks them to relate the dreams and in the next verse verse 9 says so the chief cupbearer told Joseph his dream.

He said, "In his dream, in my dream, I saw a vine in front of me, and on the vine were three branches. As soon as it was budded, it blossomed, and its clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh's cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes, squeezed them into Pharaoh's cup, and put the cup into his hands." Joseph goes on to interpret this dream as a really positive interpretation. And in 3 days, Joseph says, "You'll be in goodstead with the king. You'll be brought back in, and you will be his cup bearer again. You will put the cup to his lips, and all will be well with you."

The baker, hearing of this really positive interpretations, excited, apparently, to tell Joseph his dream. And he says, "When the cup bearer saw that Joseph had given a favorable interpretation, he said to Joseph, I too had a dream. On my head were three baskets of bread. In the top basket were all kinds of baked goods for Pharaoh. But the birds were eating them out of the basket on my head. Uh-oh.

Joseph's got a slightly different read on this. Similar dreams. Slightly different read. They're happening on the same night. They have a They kind of coincide, which is fascinating. They they're almost like parallel dreams, but they have very different outcomes. This is what it means. Joseph said, "The three baskets are three days. Within 3 days, Pharaoh will lift off your head and hang you on a tree, and the birds will eat away your flesh." That's not good. Um, that's a problem. Um, and so we have these two dreams and Joseph is there to interpret it. And he asks the cup bearer not to forget him because he's languishing in prison.

He will be back in goodstead with the Pharaoh and he'll still be in prison. Don't forget me if you if you think of me. Put in a good word with the Pharaoh. And it happened just as Joseph had anticipated. So these were prophetic dreams. Joseph interpreted them with the help of divine guidance and he is able to uh give them great insight into what those dreams mean. Now, of course, Joseph is forgotten in prison. And uh just two years later, Pharaoh has two dreams. And these two dreams different than the cup bearer and the baker in that the two dreams were in a sense identical in their meaning and different in their content. Um, Pharaoh is disturbed by his dreams and can't figure out how to interpret them. But the cup bearer, who's pretty close to the Pharaoh, says, light bulb goes off. I know a guy. I know a guy. His name's Joseph. He's in prison. He can interpret your dreams for them.

He did that for me once. I doubt that he reminded the pharaoh that uh you know um he took the head of one guy and let me go. Uh he probably just said, "Hey, I know a guy." Um but anyway, he he says that and Joseph is a little bit perplexed. This is in uh chapter 41 because he doesn't consider himself a dream interpreter per se. He says,"I cannot interpret, but God can and will do what the Pharaoh wants." And so, Joseph, let's see if we can find that here. We're in Genesis 41. Um, yeah, right here, right at the beginning of 41. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream.

Now, two years after the cup bearer and the baker had their uh their day with the pharaoh, um the pharaoh has a dream. He was standing by the Nile when out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the the the reeds. After them seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside them on the riverbank. and the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek fat cows. Then the pharaoh woke up. He fell asleep again. So he's having a dream series here, which is interesting.

Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk. Um after them seven other heads of grain sprouted thin and scorched by the heat and the wind. Um the thin heads of grain swallowed up the seven healthy full heads. Then Pharaoh woke up. It had been a dream. And so here we have parallel dreams. And when you get to um Joseph's interpretation, it's kind of fascinating. He says, "Then Joseph said to Pharaoh," this is all the way now in verse 25, "the dreams of Pharaoh are one and the same." So, Joseph recognizes this is a dream series. And dream series are pretty important dreams.

Generally speaking, you're having them over and over because they are issues that are weighing on you in some fundamental way and they're trying to speak to you in some fundamental way. He says, uh, God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good heads of grain are seven years. It is one in the same dream. The seven lean, hungry cows that came up afterwards are seven years, and so are the seven worthless heads of grain scorched by the east wind. They are seven years of famine. It is just as I said to Pharaoh. God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do. Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, but seven years of famine will follow them.

Then all the abundance in Egypt will be forgotten and the famine will ravage the land. The abundance in the land will not be remembered because the famine that follows will be so severe. The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God and God will do it soon. Notice there it's not just these dreams are important but that God has firmly decided it and has revealed it twice to you Pharaoh. Don't ignore this. Take it seriously. Now, of course, this becomes an opportunity for uh Joseph to gain great favor with Pharaoh and reestablish himself in Egypt.

And you know, we know the rest of the story from there. But um dreams and uh their significance are one thing but the conduit the bridge that they represent from God to us the the communicative act the abil the relationship God establishes even with Pharaoh with some help from you know um god-fearing people um is an important thing I mean the dreams are are are are not just accidental collocation of ideas in their life. They actually matter to you know flourishing to living a good life and uh and Joseph recognizes that.

Okay. Um the last dream in Genesis I want to focus on here is Genesis 46. Interestingly, in this march from Abraham, Isaac to Jacob to Joseph, we come back to Jacob in Jacob's dream. And this is in um I guess it's I guess it's a vision actually in chapter 46. Let's go ahead and read this opening passage. And I think it's important here because it bookends the entirety of the Genesis account. So Israel set out with all that was his. And when he reached Beerseba, he offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac. And God spoke to Israel in a vision at night and said, "Jacob, Jacob, here I am."

He replied, "I am God, the God of your father." He said, "Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there. I will go down to Egypt with you and I will surely bring you back again and Egypt own and Joseph's own hand will close your eyes. What a beautiful dream he has here right toward the end of Genesis. Um this second really sort of magnificent dream. Um it it's I'm calling this one kind of a semiincubated dream. You have this first dream of Abram that is kind of just going along in the flow of life.

Let's call it a little bit more incidental, but it's coming to confirm the the Abrahamic covenant. Isaac has no dreams. Jacob in his first uh uh situation is desperate and he has spiritual technology. He goes to a place where he can incubate the dreams. Then we have Joseph come along and Joseph has this kind of personal dream as a teenager and then he starts to see other people's dreams and interpret them. So we have the cup bearer, we have the baker and then we have of course Pharaoh himself. Um in this last dream of Jacob, we have a kind of middle ground one. It doesn't seem to be incidental and it doesn't seem to be fully incubated like laying his head on a stone. Rather it comes up in the context of a sacrifice. It says again when he reached Beerseba he offered sacrifices to God of his father Isaac and immediately it says and God spoke to Israel in a vision at night and said Jacob Jacob.

Fascinating. He reiterates the covenant and he instead of the sort of international flavor if you will that Abram's dream had in Genesis 15 that he will bless all nations and that this covenant will uh will will will will be effectual for Abram and his descendants and his descendants descendants and for the whole world. Here we have the initiation of this turn towards Egypt and the really peculiar sort of national dream that his people will be taken into slavery but God will be with them and he will be the one that leads them to freedom. Fascinating all of this all these key moments are happening in visions and dreams.

Um there's one other event that you know again I don't want to overplay the importance of dreams and visions but um I do think that the uh the vision of um there's one more incident in Jacob's life that I think is worth noting and that is um when he was um when he wrestled God in Genesis 32. slipped my mind earlier when we were talking about it, but I think it's important because Jacob is kind of bookending our dreams here, our dream series in the Old Testament in Genesis.

Um, in that passage, we see Jacob wrestling with God through the night in a in almost like a dreamlike state. And notice by the end of that dream and uh yeah not dream, you know, I I don't want to say it's a dream because I know many people take this literally and and frankly I guess I do too, but it I can't help but wonder how dreams are affecting this this story. Listen to this. And this is Genesis 32. This is a freebie for you. It's not really in that sequence that I've just been talking about. It's interesting because it shows you the importance of dream as dreams as a hermeneutic rudder for how we understand the scriptures.

Verse 22 in uh in uh chapter 32. That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidervants and his 11 sons and crossed the ford of the Jbuk. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all the possessions. So Jacob was left alone in the middle of the night. And a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, "Let me go for it is daybreak." But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." And the man asked him, "What is your name?"

"Jacob," he answered. Then the man said, 'Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome. Jacob said, "Please tell me your name." But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then the blessed then then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Pineal um saying, "It's because I saw God face to face and yet my life was spared." The sun rose above him as he passed and he was limping from his hip. You remember I had that dream about um the crematorium and I woke up completely in sweat, overheated, almost overcome really by the intense heat of my dream.

Here we have Jacob wrestling with God in the middle of the night all alone till daybreak and an interesting conversation happening. He's touched on the hip and then he at daybreak has this kind of limp that stays with him apparently at least for a little while. We don't I don't think we know how long it stayed with him. Interesting, suggestive. Not really sure. Um but it highlights the importance I think of taking dreams seriously not only in our own lives but how we approach the scriptures. Okay. I wanted to I wanted to share that with you because I thought it was significant.

Now, if you think that Genesis is the only Old Testament book that has dreams of significance in it, you'd be wrong because they are in other places as well and u probably more than I'm going to let on here. I do want to sort of I don't want to say wrap up, but I do want to mention a few of these additional dreams and uh because it'll be familiar to you. Um the first one is in first kings 3 and this is Solomon the story of Solomon and Solomon's going through a kind of trial here. Um in first kings 3:es 5-15 we find another dream and this is a really kind of cool one because I identify with this dream somewhat. Let me try to share why.

But the trial that Solomon's going through is kind of a personal crisis. His father David was a warrior, a statesman, a great leader of the people of Israel. And he's just a kid. He's just a kid. How is he ever going to live up to what his father was? That's something I think every kid if they've uh grown up with a strong father figure uh goes through. They like my goodness, how can I ever measure up to the what that guy has accomplished. Well, um so he has this thing going on. He's going to be the king of Israel and he just doesn't seem like he measures up.

And so dream interpreters might call this a compensation dream of some kind. that is he's trying to figure out how do I compensate for my inadequacies. So let me let me just read this because I think it's fascinating in that light. It says at Gibian the Lord appeared to Solomon during the night in a dream and God said ask for whatever you want me to give you. Just a personal aside, the Jack in a Box dream that I talked about sounds kind of similar. I was in the forest. I go in a hut, wind up the Jack in a Box, and then he asked me, "Ask me anything you want.

Anything you want." And I took him to be kind of an oracle. Well, here we have God um appearing and saying something similar. Ask for whatever you want me to give you. And uh Solomon answered, "You have shown great kindness to your servant, my father David, because he was faithful to you and righteous and upright in heart. You have continued the great kindness to him and have given him a son to sit on his throne to this very day." So you can see the compensation problem here. David uh Solomon's concerned that God was with David and blessed him and but he he obviously had a certain set of skills.

Now, oh Lord my God, you have made me your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry my duties to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people, to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern the great people of yours? So Solomon, this is almost like a holy grail moment where choose which grail and Solomon chooses wisely. And interestingly, God honors Solomon. Since you have asked for this, and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have you asked for death of your enemies, um, but for discernment in administering justice, I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart. So, in this dream, God speaks to Solomon.

Solomon does really what I didn't do in my dream. I asked a kind of like I wouldn't say a dumb question. It was an existentially interesting question to me. But Solomon chose wisely and he asked a question. He he he he answered God's question with a um a request for wisdom so that he might distribute justice to the people. And God was pleased with that. And he gives him that great wisdom. And then he showers him with more grace by giving him wealth and family and uh um you know and and and uh great favor throughout the land. And that's just the kind of God we have here in the Bible.

It's it's uh it's amazing. all of this. It says here in verse um 15, then Solomon awoke and he realized it had been a dream. Again, absolutely crucial to the story of Solomon is his great wisdom. And here we have the dispensation of that wisdom being granted to him in a dream. might as well have been waking life because it certainly impacted waking life and he took it to be a speech act from God in life in general and that I think is super fascinating. All right. Well, I would be remiss if I at least don't mention Daniel. He is, you know, right up there with Joseph in terms of dream interpretation.

Uh we're already getting a little long in the time frame and you know my shoulders are not as young as they used to be. But let's take a quick look at Daniel. Daniel, couple of different dreams, but I'm going to focus mostly on Daniel 2. Um in Daniel 2, he uh encounters Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Now, this one, the stakes are raised really high. And if there's ever a dream in the Bible where you've got to scratch your head and say that has to be a God thing, then it's going to be Daniel 2. Because Nebuchadnezzar has this dream and um in this dream he u he is greatly disturbed. He wakes up. He's like beside himself. He knows that his dream has undone him. him forcing him to tear his robes. It's like I don't know what that was. But that dream shook me to my very core.

So much so that um Nebuchadnezzar has to figure out an interpretation for it. The problem is he doesn't have a dream. Talk about a catch 22. Um Nebuchadnezzar has his dream greatly disturbing, but he doesn't know what the dream was. And so he starts to ask the magicians and the the the the uh you know the counselors and the astrologers and everybody else surrounding him all these wise people and they're all like look man if you don't know the dream how can I interpret it and then Nebuchadnezzar's answer is basically look man interpret the dream or die and he is basically so frustrated ated with his wise persons that are surrounding him.

He says, "Look, I'm going to make a decree to kill all you guys. Bring in the soldiers. Start wiping these guys out." Daniel, of course, hears about this and he is um concerned. Now, he's I think he's concerned in two ways. Um he's concerned because it's such a harsh decree. He he he he basically says that he says Daniel replied, "No wise man, enchanter, magician or diver can explain to the king the mystery he has asked about." This is in verse uh 27 27 But there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries.

He has shown Nebuchadnezzar what will happen in the days to come. Your dream, the visions that have passed through your mind as you lay in your bed. Now, Daniel's concerned with the harsh decree, but he's also concerned for his own life and the life of his friends. This decree was such a blanket decree that every wise person, every person who has said to have been wise, probably Daniel and some of his friends, all of them are going to be wiped out because nobody can help him overcome the sort of trauma and grief that he's experiencing because of this incredible dream he had. But Daniel gets together with his friends and they pray about it.

He said, "Give me some time, king, to pray about this and I will come up with an answer." So he does and he pray about it and he says that he has uh that he's solved it. And so in verse 29, he says, "As you were laying there, O king, your mind turned to things to come, and the revealer of mystery showed you what is going to happen. As for me, this mystery has been revealed to me, not because I have greater wisdom than other uh living men, but so that you, oh king, may understand what went through your mind. You you you I'm sorry. You, oh king, may know the interpretation and that you may understand what went through your mind. You looked, O king, and there before you stood a large statue and an enormous, dazzling statue, awesome in appearance.

The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay. It goes, it goes kind of on and on here. And then then then we get to uh David's interpretation of these things. If you want to read more, I mean, we could go on and on. It to take 5 minutes, 10 minutes to read this and then to to get to the punchline. But David does interpret this for him. This is what the dream uh this was the dream and now we will interpret it.

O king. So notice what happened here. Nebuchadnezzar had a dream he couldn't remember. David prayed about it with his friends, went asleep and dreamed apparently the same dream. And then he tells the king and the king has a kind of click moment like Daniel that was the dream. It's almost as if he was prompted to remember it. But notice here that David has I not David um Daniel has interpreted this dream. There's got to be a third source. That's really the moral of the story here of Daniel 2 for me is that it can't be some kind of osmosis. It has to be a third party has given both persons the dream and uh and so he goes about to interpret that dream.

He says this was the dream. Uh you oh king are king of kings, the god of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory. In your hands he has placed mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Wherever they live he has made you ruler over all of them. You are the head of gold. After you another kingdom will rise inferior to yours. Next a third kingdom will one um one of bronze will rule over the whole earth. Finally there will be a fourth kingdom strong as iron for for iron breaks and smashes everything and as iron breaks things in in pieces so it will crush and break all other all others.

Here Daniel has the honor of interpreting the king's dream and its interpretation is given to him. Not just the interpretation, the actual dream itself is given to him and its interpretation is given to him. And this of course is going to set the stage for the prophecy that we see coming after Daniel. And lots of literature sort of has been written on what these prophecies actually mean.

It says here in verse 44, "In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people." And it goes on and all the uh the uh the mysteries of Daniel too are deep. But clearly we have here another sort of dream. The non the dream that's not remembered. the dream that is granted by God and then of course interpreted as well. And uh again really really a kind of cool kind of cool dream. Daniel and his friends had to pray and it was revealed to them. Well there are it's not alone.

If you go over to Daniel 4, you'll see another important dream in Daniel 4. The dream of the tree and it being cut down.

really all I want to say to close here because you know I want to I don't want to push your uh you know attention span farther than I have to but if you think that these are ancient stories that they don't really matter to us today it's like a ancient people you know maybe a primitive people and so forth then you'll want to come back for our podcast on interpreting the dreams of the New Testament because the New Testament feels a lot more modern to some of us, you know, a lot closer to us talking about the the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the church and um you know, the mission going to the ends of the earth.

And there we will find dreams are super important to the new covenant. And um that dispensation, if you will, of dreams being significant to human life is not over. It's not over in the Old Testament. It's not over in the New Testament. And maybe it's not over for us today. Well, that wraps up my time with you on dreams in the Old Testament. I hope that was helpful. We will review some of these things in the next lecture and then turn our sights towards dreams in the New Testament and then trying to pull it all together in the uh in the final lecture. All right, thanks for joining me. I look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on Bible.

If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions and remember the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.