Deceitful Dreamers

I have made comments before related to the video below here and here, but I just wanted to let the words of Thomas Manton address these so called dreamers of God.


Jude 1:8 "In the very same way, these dreamers pollute their own bodies, reject authority and slander celestial beings."

"Concerning these dreamers pollute, note that the erroneous thoughts of wicked people are but a dream. Wicked people are dreamers. First, they are dreamers in connection with their state and condition. Every worldly person is in a state of "deep sleep" (Isaiah 29:10). They snore on their bed of ease without any sense of their dangerous condition. They are like Jonah in the ship who slept while the storm raged. They sleep, but "their destruction has not been sleeping" (2 Peter 2:3). Second, they are dreamers in the sense that their vain thoughts are aptly compared with dreams. A dream gives a false delight and deceives with a vain hope.

Dreams tickle our fancy. They hug a cloud, as we say, and embrace the pleasures of the world in place of true riches. Worldly people run from pleasure to pleasure as if they are in some sweet dream. "Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro: He bustles about, but only in vain; he heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it" (Psalm 39:6). They imagine that they are happy and are content with their condition.

Dreams deceive us by giving us false hopes. The prophet Isaiah compares the dream of the enemies of the church to a dream of a night vision. "Then the hordes of all the nations that fight against Ariel, that attach her and her fortress and besiege her, will be as it is with a dream, with a vision in the night—as when a hungry man dreams that he is eating, but he awakens, and his hunger remains; as when a thirsty man dreams that he is drinking, but he awakens faint, with his thirst unquenched. So will it be with the hordes of all the nations that fight against Mount Zion" (Isaiah 29:7-8). So it is with these dreamers—all their hopes are dashed in an instant. The foolish virgins slept (Matthew 25:1-13), and they dreamed that the door of grace would remain open to them, but they found it shut. Many flatter themselves with fair hopes until they awake in flames.

Take heed, then, of being deceived by your own dreams and the imagination of your own brain. There are no dreams as foolish as those we dream while we are awake, as Epiphanus says of the Gnostics. Waking dreams are most pernicious. There are two kinds of such dreams: firs5, dreams of opinion, which hug error instead of truth; and, second, dreams of hope, when we cherish presumption instead of faith.

Dreams of opinion. These are rife today. Idle and ungrounded notions, no matter how plausible they appear, are but the dreams of a misty, sleepy brain. To avoid these you must beware of a blind mind. People sleep in the dark, and in sleep fancy gets the better of reason. Study the Word, or else there will be no light in anything that is brought to you. Many people are perverted by mystical interpretations when people bring to the Word what is not really there.

Dreams of hope. People dream about external happiness in temporal enjoyments (Psalm 49:11; Luke 12:19; Revelation 18:9). Others dream about attaining an end without using the means. They live in sin and yet hope to die comfortably and at last go to heaven, as if it were an easy thing to leap from Delilah's lap to Abraham's side. If you do not want to dream like this, examine your heart. Examination is like rubbing your eyes after sleeping. People laugh at their dreams when they are awake. When we confess our sin, we are telling our dreams to wake up, and we come to ourselves." —Thomas Manton (1620 - 1677)