it is not simply about the messages in the dreams themselves. He uses their ambiguity to force us to draw closer to Him. I think that was the message being communicated when He told the disciples, "Do you not know even this parable?" The entire message was to say, "They are so far from God that I am deliberately trying to conceal the meanings from them, but I am NOT trying to conceal them from you, so why are you having such a hard time hearing Me? You are not yet close enough to understand and perceive as you should be."
Hmmm... It doesn't seem very plausible to me that Jesus obscured the meaning of his teachings because the hearts and minds of his audience were far away from him. Why speak to them at all if they would not understand him because of their distance from him? Why not just silently proceed to the cross, giving no hint as to who he was and what he had come to do? It seems a strange idea to me to think that Jesus purposely obscured his message from those who were
already deaf and blind to it by virtue of their "distance" from him. Scripture offers a different reason:
John 12:37-40
37 Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him,
38 so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: “Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”
39 Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said,
40 “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.”
Why didn't Jesus' own disciples better understand his teaching? I think part of the answer is revealed in this exchange between Peter and Jesus:
Matthew 16:21-23
21 From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day.
22 Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to You."
23 But He turned and said to Peter, "Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's."
Jesus did not want to be hindered in his fulfillment of his Father's will by his own disciples and so he did not illuminate their minds and hearts fully to his atoning purpose. But, also, the disciples had grown up in an OT Jewish context, expecting a very different Messiah than Jesus turned out to be, thinking his kingdom an earthly one and his victorious rule to be temporal and political, and so they labored under the same resulting "hardness" toward the true Messiah as did their Jewish fellows. It was a testament to how deeply entrenched were the misconceptions concerning the Messiah the Jewish people had taken up that even the Twelve could not readily shake them off. Their difficulty in understanding, then, wasn't a matter of proximity to Jesus, of hearts not "tuned" to him, but of a well-set hardness of belief and thought, an entrenched way of thinking about the Messiah, that they could not set aside even after living with Jesus for three years.
I think you're kinda contradicting His teachings in Mark 4 here. You're also lumping Moses and Paul into the same category with Pharaoh and Balaam, and the former had very good hearing and encountered Him personally, whereas the latter two were extremely hard of hearing spiritually, and both were made examples of because of it...
I don't think you want to use the latter two as examples of the way God wishes to operate, and I think using the former two as examples is placing a HIGH demand on the body of Christ in general. I think He sends visions and dreams to the common believer, whereas He only speaks directly to a select few, so maybe neither group do the discussion much good... but let me move on to your last paragraph.
I only lump together Moses and Balaam, Paul and Pharaoh, insofar as they were all clearly communicated to by God when
they did not expect to hear from Him directly and were not living in a manner that was particularly conducive to such an experience. Moses was not as far gone as Pharaoh or Balaam when he encountered the burning bush, but there was nothing especially spiritual about his living that warranted hearing from God, either. In fact, Moses was a murderer-in-hiding, living in obscurity on the back side of the desert when God confronted him. In any case, my point was that God did not need someone to be "near" Him in their heart and mind, living well before Him, in order to communicate clearly to them. If He did not require this in the record of the OT, why should we make it a stipulation now to "hearing" Him?
My response here would be that I think you are seeing this too much through the lens of 21st century Christianity. Look at how many visions and dreams they had. In the space of just the books of the NT, you have numerous references to them. Paul had a vision of Third Heaven, John had a vision of the future that stretches 22 Chapters in the Book of Revelation, Peter had a vision that led to the first preaching of the gospel to Gentiles, Joseph had his dream of taking Mary and the Christ child to Egypt, Paul experienced seeing Christ on the road to Damascus, Paul also had a vision of being told to go to Macedonia and not Asia, Stephen saw a vision of Christ seated at the right hand of God when standing before the Sanhedrin, and Pilate's wife even had a dream that he should not crucify Christ, and it goes on and on.
But this doesn't take into account the summary nature of the New Testament.
John 21:25
25 And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.
The events recounted in the NT do so in a condensed manner, many years often standing between those experiences you've listed in the quotation above. Did Joseph have frequent directive dreams from God during his life? We read only of two in Christ's infancy, no more. How about Stephen? Was it
common for him to have the sort of vision he had at his end? Scripture gives no hint that this was the case. It seems to me, anyway, that his vision had to do with his being martyred for the faith, a special dispensation of divine comfort in the midst of a brutal death. Paul only spoke of a single experience of the "third heaven" (for which God gave him his enduring "thorn in the flesh"), though he did have a series of dreams/visions. Paul is pretty unique in this respect, actually, no other person in the NT having such a collection of experiences so frequently. Not even John or Peter are reported in the NT to have had such a string of directive visions/dreams as Paul, each of them having only a single vision/dream recorded in the NT (Peter, the sheet full of unclean animals, and John's Revelation). Regardless, the NT in its condensed summary style gives the impression that dreams and visions were commonplace, but this isn't actually the case upon closer inspection. And so, I don't see that the Christian person should expect God to communicate commonly with them by such means - especially when they already have the entirely sufficient word of God.
I understand what you are trying to say, but if you look a little deeper you are actually contradicting yourself. If they had had a greater closeness with God you don't think He would have already been revealing to them a sense that something wasn't right about the things they had been taught to believe? Some were demanding a sign, and for the very same reasons. They wanted to see the sun grow dark and the moon turn to blood before they would believe He was the Christ, but the disciples didn't. And why didn't they? When Jesus asked, "But who do you think I am" and Peter said, "You are the Christ," He replied, "Flesh and blood has not revealed this unto you, but My Father who is in Heaven." Now, if they were receiving revelation directly from the Father through the Holy Spirit, who is to say they could not have been doing so even earlier, especially since Jesus was mildly chastising them rather than just passing it off and excusing it when they were NOT understanding the parables?