In his book, Miracles, Eric Metaxas tells his conversion story in a chapter entitled, “The Golden Fish.” He writes, “In 1988 I had a dream in which God spoke to me in what I have come to call ‘the secret vocabulary of my heart.’” But, before we get to the dream, there’s an important piece of the story you need to know.
Once as a young man, Eric saw a chrome fish on the back of a car. He wondered what it meant. Eric asked his father – who was a religious Greek Orthodox church-goer – and he explained, “This was from the Greek word ixthys, meaning “fish,” because the early Christians used this word as an acronym—Iesus Xristos THeos Ymon Sotir. It stood for: Jesus Christ Son of God Our Savior. It was their secret symbol.”
This puzzled Eric, who’s enjoyed fishing as a hobby. The strange idea of the Jesus fish stuck with him, and he never forgot it. Later in his mid-twenties, Eric was befriended by a Christian co-worker who began witnessing to him. At this time, Eric was a skeptical, agnostic. “If God existed, there’s really no way we could know much about him,” he thought. Then Eric’s Christian friend suggested something strange, “Why don’t you pray and ask God to reveal Himself to you in an unmistakable way?” Eric did, but he didn’t expect anything to happen.
In Eric’s own words, here what happened next, “One night near my 25th birthday, I dreamt I was ice-fishing on Candlewood Lake in Danbury, CT. I looked into the large hole cut into the ice and saw the snout of a fish poking out. (Of course, ice-fishing is never this easy.) I reached down and picked it up by the gills and held it up. It was a large pickerel or perhaps even a pike. And in the dazzlingly bright sunlight shining through the blue sky and off the white snow and ice onto the bronze-colored fish, it appeared positively golden. But then I realized that it didn't merely look golden, it actually was golden. It was a living golden fish, as though I were in a fairy tale.
And suddenly I understood
that this golden fish was ixthys—Jesus Christ Son of God Our Savior—and
that God was one-upping me in the language of my own symbol system. I heard God
speaking to me, telling me I must accept Christ. And I realized in the dream
that Jesus was real and now I was holding Him there in the bright sunlight and
at long last my search was over.”
The next day, Eric told his Christian friend about the dream and what it meant, “I said what I never would have said before—and would have cringed to hear anyone else say. I had accepted Jesus. And when I spoke those words I was flooded with the same joy I had had inside the dream.”[1]
As I read Eric’s story, I was reminded of a couple Scriptures. Paul preached to the Athenian philosophers in Acts 17:27, “that men should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.” The prophet Jeremiah said, “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jer. 29:12-13).
God can speak through dreams, if He chooses to. Think of the Biblical examples – Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28), Jospeh’s starry hosts (Gen. 37), Solomon’s “blank check” (1 Kings 3), and Jospeh, the husband of Mary (Matt. 1-2). Dreams and visions are not on par with Scripture, but God can speak in and through them to point unbelievers to Him and express specific truths to His children. In Scripture, whenever anyone experienced a dream from God, God always made the meaning of the dream clear. He is never the author of confusion. God is still speaking today: through His word, through the Holy Spirit, through His servants and even in our dreams.
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