He made darkness His hiding place,
His canopy around Him,
Darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies.
(Psalm 18:11).
The Dark Cloud was a process that I went into to engage God face to face. He hides himself within a dark cloud to protect us, so that we cannot access His actual Presence in a way which would completely overwhelm or obliterate us in our mind (and we would probably just not be able to cope).
So He prepares us for a level of relationship and face-to-face intimacy of which in the beginning I had no concept of at all. I was engaging with the presence of God, talking to Him and fellowshipping with Him – but I did not realise that there was a dimension to God that was beyond that. To bring me into the freedom of how I am now living, in multi-dimensional realms, my soul and spirit had to be separated and reintegrated.
He knew that I was not yet at that point. My soul was to a degree tethered to my spirit, on a short leash. We would go in to the heavenly realms and come back out – my spirit could not stay there. But God wanted me to live in that realm in a multi-dimensional way, so He had to start the process of my soul giving up and surrendering my rights to control or to choose my own way of doing it.
God showed me a dark cloud. I was in a dark cloud a number of times during worship: I was not frightened but I just could not find my way. It was so thick that I could not see anything. I thought “I must be in the dark cloud – I’m going to go and see God” but I did not know how to get there or do that; they were just experiences.
Then God gave me this challenge to spend four months with Him. And I think what God did during that process for me was to remove the power that my spirit had in bringing some sense of government into my life. He removed that to let the soul operate so that I could sense what it was really like.
I thought I trusted God implicitly; I realised I only trusted God when I knew what He was doing…
Key takeaway
God is looking to prepare us for a level of relationship and face-to-face intimacy beyond what we can think or even imagine.