What About Miracles?

Miracles wrought at the hands of God's messengers, were primarily clustered in three brief ages of Bible history, during the lives of 1. Moses and Joshua, 2. the prophets of Elijah and Elisha and 3. Christ and the Apostles (after Christ was thirty years of age). We have no record of healing miracles occurring in large numbers, anywhere, any time, at the hands of just any saint. C.S. Lewis states it plainly: "God does not shake miracles into Nature at random as if from a pepper-caster." Only certain messengers of God were used to perform divine miracles, referred to as "signs and wonders" throughout the Old and New Testaments.

Why were these "signs and wonders" performed? (past tense) God used these supernatural feats as signs to the people, identifying and authenticating the credentials of His earthly spokesmen. Christ did numerous wonders and signs to demonstrate the truth of His message. (John 10: 24, 25; 20: 30-31; Acts 2: 22). When Elijah raised from the dead a widow's son, the widow proclaimed "Now I know that you are a man of God and that the Word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth." (1 Kings 17: 24). With the canon of Scripture incomplete and with so many false prophets buzzing around, citizens had difficulty separating God's truth from human imagination. But by orchestrating an inexplicable miraculous event through His prophet, or apostle, or His own Son, God effectively channeled His truth to the people.

To accomplish this, God performed miraculous healings that blew away the magic, trickery, and psychosomatic healings of His competition -- mainly Satan and the false prophets. Christ instantaneously healed a paralytic and the people praised God saying "We have never seen anything like this." (Mark 2: 12) Spinal-cord paralysis is a healing without medical explanation - it's supernatural. Christ also restored the sight of a man born blind which is another healing without medical explanation. (John 9: 1-34) Christ immediately healed a man of leprosy. (Matthew 8: 1-4) Again, this healing defied all medical explanation. Perhaps Christ's greatest miracle was seen in raising Lazarus from the grave. (John 11: 11-44) Lazarus was dead for three days, to be raised to complete health, was truly beyond medical rationalization. And Christ raised not one but at least two other individuals to life - one right out of a coffin on his way to his funeral (Luke 7: 14-15; 8:49-56)! From "Does God Still Do Miracles?" by Dr. Brad Burke. The miracles being performed today in no way compare to the miracles which Christ performed. His miracles had distinctive characteristics which will be discussed on the next posting.