WHY DON'T WE EXPERIENCE OVERT MIRACLES AS MUCH TODAY?

The Biblical Record

The first thing to note is that maybe our expectation that spectacular miracles should be a current phenomenon is based on a faulty understanding of miracles in biblical times. “In point of fact, miraculous signs are not uniformly distributed throughout the OT. They are largely grouped in three main periods, each of which was marked by a life-and-death struggle for the people of God and which put Yahweh's saving powers and will to the proof.” (Colin Brown)

And during the long period between the OT and the NT, one of the sign gifts, prophecy, was apparently missing entirely. We get this from hints in the apocryphal book I Maccabees 4:46; 9:27; and 14:41.

And if you chart those major time periods which are characterized by miracles, they appear to be a ordered in a symmetrical pattern.

    A. Primeval World History

            B. Moses and the Exodus

                    C. Conquest and Settlement of Canaan

                            D. Divided Kingdom

                                1. Elijah

                                2. Elisha

                            D'. The Exile

                                1. Daniel

                                2. Daniel's Three Friends

            B'. Life and Ministry of Christ

                    C'. Early Spread of the Gospel

    A'. Final World History

Note that:

    A and A' are the only periods in which the miracles affect a large geographical region and are effected by God only, without human intervention.

    B and B' are times dominated by the major figures of the Old and New Testament, respectively.

    C and C' represent the missions of those leaders being continued and expanded by their immediate successors.

    D and D' are both difficult times for the nation of Israel in which almost the only miraculous elements are found to be associated with a small group of select individuals: two during the Divided Kingdom period and four during the Exile. And in the case of Elijah and Elisha, they were only active during about 30 of the 300 years of the Divided Kingdom.

The Testimony of Jesus

The next clues we get concerning the future of miraculous happenings come from Jesus' experiences and teachings. It may surprise many that although Jesus was widely known as a miracle-worker at the time, his feelings regarding those activities was somewhat mixed. While it was out of love and concern for others that he healed wherever he went, at the same time this reputation sometimes hindered him from carrying out his teaching ministry. We see from Mark 2:2-4; 3:7-9; and Luke 8:42-45 that the press of the crowd who followed him served as an impediment.

In addition, he found it necessary on occasion to chastise those who approached him with requests for a miracle (See Matthew 12:39; 16:1-4; John 2:18-22; 4:46-48) even to the point of calling some of them “an evil and adulterous generation.”

Matthew 28:16-17 demonstrates that such a miracle as Jesus' resurrection is not enough to bring some people to the point of belief. And even belief brought about by sight is considered a much lower form of belief than that brought about by faith in the absence of sight (John 20:28-29).

And more concerning is the possibility of false miracles and signs luring people away from the truth, as Jesus warns us in Mark 13:22. So they are not reliable signs by themselves.

All of these factors might have gone into the gradual diminishing of miracles in the church as time went along. In addition, we are given the following teachings in the Gospels which have an impact on the ability and advisability of believers doing miraculous deeds:

Luke 11:9-13 – Jesus says we ask God for the wrong things, rather than the Holy Spirit.

John 16:23-24 – This passage warns that we need to ask in Jesus' name. And that is not just a matter of saying the right words at the end of a prayer, but asking for the sake of Christ and all that He stands for. In other words, it is akin to Jesus in Gethsemane praying that God's will be done, not his own.

Matthew 13:58 records that Jesus himself “did not do many deeds of power there [his own hometown] because of their unbelief.” So there is the possibility that the general lack of belief in a community may have an adverse effect on the ability for miracles to be performed there.

But on the positive side, Jesus says to his disciples in John 14:12 that they will be able to do greater works than He himself did on earth. This statement only makes sense when one realizes that the task of worldwide evangelism to save souls is a miracle of greater numerical scope and spiritual importance than what Jesus accomplished in his three years of teaching and healing ministry.

Then there is the difficult passage in Matthew 17 in which the apostles prove unable to cast out a demon and Jesus upbraids them for their lack of faith. He says that even an amount of faith the size of a mustard seed would be enough to move mountains. Taking into account the hyperbolic nature of that saying, it still brings up the question as to how we today would be able to muster (no pun intended) enough faith to accomplish a miracle if even the apostles couldn't do it.

Also, Jesus tells his apostles that where two or three are gathered together, their prayers will be answered. Assuming we can extend this principle to the church as a whole (which admittedly may not have been intended in Jesus' words), it indicates that a group prayer by united believers is the one most likely to result in a miraculous answer.

My personal experience over the years as a believer is that I have witnessed three overt examples of miraculous healings. And in each case, there was a concerted and fervent group of believers praying at the same time for a miracle to be performed despite what doctors had determined were hopeless cases.

Spiritual Gifts in Acts and the Epistles

Moving on in time to the early church age, we have an interesting incident recorded in Acts 8:9-24. A new convert named Simon the magician witnesses the apostles laying hands on new believers, at which point they receive the gift of the Spirit and begin speaking in tongues. Simon offers to pay for the ability to do the same thing himself but is rebuffed strongly by the apostles. It should be clarified at this point that receiving the gift of the Spirit is something beyond receiving the Holy Spirit, since that is promised to all believers.

From this example, some have proposed that the sign gifts were performed by the original apostles and those who had the apostles' hands laid on them, but this was not passed on to subsequent generations of believers. This interpretation is certainly not an obvious one, but it is possible and would roughly fit the historical evidence of experiences in the later church.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit listed in I Corinthians 12 contain two basic categories. The first are those which give practical and spiritual aid to the church as a whole and would not be considered by outsiders as miracles at all, although the Holy Spirit is still directing them. Those of the second type have been labeled by some as “sign gifts,” and these for the most part would result in what most people would call overt miracles. Among these are utterance of (hidden) knowledge, mountain-moving faith to work miracles, healing, prophecy, and tongues-speaking and interpreting.

Those Christians called cessationists take the stance that the sign gifts were never intended to last forever, but only during the early years of the church when it needed the most help. As biblical evidence to bolster up this view, they cite the following passages in I Corinthians and Hebrews:

“Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away...but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.” (I Corin. 13:8-12)

“How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard him, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his own will.” (Hebrews 2:3-4.)

Regarding the first passage, the meaning all hinges on what “the perfect” is that will usher in the cessation of these sign gifts. Cessationists state that it is the printing and dissemination of the Bible, but that definition of “the perfect” is certainly not found anywhere in Scripture. A more reasonable understanding is that it represents existence in the New Heaven and New Earth in God's very presence.

And no matter how many times you read the Hebrews passage above, I doubt that you would come up with the idea that signs and miracles were destined to disappear once the initial announcement of salvation had been done. You could just as well argue that this means miracles will continue as long as there are those on earth who have not heard the Good News.

The safest approach to understanding Hebrews 2:3-4 is to take seriously the last phrase of verse 4: “gifts of the Holy Spirit according to his own will.” In other words, the Holy Spirit is free to do whatever he wishes in terms of the sign gifts and is not bound by any arbitrary restrictions interpreters may attempt to place on him.

Paul echoes Jesus' own caution regarding miracles and their utility in the life of the church. In I Corinthians 1:22-23, he criticizes those Jews who demand signs and treat Jesus' ignominious death as a stumbling block to accepting him as the Messiah. And in chapter 14 of that same epistle, he tries to wean the congregation away from their elevation of the gift of tongues to the detriment of other more useful gifts such as prophecy. It is generally accepted that “prophecy” in that context encompasses more telling-forth God's will than foretelling future events, as it also does in the Old Testament.

Finally, James 4:2-3 gives another obvious reason why miraculous events are not happening as often, namely “You do not have because you do not ask.” To this we might add the just as obvious fact that miracles by their very nature are not, nor will they ever be, the norm, but always the exception to the norm.

Post-Biblical Evidence

One of the first bits of historical evidence indicating that miraculous events continued to happen to Christians after the Apostolic Age actually comes from the dubious ending to the Gospel of Mark, in verses 16:17-18. This ending is felt to have been written by an unknown author somewhere around A.D. 130. It promises, among other things, that Christians will speak in tongues and heal the sick. The feeling is that these words would certainly not have been written unless such events were still happening. Of course, that evidence alone does not necessarily indicate that such miracles will continue in the church since they may have been performed by those who were given the gifts by the laying on of hands by an apostle.

Next we have the writings of the early Church Father Origen (A.D. 185-254) who spoke of exorcisms occurring in his day. And the first church historian after Luke, Eusebius (A.D. 260-341), wrote that Christians were “evangelizing...with God's favor and help, since wonderful miracles were wrought by them in those times also through the Holy Spirit.”

And even St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430), who was initially skeptical about such reports, supposedly changed his mind when he witnessed what he felt were genuine miracles taking place in nearby churches.

Genuine, overt miracles following that time period are harder to document with the exception of sporadic reports still coming in from some missionaries in third-world cultures steeped in pagan beliefs and practices. And even those can fit into the idea that miraculous healings nowadays appear to take place primarily in those places (a) having no good medical personnel in the area and (b) where demonic forces appear to be also active.