“All supposed miracles are faked”
A year and a half ago, I posted a blog about God raising people from the dead. It was one of those blogs that got an inordinate amount of traffic. It’s still getting comments on it. Last night Manuel posted this comment:
“Raising of dead people will be in the future when Jesus will rule all the world. (John 5:28 and 29) meanwhile all supposed miracles are faked.”
Interesting in light of yesterday’s blog about Marvin dying over in the Philippines.
This is one of the most important questions God has given us to answer for ourselves, because if it’s true, then in the meantime, we’re basically alone down here, feeling like my son did yesterday after Marvin died in the Philippines. He’s wondering how far to trust God.
Where do we go with our disappointment? Eventually for people like my son, the disappointment overwhelms us and we conclude with Manuel that indeed, we serve a God who has chosen to withhold his power from us.
Today, a blog reader who had written about her disappointment is going up against her abusive ex-husband in court. It’s a terrifying place to be if you serve an impotent God. How do you have a personal relationship with a God who promises you miracles and then withholds them?
If you want to read more about recent miracles, check out: Eyes opened in Mozambique
Comments (8)
Leave a Reply
How does a person fake no pulse?
Don’t we point to the change in the disciples as one of the proofs that Jesus was raised from the dead? My husband met a pastor in India who became a Christian AND a pastor because a man he personally knew in his village was raised from the dead. How does a whole village become Christian based on a lie? Actually the raising of the dead is not as uncommon in places where faith and desperation of heart abounds. Jesus rebuked his disciples upon his rising from the dead for their “REFUSAL to believe.” I’m more amazed at people’s refusal to believe when it’s right in front of their noses. But for those who need a couple of chapters and verses, Jesus did command the disciples to do and to teach others to do EVERYTHING that He commanded. (Not some of the things.) (Matthew 28:28-20) One of the commands was to “raise the dead.” And why didn’t Peter tell Dorcas’ friends (Acts 9:36f) that theologically there was no hope till Jesus returned? Did Dorcas fake it? Do the Scriptures lie? As for other miracles, how do you tell ME and others who have experienced healings and miracles that we faked them? My encouragement is to dare to open your heart to a loving, listening, living God. Yes, sometimes I’m disappointed as I just had a friend die two days ago after praying earnestly for her. But no physical resurrections for Stephen or James did not create a no miracle theology. It comes back to trust. Trust in a God of hope. Maybe in the U.S. some people are satisfied with an impotent God that they can carry around in a hip pocket, but those in lands of great need respond to One who can do what their gods cannot do. So again, for the armchair theologists, dare to let God be God, who will sometimes disappoint you and sometimes ravish your heart. Be raised from the dead!
Amen Kathy!!! I am really saddened by the rise in the number of Christians I run into that hold this belief. It is now often coupled with the belief that Jesus really does not transform Christians into new creations on earth and that all of the statements about a new life in Christ refer to a heavenly life after physical death which leads to the additional belief that Christians are still fundamentally sinners until death. All of these beliefs lead to a very anemic Christian life which may be a major reason that too many churches in America are declining. Jesus said “know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Maybe the church in America can be freed by the truth of the phenomenal power of God working through the lives of believers from everything from raising the dead, to healing the sick, to feeding the poor to transforming the lives of those who turn to Christ.
I’ve got a healing story I must pass on and my thoughts that go with.
My youth leader was in a church that really didn’t have much together. Leaders were having affairs etc. This couple had a baby and there were complications and the baby was clinically considered doomed to die and if somehow it survived it’d be little better than in the vegetable state. Real pitiful.
So a few church leaders read “Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up.” James 5:13-15 and decided they might as well try. So they did. The baby was COMPLETELY restored, physically and mentally. The doctors were shocked and confounded to say the least.
Now comes the sad part of the story. The family gave a testimony in front of the church and it offended the congregation so much to have God come so near that they never allowed testimonies or prayer like that again.
Just some food for thought. There’s a definite lie going around in the church about God. People want a distant God who gets them their necessities and minds his own business. But he is ever present and ever concerned. He be forever praised Amen!
God still does miracles & so I believe in miracles.who so ever does not believe will soon see something that will press them to the wall & cause them to need a miracle that will make them believe.I love jesus
May I comment? I am recently concentrating on what ‘the ‘Christian faith’ means for me personally. With innumerable blogs today saying everything from damnable atheism to ‘Christians who have become moslems…and others agnostics’, it must concern our Lord that it is us believers who are essentially splitting the church by saying what we want ‘our faith, our church belief, our personal witness of something’ to redefine the truth. I am writing from Africa, and I can tell you that over here there is a huge effort to ‘Africanize Christianity.’ My personal view is that for too long most of the Christian world has known not Biblical Christianity but ‘American Christianity’. In not very long, we have become a ‘corporate’ church, and created our own God and Christ about whom we now set out to not only define, but also determine what he ‘can’ and ‘should’ do, and what he can’t and will not. Then we will worship and praise him on that basis. Increasingly, we Christians are adapting a more islamic manner of ‘defending God’ by resorting to select scripture to defend what we think is the truth. Do you see much evidence of children of God who love each other, UNCONDITIONALLY? Yet, that – and not our knowledge – was what Jesus said would distinguish us as HIS own, and draw many from the world. The pentecostalist church has its faith almost exclusively on the ‘miracles, signs and wonders’ of Jesus of Nazareth, and if he does not do that, he is not the Christ. It is a belief that I have seen kill the faith of many radical believers who soon enough became deists – ‘that God is out there somewhere but not here and now, nor interested in us.’ The other extreme is the so-called ‘mainline evangelical’ etc which plain rejects a miraculous God and lives for their faith in the liturgy (except now, to get numbers – particularly the youth – they are bringing in Vineyard-type charismatism, but are not interested in God. Today, I do not hear being taught, ‘Christ, and him crucified,’ I do not hear anyone teaching ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’, nor ‘you in Christ,’ the heavenly blessings in Christ, our inheritance in Christ, the blood of Christ, the predestinate love of God, our suffering with him to be glorified with him, things above, our eternal union with Christ and so on. These are the things (and others) that Paul speaks of in Ephesians, for instance, Chapter 4;1-16. Paul does not in any manner emphasize miracles (nor does he say anything to reduce or deny them.) The whole of the scriptures by the apostles (Paul, Peter, John, James, Jude..) is focused not on miracles or tongue talking, healings or material blessings but fully and exclusively on Christ and our eternal union with him, and our stand with each other. We are to grow in Christ (by which Jesus, before the cross, meant when he said: “Follow me”). Whether he raises anyone from the dead, heals cancer, gives jobs and spouses, or not, is a side issue. And, in any case, it would be more believable concerning these resurrections if we had confirmations by UNBELIEVERS, (today’s technical world can tell us to the nano second, and covering everything about a body, when and whether, the person died) and be shown their pictures, and hear testimonies from those who knew them and saw their dead bodies in the morgue. Whether it has happened or not I do not know, but I do know that the only miracles and signs and wonders that happen do so only in the pentecostal/charismatic church movement, never in a baptist or prebyterean or anglican church where there also are children of God! Jesus raised the dead in day time, in open air, in full view of the most arrant, sarcastic, malicious, abusive, God-hating unbelievers known in history, and who followed him everywhere, to prove that he had no such power; not in the synagogues. It is wrong for a Christian to try to blackmail others as unbelieving because they have raised – even questioned – one’s faith in these matters. And why, someone tell me, are people dying despite days, months and decades of prayer and pleading for their lives? All this does is tell the unbelieving world that we have a very powerful God who is as idiosyncratic as an alcoholic (and I once was that, myself) CEO – forgetful, moody, uncontrolled, forgetful, some times nice and available, cruel, flattering, choosy, cuddling, and all that. And that is the God I knew before I got saved! Resurrection and healing miracles are not what the gospel of grace is about. The grace of God through Christ Jesus for condemned, sinful man, is the whole gospel of Christ Jesus, and its objective once I am saved, is to conform me to the Son of God, and a living hope of eternal life with him in heaven. The ‘Christianity’ of today is a mutated form of ‘heavenly capitalism here on earth,’ social wellness and acceptabilty, and a heathened ‘Dr. Jesus’ who sits in his clinic and waits for the hurt,wounded to pacify us so we can, in exchange, ‘follow him’. We want a Jesus Christ of this world, and we can deny this as much as we want, and argue ( as we now resent each other, like the Corinthians, on the baiis of ‘speaking in tongues or not’, pentecostal or evangelical, miracles/sgns/wonders or not. “Church”, and not Christ, has become our basis for faith, and we therefore take positions on the premise of what ‘our church’, or, ‘our experience’, or ‘our study,’ or ‘our pastor’ is saying to us. If we are going to demand that God raise the dead, then we must also go to factories where metal is being melted and stand in there, before unbelievers, and expect the fourth man; go to the Kenya(my country)game parks, and walk at night where hyenas maraud, and, like Daniel, use the animal for a pillow. Do not be selective, in one’s theology. Hebrews 11 defines what our faith in Christ should be, and my enlightment in other things will not change that. We are to be, and live, sober, not drunk with our own cherished, even genuinely desired hopes, in God, which are generated not by truth but by our hearts. God did not heal Timothy’s stomach pain despite entreaties, nor remove Paul’s thorn. Why do we not live by faith in the grace of God? The more I think about these things, the more I see just how far I am from the mark, and my need of an understanding of the truth. I am not even scratching the surface! Miracles? Just remain in Christ, and Christ remain in you. That is ALL of Christianity.
Thank you and God bless you.
Paul
Paul – that is so right, Thank you!
The thing that bothers me is that with all of the video equipment and ways to prove things, why is it that it is always TOLD ABOUT what happened somewhere else? Why for instance do preachers do that pulling on the leg thing to fix a short leg but they can’t pray for someone with a missing leg and see it grow back? I am not against miracles, and I KNOW that God CAN do it, but i wonder if He just holds back till the Church decides to start believing HIM for miracles instead of believing the crooks that are claiming things they are not doing.
It’s being recorded more and more. For example, here is a video that documents a man being raised from the dead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDAmvgwAjw – multiple witnesses and the corroboration of a mortician.