Miracles and checking my intellect at the door
We’re stuck – here we are, children of a cynical culture, and we serve a master whose top priority is teaching his disciples to trust a God they can’t see. Along the way, Jesus said and did some outrageous things. How do we live the life of faith while not checking our intellect at the door?
Along comes a minor documentary that helps us wrestle with the issue. It’s called The Finger of God. Filmmaker Darren Wilson was a natural-born skeptic, never having personally witnessed a miracle. When his uncle and aunt showed him the amazing gold teeth God gave them, he decided to go in search of the miraculous, wherever it may lead him.
While starting in places like the local Pentecostal church, where falling down in the Spirit is regular fare and gold dust and gemstones showed up out of thin air, Wilson soon moved on to places like Mozambique to interview Rolland and Heidi Baker.
Seeing God heal is the standard way the Bakers start their outreaches in a village. In one scene, Baker calls a deaf woman to the front. She asks the crowd, “Is this woman deaf?” Everyone shouts back that she is.
Then, after praying for her, the woman is healed. While seeing is believing for the locals, and many come to faith, I wish it were so easy for us Americans. Weaned on movies replete with special effects, we tend to be like Toto, wanting to pull back the curtain on the Great and Powerful Oz. With Roger Daltry of The Who, we sing, “I won’t get fooled again.”
It’s hard to be a person of faith when you’re born in a nation of Doubting Thomases. We’re not going to check our intellects at the door. Some of us have polished them to a fine sheen at the best graduate schools. In an age of science, gold teeth look to us to be some kind of hoax. People lie all the time, and the religious
crowd so earnestly desires to believe.
Why shouldn’t they fudge the facts a bit?
Yet, at the end of the day, I believe in a God who is still in the healing business. I can’t explain the gemstones, but when Wilson interviews a man who was
murdered, raised from the dead, and then converted his murderer (who subsequently became a preacher), I find the story compelling.
It reminds me of Paul of Tarsus, and I choose to believe. All of us who call ourselves “believers” (believing in stuff we can’t see) at some point have to make that choice. What’s your experience with doubt and faith?
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I was at one of those outreaches in Mozambique with the Baker’s team. My daughter and I witnessed two boys healed, there deaf ears were opened. Wow!! God help me to remember you are still a God of miracles, even in our country, filled with doubting Thomas’s
I applaud you seth…I know that i am not there yet.
I’m a skeptic too, but yearning to be proved wrong. I’ve seen a paralytic healed before my eyes and sick boy instantly returned to health after years of sickness. I know that this is real, but I still struggle when I pray for my wife who has a headache or some illness in our church. I feel like I have to explain away why God may not be moving here (do we really not need him? is it really a lack of faith?). The superficial explanations I hear don’t seem to satisfy; maybe it’s just a mystery. This was a great blog.
Seth, GREAT post…LOVE it!!! I am AMAZED by this stuff too…and am a believer in anything God wants to do to bring glory to Himself and people to Him. I wrote my thoughts on these miracles on my blog too. 🙂