Healing and Preaching

One of the strongest motivations for Jesus' miraculous ministry was Jesus' compassion for people who were suffering. But there is a larger question about the function of miracles altogether in sacred Scriptures. Jesus would travel from village to village healing the sick, and some say that the miracles He performed are meant to prove the existence of God. Others say that they're meant to draw unbelievers to salvation. How should we view them? Today on Renewing Your Mind, we return to the gospel of Luke to study the miracles of Jesus. Here's Dr. R.C.

Sproul. Well, Luke has been giving us a chronicle of the activity of Jesus in the early years of His Galilean ministry. We saw what happened when He preached at His home synagogue of Nazareth when the response of the people was, we know who you are. You're Joseph's son. Then He goes to Capernaum, and He's confronted there by a demon who says a little bit something different from what the people had said at Nazareth.

They said, we know who you are. You are the Holy One, the Son of God. And so He's first identified simply as the Son of Joseph, and then not so simply the Son of Almighty God. And Luke continues the narrative by telling us what happens when he goes back to the house of Simon Peter, where presumably he was taking, lodging in that place. But when they get there, Simon's mother-in-law, his wife's mother, was sick. And Luke the physician tells us that she was ill because of a high fever. This was a serious matter for Peter and his wife in those days. If you ran a high fever, it could be something that would indicate a fatal illness. And so they were profoundly concerned, and Jesus came in, and we're told that they made a request of Him concerning her. And I'm interested in how Jesus responded to that beseeching of the family. We read, we read, so He stood over her, came over, stood over beside her, and rebuked the fever.

What? It's one thing for Jesus to rebuke a demon and have the demon leave the poor soul that it had possessed, but we don't think of fevers as being capable of being admonished or rebuked. We might administer aspirin or put cold compresses on somebody's forehead or at least call the doctor, but usually if our child or if our mother or anybody in the family is running a fever, you don't stand there and admonish the fever.

Whoever heard of such a thing? Well, I'm not a physician as you well know, and I don't really always understand the difference between viral infections and bacterial infections, but I know that in some cases a fever may be an indicator of a bacterial infection. Is that right, Don?

Thank you very much. He's a doctor, I'm not. Well, I am a doctor, but not a medical doctor. So in any case, I'm assuming that this was a bacterial infection because bacteria are living organisms, subject to the Creator of life, subject to the One who is sovereign over all life. But even if it were not bacterial, if it were not a microscopic organism that were producing this fever in Peter's mother-in-law, if it were an inert, inorganic, non-living cause, no matter. The same One who's there who can calm the sea and still the storm by the word of rebuke has the power and the authority to command rocks to speak or bacteria to leave a human body. And so the authority of Jesus over all power and force of nature is manifest in this event when He simply heals Peter's mother-in-law by admonishing the fever and instantly it's not only that the fever broke, but the fever left and left her so completely that with the departure of the fever also went all of the consequences of that fever and the weakening of the fever that had beset her, for she was so completely instantly healed that she got up from her sick bed and ministered to those who were there serving them presumably their dinner.

A remarkable thing, isn't it? And then Luke goes on to say after this, everybody in the town who had anybody sick, they came to Jesus in great crowds and multitudes, beseeching Him to heal their loved ones who were suffering from diseases, from demonic oppression and possession and other matters. And we're told that Jesus laid hands on every one of these persons and healed them and healed them completely. As I've said before, during the earthly ministry of Jesus, His ministry was accompanied by a blaze of miracles. And what I'd like to consider in the time that we have left this morning is this question, why all these miracles? What was the point of all of these miracles?

Well, the answer to that question, dear friends, is not so simple, and it can't be answered with one basic factor in mind. Certainly, one of the strongest motivations for Jesus' miraculous ministry was Jesus' compassion for people who were suffering. We're told again and again before He heals people that He feels compassion for them.

He demonstrates His concern and His care. He has the power to relieve this suffering, and so He does it out of compassion. But there is a larger question about the function of miracles altogether in sacred Scripture.

And here we find a lot of confusion even in the churches today. For example, I hear people say frequently that the miracles of the Bible are there to prove the existence of God. I don't know a single place in sacred Scripture where the Bible says that the function of a miracle is to prove the existence of God. God doesn't need miracles to be performed to have His existence proven. The creation proves the existence of God.

And Paul tells us in Romans chapter 1 that God's general revelation, that is the revelation that He gives of Himself, both externally in nature and internally in the conscience of every human being, that God reveals Himself clearly, plainly, and manifestly, and utterly convincingly to every human being that walks on the face of the earth and to such a degree of the Apostle tells us that every person here in this world knows that God exists. Now we know there are people who deny that. We know that there are people who protest against them, but we know that they're not telling the truth.

They say they don't believe in the existence of God, but they can't avoid believing in the existence of God. They can bury it. They can repress it. They can deny it. They can hate it.

They can despise it. They can do all those things, but they can't destroy the knowledge of God that God has planted in them and shown to them through the creation. So, the function of miracles is not to prove the existence of God or even to give corroborative evidence of the existence of God. Well, if that's not the point of the miracle and beyond compassion, what is the primary point of the miracle? Well, you know, there is no word miracle in the New Testament. That word in our vocabulary, you may find it in some of your English translations, but there's no… in the Greek there's no single word that means miracle. We have three words that are used. You see, it took me a while to get to three, but thankfully I'm not Burke.

It would take Burke an hour and a half, right? Okay. Three words for miracle, signs, wonders, and powers. And we look at those three words, and we look at those three words, signs, wonders, and powers, and extrapolate from them the common essence of the three, and then articulate our concept of the miraculous. Well, you know, take for example the word sign in John's gospel, where when Jesus changes the water into wine and He does other miracles, John will say, and this sign did Jesus.

It's called a sign because it's significant. The point of the work that we call the miracle, that John calls a sign, is as a signpost ordinarily does, points beyond itself to something else. That is, the miracles of Jesus and of the apostles are signs that point beyond the immediate action to something else.

And so what we're looking at this morning is what is this something else? What is it that the miracles point to? If they're not pointing to the existence of God, what are they pointing to? They are pointing to the attestation of God Himself to the person who is performing the miracle. That is, the miracles are God's certification of His agents who speak and proclaim His Word. Now let's look for a moment, if we can, back in the book of Exodus where we see this, where the first outbreak of plenteous miracles are recorded in the Old Testament during the ministry of Moses in preparation for and then afterwards the exodus out of Egypt. God appears to Moses, as we know, in the burning bush in the Midianite wilderness, and God gives Moses the task, the mission impossible, if it were, of the day to go to the most powerful monarch in all of the world, Pharaoh. And say to Pharaoh, and say to Pharaoh, God says that you are to let My people go. I've heard the cries and the groanings of these people that you have enslaved, and I want you, Pharaoh, to set them free, that they can come out and worship Me at My mountain.

That's the task. And then God says, Moses, you have to go tell the people to be involved in the greatest walkout and mass labor movement in the history of the world against all this power. You have to persuade the people to revolt against the power of Pharaoh and get up and leave. Now these are not two small tasks, and Moses is puzzled. He said, I'm supposed to go to Pharaoh and say, let these people go? And Pharaoh says, why should I do that? And I'm going to say to him, well, I was talking to this bush out in the desert, and this voice came out of the bush and told me that I was supposed to come to you and say, let these people go. How is that going to work? Or if I go to the people and say, okay, stop making the bricks. We're out of here.

Follow me. And they're going to say, you're out of your mind. How is anybody going to believe that you are sending me, and I am speaking your word? That's the question that Moses brings to God. Now listen to how God answers it. Chapter 4, verse 1, Moses answered and said, suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice. Suppose they say, the Lord has not appeared to you. That's the question.

Here's the answer. God says, so the Lord said to him, what's that in your hand? And he said, a rod. And God said, well, throw it on the ground. And so he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent. And Moses fled from it, terrified of this snake. And God says to Moses, come on, Moses, just reach out your hand and grab a hold of that snake.

How would you like to do that? Not me. I don't like snakes.

They don't like me. And so he reached out, and he caught it, and it became a rod in his hand again. That they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has appeared to you. Furthermore, the Lord said to him, Moses, put your hand in your bosom. Put your hand in your shirt. He put his hand in his bosom, and when he took it out, his hand was leprous. He said, okay, put your hand in your bosom again.

He put it back in, brings it back out, and it's clean. Now, what's just happening? Moses is saying to God, how's anybody going to listen to me? And God answers that by telling him to throw his rod on the ground and to put his hand that it might become leprous.

What's he doing? He said, here's how they're going to listen to you. You're going to perform miracles. And when you perform those miracles, it won't be to the end that these people will know that I exist.

It will be for the purpose of letting them know that I sent you and that you are speaking my Word. And that's exactly what Moses did. He went to Pharaoh and made the demands that God had made, and Pharaoh brings out all his magicians, and they play their little games of throwing their sticks on the ground, and they become snakes, and then Moses eats up their snakes. The whole point is that the court magicians of Pharaoh were just that, magicians, collapsible boxes that concealed snakes. That kind of trick was known in antiquity. And they pulled out all of their tricks, but it didn't take long for their tricks to end and the miracles of God to stay and to prevail. The higher point of the miracles that we find in the New Testament was to authenticate the spokesman for God that they were sent from God.

Nicodemus got it when he came to Jesus by night, and he said, teacher, we know that thou art a teacher sent from God, or you would not be able to do the things that you do. Now, you want this to get tough in the two minutes I have left? I get this question all the time, R.C., do you believe that miracles happen today?

I hate it when people ask me that because what they're asking me isn't, and what I'm saying, they're not hearing what I'm saying. But if you want me to give the simple answer, the answer is no. You go into the pastor's office and the sign says, expect a miracle. If you expect a miracle, if miracles are expectable, there's nothing miraculous about them.

If they're ordinary, they carry no certifiable weight. It's by their extraordinary character that they have sign power, significance. Now, of course, when people ask me, do I believe in miracles, they're asking one question and I'm answering a different one. If they are saying to me, do you believe that God is still working in the world supernaturally? Of course I do. Do you believe that God answers prayers? Of course I do. Do you believe that God heals people in response to prayers?

Of course I do. All miracles are supernatural, but not all supernatural acts are miracles. Theologians get real tight in their making of distinctions. And when I say I don't believe in miracles today, I don't believe in the tight kind of miracle in the very narrow sense where a miracle is defined as a work that occurs in the external perceivable world, an extraordinary work in the external perceivable world against the laws of nature by the immediate power of God, a work that only God only God can do, such as bringing life out of death, such as restoring a limb that has been cut off by command, such as walking on the water, such as turning water into wine. I mean, some of these marvelous signs in the New Testament wouldn't even qualify as miracles in this tight definition. So, why do we labor so hard for this tight definition for this reason? If anybody can perform miracles, if a person who is not an agent of divine revelation, now here's the crux of it, if a person who is not an agent of divine revelation can perform a miracle, then obviously a miracle cannot certify an agent of revelation.

Let me say it again. If a non-agent of revelation can perform a miracle, then a miracle cannot authenticate or certify a bona fide agent of revelation, which would mean that the New Testament's claim to be carrying the authority of God Himself because God has certified Christ and the apostles by miracles would be a false claim and a false argument. And so what's at stake here is the authority, the authenticity, and the truthfulness of the Bible itself. That's why I have this tight definition and why I don't expect miracles because I don't expect to find apostles running around today so that the narrow miracles, they'd stop at the end of the apostolic age. Now, God's still alive.

He's still working. He's still answering prayers in an amazing way. But I've seen marvelous answers to prayers. I've seen people healed of so-called terminal illnesses. I just have never seen anybody raised out of the cemetery or an arm that is severed to be growing back or a preacher walking on the water.

And if you find one who can turn water into wine, give him my phone number. But in any case, the Lord Jesus did these miracles not only in the broad sense but in the narrow sense. It's these miracles of the New Testament that are so important to us because they are God's attestation of Jesus and of the apostles, for whose authority we submit. Well, there are teachers and denominations that claim to still be performing the miracles we heard described today.

Dr. R.C. Sproul's explanation of why those signs and wonders cannot continue in modern times was very helpful. We're glad you've joined us for Renewing Your Mind on this Sunday. Each week we continue Dr. Sproul's verse-by-verse series from The Gospel of Luke. Let me recommend that you request our resource offer today as a helpful study companion for this series.

It's Dr. Sproul's commentary on The Gospel of Luke. Contact us today with a donation of any amount, and we will be happy to provide you with a digital download of this nearly 600-page commentary. Our offices are closed on this Lord's Day, but you can give your gift and make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. Well, as we close the program today, let me also remind you that our goal here at Ligonier Ministries is to come alongside the local church. It would never be our desire that this program replaced the fellowship that you enjoy with your church family. We're grateful that you benefit from Dr. Sproul's teaching, but we also hope you're benefiting from the means of grace in the proclamation of God's Word and in the sacraments at your church. Renewing Your Mind is the listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. On behalf of all of my colleagues here, thank you for listening, and may the Lord bless you in the coming week.