The Miracles of Jesus

When the Pharisees criticized Jesus' miracles, they never denied that He actually performed them. But the Pharisees denied the source of His power, said that He was doing these things through the power of Satan. But at least they recognized that the power that Jesus manifested while He walked on this earth was superhuman, was extraordinary, and was attended by miracles. Welcome to Redoing Your Mind on this Thursday.

I'm Lee Webb. You know, many people today reject the Bible's authority because they have a hard time accepting all of the miracles. They're too far-fetched to be credible, they say. But Jesus appealed to His miracles as proof that He was set by God.

Today, Dr. R.C. Sproul helps us understand these miracles and why we can believe that indeed He had the power to perform them. How is it possible for a person to listen to the radio, watch television, read about putting people on the moon, avail themselves of computers, modern technology, and antibiotics, and still believe in the miracles of Jesus? That's a question raised by one of the most important critics of the New Testament record in the 20th century, Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann believes that the record and account of the life of Jesus that is found in the pages of the New Testament is one that is cloaked heavily in mythology. And one of the reasons for the rejection of the authenticity and inspiration of the New Testament is that because so much material in the New Testament centers on the historical claim of miracle. Now we know, for example, that miracles are recorded in the Old Testament, but there is not a consistent, constant pattern of the working of miracles throughout the whole history of the Old Testament. But rather, the appearance of miracles in the historical text tend to be clustered in certain crucial times, and most significantly, at times when a major revelation of God is being brought before the world. One of the heaviest centers of the cluster of miracle that we find in the Old Testament Scriptures is in and around the life of Moses. And we remember in the Old Testament that the reason why Moses was invested or endowed with the power to perform miracles is because of the extreme difficulty of the task that had been given to him by God. You remember that when God commissioned Moses and told him to go to Pharaoh and say, let my people go, and to go and tell the people of Israel to follow him in this Exodus experience, Moses said, you know, how are they going to know that you are speaking to me and that the word that I will be proclaiming will be your word?

And remember God said, Moses, put your hand in your cloak, and he did. And then when he pulled it out, it was leprous. He said, put it in there again. And when he pulled it out the second time, it was clean. He said, take your staff and throw it on the ground. And he did, and it turned into a snake.

He said, now reach down and pick it up, and it turned back into a stick. And we know of the contest that Moses had with the magicians of Pharaoh's court. Well, we see the same marvelous display of the supernatural with the advent of the new age of prophecy with the appearance of Elijah and Elisha in the Old Testament. But you don't read about miracles performed by David or by Solomon or by Jeremiah or by some of the greatest people who appear in the Old Testament. Not even with Abraham do we read of Abraham's performing miracles. So, there has to be some reason that God had in history to cluster these miracles the way that He did, but there is no place where we see such a heavy concentration of miracle than when Jesus appears on the earth. One literary critic of the New Testament said, one thing is unmistakable, and that is that the record of Jesus is a record that is ablaze with miracles.

Well, the question is, do we trust them? Are they true? Nineteenth-century naturalism denied them wholesale. Twentieth-century neoliberalism, as I mentioned with Bultmann, categorically denied the historical reality of these miracles. In fact, one of the elements of so-called higher criticism or form criticism is by looking at various passages in the New Testament and seeing the literary form in which they occur. And one of the things that the form critics have done is they have examined the miracle stories to see if there is a pattern that is repeatable. And they have noticed such a pattern of these so-called miracle stories where a severe problem like a disease or a malady or affliction is first described.

It's kind of the before and after of the before and after story. And then the actual work is performed that is the miracle, the result of which is some kind of deliverance or rescue. And then the characteristic response in this pattern is one of amazement or astonishment. When you learn Greek in seminary, one of the first words that you have to learn in the Greek language is the word thaumatsai, which means to be astonished. And the reason why it's one of the first words you learn is because the high degree of frequency of the occurrence of this word in the New Testament. Every time Jesus walked around, it seems that the response to people, to His behavior was one of astonishment. Now I think that's important for us to realize when we consider the New Testament record of the miracles of Christ, because we have a tendency to judge the first-century church and the writers of the Scripture from a rather Olympian posture of cultural arrogance from our day. We say, oh, these people are prescientific.

They're primitive. They're credulous and gullible. They lived in a world where they took miracles for granted.

Do a word study, a frequency study of the word astonishment. Get in touch with the response of Jesus' contemporaries to His power and to His display of power. People had never seen anything like it. And I don't care what period of history people lived in, seeing somebody raised from the dead who was dead and entombed for four days was not commonplace. And people in the first century were not so gullible as to swallow, hook, line, and sinker every report of somebody's being raised from the dead after being in a state of physiological decay. People in the first century were not stupid.

They were not dummies. Neither could it be justly said of them that they were unscientific or even prescientific. Now, they didn't know what is known in our day scientifically, just as we don't know what presumably will be known in the next century scientifically, and they may look at us with the same kind of arrogance and say how naïve we are with some of the views we cling to. But the fundamental issue here with respect to the New Testament record surrounding the works of Christ is the question of whether we believe there is a God who has the power to create a universe, ex nihilo. Once that's established, then the only question is, is it this God who is manifesting His endorsement of this person who is displaying these powers that are recorded? You know, it's interesting that the first century critics of Jesus never denied that He was doing miracles. They were so obvious, but the Pharisees denied the source of His power, said that He was doing these things through the power of Satan.

But at least they recognized that the power that Jesus manifested while He walked on this earth was superhuman, was extraordinary, and was attended by miracles. Now, before we look at an example or two of miracles, I want to ask the question, what were the functions of miracles in the New Testament? Why miracles? And why don't we have them all over the place today? I'm not saying, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that God is not working in an extraordinary way today, but we don't have the blaze of miracles, of people being raised from the dead, and that sort of thing that was written about in the New Testament.

Why do we have that? Why does the beginning of Jesus' life and all the way through His life to His resurrection, why are these events surrounded by the manifestation of miracles? Well, we remember Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, and in his introductory remarks to Jesus, he said to him, 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, that was a very important insight from Nicodemus, and Nicodemus understood his Old Testament. He understood that God did not perform miracles willy-nilly, nor did ministers in the Old Testament have signs in their studies that said, expect a miracle, because if a miracle was something that one readily expected, the extraordinary nature of it would be lost if it were commonplace.

I hear people speak in the vernacular constantly. They'll say, oh, the birth of a baby is a miracle. Every time I see a baby born, I say, it's a miracle.

I'll say, I don't usually say anything, but I'm tempted to say, no, it's a marvelous thing. And it's something to which we should never be inured, that we should always, in a sense, be amazed by the majesty and mystery of human birth. But the human births occur every single day. They don't require the extraordinary, direct, immediate visitation of power that God displays in a miracle. Now, that doesn't mean that the power of God is not present in the birth. Again, the Bible teaches that the power by which everything comes to pass in this world is the power of God. But there is a difference between the ordinary operation of God's power and the extraordinary, where at times He will depart or deviate from the standard, normal pattern of the laws of nature, which are His laws, and set them aside to get our attention with something dramatic and transcendent.

That belongs to the very character of nature. And so Nicodemus understood that, and he said, wow, you're doing things that a person could do only if God were with him. I mean, Nicodemus didn't even think, presumably, that Satan could do the things that Jesus was doing. And Jesus Himself appealed to His miracles as His credential. He said, if you won't believe my words, believe me for my work's sake. Now we go to the book of Hebrews in the New Testament, and we read in the second chapter of Hebrew these words.

Therefore, we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest we drift away. For if the words spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just reward, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord and was confirmed to us by those who heard Him, God also bearing witness with signs and wonders with various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit? We often think of bearing witness as something that only we do, that it's our task to bear witness to Christ or to bear witness to God. But God bore witness to Jesus, and the way in which He bore witness to Jesus was by miracles. John Locke, the British philosopher, once said that the primary function, not the only function, but the primary function of the miracle in the Bible is to be the credit of the proposer, that is to prove the truthfulness of the person who was doing them, to certify that this person was endorsed by God and was speaking the truth of God. That's why we have to be very, very, very careful about our understanding of miracles, because apart from the other functions that they have of relieving suffering and so on, in biblical times, one of the primary purposes of the miracle was to prove that this person was an agent of revelation, was somebody speaking nothing less than the Word of God. Now, it may be somewhat interesting to you that the word miracle does not occur in the New Testament. Now, that could be somewhat misleading, because what I mean by that is that there is no single word in the Greek that appears in the New Testament that means miracle. I once lectured on this, and the next day people sent me all kinds of references from the New King James Bible or other translations where the word miracle occurs in the English text.

I said, yes, I understand that that's what's there. But actually, there are three different words that are used in the Greek text, and what we have done historically is that from these three different words, we've extrapolated an abstract concept, and we've called that concept miracle. And so, at times, the translator will translate one or all three of these words by the English word miracle. But I think it's fascinating to look at the three distinct words, because they have little nuances that are important to us. And the three words that we find in the New Testament that combine to give us our idea of miracle are the words sign, or signs, powers, and wonders.

And let me take them in reverse order. We've already seen that one of the recurring aspects of the miracle stories is the response of amazement. These are activities or actions that provoke from the witnesses of them a sense of wonder. We use the word wonderful in kind of a hackneyed way in our day. Originally, the term wonderful meant full of wonder, something that elicited a sense of awe. And a wonder was something that was beyond the normal ken of human experience. And so that word is used to describe the works of Jesus. They were wonders.

He was a wonder worker. Secondly, they were called powers, because what they display is a dimension of power that we normally believe is out of bounds or off limits to human beings. What person has the power to speak to a wind and to a churning sea and say, peace be still, and immediately the calm comes to pass? What human being has the power to go to the graveside of a mausoleum, the man, as I said, who's in the state of decay and stand outside of the tomb and utter a verbal command simply by saying, Lazarus, come forth and have in that very instant neurons in the brain beginning to charge, the hearts start to beat, blood begins to flow again through the vessels, the tissues, the fibers, the sinews begin to be filled with strength, and the man opens his eyes and walks out alive.

What kind of power is that? What kind of a power is it that enables a person to defy the laws of gravity and a buoyancy to walk on the water or to take water and by fiat, by imperative, change it constituents from water to wine? What kind of person can give sight to the blind by touching, adhering to the deaf?

Have you ever seen a miracle worker today restore a limb? Jesus did all of these things and more displaying these powers. But the other word, the word that is John's favorite word as we see it, the first miracle that is recorded at the wedding feast of Canaan where Jesus does change the water into wine. It is called a sign.

In one sense, it was what the evil and adulterous generation sought after. I'm not going to believe until I see a sign from heaven. Thomas said, I'm not going to believe until I see the pierce marks on his body and I put my hand into the wounds of his body. What were they asking for? They were asking for a miracle. They wanted something that was so manifest, so clearly the power of God, so clearly something that only God could do that then and only then would they believe. And Jesus rebuked people for that sort of thing and at the same time told us that that generation was so wicked that even if one came back from the dead, they wouldn't believe. Then no matter how many signs Jesus did perform, they wanted more.

This isn't enough. And Jesus finally said, there's no sign going to be given to you except that which was given to Jonah, and that was the resurrection. You remember what Paul says to the Athenians when he goes to Mars Hill? He said, these former days of ignorance God overlooked, but now He commands all men everywhere to repent because He has appointed a day by which He will judge the world by this one that He has proven to be who He claimed to be by the resurrection from the dead. It's as if God was saying to us if the resurrection of Jesus isn't enough to prove to you that this is my only begotten Son, you're not going to see anything greater. You're not going to see anything more because I have given the credit of the proposer. I have surrounded the life of my Son with manifest and manifold demonstrations of my power.

I have given the sign of who He is. And that's why these miracles are extremely important for us as we read them. And when you read them and read the New Testament and you see a miracle story, ask yourself immediately, what is the significance of this? Or to put it more deliberately, what is the significance of this? What does this tell us about this person called Jesus?

That's Dr. R.C. Sproul and a message from his overview of the entire Bible. It's a series called Dust to Glory, and it helps us tie together the major themes and events that we find in the Old and New Testaments. And this week on Renewing Your Mind, we're concentrating on the life and work of Jesus. I think we can agree that this teaching is critical today more than ever.

In Ligonier Ministries' recent State of Theology survey, we found that 58 percent of evangelicals in the United States believe that Jesus is a created being. When we as Christians misunderstand the foundational truths of the faith, it's no wonder that we find the church in a state of confusion. This series is a valuable resource to help you shore up your understanding of biblical truth. As I mentioned, this is a special edition set that includes a bonus disc with all of the audio files for the series, plus a digital edition of the study guide, helpful especially if you plan on using this series in a group setting.

So again, request Dust to Glory with your gift of any amount. Our number again is 800-435-4343, and our online address is renewingyourmind.org. Before we go, I'd like to remind you of our upcoming Mediterranean Study Cruise. It's October 17th through the 29th. You'll have the opportunity to visit some iconic biblical locations, including Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. Plus, you'll hear biblical teaching from Dr. W. D. Robert Godfrey and Nathan W. Bingham. A limited number of cabins are available, but you'll want to sign up soon.

For more information, go to ligonier.org slash events. Well tomorrow, Dr. Sproul will focus on the question, who did Jesus claim to be? We tend to think that Jesus calling Himself the Son of Man was an expression of humility, when in fact it was a claim to divine authority. That's why I want you to notice this. When He heals on the Sabbath day and is rebuked by His enemies, He said, I did this that you may know that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. Please join us Friday for Renewing Your Mind. .