When I became a Christian, I heard the gospel through a Cessationist church. These were people who loved God and were ardent students of the Bible. The lens through which they interpreted the word was, however, Cessationism. That simply means that the denomination that church aligned itself with believed that the miracles, supernatural interventions by God, and the miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased to operate around the end of the first century when the last of the apostles died.
The idea is that God performed his miracles through Jesus solely in order to prove that he was the Son of God and the long awaited Messiah. He performed miracles through the apostles in order to validate them as leaders of the church and to validate their writings as inspired by God. The argument continued that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit were also given to validate the early church as the body of Christ and gifts such as prophecy and discernment were needed because the church did not have the complete New Testament canon until the end of the first century. However, once there was enough historical record of miracles in the life of Jesus and his apostles and once the entirety of the New Testament had been penned, the need for the supernatural acts of God and his church were fulfilled and God began to work only through natural means. Most American mainline churches still hold this view in varying degrees.
Of course, that perspective leaves much unanswered. For instance, why all the miracles in the Old Testament if miracles were only to validate Jesus? If miracles were only given to validate the apostles and their writings, then why did Luke gain a place in the New Testament with a gospel and the book of Acts as well as James, the brother of Jesus, not the apostle James? Neither were apostles and we have no evidence that either of them ever performed a miracle to validate the inspiration of their writings. Why did the church need gifts of miracles, tongues, healings, and the capacity to cast out demons if the miraculous gifts were only to make up for a lack of a complete New Testament? Those gifts did not fill in the “yet to be written” word of God for the church. If the church needed miracles to validate that it was approved by God, why would the church not need the same validation today in the face of Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism? In addition, if the biblical record shows that God interceded for his people with miracles from Genesis to Revelation, why would he stop intervening for his people after the Holy Spirit had been given to the church and since God himself does not change? He is the same yesterday, today and forever.
In addition to those questions, being taught that all of God’s miracles, supernatural interventions, and miraculous gifts were relegated to the past had an unintended side effect, I believe. As I was taught to read the Bible through that lens, I also came to believe, at least at a subconscious level that we could no longer do great things for the Lord. The Bible stories of David slaying Goliath, the Red Sea parting, supernatural strength in battle, fire falling from heaven, Philip being transported by the Holy Spirit, and so forth seemed to take on an almost mythological aura in the sense that these heroes of the past were not like you and me. God would not work through us as he had through them. I was reading the Word to see what God had once done, not what he would do.
The question becomes why the story of all those people and the story of all those supernatural events were even recorded if we cannot be like the people we are reading about. God’s mighty works sound like stories that happened long, long ago in a far away galaxy. And yet, I believe that the stories of David running toward Goliath, Joshua marching around Jericho, Elijah facing the false prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel, Gideon routing the enemy of Israel with clay pots and torches, Peter being led from prison by an angel, etc. are to be emulated by us, not just remembered.
I believe that the stories were written to tell us who God’s people were and who they can be again. They are written to tell us that we can be those people. These were real people with flaws and fears and great misunderstandings who eventually did great things through faith and the supernatural interventions of God. If we are to be like them…if they are our role models then we cannot be like them without faith and we cannot be like them without the miraculous power of God working in our lives as it did theirs.
To take away the supernatural operation of God in our lives is to take away the possibility that we can be another David, another Gideon, another Esther, another Elijah, another Mary, another Peter, Paul, or John. In an effort to explain why we personally haven’t seen someone heal the blind or raise the dead, we create a theology that denies the miraculous today and, at the same time, cuts the legs out from under the church and the church’s ability to “turn the world upside down” once again.
The Bible isn’t simply a history book as much as it is a book that demonstrates how men and women have encounters with God and that demonstrates what every believer’s life can look like in fellowship with God. What the Father has been willing to do in the past he is willing to do again because he does not change. In my first church home, I was taught to run away from the miraculous because I might be deceived and led astray. Of course we are to test the spirits to see if they are from God, but I believe that scripture actually instructs us to run toward the supernatural because we may just find God there.
