When Did You Last See a
Genuine Miracle of God?
When Did You Last See a
Genuine Miracle of God?
By Jan Lilleby
Well, let me be the first one to reply to the question in this headline: I cannot ever recall that I saw one single miracle of healing in my entire life!
Oh, of course I have ‘seen’ miracles….that is – seen and heard people saying they experienced a ‘miracle’ after some Christian evangelist or pastor laid hands on them in prayer. But there are ‘galaxies’ between a person saying he had gotten a healing miracle from God, and the true fact that such a ‘miracle’ ever took place. No one can present solid confirmations from serious doctors that they have been healed miraculously by God. So all we have are their own ‘impressions’ of having been ‘healed’ – often in a fired-up and ecstatic revival campaign abroad or domestic, whatever. It is not genuine true miracles performed by God – it is just the believer’s own imaginations and high hopes in ecstasy making them think that they got healed. Also, we cannot overlook the Biblical fact that miracles/wonders can be done by occult powers – even in Christian meetings. The Bible speaks of Jesus, Who will rebuke certain people even as these people persists on having worked miracles in the name of the Lord! I refer to Mat. 7:22, 23 – this is clear evidence that a person can work miracles which seems like something from God, but even if they cast out demons and they had prophesied and done many powerful things in His name, Jesus tell them that He do not know them and that they shall ‘get lost’! This means that we cannot cry “look! a miracle of healing!! God has healed me”…etcetera. It actually means that we do have to check this out to see if it is of God or of occult/satanic powers.
Whenever people claims that miracles took place in our time, we will already know that such are NOT genuine miracles from God – simply because such signs were only given to Israel’s Messianic believers in the times of the apostles.
When did you last see a real healing take place in any Christian meeting?
I have seen videos, heard speeches, watched lots of people coming forward to receive the laying on of hands for healing, but I have never seen a real healing miracle following such actions. And I also think this is true of every other person on earth, Christians or not. There have not been any miracles, signs and wonders after the times of the Acts and the apostles. There is no Biblical report of any such miracles after the apostolic era ended in the first century.
How so?
Because God performed, through His special elected apostles – Paul being one – miracles, signs and wonders like those we learn from reading the Book of Acts aimed at Israel’s people only, so they could believe that Jesus Christ was their rightful Messiah of God, the promised King to take throne on Zion in a coming millennial Kingdom (Dan. 2:44).
Paul taught that to the Corinthians, using the spiritual gift of tongues as an example, saying,
“Thus tongues are meant for a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophesy is not for unbelievers but for believers.”
How can we know that this was aimed at Israel’s Jews in particular, and not to the Gentile world?
Paul explained that in the previous verse, saying,
“It is written in the Law (of Moses), by men of strange languages and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to THIS PEOPLE (Jews), and not even then will they listen to Me, says the Lord.”
Paul thus quoted what Isaiah had prophesied, (Isa. 28:11, 12).
This was a special sign to Israel and Jews only, NOT to us Gentiles at all! But none of the nine supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit described in 1 Cor. 12-14 were ever meant to be for us Gentiles.
They were signs and wonders to be shown forth to God’s segregated people on earth, namely Israel.
Crusading evangelists in our time are totally out of line as they think that signs and wonders should be for the multitudes out in the third world, and should follow the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentile multitudes. Its way out of line; and it is a total fraud!
Compare if you will, the following quote from Acts of Paul’s ministry, with that of evangelists of our day, and you will notice that there is a huge difference in the apostle Paul’s ministry compared to ‘healers’ of our time,
Acts 14:1-11: (Using NASB) –
“In Iconium they entered the synagogue of the Jews together, and spoke in such a manner that a large number of people believed, both of Jews and of Greeks. 2: But the Jews who disbelieved stirred up the minds of the Gentiles and embittered them against the brethren. 3: Therefore they spent a long time there speaking boldly with reliance upon the Lord, who was testifying to the word of His grace, granting THAT SIGNS AND WONDERS BE DONE BY THEIR HANDS. 4: But the people of the city were divided; and some sided with the Jews, and some with the apostles. 5: And when an attempt was made by both the Gentiles and the Jews with their rulers, to mistreat and to stone them. 6: they became aware of it and fled to the cities of Lycaonia, Lystra and Derbe, and the surrounding region; 7: and there they continued to preach the Gospel. 8: At Lystra a man was sitting who had no strength in his feet, lame from his mother’s womb, who had never walked. 9: This man was listening to Paul as he spoke, who, when he had fixed his gaze on him and had seen that he had faith to be made well, 10: said with a loud voice, “Stand upright on your feet”. And he leaped up and began to walk. 11: When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they raised their voice, saying in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have become like men and have come down to us.”
The response of Paul’s extraordinary miracle of healing at Lystra, made the Gentile crowd ‘go bananas’ – they thought that their false idols/gods had come down in human form!
But wait a minute: Paul cannot have spoken about that at all, could he? He spoke the Gospel of the Kingdom on earth, in which Christ will be the King. And still, the people thought that it was THEIR gods who had performed such a great miracle.
Gentiles cannot handle miracles at all. It’s a fact. They are totally stuck in the admiration of their own idols – in this case it was Zeus and Hermes (Mars and Jupiter in Greek astrological mythology).
But Jews in the times of the apostles were notorious for raising persecution against them, and here we see that they even managed to fire up the Gentiles present…and the apostles had to flee the place in a hurry to save their lives.
Paul and his fellow ministers had performed miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit, but as he told in 1 Cor. 14:21 – the Jews would still not listen to the Word of the Lord. I will dare suggest that seeing healing miracles and wonders really made more effects and more solid conviction than that of speaking in tongues. They would neither take to the faith by hearing tongues, nor by seeing great apostolic miracles and healings!
Gentiles have not walked through the Red Sea as on dry ground, Gentiles were not seeing that huge pillar of smoke at the entrance to the Hebrew’s camp at Sinai or the same pillar turning to fire at night, watching at the gates there. Gentiles had no experience of having birds falling from the sky to feed over 600 000 people out in the desert – every day for forty years. Gentiles had no experience of seeing that their shoes and clothes were like all new and fresh every morning for forty years in the desert. But Israel’s children in the desert had. And it became a permanent part of their religious culture. They knew what it meant when their prophets spoke of miracles and signs. But Gentiles did not!
When did you last see a healing miracle, a genuine miracle of God, healing or otherwise?
Pentecostal-Charismatic groups of believers are known to be the foremost promoters of such beliefs, that miracles and signs, wonders, healings, tongues and prophesy, all are things given the believers by God, in our time. We have as believers, inherited the power and ministries of the apostles, they say. But no – the Bible says otherwise: no such miracles were ever promised to the Church dispensation, but only to Israel’s Messianic believers such as we learn from Acts.
Biblical miracles of healings are of such divine nature that one cannot confuse these with sick people getting gradually cured by the use of medicine. “Oh, thank God, my wife has gotten well…she is now out of the hospital recovering. It was a miracle of God!” Sorry, but such experiences of getting well after having spent days or weeks in a hospital, is NOT a miracle of God. It is nature taking its course helped by medicine or surgical operations made by skilled doctors. Of course we may (and we should) thank God for people getting well from sickness. But this is NOT miracles or wonders.
Had anyone of us been present there at Lystra as Paul healed that disabled man, we would have had our ‘socks blown off’ in awe and pure astonishment! Genuine miracles had that effect, I tell you. It may be that when Christ has returned to earth to establish the millennial kingdom in Israel, the world may witness outstanding miracles again, performed by Jesus in person and His priesthood at the new temple in Jerusalem. We can only wait and see.
Miracles and wonders are always exactly like that one which I referred to from Acts 14:1-11 with the apostle Paul. It was a healing which happened instantly by the God given power of the Holy Spirit through Paul.
This man there at Lystra was born with defected feet, he had never walked. But in a tenth-of-a-second….voila!...jumping up and stood and immediately walked around, for the entire crowd to witness. It was actually a double-miracle: first God made his feet come right, but following this, God had to heal him or ‘make him able to have instant balance’ so he would not fall on his face.
Tell me, please, when have anyone ever seen something like this…after the apostles died?
I have explained to you why we don’t see such fabulous miracles and signs in our time - it is because these things were only given to the Messianic Jews in the times of the apostles, so Jews could believe that this was works made by God Jehovah and His Son Jesus Christ.
After the fall of Israel as a nation of God (see Acts 28:25-28 of their final disastrous unbelief) – followed by their total destruction in A.D. 70 – God no longer reveal Himself to mankind. Heaven is entirely silent, and shall remain so until He send His two prophets to Israel to trigger the ‘Great Tribulation’ to get Israel back as a nation for Him (Rev. 11).
As Israel fell spiritually, in the sight of God – confronted by Paul in Acts 28:25-28, God revealed His secret to Paul, a Mystery that had been kept hidden in God from before creation. This Mystery is taught in Eph. 3:1-9 and Col. 1:25, 26. A body of believers which has Christ as its Head, and Heaven up above (Greek: epiuranos) as hope of salvation. Namely, believers such as ourselves, the present dispensation of the free Grace of God by faith in Christ, and no works demanded of us for salvation, only regular faith in Jesus Christ, Eph. 2:8, 9.
Paul for this revelation – the free Grace Gospel to the entire world – he wrote the two epistles, Ephesians and Colossians, in which we find the faith doctrine for the Church dispensation. And nowhere in these can we find any “signs, wonders, miracles, healings, tongues, laying on of hands, etcetera. No Mat. 28 and Mark 16 of any ‘Great Commission with miracles following’.
When did you last see a genuine miracle of God?
Whatever you think that you saw, it was not a miracle of God. You have been deceived if that is what you thought. We need to make right division of the Word of God so we can learn what is for us today.
