Once we get past the Radix Fidem approach to religion, it’s just a matter of answering questions. In the process of answering questions, we open the door to someone’s heart so they can hear the things they need to hear. The rest of the onion layers can be shuffled around in order; we have to reach people where they are.
Now, the market for religious teaching is saturated. We are not going to reach anyone who isn’t already searching for better answers. And among those who are searching, we cannot appeal to those who aren’t ready to hear our kind of answers. There will always be people genuinely searching but looking in a different direction. We cannot help them until/unless the Lord leads them our way.
We know that a critical element in Jesus’ ministry was the miracles. But we really need to understand that His miracles were a restoration of the Covenant of Moses. Every malady and demon His people suffered was because of the failure of the Judea’s leadership. As the Messiah, He was restoring the covenant promises to the people.
We do not have a covenant nation. There are no missing miracles that we can pin down by God’s promises. Whatever we do with miracles, it cannot be the same thing Jesus did. We are not in the same context; the manifestation of authority must come in a different way. It’s not as if we cannot have any miracles at all, but that the character and net result of those miracles will be different.
Miracles belong to the Covenant, but are not limited to the Covenant. While God can and does choose to grant miracles outside of any covenant, it will appear to us wholly random because the divine policy on that issue is beyond human ken. There is no principle stated in Scripture that covers that issue. Rather, we have the issue of struggling to reach full covenant compliance. There’s a lot of ground to recover there, and until the Lord shows us more of what we have lost over the past two millennia, we cannot have a strong assurance of the ground of miracles.
Don’t point to the apostolic miracles that proliferated after the gospel escaped the borders of Judah. Those were under a level of covenant compliance that we haven’t yet approached. Again, those took place in a different context than ours. I am not suggesting that miracles have ceased. By no means; I’ve been granted too many in my life to suggest that. What I’m saying is that we do not have grounds for a consistent expectation of miracles. We are not in the position to declare that they simply must come when we engage this or that set of practices and teaching.
And God forbid we should drop off into the swamp of telling people their miracles have failed because they don’t believe strongly enough. That’s not how it works. Blaming the victim is not a biblical principle.
All we really have is a minimum standard that will give us a better chance to exercise the kind of faith that manifests spiritual gifts and other miracles. We should have our own covenant context, something that matches our situation.
We’ve already said this before: A major element in seeing miracles is having your soul prepared to hear the voice of God. Insofar as it’s possible, we must replicate in our own souls the minimum standard equipment that makes us able to see what God is willing to do for His people at any time and place. It’s not as if we could perfectly match the ancient Hebrew frame of mind and faith, but we can certainly approximate that in our own context.
Here’s the problem: Our western society is so very far away from even that approximation. It’s not just a geographical move, nor an intellectual one, but we have to crawl across several millennia of human experience, too. In order to pursue the Spirit, we must be able to see Him. We must become sensitive to where and how He has walked in this world. It’s not something the head can learn; it must be in the heart. It requires a gift from the Holy Spirit just to know the Holy Spirit.
There are plenty of human maladies the Lord will not heal under any circumstances. Did you ever consider the simple matter of human aging? The flesh is mortal, and the only healing for mortality is to die. Dying in this human existence is the ultimate miracle.
To avoid the mass of sorrows afflicting the Jewish people in Jesus’ day, we would need several generations of covenant faithfulness. How many people today do you know that were born under a valid manifestation of the Covenant of Christ? Our social and political institutions have not been specifically Christian since before the rise of Constantine. We are all coming into the Covenant of Christ as individuals starting from scratch with no useful legacy at all. We have zero background in understanding the nature of these things.
People who stand outside the Covenant are always in the line of fire, but people within the Covenant are working toward the reward of death. With the Jews of Jesus’ day, the unfaithfulness of the leadership (the Two Witnesses) placed the people in the line of fire. Jesus healed, delivered and raised the dead to restore what people lost from their established Covenant promises. Most of us have no missing covenant to recover. We are coming from outside the covenant system.
We must reclaim the covenant that we have been offered, coming in from scratch. It’s a different covenant altogether. The key to our miracles is conviction and context, and the certainty that it will appear random. We approach the Throne of Supplication with a totally different expectation. There is nothing automatic about it. We can heal, deliver and raise the dead only if the Lord desires to in each particular case, and when He wants. Don’t presume on His whims; it’s not a matter of human need, but of glory’s necessities.
Thus, the issue of having standing to request a miracle becomes paramount. That’s what we must work on. The greatest miracle prior to death is the realization that we are His. The next greatest miracle to that is being moved to enter into the full Covenant of Christ. These are the miracles we should put at the top of our list of things we seek from the Father.
