The Biblical Data⤒🔗

 God's work of salvation from the begin­ning was accompanied with wonders, signs of divine power and agency. The redemption from Egypt was to be a display of the miraculous: the God of the burning bush declared to Moses "I will stretch out My hand and strike Egypt with all My wonders which I will do in its midst..." (Exodus 3:20). In the land of Egypt, God prom­ised to "harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply My signs and My wonders in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 7:3). Then, following the deliverance and the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, the Israelites sang of the incomparableness of the God who is "glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders" (Exodus 15:11).

The wonder-working power of God is celebrated by the Psalmist, who urges the people of God to "Declare His glory among the nations, His wonders among all people" (Psalm 96:3), and who declares that God "alone does great wonders, for His mercy endures for ever" (Psalm 136:4). Mercy and miracle are woven together in the unfolding of God's redemptive plan. The miraculous in the Bible signifies the working out of a great drama, by which God will create a people for Himself. Thus the prophet Isaiah can say that "I and the children whom the Lord has given me ... are for signs and wonders in Israel" (Isaiah 8:18). The very presence of the church in the world is nothing short of miraculous.

Indeed, Jeremiah goes further. He tells us that these redemptive signs secured for God a reputation among men: "You have set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, to this day, and in Israel and among other men; and You have made Yourself a name, as it is this day" (Jeremiah 32:20). Nebuchadnezzar, the heathen king of Babylon, had to acknowledge the grandeur and greatness of God:

How great are His signs, and how mighty His wonders! His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and His dominion is from generation to generation!Daniel 4:3

It is with the advent of the Redeemer that we see signs and wonders in a unique way accompanying the work of redemption. The events at the marriage of Cana signalled a new era and the opening of a new chapter in the Book of Redemption. Our Lord's first miracle, chang­ing water into wine, seems a trifle for the hand of omnipotence. Yet John presses its significance by declaring that "This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed on Him" (John 2:11). The implications are first, that Jesus had per­formed no miracles up to this point; second, that they displayed to a remarkable degree the essen­tial glory that belonged to Him as the eternal Son; and third, that they confirmed the disciples in the faith. The first of these is often overlooked in our reading of the passage. This was the Lord's first earthly miracle; and it occurred only with the genesis of ministry. It is also worth noting that although the first earthly miracle is recorded, the last is not — He did "many other signs in the presence of His disciples which are not writ­ten..." (John 20:30). Cana demonstrated that as far as the history of salvation was concerned, the advent of Jesus was God's best wine, and He was leaving it till last.

The miracles of Christ can be divided into four kinds. There were miracles which directly affected the elements of nature, changing them materially (as water into wine), changing the force of them (as in the stilling of waves and winds) or exerting a supernatural influence over the efficacy of them (as in the feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes). There were miracles too which of a restorative nature, healing sickness and disease. Peter at­tributes these healing miracles to God's anointing of Jesus with Holy Spirit power, as a result of which he "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed with the devil" (Acts 10:38). There were miracles which engaged specifically with the powers of darkness, casting out demons and exorcising devils. Even those who attributed this power to the devil himself could not but see the effect and acknowledge the nature of the work that He had performed. Although they were wrong in their explanation, they were correct in their affirmation: "He casts out demons..." (Luke 11:15). And finally there were miracles which dealt directly with death, in the raising of Jairus' daughter, the widow of Nain's son and Mary and Martha's brother, Lazarus. The interesting thing in this connection was the progressive engage­ment of the resurrection miracles: Jesus raised a teenage girl who had just died, then a young man who was being carried to his burial, then a mature adult who had been buried four days previously. The emotional impact of the death of Lazarus is registered in the fact that Jesus wept before the grave, not only because of the burden He was sharing with His Bethany friends, but also in the realisation that His next assault on death would be from within.

Following the resurrection triumph and the advent of the Spirit, signs and wonders were present among the early church. The miracles of Acts included healings, exorcisms and res­urrections. Some of these are recorded, many are not. Stephen, for example, we are told, "full of faith and power, did great wonders and signs among the people" (Acts 6:8). And of the ministry in Iconium all that we are told is that the disciples stayed there a long time, "speaking boldly in the Lord, who was bearing witness to the word of His grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands" (Acts 14:3). Paul summarises his apostleship and his preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles as being "in mighty signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God", characteristics, he continues, of his having "fully preached the gospel of Christ" (Romans 15:19). And to the Corinthians he says that,

Truly the signs of an apostle were accomplished among you with all perseverance, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds.2 Corinthians 12:12

Thus, according to Peter, was fulfilled the prophecy of Joel which declared that God would "show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath" (Joel 2:30, quoted in Acts 2:19); and the story of Pentecost continues, informing us that "many wonders and signs were done through the apostles" (Acts 2:43).

Interpreting the Miracles←⤒🔗

The 'signs and wonders' of biblical revelation were conspicuous. They were designed to be seen. They were facts of experience, facts of history. More impor­tantly, they were facts of redemption. As Lorraine Boettner reminds us, "The abso­lutely wrong way to study the miracles is to look at them as detached and isolated happenings having no connection with any plan of redemption" (Studies in Theology, p.179). It is clear from the biblical data that signs and wonders, expressions and displays of divine power, were intended to herald the work of redemption from its beginnings in the Old Testament, through to its culmination in the work and sacrifice of Christ, and its application in the lives of men and women through the preaching of the apostles.

The miracles, first, demonstrated the reality of the supernatural. They showed that not all explication can be contained within natural, observable phenomena. There are some things for which there can only be a supernatural explanation. The fact, for Rudolf Bultmann that "We act always in reliance on a sequence of world events conforming to law" means that for him "The idea of miracle has, therefore, become untenable and it must be aban­doned" (Selected Writings, p.258). The Bultmannian view of miracle became popu­larised in the 'Honest to God' debate and its aftermath. Bishop John Robinson urged a reinterpretation of the incarnation on the grounds that "as supernaturalism becomes less and less credible, to tie the action of God to such a way of thinking is to banish it for increasing numbers into the preserve of the pagan myths and thereby to sever it from any real connection with history" (Honest to God, p68).

This is the major stumbling-block to modern, liberal Christologies: the ap­parent disjunction from reality and history that the supernaturalism of the New Testa­ment forces. Yet, as C.S. Lewis, the great apologist for Christianity, reminds us, this is to approach the whole issue from the wrong angle. Our experience cannot dem­onstrate laws of nature, but only norms of natural order; the miracles demonstrate that while these norms are not excluded by the miraculous, they may be suspended. Or, as Lewis goes on to demonstrate in Miracles, the supernatural acts of God can feed new elements into the norms of natu­ral order to produce new results. The testimony of Scripture, however, is not so much that miracles introduce new causes into nature to bring new effects into being, but that they are "the immediate products of the energy of God" (B.B. Warfield "The Question of Miracles" in Selected Shorter Writings II, p.198). Or, as Arch­bishop Trench put it last century, the miracles remind us that "laws are then working in (the world) which are not the laws of its fallen condition, but laws of mightier range and perfection" (Notes on the Miracles of our Lord, p.19). The observable and attested facts recorded for us in the Bible by eyewitnesses, and for which no naturalistic explanation is possi­ble, bring us face to face with the supernatural fact of God and another world. Without such supernaturalism the heart is torn out of biblical Christianity.

The miracles, secondly, reveal to us the divinity of Jesus Christ. John tells us at 2:11 that they revealed the glory of Jesus; or, as Boettner puts it, they were "sparks emitted by the fires within" (Studies in Theology, p.179). Bishop Robinson ac­cused traditional incarnational theology of being necessarily docetic; that is, that "(Je­sus) looked like a man, he talked like a man, he felt like a man, but underneath he was God dressed up" (Honest to God, p.66). Robinson sought "to begin 'from below' and move from immanence to transcendence ... from the Son of Man to the Son of God, rather than the other way round" (quoted in E. James, A Life of Bishop John A. T. Robinson, p.197).

Don Cupitt took this further, when he stated that the critics say that the miracle-sto­ries in the gospels can be sufficiently explained in terms of traditional symbol­ism, standard techniques for developing stories, the culture of the period, and the theological purposes of the gospel writers. The question of historicity does not arise, and even if it did, could not be answered with confidence... Today the critics have largely surrendered the gospel miracles.The Debate about Christ, p.50

Yet the miracles of Jesus force our thinking into categories of deity, omnipo­tence and supernaturalism, not as attainments of the Nazarene, risen to in the maturity of His sinless life, but as attributes of the Son of God, possessed by Him in the essential glory of His divine nature. The Word who became flesh and pitched His tabernacle among men, allowed the light from inside the tent to shine through to those who could observe the phenomenon of an incarnate God. He came, as Warfield has it, "trailing clouds of glory" (The Person and Work of Christ, p.55), His life-story on earth is set between the miracle of the virgin birth and the miracle of resurrec­tion and ascension. He Himself is the greatest miracle (see D. Calhoun, The Majestic Testimony, p.250).

More particularly, the wonders per­formed by God in our nature, demonstrated that He was the sent one, the apostle. And it was supremely in our Lord's case that the signs of an apostle were wrought among men. "The works which the Father has given Me to finish - the very works that I do — bear witness of Me, that the Father has sent Me" (John 5:36); "The works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of Me" (John 10:37). And, as Warfield puts it, "The persistent attempts to explain away the facts so witnessed ... are all wrecked on the directness, precision, and copious­ness of the testimony" (The Person and Work of Christ, p.33). Indeed, the crowds who watched Jesus could not believe that the Messiah would do more miracles than this man was doing among them (John 7:31).

The miracles, thirdly, attested the revelation of God's salvation. This is explicitly stated in Hebrews 2:1-4. The word spoken by angels was stedfast, and every transgression received its own re­ward. Therefore, we cannot escape if we neglect the salvation which was spoken to us by Christ, confirmed by the apostles and witnessed "both with signs and wonders, with various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to His own will" (He­brews 2:4).

The Word of God is brought before the recipients of that revelation as a spoken word, a confirmed word, and a testified word. Those who embrace it do so will­ingly and lovingly; those who close their hearts to it do so in the face of the over­whelming evidence of miraculous attestation. So at Exodus 11:9, the signs and wonders are set in apposition to the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. The rejection of the divine message is all the more solemn in the face of such overwhelming attestation of the truth.

This is the more explicitly brought before us in John 12:37, where we find that some, "although He had done so many signs before them, they did not believe on Him". Again, John declares the overwhelming nature of the evidence and the seriousness of the rejection of the Messi­ah's message. This is registered again at John 15:24:

If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin; but now they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father.

There is a forensic and judicial aspect to the miracles, witnessing against those who will not bow to the voice of God in Jesus Christ.

The miracles, fourthly, remind us of the great changes yet to come. The Christ by whose hands the lame came to walk and the deaf to hear, and by whose words the waves ceased their roaring, will shake heaven and earth when He comes to reign. He will come then, not trailing glory-clouds, but in these very glory-clouds. And when thought turns to doubt at the concept of a universally seen and univer­sally acknowledged Jesus, before whose presence the elements will melt, and heaven and earth will flee away, we remember the miracles. As Geerhardus Vos says of the miracles of the prophets in the Old Testa­ment, the element of the miraculous has "a typical significance belonging to the sphere of eschatology. It bears witness to the prophets' interest in the great supernaturalizing world-change expected from the future" (Biblical Theology, p.251). So, in John 5:25ff, we are re­minded that the Father has given Jesus works to do, the greatest of which lies in the future — the eschatological miracle when the very dead will be summoned out of their graves to stand before the judge of all the earth. Every miracle wrought by Christ anticipates the mighty, climatic end-time.