Do You Believe in Miracles?
Acts 3:1-10
Do you treat miracles in the Bible as if they are true? How can our understanding of miracles affect our worldview?
Peter and John went to the Temple one afternoon to take part in the three o’clock prayer service. As they approached the Temple, a man lame from birth was being carried in. Each day he was put beside the Temple gate, the one called the Beautiful Gate, so he could beg from the people going into the Temple. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for some money.
Peter and John looked at him intently, and Peter said, “Look at us!” The lame man looked at them eagerly, expecting some money. But Peter said, “I don’t have any silver or gold for you. But I’ll give you what I have. In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, get up and walk!”
Then Peter took the lame man by the right hand and helped him up. And as he did, the man’s feet and ankles were instantly healed and strengthened. He jumped up, stood on his feet, and began to walk! Then, walking, leaping, and praising God, he went into the Temple with them.
All the people saw him walking and heard him praising God. When they realized he was the lame beggar they had seen so often at the Beautiful Gate, they were absolutely astounded! (Acts 3:1-10)
We are just at the start of the book of Acts and already we’ve seen plenty of the miraculous. When the Holy Spirit came there was the loud sound of a windstorm, flames of fire appeared to rest on the believers and they spoke in different languages. Within the community of believers the apostles “performed many miraculous signs and wonders.” Now we read about Peter and John healing a lame man at the Temple.
Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe the miraculous events you read about in the Bible—that Jesus performed, that Luke recorded in the book of Acts—actually happened? Though we deny it, many of us read the Bible as if it’s a fairy tale, a fairy tale world far removed from our real world, the world we live in. We say we believe the Bible; we believe it’s true. But somehow it’s not real to us. We don’t think about what we read in Bible in the same way we think about our world—the way we read an article on Wikipedia, or listen to a medical expert speak about the pandemic. We live in two worlds: the scared and the secular; the religious and the real. Many of us believe in miracles, we believe God can do miracles—according to the sacred world. But we doubt the miraculous, we don’t really expect miracles—according to the scientific, according to the real world.
It’s hard to say how commonplace the miraculous was in the early church, but Luke’s record gives the impression the miraculous happened frequently.
A deep sense of awe came over them all [the believers], and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders (2:43).
“And now, O Lord, hear their threats, and give us, your servants, great boldness in preaching your word. Stretch out your hand with healing power; may miraculous signs and wonders be done through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” (4:29-30)
If we’re honest, the kind of miraculous signs and wonders we read about in Acts are not commonplace today. Why is that? Certainly God is powerful enough to do any miracle he wills to do. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). So it seems it’s not his will to do the miraculous signs and wonders he once did. Some say it is God’s will to do the miraculous, it’s our lack of faith that’s holding him back (Mark 6:5-6).
Would you like to have the kind of faith—as small as a mustard seed—that can “say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move”; the kind of faith by which “nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:19-20)? Just think of the great things you could do, do for the glory of God, if you had that kind of faith, that kind of power?
What if you had the kind of power Peter and John had? Think of all the people you could save; all the people whose suffering you could bring to an end; all the lives you could save; all the heartbreak that would never happen. I just learned of an eight-year-old girl who is having seizures because she has a malignant brain tumor. If I had Peter’s faith and power I could heal her. God doesn’t only work on a “personal” level. Jesus calmed a storm (Luke 8:24-25). God’s power is not limited. If you had the faith (to move mountains) you could stop the wild fires in the far west and put an end to the Covid-19 virus. Scientists wouldn’t need to come up with a vaccine if you had faith in the power of God to work a miracle.
And just think how God would be glorified and believed in if you wielded this kind of miraculous power in Jesus’ name! These signs and wonders would be an unmistakable, irrefutable, irresistible sign by which the whole world would have to admit that Jesus is Lord, and come to faith in Him.
So why doesn’t God “stretch out [his] hand with healing power” and work “miraculous signs and wonders through the name of [his] holy servant Jesus”? Is the problem that no Christian has ever had enough faith, not even the faith of a mustard seed, that would set God free to do great things?
Whenever we’re perplexed about what God is or isn’t doing, about how he works or doesn’t, we need to remember that he is God and we are not. He is smarter than we are. He is more moral, more good, loving, kind and merciful than we are. He is “mindful” of our weaknesses, limitations and suffering. We should humbly submit to him, trust in him and be thankful that his “…thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways [his] ways…. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are [his] ways higher than your ways and [his] thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9; see Jeremiah 29:10-14; Habbakuk 3:16-19; Romans 9:20-23; 11:33-36; 2 Peter 3:8-9).
What if you had unlimited power to heal and to end all suffering—to end all physical, mental, emotional suffering, to end discord, hatred, injustice, racism, wars, poverty, evil in this world? What if you ended it all for the glory of God, in Jesus’ name? Isn’t this what all humanity is striving for and progressing toward? What if we got what it seems we all want, then what? What would we have? We would have everything we want, but God.
Jesus said, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul” (Matthew 16:26)? What if we get everything we want, everything that seems good to us, if we gain the whole world? We think we would then be happy, satisfied, we would experience the fullness of life. That‘s what we think. But Jesus prefaced what he said here with this: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (16:25).
Suffering isn’t the means by which God tries us to force us to come to him. Suffering isn’t God’s proverbial “Gun to our head.” Suffering is the result of our rejecting God, it is a symptom of our estrangement from God. The happiness, the fullness of life we long for isn’t found in the end of all suffering, in gaining the whole world, it’s found in God alone. “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”
Miraculously ending all “suffering”, would, in fact, condemn the whole world to eternal suffering. C. S. Lewis wrote,
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (The Problem of Pain)
L. E. Maxwell in his book Crowded to Christ, begins with this quote,
“I am one of the Jews who escaped from Germany,” says Abraham Poljak. “I thank God for all the strokes with which I was driven from darkness to light. It is better that we arrive beaten and bleeding at the glorious goal than that we decay happily and contented in darkness. As long as things were all right with us, we did not know anything of God, and the salvation of our souls and the world beyond. Hitler’s arrows and our misery have led us to the innermost heart. We have lost our earthly home but found the heavenly one. We have lost our economic support, but won the friendship of the ravens of Elijah. On the bitter ways of emigration we have found Jesus, the Riches of all worlds.”
…There are things worse than trouble, worse than pain, worse than death. Sin, to God, is the only unendurable—more intolerable even than hell…. If the world’s mounting miseries will crowd men to Christ and make hell the emptier, they are better than sin. Such is the wisdom of God in a mystery.
If God “shouts” at us through pain and suffering about our need for him and of our dependence upon him, why, then, did Peter miraculously heal the lame man? Wouldn’t it have been better for him “to arrive beaten and bleeding at the glorious goal than to decay happily and contented in darkness”?
Often this seems to be the case, seems to be God’s will—that we suffer. Jesus specifically prayed for his disciples, that his Father not take them out of the world, but just as Jesus was sent into the world, he was sending his disciples to be in the world (John 17:13ff.). To be in the world as Jesus was in the world means to suffer along with all mankind all the suffering that comes with living in this world… and persecution as well. Jesus prayed the Father would keep his disciples safe from the “evil one,” not safe from all suffering. Safe from the evil one looks like faithfulness and perseverance through, in the midst of all the suffering and persecution (see Hebrews 12:2-3).
It’s likely there were many with physical needs—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed—begging at the entrance to the Temple along with the lame man Peter and John healed (see John 5:2-5). Why did they choose to heal this lame man and not the others as well?
Luke tells us that when the lame man saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for some money. “Peter and John looked at him intently, and Peter said, ‘Look at us’” (3:4)! Why does Luke mention this minor detail? Is there significance to their looking intently at the man? I think so. I think they were seeking discernment from God as to what his will was for this lame man. They saw something when they looked intently at him and in his eyes (for they demanded he look at them) that, I believe, they saw in this man and in none of the others, that convinced them it was God’s will to miraculously heal this man.
Because they had discerned that it was God’s will to heal this man, acting in accord with God’s will, they then could pronounce, “In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, get up and walk!” The phrase “in Jesus’ name” is not meant to be a tag line at the end of a prayer signaling the end. It’s not a kind of magical incantation that gives power to one’s prayer, to force God’s hand to give what is being asked for in prayer. (If it was, it doesn’t seem to work too well!) It’s not proof of your orthodoxy and that you’re not ashamed of the name of Jesus.
“In the name of Jesus” means that what is being done, what is being prayed is consistent with the character, the nature, the person of Jesus. Because Jesus is God, what he does inseparable from the Father—for he always does only that which is the will of his Father; to see him, is to see the Father (John 8:19, 28-29; see Hebrews 1:3). To say, to act ”in Jesus’ name,” is to pronounce that what is being done or prayed is in accord with the will of God. This is why Jesus could promise his disciples
Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it. (John 14:12-14).
We should be very careful—not ritualistically or casually—when we attach Jesus’ name to our prayers. Are we certain that what we are praying is in accord with God’s will? If it is not according to God’s will, and we are attaching Jesus’ character and person to that prayer, pronouncing it to be consistent with who he is, then it seems to me that that is blasphemy.
Peter told the crowd that the lame man was healed “by faith in the name of Jesus,” that it was “Jesus’ name and the faith that comes through him that has completely healed him” (3:16). “Faith” is a knowledge of God’s will and action consistent with God’s will (obedience). “Faith in Jesus” then is a knowledge of God’s will and the strength that comes through Jesus to act consistent with his will. This man was healed because it was God’s will, revealed in and made possible through Jesus.
It’s not the miracles that we see in the book of Acts that should grab our attention and wish to perform. It is the life of faith, the life lived “in Jesus’ name” exemplified in the book of Acts that should grab our attention and that we should long to live. God calls us to live and act just as Peter and John lived and acted—in accord with the will of God. Do you believe in miracles?