Proclaimer Blog
What the miracles don’t prove…
I’ve noticed that preachers often follow a miracle passage by saying, “…and this shows that Jesus is God”. My problem is this: I may be perverse, but it seems to me that it doesn’t do anything of the sort. Elijah, Elisha, Peter, Paul, and others did miracles, and we don’t conclude that they too are gods.
Surely it would be truer to say that “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power” and this is why he did miracles (Acts 10:38). Each miracle is a signpost, a pointer to something not only of Jesus’ identity, but also his work. And they are different. When Jesus heals a leper, the ‘shape’ of the miracle shows us something of his work of undoing the infectious and isolating power of sin. When Jesus feeds a large crowd, we learn that he is the one who feeds and sustains the people of God through the ‘wilderness’. When he raises the dead, it is a pointer to what he does spiritually and will one day do physically, in the resurrection. And so on. Each one shows that Jesus is God’s Spirit-anointed instrument to do some part of God’s rescue work.
Oh, true, together with his claims, his purity, his teaching, and above all his resurrection, we may see that they were pointers to his deity. But let’s not overload individual miracles with a burden they cannot bear.