Wilson The Wonder-Working God

Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Miracles
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3675-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Do you believe in miracles? Walking on water. Multiplying the fish and the loaves. Raising Lazarus from the dead. The miracles of Jesus may be well known, but they're often misunderstood. In The Wonder-Working God, pastor Jared Wilson wants to help us see that there's more than meets the eye when it comes to the miraculous events recorded in the Gospels. From the humble wonder of the incarnation to the blinding glory of the transfiguration, this book shows how Jesus's miracles reveal his divinity, authority, and ultimate mission: restoring us and this world to a right relationship with God.

Jared C. Wilson is assistant professor of pastoral ministry at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and director of the Pastoral Training Center at Liberty Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri. He is a popular author and conference speaker, and also blogs regularly at Gospel Driven Church, hosted by the Gospel Coalition. His books include Gospel Wakefulness; The Storytelling God; and The Wonder-Working God.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Jared C.

Leseproben

Introduction

No one believes in miracles anymore. We are much too smart for that. The earth is round and our brains are evolved. Our creation is in the lab, our resurrection in the work of the microbiologist, our ascension in the journeys of the astronaut. Who needs revelation when we have the endless diversionary enlightenment of the Internet? Who needs prophets when we have experts?

Some scientists tell us that the things we often call miracles are statistical aberrations in the natural order of things, random outliers in the overwhelmingly “normal” flow of everyday events. Most say that what we label “a miracle” is simply an illusion, a trick on the eye, a misperception misattributed. Every event has a perfectly natural explanation, they say; we simply don’t have all the data needed to explain what we’ve perceived. Scientism, which hinges on what may be observed, in this case insists that seeing is not believing. There are, then, rational explanations for every unexplained event, and the supernatural, by presupposition, cannot be one of them.

In this way, once again, science is pitted against religion, and to choose one is to disavow the other.

In the age of reality television and viral video, everything is extraordinary and therefore nothing is. We have no need for miracles, says the spirit of the age, because we are sufficiently advanced and entertained. Superstition is less and less acceptable as an explanation for the world and as an escape from the mundane life it offers.

Our miracles have become the stuff of sentiment, removed from the world of the supernatural and safely nestled in the inspirational world of human potential. In movies such as Miracle on 34th Street and The Polar Express, the power of belief becomes the miracle. “Anything’s possible,” goes the idea, “if you just believe.” Many of us see this mantra repeated in a variety of ways every day in our Facebook newsfeeds and on Twitter.

The closest we may come to the miraculous in the popular imagination is the cultural fascination with the so-called paranormal. Vampires and zombies are the rage right now. Witches and warlocks appear to be in the next wave of occult appeal. When I was a kid, I consumed everything I could find related to UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster. Those sorts of speculative fiction are making comebacks still. My ten-year-old daughter loves the show Fact or Faked, wherein a team of special-effects experts and videographers examines videos of unexplained phenomena, then attempts to re-create the footage in a bid to conclude the veracity of the originals, or lack thereof. In nearly every case, they conclude that the video footage is the result of a perpetrated hoax or simple mistaken identity. However, the show succeeds not because it appeals to our inner skeptic but because it deftly raises our hopes for that one conclusive sign of something out there new, different, mysterious, out of the natural order—and real. On the popular television show The X-Files, FBI special agent Fox Mulder hung a now-iconic black-and-white poster on his office wall featuring a flying saucer and a caption reading, “I want to believe.”

For all of our technological advances and instantaneous access to exhaustive information, we still carve out a space for the mysterious. Many of us say we don’t. But we do. Some of our most ardent atheists have made clear their conditions for belief. They require a miracle. They don’t believe in miracles, just as they don’t believe in God, but if a miracle could be legitimately demonstrated, they claim, they would reverse their disbelief and agree that God exists.

But this is not how miracles ever worked. Even the miracles God grants to Moses in corroboration of his mission from YHWH to secure the children of Israel’s release from bondage only serve to harden Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh says, “Prove yourselves” (Ex. 7:9), but even when his demand is met, he is not satisfied (v. 13). When God sends fire to consume Elijah’s wet altar and shame the prophets of Baal, there is no convincing anyone that a God exists but only that “The LORD, he is God; the LORD, he is God” (1 Kings 18:39).

Further, in the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life and ministry, miracles seem to be plentiful, but none of them is meant to convince his audiences that something like a god exists. Most of them already believe that. And divine authenticity is only the tip of the iceberg of the meaning of Jesus’s miracles.

Certainly Jesus is God, and authenticating his deity is undoubtedly one of the functions of his miracles. But that is still scratching the surface. Jesus himself rebukes the crowds that are looking for signs. In one instance, he tells a parable of a dead man in the condemnation of hell begging Abraham for a resurrected witness to evangelize his living relatives (Luke 16:19–31). Jesus has Abraham tell the tortured man that unless there is belief in the Scriptures, a miracle won’t accomplish a thing (v. 31). Jesus later tells Thomas that it is more blessed to believe without seeing (John 20:29).

The point is this: the miracles are more than they’re cracked up to be, but probably less than we often make of them. The miracles are not the smoking gun, in other words. But they are the bright explosions of the violent spiritual campaign against evil.

Even today, the New Testament miracles do not serve so much to prove that there is a God but that the Lord is God and we are not.

It’s a subtle distinction, to be sure, but the miracles in the Bible never appear to serve God proving himself so much as God showing himself. The Lord consistently refuses to be put on the defensive, as if he must prove his existence to the jury of mortal disbelief in order to save his life. Instead, he simply and majestically shows off. And in the biblical economy of space-time—which is the actual economy of space-time—what we eventually learn is that in a fallen and broken world groaning for redemption, the miraculous is the normal. By contrast, what we have come to call “normal life” is not normal. Miracles don’t turn things upside down, in other words, but rightside up.

I’ll say more along those lines in chapter 1, but for the moment, let’s consider this: What if the miracles in the Bible—and miracles today, should they still occur—are not God trying to convince us he’s “up there somewhere,” looming out there in heaven and trying on earth to get us to acknowledge him, but are actually God showing us that he is right here and right now in charge? What if, in other words, God is not an interloper in our world, but the things we find so familiarly “everyday”—sin, corruption, injustice, decay, death—these very “laws of nature,” are interlopers in his?

When we are able to see the world that way, we get closer to the heart of the gospel. The miracles of Jesus serve that end, and when we see the world through the reality of the kingdom of God, the miracles become just as provocative, just as scandalous, in this day as they were in first-century Palestine. We post-postmoderns pride ourselves on being beyond all that superstitious hokum, but we place our hopes in the same sorts of sentimental magic as the ancients. We worship our accomplishments and our knowledge, because we worship ourselves. It makes no difference that our golden calves are gadgets and Google, while their golden calves were, well, golden calves. There is nothing new under the sun, quantum mechanics and particle physics notwithstanding. We seek a heaven on earth, be it natural or “supernatural,” and we don’t want this Jesus coming into the mix with his self-referential agitating. By reason and rationalization, we figure we can do just fine without him.

No, we don’t believe in miracles anymore. We’re much too smart for all that. But as it turns out, God’s power is not hindered by disbelief. We don’t believe in miracles. Well, okay. Turnabout is fair play, and the miracles don’t believe in us.

The kingdom has come, is coming, and will come. You and I cannot impede this reality with our disbelief any more than we can enhance it with our allegiance. Gravity did not become a law of nature when it was discovered. Who knows how many times that treasure in the field (Matt. 13:44) was trampled over before it was found?

The miracles do nothing for those who do not have the spiritual eyes to see them. Of the five thousand who ate Jesus’s miracle meal in John 6, how many do you suppose remained after he began explaining the significance? It seems from the text only a few. Even some identified as disciples abandoned the mission (v. 66).

In some instances in the Gospels, the miracles have an effect also innate to the parables—confounding witnesses as much as enlightening them.

So we may keep building our Babel towers, be they monuments to religion or rationale, and even as we keep declaring our view of how the world is, we remain confused on the way it was meant to be. Our counterfeit heavens are both too earthy and not earthy enough. And part of God’s plan in the revelation of the glory of his Son Jesus is to discredit and demolish both naturalistic utopia and Gnostic bliss. Somehow in the proclamation of the gospel of Christ and his kingdom is the merging of heaven and earth, in which each becomes what it was...