Posted 6:02 PM by Sarah G.
The Role of Preaching in the Covenant Renewal Liturgy
Duane Garner

In every city in the United States there are at least a couple of Christian radio stations which broadcast preaching around the clock, seven days a week. Many areas have a Christian television station or two which broadcast worship services several hours a day. Almost any bookstore will have a religious section stocked with scores of books written by popular preachers which are really nothing more than collections of transcribed sermons. While there are still many parts of the world where Christian preaching is quite scarce, in North America preaching may be found in all of its various forms without much effort at all. One must no longer wait until the church doors open to be exposed to preaching.

Such observations may lead us to inquire about the health of today’s pulpit and how are we doing under all this preaching. We may ask if our culture is a great example of what such a preaching-saturated society should look like. Indeed those are important, and almost rhetorical questions, but before we can rightly critique the pulpit in our day and judge whether it is doing its job, we must first ask what it is there for. What is the chief end of preaching on the Lord’s day and how does that relate to the particular emphases that are vital to the spiritual health of this generation and culture?

Whether the response has been completely thought-through or is simply a default to tradition or preference, every Christian church has an answer to this question. A great majority of churches in North America see preaching solely as evangelism . Week after week the sermon serves only as a plea to the non-Christian to repent and turn to Christ for salvation. The faithful Christian in such churches never hears anything more from the preacher than the basic building blocks of repentance and faith. The success or failure of such sermons is determined by the number of people who “walk the aisle” each morning and those Christians in attendance who have already repented and believed are left stunted, immature, and untaught, year upon year.

Other churches use preaching as the weekly Christian pep rally. Congregants are encouraged to reach farther, press harder, climb higher and do better. The pastor is a motivational speaker who shouts aphorisms and sports clichés, pumping his fist in the air, inflaming the crowd with emotional fervor.
Some preachers use their allotted time to dole out bits of popular wisdom to the church. Their sermons sound as if self-help books were used as the chief source material. The preacher seeks to bring about emotional healing, higher self-esteem and better mental health. Sometimes scriptures are used as proof texts for the various lessons, but the sermons are mainly driven by secular psychology.

Larger congregations hear many sermons that are really nothing more than commercials or recruitment drives for certain church ministries. Such preaching grabs a few Bible passages about giving and sharing and then sets off to entice people to sign up for mercy ministries. Perhaps a couple of verses from Acts or the Epistles are enlisted to get folks to go on a missions trip, or scriptures which speak about discipleship are used to encourage members to join small group Bible studies. The goal of the sermon is to promote one ministry or another and to ask the members of the congregation to pitch in and ensure the success of whatever initiative happens to the hot item of the day.

Still other churches see the sermon as the highest and best opportunity to equip and train the people of God. The pastor views the congregation as the great big seminary class he always wanted to teach. The people are busily scratching notes in their notebooks and margins of their Bibles as the pastor works his way through sub-point three, letter “L”, Roman number IV of his outline. Preaching becomes an educational experience with the goal of filling heads with bits of theological knowledge.

Then there are those churches who do not see the benefit of preaching at all. These consider it to be an antiquated means of communication with little or no relevance in our day. Dramatic plays, open discussions, panels of experts and celebrity interviews are preferred over one man standing and speaking.

I readily admit that these examples are mostly caricatures and there is quite a bit of preaching that falls into none of these categories, and some that is simply too lame and boring to have a discernable purpose. To be fair, most of these models simply over-emphasize things that all good preaching should accomplish, though they make the whole of preaching an exaggeration of one of its parts. With the revivalists we can agree that preaching must certainly be evangelistic in the sense that the gospel can be seen in every section of scripture. With others we can say that it is good to preach sermons which exhort and encourage and we can concur there are times when it is necessary to call the congregation to actually follow through and do one thing or another. With the academics we may affirm that it is imperative that preachers convey the truths of scripture in an intelligent manner and that there is no excuse for ignorance or sloppiness. We recognize with the innovators that we need not bore the daylights out of a congregation. All of these things are true, but not one of them by itself comprises the whole purpose of preaching.

We can hope to reform none of the problems with preaching in the Christian Church until we first consider the particular problems we have with preaching in our own tradition, and ponder the solutions to those. The tendency in Reformed circles has been to lean more toward the academic model of preaching. While there are a few who have been infected in a number of ways by revivalist and Baptist influences, a typical traditional Reformed sermon can usually be described as a lengthy pedagogical theology lecture. The feeling seems to be that the longer sermons a congregation can endure the more serious that congregation is about God and His word. Certainly as the exegesis becomes more tedious and the prose more turgid, the hearers must certainly be learning more. After all, learning is the main intent of the preaching in this model. Songs and prayers are for the heart, but preaching is for the head. The praying and singing in the worship is merely the build-up to the sermon which is the climax of the service. Thus, in one sense the sermon is relied upon to do all of the things that must be accomplished when God’s people gather, and the preacher attempts to accomplish those ends by simply talking about them for a long time.

Such preaching is as unbalanced as any of the other models mentioned, but it is by no means a twenty-first century innovation. The Reformed orientation toward preaching has not changed substantially since the sixteenth century. The Reformation produced distinct attitudes toward preaching and thoughts about the purposes of preaching and we have maintained the whole kit, both good and bad elements preserved, handed down to us in the generations since.

Many of those practices which have been established as the most important distinctives of Reformed worship were initially instituted as responses to areas in which other branches of the Christian Church were in error. Reformed preaching as it is today is a product of the manner in which the Reformers and the Puritans responded to the Medieval Church and to the Church of England as they sought to greater emphasize the primacy of the Word of God in Christian worship. As such, it is necessary to study what Reformed preaching is not, by studying the ideas that it intended to reform, before attempting to study what it is.

The medieval Church against which the Reformers raised their voices and their pens was dominated by a theologically illiterate, hermeneutically untrained clergy. Sermons, on those rare occasions when they were included in the mass, were moralistic, filled with apocryphal illustrative stories and anecdotes , and had rather little to do with exposition of the Scriptures. Because the weekly Mass was performed in Latin, which was practically a foreign language to the majority of the European people, and because there was not yet an efficient means of reproducing the text of the Bible, the world had been cut off from the written Word of God for several centuries. As a result, superstition took the place of faith for the laity and it followed that the people were gradually separated from the Lord’s table; first from communing with their children, then from the cup and finally from the bread and participatory worship altogether. Medieval worshippers were, in general, uncomprehending observers to the worship of the clergy with no access to Word or Sacrament.

This is the Church in which John Calvin, the key influencer of the reformed tradition, was raised. Knowing first-hand the distance of the people from the Scriptures, the most urgent reform for Calvin was not only to bring the people back into participation in worship but to make it possible for them to hear the Word of the Lord in their own language. He worked to translate and adapt the worship of the Christian Church as it existed to both meet the need of the day and to reinstate patristic practice as much as was possible. Calvin did not see his work as innovation, but as restoration.

It has been said that the reformation was a preaching of reform, but it was also a reform of preaching. Calvin was strongly convicted that the preaching of the Lord’s Day should pass on Christ’s teaching. Calvin preached continuously through the books of the Bible, preaching the New Testament on the Lord’s Day and the Old Testament on weekdays. He used no notes, but so immersed himself in his text that he walked directly from his study to his pulpit and there built the sermon right in front of his congregation, concentrating on both the people before him and the text at hand. Such was the appetite for the Word of God that people regularly attended two or three sermons each Lord’s day and up to fifteen other sermons throughout the rest of the week. Some accounts describe the great length and frequency of those sermons, and the people’s attentiveness to them, and some scholars then proceed to use this to bludgeon the modern man over his short attention span. Perhaps it is more appropriate to view these facts as an illustration of how starved the people were for the Scriptures. People who had never heard the Word in all of their lives suddenly were refreshed by the ability to walk into the church and hear the Bible read and preached in their own native tongue.

Calvin did not minimize the importance of other necessary elements of worship, such as communion or confessions of faith, or elevate preaching to become the all-in-all of the Lord’s Day gathering, as some second and third generation Reformers eventually did, but in all of this Calvin did place an immense emphasis on the preaching of the Word. It is an emphasis that has been passed on to every Church and preacher who claims the heritage of the Reformation, and is a focus that was picked up and carried by the English Puritans who followed Calvin.

In order to understand the Puritan contribution to the Reformed tradition, it is important to understand the nature of the Church of England against which they struggled. Queen Elizabeth, who as queen of England was also head of the Anglican Church in those days, had a marked distaste for preaching, believing it necessary to do so only about four times a year. Though her desire for such a truncated pulpit ministry was never fully realized, it was a fitting expression of the spirit of the age, and that comes as no surprise given the low quality and ineptitude of the clergy. Because it was common for pastoral offices to be bought and sold and traded for favors, the teaching and preaching ministry of churches in England was left largely to vicars who could scarcely recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ Creed, let alone teach their congregations the rudiments of the faith. What little skilled pulpit oratory could be found was seriously influenced by the flowery, prissy Baroque style - big on style, short on substance.

Against the Church of England came the Puritans with their profound preaching, precise theology and utter abhorrence for anything remotely related to papalism. The English Puritans were appalled at a State Church which had all of the outward appearances of religion, but which did not produce the piety or general morality they expected. Thus their primary focus became one of reforming the inner life of the Christian. The English church had failed to produce the sort of preaching or scholasticism that would achieve such a reform, so the work of the Puritan was to do the theological legwork necessary to understand the relationships between the spiritual life and the material life, law and grace, human will and divine decree, and then to preach sermons which would accordingly call people to repentance and faith based on their conclusions.

With this focus, the intended audience of the Puritan sermon was no longer the faithful people of God but the non-Christian and the nominal Christian. The sole aim of Puritan preaching became the conversion of its hearers. All other elements of the liturgy were stripped away, first because they too closely resembled the practices of both the Roman and State Church and secondly to accommodate the more detailed, analytical, lengthier sermon. Preaching then became entirely divorced from the liturgy and stood on its own as the only necessary element of Christian worship. Though the Reformers had once restored the congregation to full participation in worship, the Puritan preachers reversed the trend, stripping away and minimizing almost all other rudiments of Christian worship. Worship became something that happened between the ears and under the hat and required no other action on the part of the congregant than to sit and let the lecture wash over him.

Today, the great majority of Reformed preaching is not too far from the basic Puritan model. The entire Lord’s Day gathering in many Reformed churches is driven by and centered around the sermon, which is ordinarily marked by its academic language, arcane theology and tedious delivery. This present reality is a world away from Calvin’s original intent when he endeavored to place the preaching of the Word back in its proper place in worship.

Calvin wrote, “No assembly of the Church should be held without the word being preached, prayers being offered, the Lord’s supper administered and alms given.” , indicating that the weekly meeting should be a balanced celebration of Word and Sacrament. Calvin did not intend to obliterate the mass, but simply to rid it of those things which were distractions and not helpful to the ministry of the Word and Sacrament. Throughout his time in Strasbourg and Geneva, he appealed to the patristic pattern of worship and sought to present Communion every single Lord’s day. Such was the importance of proper liturgy to Calvin. He desired to have truly “Word-centered” worship by not simply preaching the Word, but obeying the Word in renewing covenant and eating with the Lord every week.

Some Reformed churches have returned to a balanced understanding of the Lord’s service, and acknowledge the great importance of following the liturgical pattern of cleansing-consecration-communion each Lord’s day. With this, I trust, a re-thinking of the role of the sermon in covenant renewal worship will soon follow. Because the sermon is no longer the only weighty thing to be accomplished during the worship of the congregation, and that it is no longer the climax of the service, (that role having been taken by the sacrament of communion), the preacher must re-visit what a sermon exists to accomplish and to work to make sure that it fits into the greater context of what is taking place when God’s people gather together before Him.

Many others have worked to describe and define each section of the covenant renewal liturgy and have demonstrated how it is patterned both by the covenantal structure of the entire Bible and the liturgy of the temple sacrifice. As such, covenant renewal worship is the only order-of-worship the Scriptures provide us. But for the purpose of this topic we need only to consider where the sermon comes within that well-planned liturgy. Preaching comes after the Church has repented and has been forgiven of her sins and before she eats at the Lord’s table. Thus, preaching arrives at the center point in the order of events. The children of God, having been forgiven, are now ready to enter and eat with their Lord, but before they are fed, He speaks to them. It is here in this moment that they have a perfect standing before God, having called upon the sacrifice of Christ to cleanse them and having determined to turn from their sins. They are holy, they are righteous and they are gathered around to hear the voice of their Father.

Imagine being called in for supper as a child and as you sit down at the table your father mentions that before you can eat, he has a few charts to show you, and pulls out an overhead projector, peering at you as he lectures for an hour, making sure you are taking copious notes. Or imagine if he were to begin a long tirade on the legitimacy of your ancestry right there as the food sat on the table, bringing up all sorts of doubts as to whether you were really his own child. How much more odd would it be if he were to declare from the beginning of the conversation that you were not his at all, and begin to beg you to join the family, listing with great detail all of his grievances against you. Though this all may sound quite absurd, this is exactly what the preacher is saying that God does when he preaches an excessively academic or evangelistic sermon in the time designated for covenant renewal.

When a God-ordained pastor stands before a Christian congregation and opens the Scriptures, his words are as authoritative the very voice of God. The Second Helvetic Confession reads:

“The Preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful; and that neither any other Word of God is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good.”

As the pastor preaches and the people attend, both must realize what is taking place. The Father is speaking, and His message is in the context of renewing and maintaining His relationship with His people, which in turn causes them to worship Him and seek to glorify Him alone above all other things. When the Father calls us to the table, He is not waiting there with a dozen theological vocabulary words we need to learn, nor is He preparing to bring charges against us. He is there for us to enjoy Him and His fellowship and to take great joy in His wisdom, love, beauty, transcendence, holiness, effulgence, mercy, sovereignty, goodness and providence. He is the perfect loving Father at the table with His children, and His children adore Him and are delighted by His presence there with them.

It may be that the congregation on a given Lord’s day requires some instruction, or exhortation, or an exposition of the gospel, but nothing should eclipse the central purpose of preaching in such a way that the congregation is brought by the exposition of the Scriptures to worship their Father and enjoy His fellowship. All other purposes can be worked out and attained as secondary means to get to the one vital end of displaying and worshipping the Lord of Hosts. If we think of preaching as the way that God gets us to the table and visits with us before the meal, the result will surely be less like withering academia and more like brisk doxology.

Luther taught that where the word of Christ is preached, there is the saving presence of Christ. Preaching, in a sense, is a means of grace to the congregation. Preaching saves us in that it is the very Word of the Lord which turns our heart to honor and adore our Lord. Great preaching causes us to worship Jesus as Lord.

It might be appropriate then to term preaching which uses the Scriptures to incite the hearers to worship God exegetical doxology. It is preaching which incorporates both the head and the heart, speaking to the whole man as God created Him. It is recognizing that worship does not end at the prayer for illumination only to start back up after the offering, but that worship is taking place all throughout the service. It is a realization that preaching is an act of worship both on the part of the speaker and the hearer.

Preaching must be exegetical in order to do any justice to the Biblical text. A Biblical sermon is one that is Bible-soaked. The style in which the Scriptures are formulated demands that they be unpacked; they only come in an highly-concentrated form. They Scriptures must be read aloud and their meaning made clear and their truths easily accessible to the hearers. There are other more appropriate occasions for lengthy theological lectures to be given, but our Father knows the frame of His children. Preaching on the Lord’s day must model the act of a good father explaining the mysteries of the cosmos to his small son in a way that the child can understand. The best exegesis makes texts simpler, not more difficult, to understand.

Preaching must be doxological lest it become untethered from the rest of the liturgy and exist on its own as some self-sufficient entity divorced from the worship of the Lord Jesus Christ. When the Church gathers to worship it joins itself to the praise of the angels and the saints in heaven and to the Church militant and to the Church triumphant and to the Church throughout all ages, all joining with one voice in adoration for her King. By preaching, hearing, believing and following the Word of God, we worship him in the most profound sense possible. It is through preaching that the glory of God is revealed. When God’s Word is heard, God is glorified. Preaching displays the treasures of God - His perfect knowledge, His sacrificial love, His unfailing goodness – that we might rejoice in them.

The highest and best goal for the preacher on the Lord’s day is to stir up worship in the hearts of the people through the exposition of the Scriptures. Such preaching is consistent with the context of covenant renewal liturgy. The worship service is not the appropriate occasion for a two-hour theology lecture. It is appropriate to spend a reasonable amount of time expositing a modest portion of Scripture, to give clear understanding to the hearers and exhort them to worship the God revealed therein.

Where exegetical-doxological preaching is practiced, a number of beneficial side-effects can be seen. First, the balance between Word and Sacrament is restored. The Reformers had no intention of replacing the Eucharistic service with a preaching service. They did elevate the role of the sermon, but they still acknowledged that the audible Word of God in the Bible should be met with the corresponding “visible words” of God in the sacraments. Today, the sermon has overrun every other element of Christian worship and needs to be put back in its proper place to show that Christianity is not a religion of the head only, but is a religion concerned with material reality in obedience to the Word of our Lord by eating bread and drinking wine, among other things, as He commanded.

Secondly, a less cerebral and more doxological sermon makes the entire liturgy more accessible to every member of society. Presbyterians have been mocked for their failure in reaching the lower classes and the less educated members of communities. By removing the academic element of worship we open the door wider for anyone to come and taste and see that the Lord is good, no matter what their educational background. By removing the sermon from its place of absolute power in the liturgy and giving it a shorter time period and a reduced role, we are deferring to the needs of our weaker or more elderly brothers and sisters with various infirmities and handicaps who can neither hear, nor understand, nor endure such an exercise. So too families with young children can enjoy worshipping God as a family without running their little ones to the end of their rope. Worship is for all the people of God, but dull academic lectures are as prohibitive as the medieval rood screen in keeping people from truly benefiting from being in the presence of their Father.

Lastly, exegetical doxology reduces the need for a strong personality in the pulpit. Many congregations have men as their pastors who are wonderful shepherds, but who are not particularly gifted orators. If the duty of the preacher was simply to read the text and draw a few brief exhortations from it, the congregation would be better served than if they expected their pastor to keep them interested in a ninety-minute Bible study. It is far less tempting to form a personality cult around a man who speaks mostly Scripture and who does not feel the burden of carrying the entire worship service on his back, relying instead upon the work of the liturgy to bear the worshipper through the act of renewing covenant and fellowshipping with his Father.

We are not faced today with the cultural and ecclesiastical issues that Calvin was faced with. People have more ready access to the Word of God than ever in human history and most Christians have been immersed in it all their lives. While Calvin’s greatest concern was the people’s gross lack of basic Bible knowledge, we have different concerns in our age. For several generations the Church has drained the sacraments of all meaning and has relegated the role of the Church almost to the periphery. The only way to effect restoration and reformation in those areas is to work at it first among the faithful by emphasizing a correct view of those things in the weekly Lord’s day meeting. The overextended role of preaching must decrease, so that the Sacraments may increase.

Preaching must be assimilated into the larger purpose of worship on the Lord’s day. No matter how pious we may sound when we say how much we would prefer three hour sermons, we simply do not have that luxury when it comes to the weekly covenant renewal gathering, however riveting such a sermon may be. The liturgy must become balanced. Preaching must be exegetical doxology, nothing more or less. It must get us to the table, and get us there quickly before we fall asleep and the food gets cold.

Posted 9:15 AM by Sarah G.
Toward a Biblical Understanding of Miracles
Duane Garner

A child is born and everyone who peers over the edge of his crib exclaims with great joy, “Oh, he’s such a little miracle!” A man stricken with cancer, given just months to live, returns to his doctor for a check-up to find that his body has been ridden of the disease. The doctor, lacking any other explanation says simply, “It must be a miracle.” A woman accidentally leaves her purse, full of cash on the bench at the mall, she returns an hour later to find it undisturbed, and exhales, “It’s a miracle.”

The word “miracle” is almost universally employed by Christians and non-Christians alike when one wishes to describe a transcendent, unexpected, amazing or otherwise unexplainable event. When we are overwhelmed with emotions of awe, relief or great joy we wish to acknowledge the possibility of “other-worldly” involvement in the course of events that lead to our good pleasure. But, speaking from a Biblical cosmology, can we rightly label all such occurrences as miraculous, or is it possible that we are diluting the true intent and meaning of miracles by doing so?

While we are not necessarily bound to use the words in our everyday speech in precisely the same manner in which the Bible uses those words, it is good for us to realize what we are saying when we employ language which is specifically Biblical (Footnote: I’m thinking of words rich in theological meaning like “salvation”, “prayer”, “worship” or even “God”. It might be unwise at best when someone helps you out of a jam to exclaim, “You’re my savior!”.) The word “miracle” is just one of many words which has been commandeered time and time again by various religious and philosophical movements in the course of promoting their agenda.

Eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume attacked any usage of the words “miracle” and “miraculous” in his efforts to rationalize away the content of the Bible. He believed in a Natural Law which never changed for any reason and that it would be impossible for anything to happen outside of the framework of the usual and expected order of events. If anyone were to describe an event outside of the ordinary, he would dismiss it as poor perception or ignorance on the part of the witness. He wrote, “…no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous… For first, there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good-sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity, as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind, as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same time, attesting facts performed in such a public manner and in so celebrated a part of the world, as to render the detection unavoidable: All which circumstances are requisite to give us a full assurance in the testimony of men.” (David Hume, in his paper “Of Miracles”)
Thus for Hume, the entire integrity of the Scriptures passed away with the impossibility of the miraculous.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is one Friedrich Schleiermacher who could not think of anything that cannot be described as a miracle. “Miracle,” he said, “is simply the religious name for event. Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant.” (Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, p. 88) For Schleiermacher, miracles are as ubiquitous as Coke machines, you see one every where you look. Both of these views, as opposite as they seem, accomplish the same thing in the end. They both mangle the Biblical concept and meaning of miraculous events, one by denying their existence entirely, the other by redefining them so that any event, no matter how dull or mundane is a miracle, so long as one looks at it “religiously”.

Over and above the philosophical wrangling over meanings of the word over the last century, we have seen an increasing number of individuals who claim to be the instruments and means of God’s miraculous works. There has been a dramatic surge in the interest in signs, wonders and, most notably, “faith-healings” in the Church. This activity, which has been spasmodic at best through the history of the Church, has in this century rooted itself squarely in the mainstream of the Christianity and has increased at a time when the average Christian expresses a declining dependence on and interest in the Church and her special ministry of Word and Sacrament.

T. H. Huxley writes, “The first step in this is to come to a clear understanding as to the meaning of the term employed. Argumentation whether miracles are possible, and if possible, credible, is mere beating the air until the arguers have agreed what they mean by the word ‘miracle.’” The purpose here is to work toward a Biblical definition of the word “miracle” in order that we may rightly understand the role miracles play in God’s relationship with His creation, and so that we know how to respond when we see them. My working definition is that miracles are “divine acts of extraordinary providence or judgment performed in specific times in history by specific persons in order to reveal aspects of the glory of God.”

With this definition, I am not attempting to cast an iron definition that can be applied to every event in history. There is still plenty of room to debate whether certain events in the Bible would rightly be termed miraculous, or whether they fall under the category of “ordinary providence”. I am endeavoring to develop a definition of the term so that when we approach an event in the Bible or in our own experience, we know what to do with it. It seems that the events that the inspired writers termed “miracles” require us to take a certain perspective, as I hope to demonstrate.

Further, I do not wish to undermine our due thankfulness for God’s gracious ordinary daily providences. (Footnote: By using the word “ordinary”, I don’t mean “mundane” or “dull” in any sense. I mean simply the usual or normal condition or course of events) God exercises extensive, ongoing, sovereign control over all aspects of his creation. He makes the rain to fall (Matthew 5:45), causes the grass to grow (Psalm 104:14), protects the birds of the air (Matthew 6:25-30), clothes the flowers (Matthew 10:29-30), and continually carries along all things by his word of power (Acts, 17:27-28; Hebrews 1:3). God does not simply intervene occasionally in the working of His creation. He heals sicknesses through the means of medicine and the attention of physicians, continually offers unexpected answers to prayer and daily presents us with wonders that we cannot necessarily explain. God gives us our beautiful children (Psalm 127, 128) and causes the sun to rise every day, but not one of these things is ever identified as a miracle within the Scriptures.

It is clear from these and many other passages that God has lovingly established a regular routine, or “liturgy”, for His creation, and because of this His creatures can find security in the laws that He has put in place. Things fall to the ground when you let go of them, it gets dark outside after supper and the weather gets warmer in July. We can count on these things happening all of the time, and we do not expect them ever to change. The Scriptures tell us, however that there have been relatively brief periods in history when God has found it necessary to suspend his ordinary providences and judgments in favor of extraordinary providences and judgments. It is these measures that I believe are most accurately identified as miracles.

The New Testament uses three words almost interchangeably to describe such mighty extraordinary acts of God. We find terata, translated “wonders”, dunamis, translated “powers” and semeion, translated “signs”. All three words are used in the same sentence in Acts 2:22, which reads, “Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles (dunamesin)and wonders (terasin) and signs (semeiois), which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know:” While there are different shades of meaning between the three, which point primarily to the purposes of those works done by Christ and the ends which they achieved, all three words point to the several works Jesus did during His ministry that served to display His power and deity, and testify to the truth which He spoke.

So now, moving through my definition, it is quite easy to see that miracles are divine acts. Exodus 15:11 reads, “Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?” The Bible describes these extraordinary events as direct works of the hand of God (Psalm 136:4; Psalm 72:18) regardless of whether He uses men as the intermediate means to work them. Miracles are part of God the Holy Spirit’s work to restore glory to a fallen creation. They are outstanding displays of divine power by which God works out His will and makes clearly manifest His might. It is important that we know that when the Biblical text speaks of a “sign”, “wonder” or “miracle”, it is speaking of an act of God, rather than an achievement of men, or a remarkable turn of fate. Therefore, if we are to use the term “miracle” biblically, we could not rightly use the phrases, “miracle of technology” or “miracle of innovation”. Miracles are God-wrought when they are spoken of in the Scriptures.

Miracles are extraordinary. It is difficult to describe miracles in such a way that does not compromise God’s direct and unmitigated involvement in the everyday course of events in His creation. Most of the definitions offered in theology texts do not seem to encompass the entire scope of God’s sovereign rule. Some say that miracles are “events which break the laws of nature.” I am not sure whether they mean to imply that there is an uncaused, self-existent “Law of Nature” operating independently of God against which He wages a war when He works a miracle, or whether it is meant to say that God has Himself established certain laws of nature, but then sets about breaking them when He desires to work a miracle. If this definition were true then either God is working against an equal power, or God is working against Himself. Any definition which includes the word “supernatural” would seem to be appealing to some understanding of a “natural” law that is being transcended or broken.

Another way of describing miracles is to say they are events “which couldn’t happen apart from the power of God.” Since nothing can happen apart from the power of God, such a definition would only serve to support Schleiermacher’s contention that everything is a miracle. Still others have said that miracles are “manifestations of little known laws”. In other words, God is not really doing anything special, He is just taking advantage of our ignorance and playing off the fact that we are not as scientifically advanced as He is. If we spoke this way about miracles, the rationalist could easily respond that those miraculous events in the Scriptures are really just some simple slight of hand and that the ancient man was too slow to know what was going on. They could contend that we do not see that sort of thing today, because we are less gullible.

One more way of talking about miracles is to say that they are “events which are inexplicable on the basis of usual patterns”. This definition is still not satisfactory because it relies on our ability to explain the event. Five-hundred years ago we were not able to explain a great number of the functions of the human body. Did that mean that they were all miracles until we were able to explain them? This view would mean that as soon as someone comes up with a way to turn water into wine, thus supposedly proving and explaining how it happened, the Miracle at the Wedding Feast would no longer be considered a miracle.

All of these definitions have in common the post-modern deistic perspective that in order for miracles to take place, God must sporadically break into creation, and play for a while before returning to His far-away distant throne. They also presuppose that it is not outside the bounds of reason that we may someday get to the point where we can dissect each of the Biblical miracles down to the subatomic level and thus explain exactly how they happened. On the contrary, the Bible never defines miracles scientifically, but morally and typologically. What is in view in the Scriptural accounts of miracles is not the laws of nature that were broken or suspended, but the way that people were blessed or judged by those events and how those people in turn responded. Certainly God could have used geographical, meteorological and chemical phenomena to accomplish His desired ends, but the Bible is completely silent concerning all the forces that are in play behind miracles. (Footnote: Some suppose that the Red Sea crossing could have been possible with an earthquake and some seismic aftereffects. While that is certainly possible, it is not necessary to believe that in order to believe the Bible. If God could cause an earthquake when and where He wanted, then He could just dry up the water in that one spot, you know, like you learned in Sunday School)

So then, the best term that I can produce in keeping with the pre-modern concept of God’s relationship with His creation and without involving any concept of “the laws of nature” or any scientific rationalization is to state that they are “extraordinary providences and judgments”. As I stated above, God has sovereignly established patterns in both the heavens and earth and within our own bodies and carefully attends to those events day by day. At certain times He has chosen to radically shift the direction of those patterns in order to attract attention to certain truths, to reveal something of Himself and to display His glory and power. He is always in control of His creation and never breaks any of its laws, but when He does choose to disrupt the expected pattern or outcome of a thing, we can call that event a miracle.

For example, it can be said that the birth of a baby, the rising of the sun and the growth of a grain of wheat are all “ordinary” providences (Footnote: I want to maintain that these are all amazing, beautiful, and gloriously inexplicable things.). On the other hand, the birth of a baby to a virgin, the sun standing still, and the multiplying of a few loaves of bread to feed five thousand mouths are all “extraordinary” providences, and therefore miracles. Likewise, a man and wife who promise to give a certain amount of money to the Church but later decide to hoard the money for themselves, who then lose their jobs and have their house repossessed, could be called recipients of an “ordinary” judgment. If the same man and wife were to be struck dead on the steps of the church, we could call that an “extraordinary” judgment and therefore, a miracle.

The terms “ordinary” and “extraordinary” are not perfect by any means. It would still be difficult to draw the line between the two in order to categorize certain events in the Bible without begging the question, “How extraordinary is extraordinary?” (Footnote: Is Daniel’s night with the lions an example of extraordinary or ordinary providence? It is ordinary for lions not to eat when they are full, and lions can get along with humans if the conditions are right. I might say that if God had turned the lions into chickens that would have certainly been an extraordinary providence, but that the lions did not eat him (while it is certainly splendid and striking that God spared Daniel that night) seems to be quite ordinary. However, as I stated from the beginning, the purpose is not to place every event in the Bible in a pigeon hole. I wouldn’t spend much time arguing with someone who would call this a miracle.) Yet we need to speak of these things in such a way that we neither take for granted God’s everyday providences nor do we appeal to natural law to understand the spectacular providences. Our categorization of certain events should rely on further analysis and not these two terms alone.

Miracles are both judgmental and providential. When folks pray empty, non-descript prayers for miracles they fail to realize that Biblical miracles are not always welcome by those to whom they are given. Some signs and wonders are means of judgment. The wonders in Egypt before the exodus of Israel should immediately come to mind. God shifted the set patterns in His creation so that water turned to blood, leprosy, locusts and frogs multiplied and spread at an alarming rate. The scene must have surely been extraordinary. Through the prophet Micah, God promised to do more of the same: “According to the days of thy coming out of the land of Egypt will I shew unto him marvellous things. The nations shall see and be confounded at all their might: they shall lay their hand upon their mouth, their ears shall be deaf. They shall lick the dust like a serpent, they shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth: they shall be afraid of the LORD our God, and shall fear because of thee.” (Micah 7:15-17)

As He promised, Jesus came and His mighty acts served to seal the judgment of those who did not repent and believe. He said,
“Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon, which have been done in you, they had a great while ago repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment, than for you.” (Luke 10:13-14)

When Peter preached on the day of Pentecost concerning the display of power that was being demonstrated in that place, he quoted a passage from Joel that is full of the language of the judgment of Israel, and of the great and terrible “day of the Lord” with the images of “blood, fire and vapor of smoke”. (Acts 2:19). Though I have never heard anyone use the word “miracle” to describe a natural disaster, a famine or a plague, yet these things would be fully within the scope of the Biblical definition of the word.

Still, many miracles were very welcome, and were expressions of God’s loving and merciful providences upon their recipients. In pity, Jesus healed two blind men who cried out for mercy (Matthew 20:30, 34). Jesus was often moved with compassion when he saw a great crowd of people and healed their sicknesses (Matthew 14:14; Luke 7:13). Through Elijah, God fed a starving widow (I Kings 17:8-16) and raised her dead son to life (I Kings 17:17-24). Through Elisha, God healed a leper (II Kings 5:1-19). All of these, together with a host of other miracles throughout the Scriptures at the very least demonstrate the love and tender compassion of the LORD.

Miracles are performed at specific times in history. When confronted about their practices, many non-cessationists claim that the Bible is “full of miracles”. How can you deny the presence of miracles today, they ask, when all throughout the Bible we see great signs and wonders? It is as if you could never walk through the streets of Jerusalem without seeing lame people walk and dead people raised. This suggestion that the Bible is “full of miracles” is not quite accurate.

The Bible is full of narrative and stories about the people of God which are recorded for the purpose of directing our attention to the coming Messiah and His Kingdom. Some of those stories include tales of miracles, but those particular stories are grouped together. Sinclair Ferguson writes, “In the Scriptures themselves, extraordinary gifts appear to be limited to a few brief periods in biblical history, in which they serve as confirmatory signs of new revelation and its ambassadors, and as a means of establishing and defending the kingdom of God epochally significant ways.” I suggest that there are but three periods in Biblical history which contain the bulk of the accounts of extraordinary providences; the days of Moses, the days of Elijah and Elisha, and the days of Jesus and the Apostles. Each is a relatively brief period of time, about forty years in the cases of Moses and Jesus and the Apostles, and Elijah’s and Elisha’s ministries lasted not much longer than fifty years each. I am sure that a dispensationalist would have a nice chart to add some extra meaning to these periods, but I want to hope to demonstrate nothing more than that out of the entire four-thousand year story of the Bible, there are less than two-hundred years worth of miracles. (Footnote: Again, I wouldn’t exclude absolutely everything outside of those periods from being categorized as miracles. There are events like the translation of Enoch and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah which could easily be described as extraordinary. But those are isolated events, few in number and not presented in a steady stream of wonders like the other periods.)

The Bible is full of people living their lives and enjoying the ordinary providences of God. Miracles are not intended to be the normative experience. If they are, then where are the miracles of David? (Footnote: I can hear the objection, “What about Goliath?” My answer would be that big men have been brought down by less than a projectile. That a well fired shot, aimed for killing, actually accomplishes its purpose is great and glorious, but not extraordinary. If David had shot the stone at the ground and the ground opened up beneath the feet of Goliath, then you would have something extraordinary. )
What of the miracles of Isaiah or Jeremiah? What miracles did Joseph work? These were all faithful men, but their lives were not lived during the specific times in which God intended to present mighty acts of His power. While the focus of this study is not to analyze the cessationist and non-cessationist viewpoints, it would be interesting to know how the non-cessationist deals with the fact that for the greatest part of Biblical history and even for the majority of the history of the church, (the present day notwithstanding), there is very little emphasis on or expectation of the miraculous.

Miracles are performed by specific persons ordained for the task. During specific times of extraordinary divine events, God has used men as the means of performing miracles. Though men are always a mechanically necessary part of the process, there is a sense in which God uses the man in the miracle to show to the people witnessing the miracle the confirmation of God’s endorsement of the man involved. God could have dried up the Red Sea all by Himself, but He commanded Moses to extend his staff, thus publicly endorsing Moses’ role as leader of Israel, and the man in whom God’s authority rested.

During the time of Moses, God appointed Moses and occasionally Aaron to be the instruments of His signs. No one else in all of Israel worked miracles in that time. In the one-hundred year span of the ministry of Elijah and Elisha, only those two were involved. During the time of Jesus and the Apostles, though we read of quite a larger number of miracle-workers, there were organized ordinations and charges given to those who were granted miraculous gifts.

It appears that those who were given such gifts were given them for specific purposes and not to be used at their own whim, but when it was necessary to confirm the veracity of the Word being preached. The apostle Paul at one point left behind Trophimus, one of his missionary helpers who fell sick (2 Timothy 4:20). If these gifts were left fully to the discretion of the man working them, then there is no reason for Paul not to have relieved this man’s pain and healed his body and strengthened him for his work. Timothy, Paul’s son in the faith, might have been prone to stomach ailments (1 Timothy 5:23), but we do not read of Paul’s efforts to heal him, rather he advises him to drink some wine. Even Paul himself might have had physical difficulties (2 Corinthians 12:7), yet was unwilling or unable to heal himself. Miracles are meant to fulfill God’s purposes on not man’s. The modern faith healer may say that “God wants everyone to be healed”, but there is no Biblical evidence to support such a claim.

Miracles are revelatory. As I have hinted at different points, and now hope to explore more fully, one of the purposes of the extraordinary providences and judgments of God is to authenticate the message of the prophet or the preacher. Hebrews 2:3-4 reads, “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will?” Augustine contended that miracles filled an apologetic role, saying “miracles lead us to faith, and are mainly wrought for the sake of unbelievers.” They serve to placard to the unbelieving world that the Kingdom of Christ has come.

John Calvin understood that Christ used His miracles as a way to prove that He was Messiah and Son of God. In book one of the Institutes, he writes, “Christ appealed to his miracles in order to subdue the unbelief of the Jews, inasmuch as these were performed by his own energy, and therefore bore the most ample testimony to his divinity.” In each of Christ’s works there was a shining forth of the immanence of the nature of the Trinity, and with each successive sign God is more fully revealed.

The primary and most precise way in which God has chosen to reveal Himself is through the written Word. The whole of the Canon of Scripture is the work of men, inspired by God through special revelation to inscribe and preserve the Word of the Lord. (Footnote: The question could be raised about whether this is itself a miracle. Rather than viewing inspiration as a kind of miracle, as I understand the role of miracles as revelation, I would prefer to view miracles as a subset of revelation along with inspiration. The view being that the two are related, but not the same. Thus the exploration of all the different ways in which God communicates to His creatures, and whether He still communicates through direct, personal revelation is related to this topic, but not entirely within its scope, and will have to be left for another time.) At specific points in history, God deemed it necessary to work in striking ways to call people to pay special attention to that Word that was being proclaimed.

The ultimate end of miracles is to bring glory to God. Though it could be said that the purpose of every created thing in the cosmos and the purpose of every event which takes place within it exists ultimately for the glory of God, miracles tend to sharpen the picture of that glory and incite those who witness the event to worship the Triune God in a way that nothing else can. It was not uncommon for those in who saw the wondrous acts of Jesus to “marvel and glorify God.” When Jesus gave sight to the man who had been blind from birth, He declared that the purpose of the entire course of events was that “the works of God should be made manifest.” Nicodemus freely admitted to Jesus that, “we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.”, and even the miracle at the wedding feast “manifested forth his glory”. In every miracle, whether it be an extraordinary providence or extraordinary judgment, there is a visible manifestation of the excellence of God’s character. The greatness of His being and the perfection of His attributes radiates through the mighty works and stimulate both delight in His providences and fear of His judgments.

In this study, I have attempted to develop a slightly better definition of the word “miracle” than has been provided for us by 20th century evangelical scholarship. I understand that this is just one of many countless words and concepts that must be reclaimed from the post-modern and set squarely within its Biblical context in order for the Church to continue to mature and grow in truth, but it is one that should certainly be on the top of the prioritized list. The failure to understand this word correctly is attended with a number of dangerous temptations.

We are products of a couple of generations of people who have looked toward everything but Word and Sacrament to confirm their union with Christ and to strengthen and edify them. God did not ensure us that we have been given miracles to teach us doctrine, to rebuke us, correct us and instruct us in righteousness. He gave us the Word for that purpose. Our participation in miracles is not the initiation and seal of our union to Christ. He has given us the font, the bread and the cup for that purpose.
Instead of waiting upon spectacular communications from heaven that will never come, the Church must pay much closer attention to the preaching of the Word of God. Rather than searching for signs in the heavens to find direction for their lives, the people of God must turn to the ordinary means of grace in Baptism and Communion for assurance that God blesses them and forgives their sins.

Furthermore, the overemphasis on and unwarranted expectation of the miraculous has stolen away the thankfulness due our Lord for the normal ordinary providences from which we benefit every day. People are thus easily distracted from taking careful notice of the normal processes God uses to meet the needs of His people. It is not a great faith, but a weak faith that is always looking for a spectacular, flashy, turn-your-world-upside-down demonstration of God’s power. A mature faith sees God’s hand working in daily, common, conventional ways to feed, clothe and care for His own.