Cessationist Conference with Multiple Guest Speakers | Day 2

Good morning, good morning and welcome to the second day of Cessationist Conference. If Andrew Rappaport would please come to the front and quit talking in the back, that would be great. We're going to sing this morning, I know it's a little early, so I hope you've drank your juice and your water and your vocal cords are doing great.

Congregational Singing and Opening Prayer

We're going to sing Redeemed. Would you please stand as we sing? Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, redeemed through His infinite mercy, His child and forever I am.

Redeemed, redeemed, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, redeemed through His infinite mercy, His child and forever I am. Redeemed and so happy in Jesus, no language my rapture can tell. I know that the light of His presence with me doth continually dwell.

Redeemed, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, His infinite mercy, His child and forever I am. I think, I sing, for I cannot be silent, His love is the theme of my song. Redeemed, His infinite mercy, His child and I shall see Him in whose law I take footsteps and giveth me songs in the night.

Redeemed, His child and history in the dawn. He, the theme of heaven's broken, frail, new man, and hook to crown descended, took on flesh to ransom a history. He, the perfect Son of Man, in His land no stain of sin, see the truth come to save the Christ, the great and sure.

When sinners hangs the Lamb, see the Holy Son's true glory. Grace unmeasured, love untruths mystery. Slain by death, the great strain, as we will be. Amen. You may be seated.

All right, let's open our time this morning with a word of prayer. Our Father, it is our great desire to know Your Word and to know more of You and the work and the power of Your Holy Spirit. It is our prayer that You would instruct us and inform us today in and through Your Word, through those who will be speaking to us, that our hearts would be receptive and ready and that You would be glorified through all that is said here today.

We pray that You would strengthen us in our confidence in Your Word and we pray that You would continue to renew our minds by it, fix our hope and our affection upon Christ and what He has done and our confidence upon Your Word and what it reveals.

And may we walk away from here forever changed by that. We pray that You would strengthen us through our time here and encourage our hearts together as we enjoy sweet fellowship with each other and as we listen to the truth proclaimed.

Bless this time, we pray in Christ's name.

Amen.

Announcements and Introduction to Andrew Rappaport

All right, one brief announcement before we begin today. I want to thank those who have worked so diligently to make this possible with the kitchen crew, the coffee and the juice and all of the food that is put out.

I'd like to give them a round of applause and thank them for that. They worked diligently to be here before some of us are even awake to be preparing that for us and I'm grateful for their work and their labor in the Lord.

So, thank you. Andrew Rappaport is the President and Director of Striving for Eternity Ministries. He is known to most, if not all of you, and he also directs the Christian podcast community. And this is session number three, the New Testament case for the fading of miracles.

Andrew.

Jim knew I was going to wear red, so he appropriately dressed. The advantage of this is the day will just get better with me starting. So, everything after this will be good. So, you have that to look forward to.

Let's start with a brief word of prayer. Lord, we are grateful for the fact that we have your word. We have something that we can trust and rely upon as an absolute authority for our faith and practice.

May we look to you, not just in this hour, but this entire conference to see what you would have to teach us. That we would rest solely upon what you have revealed of yourself in your word. And may you, by the person of the Holy Spirit, take your word and illuminate it to our understandings and to the application for us.

We thank you in Christ's name. Amen. Well, I'm very glad that yesterday Kevin started us off with laying a foundation, and that's what we're going to try to build upon now. Is the foundation that Kevin had laid for us.

And in dealing with this, I have to start by laying my own foundation for the question of the fading of the New Testament miracles. What I first want to do is start off with a personal experience. Some of you know that I grew up from a Jewish background.

Being raised Jewish, I knew nothing of Christianity. I didn't know anything of the New Testament when I got saved, and I didn't meet any other Christians until I got to college. When I got to college, most of the people there were word of faith.

I assumed, ignorantly, that they must know the Bible better than me because they all grew up in church. I did not. And so I was believing what they were telling me. I lacked discernment. And in that lack of discernment, what ended up happening was I was believing things that later I would find were not true.

I remember when I was, the pressure that was put upon us, those of us, the few of us that didn't speak in tongues, to practice speaking in tongues. I remember as a child, my sister and I would be in the store with my mom, and you'd hear people speaking other languages, probably Spanish.

And my sister and I decided that we would pretend like we had our own language. So we would sit in the cart and just talk gibberish to one another. And I remember, with the pressure that was upon me to speak in tongues, that they were like, just try, just try.

So I went back to my childhood and spoke in gibberish. And everyone was so ecstatic, as if I just got saved. And the reality is that I remember sitting at a Bible study many years later, just listening to two men.

I wasn't even involved in the conversation. They were at the other end of the table. One gentleman says to the other gentleman that not everybody believes that the gifts continue to today. I'd never heard anything like that.

And so I went home that night, sat down with the scriptures, and I read 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14 in one sitting. And in that process, I came to realize, not only was I taught incorrectly, but Paul was actually condemning the very things that I was taught to believe.

I realized that much of what they were saying, they took out of context. And I realized that Paul was actually condemning the spiritual pride that I saw in college, where when someone spoke in tongues, another person had to have a word of the Spirit.

And when someone had a word of the Spirit, someone else had to have a prophecy. And so I ended up realizing that that actually led me into a four-year study in hermeneutics, where I wanted to never be taught incorrectly again.

I wanted to learn how to handle the scriptures. And that's really been kind of the mark of what I'm known for, is hermeneutics. But I want to ask the question, why do charismatics get upset? We have to deal with some things.

I said I want to lay the foundation before I get to the main topic. And so we have to understand that this is a highly personal issue when you talk to continuationists. And we have to recognize that. One of the things we have to feel that just are a little bit too like, hey, this is what scripture says, move on.

But this is something that for many people, this becomes very emotional because this is how they find their identity in their experience. And so for that reason, it becomes emotional, it becomes personal, and often rationality, you'll find, goes out the window.

Not with all, but with many. And so when discussing cessationism and with this film that's going to come out, we're going to see that there's going to be a lot of people who end up arguing the way that many charismatics do today, by arguing that you first have to accept the gifts as continuing to see it in scripture.

Well, that is a begging the question fallacy. When you accept the conclusion, when you must accept the conclusion to prove the point. When your conclusion is that it has to be accepted for the premise.

Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy that's based on an assumption rather than concrete evidence. And you're going to see that with folks. And so let's first start by defining miracles. When we look at this, Michael Aubrey says this, quote, foundational to the biblical narrative is the concept that God acts supernaturally with his created world.

Sometimes God acts directly in the world, sometimes he uses an intermediary. Many times, the supernatural acts carry with it a greater significance or meaning for the people involved, unquote. So basically, a miracle is when the natural order is disrupted by the supernatural.

That would be a basic definition of a miracle. But I think that as we look in scripture, it has a more specific meaning. It is not just the disruption of the natural world by the supernatural, but miracles function as a God-inspired revelation to those who witness them.

Miracles in the Bible are not just merely the violation of natural law, but they are divine acts that communicate God's word and his purpose. And so we can see that there's actually a couple criteria that we can look at when we're thinking of what defines a miracle.

Michael Aubrey gives it four points. One is, can the supernatural event be attributed directly or indirectly to a supernatural agent? In other words, this is primary because the agent must first be supernatural if they're going to work outside of nature.

So can they be identified back to a supernatural agent? This is necessary and leads to the second one he has, number two, does the event function to reveal the power or identity of that agent? In other words, not only is it a supernatural agent, but it has to point back to the agent.

So when God does a miracle, we don't look at the person doing the miracle, we look back at the God who worked through the person. When God raises an axe head in water, people don't go, oh, look at the axe head, they go and look at God.

The third thing that he mentions is, does the event have noticeable and perhaps alarming effects in the natural world? In other words, this is not an everyday thing. When people see a miracle, they recognize this as something unusual.

This is not normal. So we're not talking about someone who gets up in the morning and, oh, my back is hurting and I got a miracle, I was feeling a little bit better. The fourth that he mentions is, is there a human intermediary performing the supernatural event?

This is sometimes in our day expected as the norm that people can perform miracles. We're going to see in a bit that that's not so normal. And it's not necessary. God can do it without humans, but sometimes he can do miracles through humans.

Norman Geisler says this, each of the three words for the supernatural events, sign, wonder, and power, delineate an aspect of a miracle. From the human vantage point, a miracle is an unusual event,.

That's a wonder,.

That conveys and confirms an unusual message, the sign, by means of an unusual power, power. But from the divine vantage point, a miracle is an act of God, that's the power, that attracts attention of the people of God, wonder, to the word of God, the sign.

So what Geisler is saying is that the miracle's purpose is not to be focused on the miracle, but to point to something, to point to the word of God. So in short, a miracle is an act of God, that confirms the message as true, and substantiates and verifies or vindicates the word of God.

So as we look at the purpose of miracles, we end up seeing that there's a couple of purposes that we see in scripture. I'm going to give you the three that Geisler gives, and he says, one is to glorify the nature of God, second is to give credit to certain persons as spokesmen for God, and a third is to provide evidence for a belief in God.

Now, Geisler states that, quote, those who accept biblical miracles debate among one another as to whether the special gift of miracles, used to confirm revelation from God, has ceased since the times of the apostles.

The issue has significance for apologetics. First, existence of apostolic sign gifts, sign gift type miracles today, raises the issue of whether New Testament miracles uniquely confirmed the truth claims of Christ and the apostles, as recorded in scripture.

Second, if miracles that confirm divine truth claims exist today, the truth claims they accompany to be accepted are on par with scripture, has divine revelation ceased? So note what he's saying is, he's saying that the purpose of the miracles is to confirm revelation.

Well, if the purpose of miracles is to confirm revelation, if that's the purpose when humans are most often doing miracles, then the question is, are these things that they're confirming still continuing?

If there is no more revelation, then what are the miracles pointing to? We think about the miracles we hear people say today, and we find that most often those miracles that people are claiming point to self, and not God.

If miracles continue today, then they should be pointing to scripture. If they're used to prove, if they're spoken as God, if you have prophecies, then that should be in par with scripture. We see that many continuationists want to argue that miracles done today, they'll accept that this is God speaking, but they say that the New Testament miracles are different than Old Testament miracles in such that they're not actually scripture.

They're not God's word somehow. What makes scripture God's word? It is that it's breathed out by God. 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17 says this, All scripture is breathed out by God, and profitable for teaching, for proof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Paul is very clear that we do not need miracles for the completing or equipping of our faith. We need the word of God. He's not saying that our sanctification is based upon miracles. He says scripture serves the purpose and is necessary to sanctify us.

There is no mention here of miracles. Now, if you were here last night, you'd realize maybe why, as Justin mentioned, it could be because, well, 1 and 2 Timothy are later books. So there wouldn't be the need for them.

So miracles, by definition, are not normative. I want to address this, because this is going to be a thing that I think in the argument of the fading of miracles we have to address. We look at the arguments of those that are proponents of continuationism and they want to claim that miracles can continue to today, and we should expect them.

Geisler gives us four arguments that proponents give.

One,.

God performed miracles in redemptive history. They're recorded from Genesis through Revelation. There seems to be no reason to believe they would cease arbitrarily with the apostles. Number two, God has not changed.

Jesus is the same yesterday,.

Today, and forever.

If a miracle-working God has not changed, why would the miracles cease? Number three, Jesus spoke of continuing miracles. He said, if anyone has faith in me, they will do what I am doing. He will do even greater things than these because I go to the Father.

In his commission, he recorded in Mark, Jesus said that miracles would accompany when the gospel went out. Number four, Geisler says, miracles manifest God's greatness and glory to deliver God's children in need and to communicate God's message with his people.

This needs to continue today. Let's look at each one of these arguments because we need to know how to answer these arguments to answer the question of do the New Testament miracles fade? The argument that God performed miracles in redemptive history.

Miracles are not performed as often as people think.

If I was to ask you to.

Give a number of how many miracles you think are in the Bible, I've been polling some people and most of the people are in the thousands. The answer is there's only 265 miracles mentioned in the Bible.

Over 4 ,000 years.

Of history of the Bible.

When you limit that to humans performing the miracles, you get down to 81 miracles.

In 4 ,000 years.

Clearly, miracles were not common in the Bible and nor should they be today. We'll see in a bit that miracles were extremely rare in Biblical history. Therefore, to argue that something that rarely happened over 4 ,000 years we should expect to see commonly today wouldn't be logically.

Valid. If miracles.

Continue today, it would logically fit that they should not be as rare as they are in Scripture. Past history, as we're going to see, reveals that there's only some 100 years of miracle activity in the 4 ,000 years of Bible.

History. I'll give another.

Quote from Geisler. He says, Logically, there is no connection between past and present miracle occurrences. Even during thousands of years of Bible history, miracles are clustered in three very limited periods.

One, the Mosaic period. From the Exodus through the taking of the Promised Land with a few occurrences in the period of Judges. Two, the prophetic period from the late kingdom of Israel and Judah during the ministry of Elijah and Elisha and, to a lesser extent, Isaiah.

Three, the apostolic period from the first century ministries of Christ and the apostles. Occurrences of miracles were neither continuous nor without purpose. The fact that miracles occurred in these three times and that's it, reveals that we do not see in the rest of history that these are normative.

The real problem with this argument is that miracles.

Were an anomaly.

In history, not the norm. You never define things by the anomaly, by the exception. But that is what we have continuationists wanting to do today, is to say that this anomaly in history should be normative, that the exception should be.

The norm. If this argument.

Was valid, then we would have to see that there would have been lots of miracles in.

Bible history.

The second argument that they often make is.

God has not changed.

To argue that God has not changed, and we all accept this, every one of us accepts the fact that God is the same, that Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever, that God is immutable, He does not change in His nature.

But this is a category error that we talk about in logic, where you take two different categories and put them as the same. You see, the nature of God and the way God works with people are two different categories.

So the fact that God is a miracle doing God.

Hasn't changed.

God still does miracles today. And often when you speak to continuationists, they're going to argue that those of us that believe that these gifts have ceased are going to challenge us by saying that we don't believe God does miracles anymore.

Let me affirm this. I believe God still.

Does miracles.

He does not do them as a gift through people. That's the distinction. And so the way He works with people is different through time. How many of you keep kosher? No, you enjoy your bacon. Trust me, having sausage on a cheese pizza is really enjoyable.

Some of you don't understand what it's like to keep kosher. But why don't you keep the Passover? For in fact, that was commanded to the Israelites to keep forever. Why don't we keep these festivals? Because God has changed the way He works with His people.

Those laws.

Are not for us in the church. And those bacon lovers say, Amen. To claim that God changed those laws but somehow He doesn't change the gifts isn't fitting. See, the gifts fit within the way He works with His people.

God does change over time. Let's look, or change the way He works with us over time. The third argument people make is that Jesus spoke of continuing miracles. This argument is again a begging the fallacy question.

It's a begging the fallacy question because it assumes you have to start with the fact that in John 12, sorry, John 14, that when Jesus says you will do greater things, they assume that's speaking of miracles.

They claim that the greater things referred to is miracles. They're interjecting that in the white space. It's not there. There's an attempt to make the Bible say what they wish it said rather than what it does say.

The key to the greater things is tied to what Jesus Himself said, that He goes to the Father. The reason that it is a greater thing is precisely because there are no miracles attesting to what they're saying.

It's the lack of miracles that will make it greater. But don't take my word for it. Let's take Jesus's. There's nothing in the text of John 14 speaking of miracles but let's see if you turn to John 16, we don't have time because, well Jim only gave me 15 minutes not three hours, but if you look at John 16 you end up seeing that Jesus explains the meaning of the greater things.

And He doesn't mention miracles, He mentions joy in suffering. That's what He says. That the greater Jesus is stating is having joy in suffering. This argument logically ignores what Jesus Himself said as an explanation to what He meant.

I will take Jesus's meaning over anyone else's of what He meant by what He said. We end up seeing in 2 Corinthians 12 -12 it says the signs of a I didn't put that slide in so back up a little. It says in 2 Corinthians 12 -12 the signs of a true apostle were performed among you with the utmost patience with signs and wonders.

And mighty works.

Now if miracles are the signs of an apostle and there are no more apostles the question should be why should there be any miracles? Why should they continue if the apostles are no longer here? So miracles, the fourth one that Geisler provided is miracles manifest God's greatness.

And as we look at this and as people argue that we need to have miracles today to see how great God is.

In all His glory.

I would argue we have something greater. Do we need miracles to know God is great?

No.

We have this. God's self-revelation. What more do we need to argue that we need something beyond what God has revealed of Himself? It's to say that this is not sufficient. We have not only God's self-revelation but we have something that many of us sorry let me correct that many of you Gentiles don't appreciate.

Do you appreciate that you have the indwelling Holy Spirit that not only illuminates God's word for you but also helps you in the application thereof? I say that because to the Jewish mindset this is the new covenant that Jewish people look forward to Jeremiah 29 and Ezekiel 36 that we would no longer need a priesthood because God Himself would indwell us so we can understand His word.

What more do we need than God's word and Himself and the personal Holy Spirit? To say we need something more? What does that do to the personal Holy Spirit? I would say it puts Him at a lower level. I know that my continuationist friends would disagree.

But the reality is desire.

For miracles.

Is often a felt need but not all felt needs are real needs. I mean Job had a felt need for.

Healing and.

When he went through. What he went through?

Did God give him a miracle?

No, God actually never told him what was happening. We could look at Paul. Paul was sitting there and he.

Prayed for.

Relief. God never gave it. And he wrote most of the New Testament. No, just because we feel a need because we want confirmation doesn't mean we get it. What is the confirmation that John the Baptist received when he wanted to see some vindication and what was it he was told?

Go to the Scriptures. Look at what the Scriptures say about the Messiah and look at what is happening with the Messiah and you have your answer. The confirmation was not the miracle. The confirmation for John was the Word of God.

Now when we compare this.

With.

The periods that prompted miracles, I would argue that there's no comparison when we look to Scripture. The Scripture provides us everything we need to see God's glory and greatness. Miracles can manifest God's greatness is what Geisler says.

He says, Though miracles can manifest God's greatness, glory, and deliverance, he accomplishes these things in other ways. The heavens declare the glory and greatness. Spiritual deliverance is accomplished through the power of the gospel.

God works through general and special providence without suspending natural laws. So miracles are not the only way that we can see the greatness and glory and deliverance of God. And oh, that last one, the message of God.

Suffering does these things. Oh, we don't like to think of that. But so does evangelizing. So does.

Worship.

Fearing the Lord. There are many things that help us to see the greatness of God, to reflect upon His creation and be amazed. Because in the New Testament times, they did not understand the universe the way we do.

And they never understood a cell, let alone an atom, let alone quantums. We have gone to the vastness of the universe, to the smallest parts of cells. At least that's what we think today, but they thought the atom was the smallest and we got smaller.

But the reality is the more we dig, the more we find the wonder of God. Because we look at His creation.

And go, wow!

He creates within every atom of your body, with every cell of your body, this little motor called a flagellum that can go from 0 to 300 in a split of a second. I'd love that in a.

Car. Alright, so.

What we end up seeing, though, is we want to look at the nature of miracles because this is where much of the debate ends up becoming. The difference between what we're going to refer to as the fact of miracles and the gift of miracles.

Because, as was said last night, so eloquently by both of the speakers, is the fact that we all accept that miracles continue. It is the gift of miracles that we're saying do not continue. When we look at this, the fact that miracles continue, we have miracles that occur any time, and yet the gift of miracles were limited to Bible times.

They were limited within Bible times to a few periods of time. So the fact of miracles are permanent. They're all the time throughout history where the gift of miracles was temporary. The fact of miracles is done without human beings.

God does miracles where the gift of miracles are done through human beings. The fact of miracles do not confirm revelation. Where the gift of miracles was their purpose of confirming revelation. And so what we end up seeing is that the view that miracles ceased with the apostles does not demand that God does not perform miracles anymore.

Again, a category.

Error. We.

Argue that the gift of miracles do not continue. And so as we look at some of the characteristics of a miracle, and all of this is laying the foundation. But as we do this, I want to point out some characteristics of miracles so we know how to define what a miracle is so we can recognize them.

When we look at the New Testament miracles, there's some things we notice. One, miracles were always instantaneous. When Jesus or the apostles performed a miracle, it was not a partial healing. There was no gradual healing over days or weeks or months.

Now some will point to one incidence where Jesus takes a blind man and he has a partial sight, but what happens when he goes and washes his eyes as Jesus tells him? It's an immediate sight. So even that one is still an immediate miracle, it's just Jesus chose to do that in two stages.

That's unlike the miracle of the healings that we see today. When we see these miracles done today, they're usually partial or incomplete, or as Justin said last night, psychosomatic. This is in contrast to the biblical miracles.

Biblical miracles were immediate, complete,.

Performed on anyone,.

Believer or not. This is in sharp contrast to the supposed miracles performed by people today. A second characteristic of miracles in the Bible, in the New Testament, is they never failed. And there's a reason for that.

Because their author is God, who never fails. A miracle is a special act of God, and since God cannot fail, the miracle cannot fail.

There's no.

Record in Scripture of anyone relapsing into this condition they were before. In fact, I believe that if that had happened, the Jewish leaders would have used that to discredit Jesus and the Apostles.

However, the Prophets and Apostles that claim to be that today also claim that they're only about 80 -85 accurate in their prophecies. The Old Testament would demand their death for every one of them.

For example,.

Not.

One of these miracle-working prophets.

Noticed.

Or saw this thing, maybe you guys heard of it, COVID? Not one of them by January 2020 predicted COVID. The other thing that every one of them got wrong, every one of them got the election wrong of 2020.

They all said Trump was going to be the president at the end of the election. If you doubt me on that, I'll encourage you to go to Justin Peter's YouTube channel, he's got a great video that details all of that.

But that is a major failure. They didn't see the elections, they missed that, they got that one totally wrong.

They didn't see.

COVID and the effects on the government. Those are some major failures, wouldn't we say? That's kind of affected.

The world. And they missed that one.

Two.

Two of them, I guess.

What we see is that their excuse will be this, and you'll sometimes hear this, Old Testament prophecies are different than New Testament prophecies. The New Testament prophecies, they can fail, it's okay.

And so what we end up seeing is that the workers today, the miracle workers today have a limitation on the belief of the person that's receiving the miracle, rather than we see in the Scriptures that it's on the person performing the miracle.

They have it backwards.

A fourth argument, a fourth credential is the fact that it was to establish the Word of God. We're going to see that throughout here. Now what I want to do, and this is, I want to go through the miracles of the Bible.

This is what I found interesting as we look at this.

And.

Because I'm going to give charts and data, this is not very easy. It's not very easy to explain in words numbers. And so I did put this out, it's on my website right now, strivingforeturning .org slash miracles.

It has all these charts, actually the entire message with all of the data underneath. So if you go strivingforturning .org .miracles. So there's 256 miracles in the Bible. Jesus did 104 of them. That's 39 of all the miracles in the Bible.

We should expect that, because something was different with Jesus. This is when the infinitely holy God became a man. The infinitely holy God enters into his own creation, becomes a man, and the miracles he did was for the specific purpose of putting his deity on display.

So that is unique in all of history. And so we would expect that he does a bulk of miracles. But there's 178 miracles of those that are done by the Godhead. That's 67 of all miracles mentioned in the Bible.

That leaves 87 miracles done by created beings, 6 by angels, leaving us with 81 miracles. That's 31 of all the miracles in the Bible. Now, one thing we can conclude from this is that miracles definitely.

Were not normative.

In the Scriptures. In 4 ,000 years of recorded history, there's 81 miracles that are performed by human beings. 23 of these are done in the New Testament, so that's 28 of them. That's over a 30-year period.

So that leaves us with 58 miracles left in the Old Testament. Most of them are done by Moses and Elijah, and we're going to look at that. In fact, the total number of miracles, if you take away those that are done during the writing of the Torah, the law, and that first writing from Moses to Joshua, you remove Elijah and Elisha and the prophets, so you take the period where the law and the prophets are being written,.

You have a total of eight miracles being done in history.

I cannot see how you can make a case that that is normative, that we should expect them to continue. So let's look at some charts. We look here, this is the 256 miracles done by 25 agents. As I mentioned, Jesus does 104 of them, God does 64, and then after that the number drops drastically as you can see, to 22 by Moses.

So let's look just at the Old Testament. Over a 50 to 60-year period of the New Testament, over that 4 ,000 years, we go to the Old Testament and we see that here, just two individuals, Moses and Elisha, make up 59