Scripture, Signs, and Wonders (Hebrews 2:3-4)

Kootenai Church

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Please open your Bibles again to Hebrews chapter 2. Before we begin, let's ask the Lord's blessing on our time.

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Our gracious God, it is such a treasure and a joy to have your word available to us in our own language, and for us to have reliable and trustworthy translations of your holy and precious word.

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It is a delight, and it delights our hearts that you use your word to call your people to yourself, to sanctify them once you have drawn them, and eventually you will use your great word to glorify us and to seat us there with Christ in heavenly places.

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And we look forward to that, and we pray that in this time as we gather here that you would sanctify us by your word.

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Teach us to be holy, teach us to be trusting, teach us to be submissive to you in every respect, and we pray that you would use your word in our hearts and in our minds to instruct us in those things that we need instruction in.

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Equip us and edify us and encourage us together, we pray in our time here in Christ's name. Amen.

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Well, today we are returning to the second chapter of Hebrews, and although it's been a bit intermittent with me preaching here, and others have been filling in for me, we are going back to Hebrews chapter 2 and now taking the third opportunity to look at this first of five warning passages in the book of Hebrews.

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And you remember that there are five of them scattered throughout the book of Hebrews, and all of them have a number of things in common.

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They sort of are inserted into an otherwise lengthy discussion of another topic. It's as if the author sort of pauses and breaks for a second to warn his readers.

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And all of these warning passages, I believe, are addressed to people who are on the fence, who have heard the gospel, who have entertained the gospel in terms of giving it some consideration, but who have yet to embrace fully the gospel and to be saved and regenerated by a saving faith in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. So these are people who needed to be the audience, the intended audience for the warning passages, are people who needed to be pushed into making a decision.

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And I use that in a strongly Reformed sense, not in an Arminian sense. As in they need to be pushed, not in the sense that you dim the lights and have every head bowed and every mind closed for a period of time while you're given a gospel invitation and you have people raise their hands.

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That's not what I mean by push. I mean somebody standing, as it were, with the word of God in front of them and saying, you must repent and believe and embrace the gospel or you will perish.

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And to have it laid out clearly like that. And that's what the author is doing in these five warning passages. And in this one that is in chapter two, verses one to four, we have looked so far that there is, in verse one, a danger in drifting, where he is addressing these people who needed to make a real commitment to Jesus Christ.

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And he is encouraging them to take action and warning them that if they do not respond, that they will be subject to the very real punishment that is described in verses two and three.

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And verses two and three are the heart of this warning passage, where the writer is encouraging them to lay hold of this message because it was delivered by a greater mediator, namely the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Not an angel, not a prophet, not a priest, not a mere king, not any mere human being. But the

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Lord Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man, the divine Son. He is the greater mediator of this covenant. And so they ought to embrace it because of that reality.

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And if they turn their back away from the Lord Jesus Christ, then they will face a stricter judgment.

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So he says in verse two, If the word spoken through angels proved unalterable, and every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

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So it is delivered through a greater mediator. It promises a greater, more stricter judgment. And it offers a greater salvation.

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A salvation that frees us from eternal judgment and sin and guilt and the wrath of God, all because of what

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Christ has done. So we are presented in this passage with a great God of mercy who is willing to save anyone who comes to him.

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And he draws men to himself, and people are encouraged to turn to that God, lest they face the wrath that is to come.

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And the encouragement here is if you should refuse to heed this call of the gospel, you will most certainly face the judgment that's promised in verses two and three.

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And then halfway through verse three, you'll notice this is actually where our text for this morning begins. After it was at first spoken through the

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Lord, it was confirmed to us by those who heard, God also testifying with them both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by gifts of the

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Holy Spirit according to his own will. Now that discussion on signs and wonders and miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit seems kind of thrown in there, almost as if the author is changing the subject matter and switching over to have a discussion about signs and wonders and miracles and gifts of the

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Holy Spirit. And it certainly doesn't follow with verse five where, it doesn't fit with verse five.

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It's not like he's introducing verse five where he returns again to the subject of Jesus being greater than the angels. Remember, verses one through four are sort of this parenthetical statement in this longer discussion of Jesus being greater than the angels.

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So verse four, this discussion of signs and wonders and miracles, you say, what? It doesn't really seem to go with the warning passage.

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What does signs and wonders and miracles have to do with the warning? And yet it doesn't really seem to go with the discussion of Jesus being greater than the angels.

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It seems to kind of like it's tacked in there, almost thrown in, on, and aside. And it's not. It is actually connected to the warning passage, and I'll let you see that today.

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This passage, these verses, the end of verse three and verse four, teach us a tremendous amount about the role, the purpose, the nature of signs and wonders and miracles, and what

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God designed them to do in the early church, in the first century. So we're going to look at that, but I don't want you to miss that the main thrust of verse four is this.

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We're going to talk in a moment about the role of signs and wonders, but I want you to see that the main thrust of verse four, the end of verse three and verse four, is to show just how great of a salvation this is, that they are in danger of neglecting.

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That's the point of it. This salvation, which was proclaimed by the Lord, confirmed by those who heard Him, and authenticated by God through signs and wonders, that is how great this salvation is.

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You neglect this, a salvation that has this much testimony, this much clarity, and this much light, you will surely face judgment.

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That's the point of verse four. This is not a salvation that was communicated to us through some mystic.

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It's not a salvation that was made up in the minds of men. It was the divine Son who stepped out of heaven. He gave us this gospel.

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It was confirmed by those who heard Him, and then God vouchsafed their testimony, guaranteed their testimony, sealed it, by giving them the ability to perform signs and wonders and miracles.

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So that is going to be our outline if you're kind of following it. You say, what outline? You really articulate it. Well, there's three things. They're to demonstrate how great this salvation is.

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Number one, it was proclaimed by the Lord Himself. You see this in the middle of verse three. After it was at first spoken through the

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Lord. He's talking about the Lord Jesus Christ there. After it, the salvation was spoken through the Lord. Second, it was confirmed to us by those who heard

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Him. By those who heard Him. So it was spoken by the Lord. It was confirmed by eyewitnesses. And then third, verse four,

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God Himself testified with them both by signs and wonders, and by various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to His own will.

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Spoken by the Lord, confirmed by those who heard Him, and then authenticated by God through signs. That is how great this salvation is.

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It is a salvation with that much authenticity behind it. So that's going to be our outline. And this verse four is going to go a long ways toward helping us understand the nature of signs and wonders because there is a lot of confusion among Christians today, and I'm not talking about in this congregation.

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I don't think that that is necessarily the case, but in the church writ large, there's a lot of confusion, a lot of lack of discernment concerning those who claim to have the ability to perform signs and wonders and to do miracles and make claims of apostleship, etc.

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And we're going to talk a little bit about that today. So, first, this great salvation, the middle of verse three, after it was at first spoken through the

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Lord. It is proclaimed by the Lord Himself. What is the it that's referred to there? After it was spoken, what was spoken?

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This great salvation. This is the testimony of Jesus Himself. He came announcing and proclaiming that this salvation had come.

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Now, He is not the first one to announce the message of salvation. You could go back into the Old Testament and say, well, in Isaiah 53,

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Isaiah clearly understood the concept of propitiatory atonement, a substitutionary sacrifice. Isaiah predicted that.

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In Psalm 22, David looked forward to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Everything in the Old Testament was intended to point us toward a faith in God who would send a

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Messiah to deal with the sin issue. And so, the Old Testament contains this message of salvation in prophecies, in types, in shadows, in symbols, in prophetic utterances that anticipated the great fulfillment of that.

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But when the Lord arrived, He Himself was the one who stood and made this great offer of salvation through His blood and through what

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He would do. So, He announced that all of these prophecies were fulfilled in Him. I'll give you a few examples of this.

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Jesus' first words in the Gospel of Mark, this is not to suggest that Mark's Gospel is any more inspired than the other

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Gospel writers, but here are the first words that are recorded from Jesus in Mark's Gospel, Mark 115. The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

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Repent and believe the Gospel. It's the first statement of Jesus. This was at first spoken to the

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Lord. Jesus came Himself and said, Repent and believe. The time is at hand. The kingdom is here.

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The fulfillment is here. I am the fulfillment of everything you have anticipated. So, repent and believe.

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Then you turn to Mark 10, 45, and I'm just going to give you a list of the things that Jesus said. Listen to this gracious offer of salvation from the lips of the

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Lord. This is Him proclaiming it for Himself. Mark 10, 45. For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give

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His life as a ransom for many. Luke 19, 10. The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. John 5, 24.

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Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but is passed from death to life.

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John 6, 35. I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst.

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John 6, 58. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

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John 7, 37 and 38. Jesus stood up in the midst of the crowd, and He said this. If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink whoever believes in Me, as the

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Scripture has said. Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. John 10, 11. I am the Good Shepherd.

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The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. John 10, 14. I am the Good Shepherd. I know

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My own, and My own know Me. John 10, 27 to 30. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow

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Me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of My hand.

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My Father who has given them to Me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the

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Father are one. John 11, 25 and 26. I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he may die, yet he shall live.

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And everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die. John 14, 6. I am the way and the truth and the life.

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No one comes to the Father except through Me. Makes you miss the Gospel of John, doesn't it? All those verses from the

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Gospel of John? That's from the mouth of the Lord. Repent and believe.

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Here is the life I am offering you. And He went throughout the nation of Israel, announcing and proclaiming that the fulfillment of God's redemptive plan prophesied and predicted and foreshadowed all the way through the

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Old Testament had now finally come to conclusion. This salvation announced and offered at first through the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Now can you think of a more gracious offer? To offer to bring people from death to life.

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From condemnation to complete acquittal. From guilty to righteous. From slavery to freedom.

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That is the offer. What a gracious offer the Lord gave. You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

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Come to Me and believe in Me and you will have life. Even though you are dead and even though you will die, you will live if you believe in Me.

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That's a gracious offer. And what greater mediator could that offer be given through than Jesus Himself?

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Not a prophet, not a bunch of mystics sitting around a campfire in ancient times coming up with some idea of a

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God who must be appeased through a blood sacrifice and let's voice that upon the people. They didn't follow cleverly devised tales and fables.

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The Lord Himself, the second person of the Holy Trinity, came out of heaven, stepped into time, took upon Himself a body and offered this salvation to the people and then paid for and purchased and secured that salvation on behalf of all who will believe upon Him.

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That is a gracious mediator of a gracious covenant. That's a gracious offer. And can you think of any anything more deserving of the wrath of God in judgment than to neglect that?

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Or to walk away from that? Or to deny it? To be apathetic toward it? Can you think of anything that deserves a greater judgment than that?

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To have a gracious offer like that given to people from a gracious God, the

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Lord Jesus Himself, and then to have people walk away and turn away from that. How will you escape? That's the question in verses 2 and 3.

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How will you escape if you neglect so great a salvation? After that salvation was at first spoken through the Lord and then second it was confirmed to us by those who heard

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Him. This is the rest of verse 3. It was at first spoken through the Lord. It was confirmed to us by those who heard.

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Now who is the those? Who are the they? He's speaking, he's describing a people here in the third person.

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There are people who heard what the Lord had offered and they confirmed this to His audience, the ones to whom the author is writing here.

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This message of salvation spoken through the Lord was confirmed to us by those they who heard

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Him, the Lord. And then you'll see verse 4, that God testified with them by granting the signs and wonders be done through them.

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So who is the they? Who is the those? Who is the them? Who is the third person being described here? I believe it is the apostles.

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There are 12 men that Jesus chose to walk the earth with Him and to hear His message and to remember

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His teachings. In Scripture 8, Judas was not saved, excluded from that group.

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Matthias replaced him. And then the Apostle Paul was one who was untimely born, who was added to that group, called an apostle.

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Sort of one who was out on the fringe, an apostle to the Gentiles. I believe he was part of the original 12, that would be the 11 plus Matthias.

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So you have that group of men whom the Lord has chosen to confirm to us what was spoken by the

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Lord. Now those 12 men, those are the apostles or the disciples, they memorized His doctrine, they studied

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His teaching, they watched His life, they observed His miracles, they were eyewitnesses in the case of His miracles and the deeds that He did, and they were eyewitnesses if there is such a thing in terms of what

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He taught and what He proclaimed and what He preached. And then after the Lord died and was buried and He rose again and He ascended back to heaven, those men went out into the city streets of Jerusalem and began to proclaim the same message that Jesus had been proclaiming, repent and believe upon this

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Messiah whom you have crucified or you will surely face the judgment that is to come. That was the message that they proclaimed.

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And these men who had memorized the teaching of Jesus and had been exposed to it for three years, who saw it, who witnessed it with their eyes and heard it themselves with their ears, they themselves testified to the original writers of the

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Hebrews. And we, we, are in the same boat. We've never met an apostle, we've never seen an apostle, but we have received what?

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Apostolic testimony. How did we receive this? How have we received apostolic testimony? Through the written word of God.

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Those men, after several decades, began to write down in Scripture 8, God used them to write down exactly what it was that Jesus had taught in his life.

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Those documents were circulated in the lifetimes of the very eyewitnesses who saw and heard these things that Jesus had taught and those documents were accepted as authoritative by the church.

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And so we have in the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel according to Matthew, the eyewitness and earwitness testimony of one of Jesus' disciples named, conveniently enough,

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Matthew. And then in the Gospel of Mark, we have the eyewitness and earwitness testimony of Peter. John Mark being a traveling companion to Peter.

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Peter himself overseeing the writing of the Gospel of Mark. That's Peter's Gospel. And then in the Gospel of Luke, we have a man who was with the apostle

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Paul during his time in the land of Israel and during his two -year stay in the city of Caesarea, was able to walk throughout the land of Israel and to hear eyewitness and earwitness testimony of all that was said and done by Jesus to interview the very people himself.

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And he says at the beginning of his Gospel, Theophilus, I have done my due diligence in laying out for you exactly what it is that Jesus began to teach.

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And then he followed that up with the Book of Acts. And then in the Gospel of John, we have Jesus' closest disciple,

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John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, who was related to Jesus and spent the most time with Jesus, giving to us his eyewitness and earwitness testimony of exactly what

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Jesus began to do and to teach. And then in the Book of Acts, we have the preaching testimony of the apostles recorded to us, and then the epistles.

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We have the written testimony, the written teaching of the apostles, of all that Jesus began to give to them. They then have communicated to us, and we are the recipients of that.

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Who confirmed what it was that Jesus said? It was the apostles. Those who heard him.

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Now there are some who say that those who heard him refers not just to the apostles, but it refers to everybody and anybody who would have heard

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Jesus. I don't believe this refers just to them because you'll see in verse 4 that these ones to whom this message was confirmed, they were the ones whom

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God gave the ability to perform signs and wonders. We'll get to that in just a second. Now before we leave this statement that God, that this message was confirmed by those who heard

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Jesus, I want you to understand that this phrase, that description right there, is one of the reasons that people do not believe that Hebrews was written by the apostle

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Paul. You say, what does that have to do with Paul writing that? Why would they say that?

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I would say that. I think this is a convincing argument that Hebrews was not written by Paul. In fact, it was not written by an apostle because the author of Hebrews says that these things were confirmed to us by those individuals who heard

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Jesus. Now some people who argue for Paul's authorship say, well those who heard Jesus were referred to the original twelve.

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They testified to Paul of what Jesus said. I would submit to you that Paul would never describe himself in this language.

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Though it might be true that Paul never heard Jesus teaching in person.

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That might be true. I could make a case that Paul knew who Jesus was and had heard Jesus teach, but it might be true that Paul had never physically, personally, one -to -one heard

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Jesus teaching. That might be true, but Paul would never say that the gospel was communicated to him by those who heard the

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Lord. He would never put himself in that camp. In fact, he explicitly says the opposite in Galatians 1 verse 11 where he says,

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I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. I neither received it from man nor was

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I taught it. I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. One of the slanders that was leveled against the apostle

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Paul was that he had received his gospel second -hand. He wasn't a legitimate apostle. He got this from Peter, he got this from John, he got it from James, he got it from Thomas, or one of the others,

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Matthew, but no, Paul wasn't, he didn't actually see and hear the Lord. And Paul in defending his own apostleship said,

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I didn't receive this from men. I received this directly as a revelation from Jesus Christ. In fact, in Paul's own testimony given to us in the book of Galatians chapters 1 and 2, he gives out a timeline of his conversion, that he said it was three years after my conversion that I went and I visited one apostle, and that was

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Peter, and he didn't have much time with him. And then it was 14 years later that Paul went to and met with the other apostles, and he said there he submitted his gospel to them, not because he feared that this was not the right gospel, but to show to everybody that what

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Paul preached among the Gentiles was the same thing that Peter preached among the Jews. Paul would have never put him in a class as one who just received his gospel from somebody else.

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So I do not believe that Hebrews could have possibly been written by the Apostle Paul. I'll let you make up your own mind on that.

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Third thing, it was proclaimed to by the Lord himself. Second, it was confirmed to us by those individuals who heard the

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Lord, the original apostles, the disciples. And third, God himself has authenticated the message of the gospel through miracles and signs and wonders.

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We have the testimony not just of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, as if that is not enough. We have the testimony confirmed by the apostles and the disciples.

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That's certainly sufficient. But then God himself has sealed the testimony of the apostles by granting to them the ability to perform signs and wonders.

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Now, where did they get the ability to do miracles? As recorded in the book of Acts, that Paul describes in some of his epistles.

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He mentions his miracles in Galatians. He mentions them in 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians. Where did Paul get the ability to perform the miracles that he did?

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Where did Peter and John get the ability to do this? It could only come from God who gave them or granted them the ability to perform these wonders by their own hands according to his will.

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And the purpose of the miracles, the miracles were intended to demonstrate that the message that they preached was indeed the message that Jesus delivered.

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Jesus came and delivered a message, and he presented his gracious offer of salvation.

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And then as I'm going to read to you in just a second, Jesus backed up that offer of salvation by performing signs and wonders, which he did.

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And then he said, if you don't believe the message, believe the works that I do. They demonstrate that the Father sent me and that the message that I'm giving to you is the word of God.

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He pointed to the miracles to authenticate what it was that he preached among the people. There was an authenticating value to it.

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So when the apostles passed away, and when that first generation of leadership, with Jesus gone physically from the earth, and that first generation of leaders gone, how would we know what message we should receive and embrace?

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The ones written by the Essenes out in the community or out in the Qumran caves and some cultic group, some

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Gnostic sect somewhere, how would we know which message we are to believe and to embrace? It was authenticated by God by giving these men a very small group the ability to perform the same signs and wonders that Jesus performed in order to authenticate the message that they delivered.

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That is the role of signs and wonders. And you can see, I just want you to notice the meaning of each of these phrases here, signs and wonders and miracles and spiritual gifts.

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The word sign is a word that in the Greek literally means to point to or indicate something else. Just as we refer to a sign, something you see, a sign that points you to something, right?

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Exit or Spokane 75 miles or whatever it is, you see a sign on the road that indicates that something is to come or that something is true.

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The same thing with this Greek word for sign, it pointed to something else. The point of a sign, the purpose of a sign was not just to wow people.

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You can do that through sleight of hand. Any cheap two cent magician can wow people with a quick card trick.

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The point of a sign was not to wow people. The point of the sign was to point people to something else. So they would see the sign that was done and they would say, oh what is it that you said?

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I can have life in Jesus Christ. That must be true if this man can do that because only

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God could do through this man what this man is doing. The word wonder is a word that could be translated marvelous, shows the astonishing nature of what was done.

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We're not talking about leg lengthenings. We're not talking about glitter dust falling from the ventilation system or angel feathers falling out of the rafters.

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We're not talking about healing somebody of, I don't know, the common cold through TV in TV land.

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That's not what we're talking about. What type of signs did Jesus do? Lazarus, come forth.

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If you're standing there listening to that and you see that happen, what do you say? No man can do the things that this man does unless God is with him.

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He must speak the word of God. And the apostles had the ability to perform the same types of signs, indicating that they too spoke on behalf of God because God granted them the ability to do the same signs that Jesus had been able to do.

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The word miracle demonstrates the supernatural power of God is evidenced in this. These are not natural occurrences.

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It's not, yeah, you got your healing, just go home, but keep taking the chemo and keep taking that pill and come back. Make sure you visit your doctor.

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Not that type of a miracle. Supernatural manifestations of divine power. And gifts of the

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Holy Spirit, I don't believe that we're talking about the gift of teaching or the gift of administration or the gift of helps or something like that.

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We're talking about supernatural gifts. Miracles, tongues, interpretation of tongues, gifts of healing, that's the type of miracles and that's the type of spiritual gifts that we're talking about in this context.

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Because in this context we're talking about dramatic and supernatural signs like signs and wonders and miracles. So these are the gifts of the

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Holy Spirit given according to His will, the Holy Spirit's will, that were intended to demonstrate that the message that the messenger preached was in fact true and valid.

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Now the point of the author again in verse 4, we're going to move here to talk about the role of signs and wonders a little bit. The point of the author again, catch it, in verse 4, is to show you how culpable you will be if you reject the message of salvation.

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This is how accountable you are. You deny or reject this offer. It is so gracious it was offered by the

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Lord Himself, it was confirmed by those who heard, and then God Himself stamped the seal of authenticity upon that testimony by granting that signs and wonders be done at their hands.

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That is how valid this offer of salvation is, from heaven itself. You deny that or neglect that, you're apathetic toward that, how are you going to escape?

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That's the point of it. Now, let's talk for a moment about the role of signs and wonders in Scripture.

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Signs were God's testimony concerning the apostles' preaching and teaching. So, the them in this passage is the apostles, those who heard the

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Lord. The miracles were the certification from God of the apostolic testimony and of the apostolic message.

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They were God's seal of approval of His divine authenticity upon that message.

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That's what the signs, wonders, miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit were intended to do. Miracles were the proof of God's approval of the message and that particular messenger.

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Let me give you a few Scripture references that indicate this. Peter mentions it in Acts chapter 2, verse 22. He says,

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Now, this is on the day of Pentecost, He's standing before some of the very people who had said crucify Him, and more than 40 days earlier had watched them put

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Jesus of Nazareth to death. And Peter stands up amongst this crowd, who then were some of them earwitnesses of the resurrection, having heard of it, and they knew that they were proclaiming the resurrection of the dead in Jesus Christ.

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And so Peter says to them, Jesus the Nazarene, a man, listen, attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs, which

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God performed through him in your midst, just as you yourselves know. Right?

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You saw the miracles. He says to this crowd of 3 ,000 plus people, you saw the miracles that He did.

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This was God's attestation upon Him that what He said was valid and true. John chapter 3, when

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Nicodemus came to Jesus, he said to Him, Rabbi, we know that you've come from God as a teacher, for no one can do the signs that you do unless God is with Him.

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Nicodemus understood the purpose of miracles. Jesus said in John 5, 36, but the testimony which

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I have is greater than the testimony of John for the works which the Father has given me to accomplish. The very works that I do testify about me that the

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Father has sent me. John 10, 25, Jesus answered and said to them, I told you, you do not believe.

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The works that I do in my Father's name, these testify of me. John 10, 38, but if I do them, that is the works, the miracles, though you do not believe me, believe the works so that you may know and understand that the

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Father is in me and I am in the Father. John 14, 11, believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Otherwise, believe because of the works themselves.

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Talking about the miracles, the signs, and the wonders. Here's what Jesus said. You don't believe what I'm saying? Okay, question it.

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Here are the miracles that I have done. That should make you believe. That is testimony that God is with me.

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That is testimony that I've come from the Father. That is testimony that the Father is in me and I am in the Father. Everything I've said to you about me being the divine

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Son of God, working when the Father is working, being one with the Father, all those claims to deity, saying that I am the

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I am before Abraham was I am. You want proof that all of that is true? Here are the works. Here are the miracles.

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Here are the signs. This is the proof that I speak on behalf of God and that I am who I am. The signs were the evidence.

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They were the credentials. What Jesus said was true. And then you pass that off to the apostles.

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Now, listen, if some people would say that the whole purpose of miracles has changed since the New Testament, really, on what basis would we say that?

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Because here we have the testimony some 30 years after the resurrection in the book of Hebrews saying that the purpose of miracles was to give

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God's certification authentication to those who confirmed Him, to those who heard Jesus Himself.

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That's the point of miracles. Here's what the book of Acts says about miracles. Now, miracles were performed by the apostles and by some people very closely associated with apostolic ministry.

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Here's the testimony. Acts 2 -43. You don't have to write these down if you want to, but if you want a good chain, I have this in a chain in my

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Bible where next to each of these references I have the next reference to turn to. Acts 2 -43. Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles.

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Through everyone? No. Signs and wonders were taking place through the apostles. Acts 5 -12. At the hands of the apostles, many signs and wonders were taking place among the people.

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Acts 14 -3. This is speaking of Saul and Barnabas. Therefore, they spent a long time there speaking boldly with reliance upon the

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Lord who was testifying to the word of His grace by granting that signs and wonders be done by their hands. God was testifying to the word of His grace by granting that Paul and Barnabas were able to do signs and wonders.

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You see what Luke is saying? That the signs that Paul and Barnabas did were evidence of the fact that they spoke for God. There's an authentication going on.

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Acts 15 -12. All the people kept silent and they were listening to Barnabas and Paul as they were relating what signs and wonders

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God had done through them among the Gentiles. Acts 19. God was performing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul.

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2 Corinthians 12 verse 12. Paul says, the signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance by signs and wonders and miracles.

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So what is the universal and consistent testimony of the book of Acts? The universal and consistent testimony of the book of Acts is that Paul did extraordinary miracles.

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The apostles did extraordinary miracles. And are there exceptions to this? Yes. There are three exceptions to this and they're notable exceptions and I'll give them to you.

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The first was a deacon named Stephen in Acts chapter 6 verse 8. There was a second exception,

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Philip, Acts chapter 8 verse 6. And then Barnabas who traveled with the apostle

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Paul. Now one thing that all three of those exceptions have in common, you know what it is? They were closely tied to apostolic ministry.

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You almost could not separate them from apostolic ministry. Paul and Barnabas, obviously. First missionary journey,

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Barnabas was with Paul. Stephen and Philip were both deacons in the early church and both served in that capacity.

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Tied with the apostolic ministry of John and Peter in Jerusalem. Barnabas tied with Paul's ministry in the rest of the book of Acts as he testified amongst

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Gentile cities. So there are three exceptions. So we wouldn't say that only the apostles did miracles.

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That wouldn't be accurate. But we would say this. The sweeping testimony of the book of Acts in the New Testament is that the apostles had unique abilities to perform signs and wonders to authenticate them and their message.

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And oh yeah, there were three exceptions. All three of them closely tied to those same apostles. Those are the only exceptions.

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The scriptures nowhere teach that miracles were commonplace among the people of God in the first century.

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It does not teach that. You read through the book of Acts, these were extraordinary miracles.

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These were magnificent. Performed by whom? The apostles. Yeah, three exceptions. But were these commonplace? No, because if it's commonplace then it's not miraculous, right?

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If everybody's special, no one's special. If everybody gets a first place blue ribbon prize, nobody really got a first place blue ribbon prize, right?

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And the same thing with miracles. If everybody can do miracles then there's nothing signatory about it. There's nothing that distinguishes the apostles from every other

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Joe who comes along with some message he wants you to believe. If everybody can perform them, then universal teaching of scripture is that not everybody could perform miracles in the

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New Testament. Now there are some who are invested in wanting to say that they could actually perform miracles and that these miracle powers were spread more widely than just the apostles.

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There's a whole movement among us now and it is a bane upon evangelicalism known as the New Apostolic Reformation.

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And one of the things that they will recognize is, yeah, apostles do miracles. And then you know what they want you to believe? That they're apostles.

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See how convenient that is? Yeah, we'll grant you when the apostles did miracles. Guess what? I'm an apostle. Now unless you are unfortunate enough to have your first name given to you by your parents be

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Apostle, I'm going to throw this out that there is a 100 % possibility that if you attach the title

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Apostle to yourself, you are a heretic. Just make that a general rule unless you meet somebody whose actual birth certificate says

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Apostle Jones because his parents just named him Apostle, his first name. Chances are very good that if you attach the name, the title

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Apostle to yourself, you belong to this movement. You're a heretic. 99 .9%.

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I'm just reserving the .1 % in that one exception where you had cruel parents. Nobody here has

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Apostle on their birth certificate, so I can say that safely. What's interesting about these people who claim to be apostles, virtually all of them are moral reprobates.

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Virtually all of them. They couldn't teach a Bible verse if their life depended on it. They couldn't tell you what the context of any given passage of Scripture is.

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They can't teach Scripture. They don't know sound doctrine. At every opportunity, they open up their demonic pie hole and out spills the most vile, blasphemous,

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Christ -dishonoring, unbiblical filth you can possibly imagine. I'm only speaking with kid gloves and trying to be gentle here because I don't want to offend people needlessly.

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Would God really certify their testimony by giving them the ability to perform signs and wonders?

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The gold glitter falling from the ventilation system, it's not a miracle. You know what that is? I mean,

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Matt can make that happen. He installs the ductwork and he puts glitter up there. Angel feathers.

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Surprise for the new facility, so this is a surprise. Angel feathers falling out of the same ventilation system to give you another idea.

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That's not a miracle. Leg lengthening is not a miracle. Go in and clean out Sacred Heart Medical Center.

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Make people who have been in coma seven years walk, you know, walk out. That's a miracle. That's the type of stuff that Jesus did. And no, no, they say, no, miracles are different today.

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We can take somebody on the street and lengthen their leg. There's an epidemic of people with short legs walking around, apparently, or one leg longer than the other because they can walk up to anybody and make their leg longer.

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Those are not miracles. That's not the type of signs that Jesus did. God does not authenticate blasphemers by giving them the ability to perform signs.

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He doesn't do it. He authenticated the apostles. These men are blasphemers. Listen to what they spew forth on Christian television.

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It's sad. It's disgusting. It's vile. It's heretical. It's false doctrine. It's poison to the soul.

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It is a bane on evangelicalism that this is even tolerated amongst the church, let alone promoted. The Bible nowhere says that only apostles perform miracles.

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That's true. That's true. And that's one of the arguments of those who are in charismatic circles who want to support the idea that all of us should be doing miracles.

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I'll give you an example of somebody who is famous in charismatic circles who teaches this.

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His name is Jack Deere. How many of you just out of curiosity have heard the name Jack Deere because you've trafficked in these things?

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A few of you. Okay. Jack Deere used to be a professor of Old Testament theology at Dallas Theological Seminary. If you don't know what

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Dallas Theological Seminary is like, Dallas Theological Seminary is not a continuation of school. It's a cessation of school where they teach the same thing that I'm teaching you concerning signs and wonders.

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But Professor Jack Deere, through a series of events in his life that unfolded, he came to the conclusion that what he believed about the cessation of these sign gifts was indeed false and that God was doing miracles today and not only doing miracles but performing signs and also speaking and giving personal revelation, private revelation, etc.

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And so he obviously had to leave the staff at Dallas Theological Seminary because they were going to have a professor there who didn't adhere to their doctrinal statements.

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So he left there. He went and pastored a church for a period of time, a vineyard church, and then in the late 1990s, I think it was late 1990s or mid -1990s, he went and he was pastoring a church in Whitefish, Montana, a

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Presbyterian church there, and then his family was struck by a tragic accident. One of his kids committed suicide and he went back to Dallas where he had family and friends and he's been there ever since.

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I don't mean to make, I'm not in any way making light of that tragedy at all. Just giving you a history of Jack Deere and kind of what he represents.

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Now when I, the first time I heard of Jack Deere was back in the early 1990s when shortly after I got married,

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I was teaching in Kootenay Church, an adult Sunday school class. I wasn't pastoring yet, but the elders let me teach an adult

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Sunday school class, and I did a series on charismatic gifts, and I was about halfway through the series on charismatics and charismatic theology, and my wife and I went up on a vacation and came back for after about a week, and there was a bunch of messages on my answering machine, so I hit the play button on the answering machine to play the message, and there was on here two or three messages,

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I suspect from the same lady, but with different voices. And I should back up just a second, because some kids are looking at me like, what?

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There was a time when we wanted a voicemail message, you had to have a machine that was physically attached to your phone with a cord, and your phone was physically attached to the wall in your house, and it was on a tape, they recorded on a tape, you had to rewind and fast forward and hit play and all that stuff, so now you're all up to speed.

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So I hit play on the answering machine, had two messages from, I think the same lady, but with different voices, and pronouncing upon me the judgment of God for questioning these men of God, and saying the same things that I've said before you today.

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And it was two just, I mean, calling down the judgment of God on me for this, and all kinds of vile names and everything. That could have been horribly destructive to a teacher of the

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Word. If in fact I had cared with somebody I never met, thought about me, it could have been horribly destructive, but as it turns out,

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I don't care, so I just kept teaching and going on with what I'm doing, and I think it was the same lady who sent me, graciously, a package of materials in the mail with all the modern day prophecies that were going to be fulfilled in 1996, in the month of June, Zechariah 14 -something was going to be fulfilled, and God was going to purge all evil from the

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United States. That was a modern day prophecy. How'd that work out for us? No, Bill Clinton got re -elected, so that didn't work.

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So that didn't come to pass, and in that package of materials was this book by Jack Deere, Surprised by the

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Power of the Spirit. I had to read that recently, because I'm working on a writing project, and that's a book that I'm reading as I'm wading through all this garbage, so you don't have to.

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And then he wrote a sequel to that, Surprised by the Voice of God. And in these two books, and he's considered the intellectual heavyweight of the charismatic movement, and in these two books, he tries to lay out the biblical case that signs and wonders and miracles continue to go on today.

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And one of the things he says, it does not say that only apostles perform miracles. That's true. But that's not our claim.

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Our claim is that those were given to the apostles, and there were exceptions to that, but those men were closely tied to apostolic ministry.

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And the second claim that Jack Deere offers in his book to prove that miracles are for today, he says that the scriptures, and I looked up what he said here on Hebrews chapter 2, he said,

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Hebrews chapter 2 does not teach that signs and miracles authenticated the message. That's true.

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What does Hebrews chapter 2 teach? That signs and wonders authenticated what? The messenger.

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Right? See that little slight, uh, what do they call that? Straw man argument? Right? But what did the messenger give?

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The message. That's right. So the signs and wonders authenticated the messenger who spoke from God, and what he said was the message.

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So in a very indirect way, the signs and wonders do authenticate the message by only authenticating the messenger.

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And who are the messengers who have the ability to perform signs and wonders? The apostles. Now, Deere would say, and this is what he claims, that those who heard, that Hebrews chapter 2 doesn't say that God granted only the apostles the power to do miracles.

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That's true. He granted this to them who heard him. I would argue it was the apostles, because the rest of scripture bears testimony to the fact that the apostles performed the miracles.

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And so it doesn't necessarily say that only the apostles are in mind here by them who heard him. That's true.

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But I would suggest to you that it is the apostles that are in mind, even though that is not explicitly said. Why? Because the rest of scripture evidences that the apostles performed the miracles.

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He is talking about those who heard the Lord. They had the ability to perform signs and wonders. And if the author of Hebrews wanted to say that everybody had the ability to perform signs and wonders, what would he have said?

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That God continues to authenticate this message among us even to this day by granting all of us the ability in multiple ways to perform signs and wonders.

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But neither the author nor those who heard apparently had that ability, because he says that it was those who heard him that God testified concerning them that they had the ability to perform signs and wonders to testify to the word of his grace.

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So, that is, I think, Jack Deere's strongest argument, and it absolutely falls flat.

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It falls short. What does Hebrews chapter 2 teach? God granted a message, proclaimed through the

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Lord Jesus Christ, confirmed by those who heard him, and then God himself validated that by giving those who heard him the power to perform signs and wonders, which they did according to his will.

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Now, some would say, if the message needed to be authenticated back then, then the message still needs to be authenticated today, therefore we need signs and wonders to authenticate the message today.

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What does that argument mean? That argument means that you're basically saying, what God certified back then,

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I don't need to trust that. I can't trust that. I need his certification today. I would submit to you that if this testimony certified by the apostles and by God in giving them the ability, the men who scripturated these words, the ability to perform signs and wonders, if that is not sufficient for you, how will you escape?

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Deny this, neglect this, where are you going to turn? Would you really stand in the face of God and say, yeah, yeah,

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I understand you delivered it, Jesus said it, the apostles said it, you gave them the ability to perform signs and wonders, but if you will not perform a sign in my midst today,

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I will not believe it. That message, vouchsafe to them, guaranteed by them, certified by God back then,

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I need it certified today before I'll believe it. It doesn't need to be certified. It has been once for all delivered to the saints,

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Jude chapter 3 says. It does not need to be certified, doesn't need to be re -stamped with God's authority. He has done that in granting to them the ability to perform signs and wonders.

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Not to us, and not to men among us today. Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for your word, once for all delivered to us, given to us by your grace and the power of your

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Holy Spirit to sanctify us, to encourage us, to show us your will for our lives. We're so grateful for the work that you have done and for how you have certified that work by giving the men who delivered these words to us the ability to perform signs and wonders, men close to apostolic ministry, men who had the ability to perform those miracles themselves.

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We're so grateful for this and we thank you again for your word. Encourage us and teach us and help us to appropriate these things into our lives.