If you would please turn with me in your Bibles to John chapter 10. We will be beginning at verse 22. John writes, ‘At that time, the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple in the colonnades of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.’ Jesus answered them, ‘I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 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 father are one.’
And the Jews picked up stones again to stone him. But Jesus answered them, ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of them are you going to stone me?’ The Jews answered him, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.’ Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your law, I said you are gods? If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came, and scripture cannot be broken, do you say of him whom the father consecrated and sent into the world, you are blaspheming because I said, I am the son of God? If I am not doing the works of my father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father.’
Again, they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands. He went away across again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained. And many came to him and they said, ‘John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true and many believed in him there.’
From the Gospel of John, we turn to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians beginning at chapter 12 verse 27. Paul writes, ‘Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating in various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? But earnestly desire the higher gifts? And I will show you still a more excellent way.
For if I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part. Then I shall know fully even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you’ve given us your word. You have shown us many things and you give us our faith to believe and trust you. Build us up and strengthen that faith. Fill us with love for you because of all that you have done and all that we believe because of you. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
So moving on, next to describe another later but related occasion during Jesus’s Jerusalem ministry. The evangelist provides us with a marker showing us the time and the place saying, ‘At that time the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple in the colonnades of Solomon.’
See, John’s specific mentioning of the feast here, which correlates with the modern Hanukkah, achieves two important purposes. The narrative purpose of the feast establishes the specific time, winter, somewhere in mid-December. He’s emphasizing the shortness of time remaining for Jesus’s earthly ministry, being only three or maybe four months away from his crucifixion. This occasion also brought the period of Jesus’s Jerusalem teaching ministry that had begun in John 7 with the feast of booths to a close.
And the interpretive purpose of the feast relates to it being a remembrance of the temple’s reconsecration by the Hasmoneans. This festival celebrated the relighting of the golden menorah which was a visual interpretation of the Lord as the light of the world. John used this occasion to emphasize how Jesus as God the Son was dwelling in the midst of his people as the Lord did in the wilderness tabernacle and how he was their guiding light, shepherding them, leading them to the true promised land, both of which were underscoring the truth of his divinity.
While those are two big picture concerns in this passage, there was something else happening that is important for us to understand. It concerns the relationship between faith and evidence. Not the evidence of our having faith, but the evidence that supports our faith; the relationship between having pasto faith in Jesus as the Messiah or not having that pist faith of not believing in or of not trusting Jesus and his word.
So during this festival, the Jews gathered around Jesus and they bluntly asked him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you’re the Christ, tell us plainly.’ They asked him a straightforward question, and they were hoping for a straightforward answer. But Jesus answered them, ‘I told you, but you do not believe. The works I do in my father’s name, they bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me.’
So Jesus again repeated his sheep and shepherd metaphor, reminding us of the necessity of his sovereign election together with the internal working of the Holy Spirit in regeneration before a person may respond positively to Christ in faith. But these Jews still would not believe Jesus because they just were not his sheep. And Jesus continued, ‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 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.’
So first, Jesus claimed to offer his followers eternal life, and then he says, ‘I and the father are one.’ There was no possible way for him to say, ‘I am God,’ more plainly than that. There could be no doubt about what Jesus implied and meant, and there was no plausible alternative understanding.
So, violently responding to his claim, the Jews picked up stones again to stone him, performing the technically proper response according to Torah. But before they began throwing their stones, Jesus asked them, ‘I’ve shown you many good works from the Father. For which of them are you going to stone me?’ The Jews answered him, ‘It’s not for a good work that we’re going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you being a man, make yourself God.’ They just proved yet again that they did not understand what Jesus was doing.
But Jesus’s final answer on this subject was, ‘If I am not doing the works of my father, do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you don’t believe me, believe the works that you may know and understand that the father is in me and I am in the father.’ They did not want to believe Jesus. They did not want to trust the words that he was saying.
So Jesus had to point outside of himself. He said, ‘Don’t just take my word for it.’ He didn’t want them to trust mere words; they are just air, if they were just air. So, he pointed them to things that were more substantial and tangible than words. He pointed to the evidence that could not be argued against or denied convincingly—things like the wedding guests who enjoyed the wine in Cana, the experience of those who ate the loaves and fishes and were filled, all of the many people who had been healed at his command or touch, and the granting of sight to the man born blind.
Jesus redirected them to consider his miracles, the works of his father, the extraordinary things that were happening all around him. Because if they were not yet willing or able to believe what he said and taught and claimed, then they should believe these proofs that were set before them. And if they were willing and able to believe these extraordinary miracles, at least then they would know and understand that the father is in him and that he was in the father—all because his miracles, his miraculous works, they supported the truth of what he taught and they supported his claim of divinity.
This final argument of Jesus was predicated on the example of the Old Testament scriptures of his lesser typological predecessors of redemptive history, folks like Moses and Aaron, Elijah and Elisha—the same evidence which the Pharisees were relying on for trusting Moses. Remember, previously the Pharisees had told the once blind man, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses. But as for this man, we don’t know where he comes from.’ But how did they know that God had spoken to Moses? They knew it because they believed in the miracles that Moses had performed before Pharaoh.
So similarly, this final argument of Jesus also relied upon Jesus’s miraculous evidence and what the true meaning and purpose of miracles is. So since Jesus instructed us to believe the works, what should his miracles cause us to believe? To get to that, we first need to consider three questions. Are miracles normal occurrences in the Bible? How often do we read about miracles actually happening in scripture? And do similar miracles still occur today?
The answers may surprise you. The first is no. The second answer is not often, and actually far less frequently than we ordinarily assume. And the third one is an emphatic no. So if you search an ESV Bible, you will find the word miracle once, miracles 11 times, and miraculous twice—14 examples of the word miracle across 66 books of the Bible. So really, we know there’s more there.
So really we need to better define what we mean by our use of the term miracle. If you pause to think about it, you will realize that we are surrounded by miracles. It is a proper Christian perspective and attitude for us to observe and identify the miraculous all around us. These things are what we might call ordinary miracles.
Ordinary miracles are wondrous, commonplace things that happen regularly and may become predictable and expected, and they are often taken for granted and overlooked. The natural healing process is miraculous. The generation of life, that’s observed across a woman’s pregnancy and the process of giving birth, is miraculous. The process of respiration, of us breathing, both our ability and the sustainability of the earth’s atmosphere for it, is miraculous. Sunshine and the visual appearance of a rainbow of light just passing through water droplets to create this beautiful image—those are miraculous. And so is the fact that the sun’s solar energy does not scour the face of our planet clean.
These ordinary miracles, however, are not what is meant by miracles in scripture. What scripture means are extraordinary miracles instead. And while miracle is not a commonly used term in the English Bible, the expression more commonly used for such things is signs and wonders. It is most often used within the Old Testament in specific reference to the signs and wonders that were done for Pharaoh.
It is used proximately in the synoptic gospels to describe the evidence that will be offered by false Christs and prophets as mockeries of God’s true power. John uses it to compare the works of Jesus with the works of Moses, and the rest of the New Testament writers use it to describe the miraculous works that Jesus and the apostles did. Both expressions, signs and wonders and miracles, they describe extraordinary displays of divine power that are otherwise unexplainable and impossible to perform or recreate through any ordinary human means.
But we also need to be careful to distinguish acts of God from signs and wonders. Causally, every miracle is clearly an act of God. But every sign and wonder occurred with some kind of human involvement so that the miracle would be associated with that particular person. The distinction is that acts of God can only be attributed to the Lord. And although the ten wonders in Egypt are attributed to Moses, they are still acts of God.
Obviously, creation was an obvious act of God. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was an act of God. Jonah’s rescue by the fish was an act of God. The miraculous preservations of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were acts of God, because like Jonah, those men were the beneficiaries of a miracle. They didn’t do the miracle.
So what the scriptures say the purpose was for all of these miracles was their performance, their whole purpose. The Lord told Moses, ‘When Pharaoh says to you, ‘Prove yourself by working a miracle,” Moses’s authority and role was proven by his miracles, by his signs and wonders. Paul told the church in Corinth that the signs of a true apostle were performed among you with utmost patience with signs and wonders and mighty works.
Signs and wonders proved whether someone was an apostle, and the author of Hebrews described the record of scripture, writing, ‘It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard it, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and the gift of the Holy Spirit, distributed according to his will.’
So, the word of God, scripture, was proven true by signs and wonders. The biblically stated purpose of miracles was to prove a messenger and their message. Miracles were their credentials, visible demonstrations of the power and authority that a messenger was invested with. Miracles were evidences that proved a messenger’s credibility and testified to the truthfulness of their message.
But if I’m correct and such miracles were not commonplace in the Bible, then how often do miracles and these wonder workers appear in scripture? There are actually just three periods in redemptive history when signs and wonders are recorded.
First, during the Exodus and the Canaanite conquest when they were done through Moses, Aaron, and even Joshua, their miracles repeatedly confirmed the divine authority of these men. Second was during the reign of the house of Omri in the northern kingdom through the persons of Elijah and Elisha, where all of their many miracles—like commanding droughts, calling fire down from heaven, healing leprosy, and even raising the dead—proved the divine authority of their prophecy and their pronouncements of judgment.
Thirdly and lastly, during the first century, only during the lifetime of Jesus and the apostles, their miracles helped to prove the truth of the gospel message that they preached of personal repentance, forgiveness for sin, and justification through faith in Jesus Christ alone according to God’s sovereign grace. Furthermore, there were no written testimonies about miracles continuing to be performed by the ancient church fathers in the second and third centuries.
During each of these three unique periods, the miracles performed were confirming God’s messengers and his message. And then afterwards, God’s people were left to just trust in his word, to believe his word and obey his word without such extraordinary miracles happening. God’s people did not benefit from signs and wonders after Joshua died until the time of the prophets.
God’s people did not benefit from signs and wonders after Elisha died until the coming of Jesus Christ. Even the Jews of that day who heard Jesus noted that fact that although John did no sign, everything that John said was true. Therefore, following the death of the last apostle, just as in those earlier times, God’s people—we have no biblical reason to expect that we should continue to experience signs and wonders.
Because Christians, we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, which should be a big enough miracle for us. Sign gifts are not expected to continue forever. The Holy Spirit, he testifies to us, and he helps us to believe without them. And concerning the question of miracles, continuing, the Apostle Paul explains that while every Christian is equally a part of Christ’s church, we do not all equally receive the same gifting nor the same calling or role of service within the church. He tells us that God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating in various kinds of tongues.
But are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? The answer was no. But he says earnestly desire the higher gifts, which would be those of faith, hope, and love.
So while the church has had apostles, prophets, and teachers, pastors and elders continue in the teaching role, every Christian is not called to every role. And since the offices of apostle and prophet were both limited by their context, they have naturally ceased. Similarly, the Christians in the first century, they didn’t receive all the gifts of miracle-working or supernatural healing or tongues. It was just Jesus and the apostles—those gifts that were specifically associated with them.
So they should be expected to similarly cease. And despite telling us that Christians should desire such extraordinary spiritual gifts, Paul also warns us that they will cease, writing, ‘As for prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away.’
Again, the extraordinary gifts and miracles were always meant to be temporary. They were given to Christians for a limited season because after their purpose was achieved, they were no longer necessary. Proving the point, since tongues are a sign not for believers but unbelievers, the gift of tongues and their interpretation, as desirable as they may have been, were not given for the edification of the church. The potential benefit of the extraordinary gift of tongues for Christians is far less than the importance that some and many people will wrongly place on them.
Because these gifts, just like the other signs and wonders, serve the same temporary purpose: to confirm the truth of the gospel and to strengthen people in their faith. So Christians, we do not need miraculous evidences to continue today because the authoritative testimony of scripture has already been confirmed. The canon of scripture is closed, and no new revelation is forthcoming.
So there’s no need for them. There’s no need for signs and wonders to continue because there are no more apostles and there is no new scripture to affirm. So when Jesus said, ‘Believe the works,’ he meant for his hearers to trust the external, unbiased testimonies that they had already heard about all the many miracles he had done and for them to comprehend what those miracles represented and meant.
Jesus told them that if they did, then they would know and understand that the father is in him and he is in the father. They just did not want to believe what Jesus was saying because it was borderline blasphemous and impossible to accept according to just logic and reason.
But testimony from other eyewitnesses about Jesus’s miracles, from their friends and family, from other sources that they considered reliable and were able to trust, should have helped them to understand the truth that God the Father was in Christ and he was in God the Father. That Jesus is not only from God but that Jesus is also the Lord God himself.
If they would have just believed the works, then they would not need to take Jesus at his word or to take it on faith. They would have been believing the evidence plainly set before them. And if they believed that evidence, then they would have had no choice except to believe everything that Jesus claimed.
And if a person believed that Jesus had done and was doing all that was claimed about him, or even just half of it, then it was reasonable that they should be inclined favorably toward believing in him. If they would believe the works, then they would believe Jesus just as they believed Moses.
But the Jewish religious leaders, they remained adamantly opposed to Jesus and his teachings. And so once again, they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands. Jesus now abandoned Jerusalem and again went away to Bethany across the Jordan where John the Baptist originally had ministered and where Jesus was baptized.
So Jesus’s teaching ministry had now come full circle, concluding where it began. And many came to him and they said, ‘John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true.’ And many believed in him there—many of those who had started off as John the Baptist’s disciples. They began to believe in Jesus as the Christ.
They believed the testimony of John, remembering when he had said, ‘And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the son of God.’ They believed the works and all of those many works confirmed what Jesus had publicly declared: ‘My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.’
So when we believe in Christ, we are trusting that he will fulfill his promise of giving us eternal life and that he will preserve our souls in both this life and the next. But many people object to Christianity because they wrongly assume that our faith is built on blind faith.
They assume and claim that we have no evidence to support any of the truth claims in scripture about Jesus. But they could not be more wrong because the greatest evidence for our hope and God’s promise of life is the empty tomb. The fastest and easiest way to disprove the promises and hope of Christianity would be to produce the body of Jesus. And the opposition never has.
Meanwhile, the body of the Islamic false prophet Muhammad continues to rest in his Saudi Arabian tomb, and it’s visited by millions of his misguided followers every year, demonstrating the hopelessness of their religion. Similarly, the remains of the Buddha are enshrined and regularly venerated, divided into eight portions and entombed in separate places, which also demonstrates the hopelessness of their religion.
Likewise, the greatest evidence for our confidence in the truthfulness of the Bible is the continuing testimony of church history and the witness of the ever-increasing number of saints who have gone on before us. Our faith in Jesus Christ is a reasonable faith, and our hope in God’s promises is supported by far more evidence than most of us realize.
We have the testimony of lives that have been radically changed and transformed through the gospel by the Holy Spirit. We have the testimony of comfort and peace in a Christian’s dying as opposed to the terror of judgment and fear of the unknown or the fear of having been wrong found in others.
And while devotees of other religions are sometimes willing to die for the tenets of their faith, only Christians are willing to live for ours, sacrificing our own chosen ways and sinful preferences in obedient submission to the commandments of Christ. And while many people are willing to live for a known lie to continue to perpetuate and promote it, no one will willingly die for something that they know to be untrue. No one will choose to pay the ultimate price for a falsehood. Yet all the apostles, along with most of the earliest faithful, were condemned and executed because they refused to renounce their faith in Jesus Christ.
Christians have this confidence because we believe the works that God has done. We believe that all the miracles that were performed by Jesus and recorded in scripture—especially his resurrection and ascension—support the truth of his teaching, his claim of divinity, and the certainty of his promises.
We believe that the miracles recorded in scripture actually happened as they’re described by the four evangelists in their gospels because all of the New Testament writers died asserting their truthfulness, and because their claims were continuously upheld by the eyewitnesses. There are also no claims denying the fact of Jesus’s miracles recorded from antiquity. If there were, the opposition would have surely produced them since the very beginning.
And we believe that scripture and its transmission down through church history is reliable and true because of all the manuscript evidence from antiquity that demonstrates the durability of the text and affirms the veracity of its accurate reception. Our Bible agrees with our grandparents’ Bible, which agrees with their grandparents’ Bible, which agrees with John Calvin’s Bible, and that agrees with the Bible of Thomas Aquinas, which agrees with the Bible of Augustine, that it agreed with the Bible of Athanasius and with Polycarp and his mentor John the Evangelist.
Translations, yes, they will vary according to our contemporary conventions. But the truth of the text and the truth within the text remains the same because it is the inherent, infallible, authoritative word of God. It is the revelation of Jesus Christ, the son of God and God the son—the Logos who is theos andros; therefore, he is, and it is the same yesterday and today and forever. Amen.