An Evil Generation Seeks A Sign

We, too, can be on the “cutting edge” if we get out where the sinners are.

Dave Dorpat

Reports of signs and wonders are coming to us from all over the world. I’ve been writing a column called “Around The World On The Cut-ting Edge.” It tells some of the remark-able stories of God’s intervention, especially on the mission fields. We define the cutting edge as “that place where the power of the Gospel of Christ is being proclaimed and is defeating the power of the enemy and bringing people into the family of God.”

Biblically, a sign is a miraculous or providential event, often an answer to prayer, which says that God is great and greatly to be praised. I believe signs happen most often on the cutting edge because God is interested in confirming his Gospel Word to those who are seeking (Acts 9:40-42; Romans 15:18,19; 1 Corinthians 2:4,5 &4:20; 1 Thessalonians 1:5; Hebrews 2:4).

Material for the “Cutting Edge” column is gleaned from newsletters of various minis-tries my wife and I support, like the Open Doors ministry to the suffering church founded by “God’s Smuggler,” Brother An-drew. He tells of sister Ruth, a house church leader in China who was imprisoned for her faith. The authorities insisted that she write out a confession of her crimes. She wrote about Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection and about heaven and hell. That night they held a “struggle” meeting against her. Four hundred prisoners and guards listened to her “crimes.” The officials read aloud all thirty-seven pages of her confession and many prisoners repented in tears and received the Lord. A month later the authorities passed out ballots to release a selected inmate. They all wrote “Ruth.” She walked home to her three children for whom she had been praying because they had only five catties of rice left in the house when she left a month earlier. She immediately asked them, “Is there any rice left?" Daniel’s beaming response was, “Mom, our rice container is overflowing!” And it really was, growing from five to over forty catties!

Other outreach organizations, like Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade For Christ (CCFC) and its “JESUS" film ministry re-ports that 3.1 billion people in 228 countries and 558 languages have seen the film with a good percentage of those coming to faith in Christ and being incorporated into a local church. Dr. Bright, who earlier held that the age of miracles is passed and did not allow any youth with charismatic leanings to be involved in leadership in Campus Crusade, has done a 180. CCFC teams and many other ministries which show the movie all over the world report healings and other miraculous events.

One of my favorite sources for the column is our own RIM founder and former St. Louis Seminary Professor, Dr. Art Vincent and his wife, Nancy. For instance, the November 2000 issue of their ARM newsletter reported how evangelists (many of them trained by Dr. Art and Nancy) plant churches in Nepal. They tell Bible stories to which they add songs and prayers for the sick. When God answers one of the prayers, a church is planted! The families recount the gospel stories and tell about the healing of their loved one to the whole village.

Our secular, rationalist culture mocks miracles. Some of that attitude has invaded the church. As sainted St. Louis Seminary professor Martin Franzmann put it years ago, “The miracles were once the church’s de-light and gave vigor to her faith. There is little ground for a feeling of modern complacency in a church whose teachers some-how give the impression that they would be happier of they had a non-miraculous Christ for their Lord.” 1

Professor Franzman speaks of Jesus’ defines the content of the proclamation which their mission brings to Israel. It is, in a word, the kingdom of heaven. Whether that content is expressed in so many words (‘Preach as you go, saying The kingdom of heaven is at hand’) or is defined in terms of its concrete manifestations by a series of la-conic imperatives which bid the disciples perform the deeds of Christ (‘Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons, ’ Mt. 10:8), always the same thing is meant: the triumphant progress of the royal grace of God going forth to renew and trans-figure the world. All that has been implied in the Baptist’s prediction of a baptism of God’s creative Spirit (Mt. 3:11), all that the Beatitudes had promised (Mt. 5:3-10), all that the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer had implored (Mt. 6:9,10), all that the ten mighty deeds of Jesus had emblazoned in history as the token and prediction of God’s Gracious reign (Mt. 8 & 9) - that is miracles as “the dynamic extension of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of heaven, His enacted proclamation of God’s graciously royal reign...In the miracles the beggary of man and the largesse of God were strikingly and unmistakably delineated, so that each miracle became the Gospel in miniature and was so proclaimed.” 2 He mentions that they are not magic or “proof” that Jesus is who he claimed to be, but rather they are “revelation of what Jesus is - what He is, specifically, for man in his need...The church must learn to face the miracle freely and joyously again if she would stand where the disciples stood, in the presence of the Christ.” 3

In speaking of miracles Franzmann does not only refer to those done by Jesus person-ally. In his comments on the sending out of the disciples in Matthew 10, he points out that they are sent out to say and do the same things Jesus did: “The Messianic character of the authority given to the disciples also the burden of their proclamation to Israel.”4

Note the awe and respect the good professor had for the Lord’s miracles and his church’s subsequent miracles. They are an expression of the gospel - “the gospel in miniature”! They proclaim the coming of the kingdom of heaven and the presence of God!

But what about the words of our Lord, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign” (Matt. 12:39 RSV)? Are not these words a clear rebuke against seeking signs and wonders? Yes they are. We are not to seek signs for the signs’ sake. We are to seek the Lord and his supernatural intervention for the healing, deliverance, and salvation of the nations that he might be worshiped, praised, magnified and given all glory.

It’s significant to note that Jesus, in Mt. 16:4, says a second time, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign.” Each time it is to those who have chosen unbelief, the Scribes and Pharisees in Chapter 12 and the Pharisees and Sadducees in Chapter 16. It’s no coincidence that in that same chapter Jesus asks his disciples who they believe he is and Peter makes his heaven-given confession of faith, “You are the Christ the Son of the Living God” (vs.16). What happens next is also no coincidence. Jesus is trans-figured before Peter, James and John (17:2). To hard-hearted unbelief, which demands proof, no sign is given. But, as Franzmann puts it, “to those who committed themselves to the Christ without a sign, the sign of the Transfiguration was given.” 5

When we denigrate answers to prayer, we rob God of worship and thanksgiving (see 2 Corinthians 1:11). Some skepticism is healthy because we know the depth of the deceit that dwells in the heart of man and what a liar the devil is. But when respected ministries and missionaries and brothers and sisters of Christ around the world and on the cutting edge in our own inner city and other mission fields testify to God’s intervention, let us join them in praising God for his mercies to the children of men.

The mighty deeds of the Christ, then and now, proclaim the coming of the Kingdom and are thus to lead to repentance and faith in Christ as Savior and Lord. Our slowness to perceive and believe what God is doing today through the outpouring of his Spirit is culturally, not Biblically, generated. Jesus reserved some of his harshest words for such unbelief: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sack-cloth and ashes. But I tell you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for tyre and Sidon than for you” (Matt. 11:21,22).

Most of us in America live in a needy mission field. We, too, can be on the cutting edge if we get out where the sinners are. I know of one congregation who went door to door and offered to pray, in faith, not skepticism, for needs. They kept track of those needs and continued to pray for the families involved. Later they followed up and asked how things were. They found a high percentage of answered prayers and whole families ready to receive Jesus as their Savior and Lord. The “triumphant progress of the royal grace of God” is still “going forth to renew and transfigure the world” also through signs and wonders, “the Gospel in miniature.”

1 Franzmann, Martin, Follow Me, CPH, St. Louis, 1961, p. 68

2 Ibid, p. 68

3 Ibid, p. 67 & 69

4 Ibid, p. 84

5 Ibid, p. 147

Rev. David Dorpat

20435 1st Place So.

Des Moines, WA 98198