Gary Derickson: The Cessation of Healing Miracles in Paul’s Ministry
Bittlinger, the European charismatic, defines spiritual gifts by saying, “A charism is a gratuitous manifestation of the Holy Spirit, working in and through, but going beyond, the believer’s natural ability for the common good of the people of God.”4
Students of the Word will be wise if they learn what Jesus meant when He explained the centrality of faith to the supernatural ministry. Consider the instance in Matt. 17:14-21 when Jesus answered the disciples who asked why they could not cast out the demon causing epilepsy in the boy whom Jesus cured. “Because of your unbelief,” He told them. If these same disciples were later the ones who performed miracles at will, then were they being instructed by Jesus on this occasion to place their faith in their own God-given ability to heal? On the contrary, their faith was to be in God who uses them as instruments of healing and conduits of the miraculous.
It is quite interesting that one of the primary passages used by cessationists, including Derickson, to say that the miraculous gifts are no longer needed is one that clearly says that these very miraculous gifts are given according to will of God. Hebrews 2:4 does not even mention the agency of man when it says that the message of salvation was authenticated by “God also bearing witness both with signs and wonders, with various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to His own will” (NKJV). Yet it cannot be proven that the signs the author refers to were not “performed” at the hands of God’s messengers for the very reason that God has chosen this agency to bring the message of salvation.
The miraculous ministry of the Holy Spirit is not a different work than His work of grace in the believer’s life. If it is He who works in the believer mightily (Col. 1:29, see also Eph. 3:20) that which the believer cannot do—filling him with all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:19), making known the riches of salvation (Col. 1:27), showing him how to live by faith in God the Son (Gal. 2:20)—why would His ministry of supernatural gifts be something He bestows on the believer for him to perform at his own will? When the Holy Spirit regenerates the spirit of a man or woman, He does not leave them to work out the rest of their salvation. The believer is not sanctified by his own will, nor kept secure in relationship with Christ by his own will. These take place because of the Spirit’s work of grace in the life of the believer. Likewise, the Spirit’s work of empowering and anointing the believer for ministry must also be His work of grace and not the believer, by his own volition, pulling out miracles from some deposit of power he has been given.
Three Reasons for Cessation
Derickson uses three lines of argument to show that Paul could not heal at will at the close of his ministry. First, Paul’s later epistles and other later New Testament books do not mention signs, wonders, and miracles very much or only in the past tense. Secondly, Paul did not, and therefore could not heal men who would have been of help to him in ministry: Epaphroditus, Timothy, and Trophimus. Finally, Hebrews 2:3-4 says that signs and wonders have already accomplished the task of authenticating the gospel and are no longer necessary.
Category: Pneuma Review, Spirit, Winter 1999
Followers
Fans
