by Lee Strobel
“So he denied the possibility of miracles?” I asked.
“It’s very doubtful whether he believed in miracles. He said if one did occur, it must have been part of God’s universal plan from the outset and already built into the universe. In other words, it was determined to happen ahead of time. It couldn’t be a response to something new that happens, and so it’s not really supernatural.”
“Did he deny the miracle of the resurrection?”
“Yes, he did. He didn’t even believe Jesus was God incarnate in any traditional sense. He tried to make all of Christianity based on experience, but not supernatural experience. So faith is internalized.”
“How has this trickled down to churches today?”
“Even in many Baptist churches, by and large, people internalize God and their relationship with him. That means God acts on our consciousness and inner life, but not on the outer world. Inside is where God is at; science can explain everything outside. So religion is reduced to two spheres: spirituality and ethics.”
“What’s missing?” I asked, knowing full well how he would answer.
“The book of Acts!” he declared. “The supernatural. And this has trickled down to us without us being aware of it. Frankly, most mainline evangelicals don’t really miss the miraculous dimension of faith because they grew up without it. They’re used to religion focusing primarily on our devotional life, and maybe evangelism and morality.”
Though I didn’t want to confess it, I said, “I see some of that in my own life.”
“Me too,” he replied.
“Really?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“How so?”
“I had a deeply profound experience in which God spoke to me. I didn’t audibly hear his voice, but what he told me was crystal clear. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I did what he said, and remarkable things happened. Yet when that experience occurred, I was utterly shocked. If I hadn’t grown up in a church where it’s normal for a Christian to hear from God, I don’t know how I would have reacted. I might have said, ‘Well, that was just a brain hiccup.’”
I asked, “What about Bible-believing theologians who say miracles have ceased?”
“There are two kinds of cessationists,” he explained. “One kind says God no longer offers a spiritual gift of healing; the other kind says miracles themselves have ceased. In other words, once the Bible was written and the early church took root in the Roman Empire, miracles were no longer needed and God stopped doing them.”
“What’s your reaction to that?”
“Bewilderment. I know miracles have happened to me, so that can’t be right. If God is omnipotent—which he is—then it makes sense to me that he’s going to continue to act.”
Caught by an Angel
Olson’s reference to supernatural interventions in his own life prompted me to ask about a physical healing that he received as a child.
“My mother died of heart damage from rheumatic fever at age thirty-two, when I was two and a half years old,” he began. “At age ten, I contracted strep throat and was very, very sick. My family believed in God’s healing through prayer, and doctors were a last resort, but they took me to an osteopath, who wrote a prescription for penicillin.”
“Did it cure your strep throat?”
“It might have, except my stepmother threw the prescription away.”
“Wow, seriously?”
“She said, ‘I don’t think you really need this.’ Well, a week later, I developed rheumatic fever, just like my mother. I was sick and in and out of hospitals for three months. Rheumatic fever attacks the valves of your heart; most patients eventually need heart-valve replacement surgery, which didn’t exist when my mother died.”
“I assume your family and church prayed for you.”
“Yes, I remember the elders of the church coming to the house, laying hands on me, anointing me with oil, and praying for me. And this was not a perfunctory prayer. Later I went for my weekly checkup, and the doctor said, ‘I don’t hear any heart murmur.’”
“You had one before this?”
“Yeah—in fact, the doctor had called it ‘impressive.’ Now he said, ‘I don’t hear anything, and your blood test for inflammation is normal.’”
“Was he surprised?”
“Very much so, but he chalked it up to the care I had received. Nevertheless, today I have zero heart-valve damage. I go to the cardiologist every year to check, and he always says the same thing: ‘You don’t have a rheumatic heart.’”
“You believe that God healed you?”
“Absolutely. I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Still, it’s scary to think of your stepmother throwing away the prescription for the antibiotic that could have averted the rheumatic fever in the first place,” I said.
“I don’t think the best approach is to say, ‘God will heal me, so I’m just going to pray.’ Usually God works through natural means. He expects us to make use of the gifts he has provided to us, such as medication and technology. Otherwise, it would be like expecting manna to fall from heaven when there’s a grocery store down the block.”
I smiled. “That’s a good analogy.”
“The best approach,” he concluded, “is to merge both prayer and medicine.”
The congregation of his father’s Pentecostal church had no problem accepting Olson’s healing as being a miraculous gift from God. For them, the supernatural was an ever-present element in their lives.
“I remember one incident where a little boy in our church, probably ten years old, accidently opened the door and fell out of the family car while it was driving down the road,” Olson recalled. “When they rushed to pick him up, they thought he would be dead, but instead he was just standing there. They said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘Well, didn’t you see the man? He caught me.’”
Olson cleared his throat and then slowly removed his wire-rim glasses. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.
“I’m a little emotional, because I miss this,” he said. “I really do. There’s no doubt in my mind that an angel caught him.”
He replaced his glasses and continued. “I remember when I was teaching at Oral Roberts University, and my car broke down. I didn’t have enough money to fix it. Then a colleague—who had no idea about my car—came to me, gave me a check for five hundred dollars, and said, ‘God told me to give this to you.’ It was what I needed to fix the car.”
I said, “I had a very similar experience, except I was on the giving end of the money.”
“Well, to me, this should be normal in the Christian life,” he replied, putting the handkerchief back into his pocket. “I’ve been away from it for so long that sometimes it just hurts.”
“This Is Not Our Christianity”
Olson’s classes at Baylor attract students from around the globe, including Third World countries where Christianity and its attitude toward the supernatural look quite different than in the United States.
“When these African and Asian students see Western evangelicalism for the first time, what’s their assessment?” I asked.
“They have to be coaxed to give it,” Olson said. “But when they do, it’s total dismay.”
“How so?”
“They say, ‘This is not our Christianity. Our Christianity in Africa is surrounded by spiritual warfare. We can’t brush it off as superstition. God really intervenes and does amazing things, but we don’t see that here. We think it’s your prosperity, individualism, materialism, and a lack of belief in the spiritual world,’ by which they mean the supernatural.”
Olson told me about the time he invited a Catholic priest from Nigeria to address his class. “He didn’t want to talk about Catholic doctrine,” Olson said. “He wanted to talk about miracles. For an hour and twenty minutes, he talked about God’s supernatural actions in Nigeria.”
“How did the students react?”
“They were in awe. They couldn’
t believe it.”
“Did it light a fire in the students?”
“For sure.”
“Some people say the reason miracles proliferate in Africa and other places in the Third World is because that’s the leading edge of the gospel,” I said.
“Yes, Benjamin Warfield first made that argument in a book called Counterfeit Miracles in the early twentieth century,” he replied.
“What do you think of that claim?”
His reply was unvarnished. “It’s nonsense.”
“Really?” I replied.
“We need the supernatural as much as they do in China. America is still a mission field. I suspect that real Christianity is a minority, even among people who call themselves Christian. Too often, we think we only need apologetics, evidence, debates, and arguments to spread the gospel here rather than to see God do a supernatural work. So Warfield came up with this explanation that miracles don’t happen in the enlightened Western societies because we’re already Christianized. Well, I respectfully dissent.”
* * *
I moved on to another reason that many Christians are uncomfortable with the supernatural. “Not all people who are prayed for recover their health,” I said. “Maybe that’s a reason why our churches don’t pursue those prayers—they don’t want to be embarrassed if an answer doesn’t come. How do we explain it when God doesn’t heal someone?”
“We don’t,” came his response. “I believe God is sovereign and not arbitrary. He knows what he’s doing. When he doesn’t answer our prayers as we want, there may be particularities about the situation that we just don’t understand. The apostle Paul talks about having a thorn in the flesh that God never healed despite prayers.”
I noted that it’s common in some Pentecostal circles to blame the patient’s lack of faith for why God didn’t heal them.
“That’s simply harmful,” he said. “When my mother died, a woman who had been associated with a healing evangelist told my father that it was because my parents didn’t follow God’s call to the mission field.”
“Yikes, that’s harsh,” I said.
“Fortunately, my dad shrugged it off and said, ‘That’s nuts.’ But those kinds of ill-informed statements can be very hurtful. We have to move away from trying to explain why a particular individual wasn’t healed. That’s God’s business. All we know is that he asked us to pray for their healing, and we have to be obedient.”
“That can be challenging,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “But let’s face it: the Christian life is a challenge.”
Gentle Whispers of God
Not all miracles are spectacular healings of incurable diseases. Not every supernatural intervention is as earth-shattering as someone rising from the dead. More often, God speaks in gentle whispers, or he orchestrates everyday events in a way that sends a message of encouragement, correction, or hope to someone who desperately needs it.
Many Christians experience these subtle and inaudible “leadings” or “impressions” from God, but they’re often reluctant to talk about them for fear of the skeptical reaction they’ll receive—and so they keep quiet, embarrassed by the supernatural.
Why did my friend Bill Hybels, the influential leader of Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago, wait thirty-five years before writing a book about these Holy Spirit nudgings? “Because of the controversy this subject tends to arouse,” he explained.7
“When I make public reference to the whispers of God, I barely make it off the stage before half a dozen people approach to remind me that ax murderers often defend their homicides by claiming, ‘God told me to do it,’” Hybels said. “Conservative Christians question my orthodoxy when I describe my experiences . . . and secularists either are humored or quietly tell their spouses that Hybels has lost his marbles. Or both.”8
Yet Hybels has found that these subtle but very real communications from our transcendent God are among the most exhilarating aspects of the Christian life.
“Without a hint of exaggeration,” he said, “I can boldly declare that God’s low-volume whispers have saved me from a life of sure boredom and self-destruction. They have redirected my path, rescued me from temptations, and reenergized me during some of my deepest moments of despair. They inspire me to live my life at what boaters call ‘wide-open throttle’—full on!”9
When I asked Olson for his opinion about whether God still speaks to his followers, his answer was quick and unabashed. “No question,” he said. “I continue to believe that God speaks to his people today, although I’ll concede that sometimes I find myself feeling pretty alone on this.”
In one of his blog posts, Olson described how he walked away from a medical examination deeply troubled and discouraged. The doctor had found a problem and raised the specter that surgery might be required.
The next day, an old hymn began running through Olson’s mind, even though he hadn’t heard the song since childhood. The words kept playing over and over, like a broken record, serving as background noise all week.
“It’s a hymn of comfort and assurance—of God’s presence whatever happens,” he said. “Being a good Baptist, I simply thought it was my own mind’s way of handling the emotional distress I was experiencing.”
That Sunday, Olson went to his wife’s church, where he noticed that the first hymn to be sung was #220, which was “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” Olson reached for the hymnal from the rack in front of him and turned to #220—but that wasn’t the song he found there. Instead, he found the hymn that had been running through his mind all week.
“Then I noticed that the hymnal I grabbed was not the church’s hymnal, which doesn’t even contain that hymn,” he wrote. “It even had a different church’s name embossed in gold letters on the front. I have never seen that hymnal before; it didn’t belong there. I have no idea how it got there.”
Indeed, it was the only one of those hymnals in the sanctuary—and it just happened to be in the rack directly in front of where Olson sat down.
“So, what to make of that?” Olson asked. “Sheer coincidence? Possibly. Is it simply magical thinking to believe this was God sending me a message that the hymn was from him? Possibly. My Baptist half says, ‘It’s just a coincidence; don’t make more of it.’ My Pentecostal half says, ‘That’s unbelief; accept it as from God.’”
Often Christians object to the legitimacy of these “God things” because they say people don’t need God to speak anymore. After all, they insist, the canon of Scripture is complete, and today God chooses to speak through preachers to communicate messages based on those biblical teachings.
“Personally, I find that absurd,” Olson said. “If God was gracious enough to give personal guidance, comfort, and correction to individuals and groups ‘back then,’ why would he stop?”
The idea that God now only uses pastors to communicate his messages “is hardly consistent with Baptist belief in the priesthood of believers,” Olson said. “It’s a form of clericalism.”
He did add cautions. “By God speaking outside of Scripture today, I do not mean with the same inspiration and authority as in Scripture,” he said. “Everything must be tested against the Bible to determine its validity.”
While Olson is aware that skeptics label these “God things” as “magical thinking,” what troubles him is that many Christians have the same attitude. “They pay lip service to God’s contemporary ‘speaking,’ but immediately turn around and, when confronted with an example, call it magical thinking.”
Regarding the hymnal incident, Olson said, “I can’t state with certainty that what happened to me was truly a ‘God thing.’ Maybe it was; maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just a very strange coincidence. I believe coincidences happen, but some are just too coincidental not to stop and consider whether they are more.”
He capped his thoughts with a question worth pondering: “If there is a God who cares not only about us but for us, why wouldn’t he do such things?”
Like Ol
son, Hybels, and many others, I believe he does do “God things” like that—even to the point of dispatching an angel in a dream to assure a spiritually confused youngster that someday he would understand his amazing grace.
Something to celebrate, I’d say—rather than feel embarrassed about.
CHAPTER 13
When Miracles Don’t Happen
An Interview with Dr. Douglas R. Groothuis
Every day my wife, Leslie, is in pain. When traditional medical treatments failed, she tried acupuncture, deep massage, diet supplements, and other alternative therapies. While some brought temporary relief, none of them stopped the chronic muscle throbbing that assaults her over and over again.
There is no known cure for fibromyalgia, a neurobiological disorder that affects the way pain signals are processed in the central nervous system. And so year after year, decade after decade, she copes as best she can with the discomfort, the soreness, the aching.
Let me tell you something else about Leslie: she is a wholly devoted follower of Jesus, a woman of prayer and spiritual depth whose persistent intercession with God was, in my view, the most influential factor in bringing me to faith in Christ. She devours the Bible daily; she consumes a steady diet of Christian resources; and her compassion for the hurting and spiritually confused is boundless. She is simply the finest and most devout person I have ever known.
Have we prayed for relief from her pain? Continually. Have we beseeched God for her healing? Often and fervently. Have we seen any improvement? Quite the opposite.
Could I give you half a dozen theological reasons that there’s suffering in this sin-scarred world? Absolutely. I’m a Christian apologist who gives lectures on that topic. But this is my Leslie. This is my wife. This is her pain and suffering. And that makes this starkly personal.
While researching this book, I came across inspiring examples of how God miraculously restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and life to the deceased. I vicariously celebrated with each recipient of God’s tangible expression of grace.
But after I wrote each story, I asked, Why no miracle for Leslie? Yes, I know God promises to cause good to emerge from our suffering if we’re devoted to him. But why no miracle for Leslie? Yes, I understand that suffering produces perseverance and sharpens our character. But why no miracle for Leslie? Yes, I am aware that there will be no more tears in heaven. But why no miracle for Leslie? Every day my wife is in pain. She needs a miracle.