Story Of Healings, Resurrections, and Miracles: With Dr. Keener

hey guys welcome to the remnant radio today we're talking about miracles with dr craig keener at asbury seminary stay tuned you are watching the remnant radio a crowd funded show where we interview pastors teachers historians and theologians from different churches and denominations my name is joshua lewis and this is my co-host michael roundtree together we want to help you break outside of your theological echo chambers if you're interested in learning about history theology or the gifts of the spirit this is the show for you [Music] hey guys welcome back we are so excited we're not in our normal studio this week uh we're actually up in kentucky they let me out of the basement we let you out of the basement michael that's so good you're actually a real person you're not just an avatar yeah so good to see you who knew so and dr keener one of our favorite uh uh guests and so we are going to be uh meeting with him or meeting with him conversing with him about all things miracles before we do that uh just i want to invite you guys if you've benefited from what remnant radio is doing just check out the links in the description you can donate on paypal a one-time uh a one-time gift or you can also donate in patreon where we come out with exclusive content and uh so please consider supporting our channel this uh trip to asbury seminary wasn't free we're actually filming uh over 16 chapters of mark it's just a service to the body of christ and dr keener is working on a commentary on the book of mark and so we're talking about that but we're taking a little break to just talk miracles today so anyway hit that subscribe button lots of great stuff coming down the pike and uh michael and i are going to be uh talking uh talking specifically about this uh the book that that you wrote dr keener on miracles the two volumes said documenting miracles so we're going to begin the episode talking a little bit about just kind of uh just theory and philosophy of miracles we're going to try to uh just begin this on a just intellectual note here but then we're going to spend a lot of time talking through documented cases of miracles across the board nature miracles resurrection miracles blind death congenital things we're going to talk all the things so really exciting episode today uh michael did i miss anything no i'm excited about this so i i first i got my hands on your two volume work i guess that was i don't know 2016 2015 and then i came down to dallas or fort worth when you did your colloquy and taught through this stuff and so to get to do this is a huge privilege for me i'm kind of geeking out getting yeah have this conversation in person so and i'm i'm actually physically present not in the basement yes not photoshopped in that's good well we're so excited and dr keener has asked us to call him craig so um so craig such a privilege to have you on the show uh for those uh for those who might not be familiar with with who you are and what you do obviously we're at asbury seminary so we know that you teach here uh and but maybe just tell us just a little bit about yourself i'm medine keener's husband i'm the father of david and karen keener and i was converted from atheism some decades ago i did my phd in new testament at duke university and i i'm a new testament professor okay and i write i've written like maybe 30 books for 33 books okay and working on some more yeah and you're working on a third volume on miracles as well um yeah it's not it's not part of the set it's okay it's a new it's a new book um it is mostly new material but it's shorter so instead of being 1100 pages and most people will talk about it more than they'll actually read it and see what it actually says um although you said you actually read it i did yeah um this this one's like 300 pages so it'll be a lot more it's a pamphlet and a lot cheaper 33 books is even more impressive when some of those books are over a thousand pages so uh well yeah dive right in let's let's start with uh the beginning of miracles you talk about david hume and some of his arguments sort of sort of carte blanche dismissing the miraculous works i'm going to start there yeah david hume's essay wasn't as influential in his own generation as it came to be later because hume was so widely respected for some of his other work and he's writing in what century the he's right in the 1700s 1700s and actually some people some of the refutations of hume that came out in his own generation were pretty successful in terms of you know the persuasive appeal i mean the the person who came up with the um the probability theory that that stands behind modern statistics actually first deployed that that theory in refutation of hume's argument on miracles so it's been it's been challenged for a long time but in recent years it's really been challenged a lot um publications book books by uh cambridge uh i think cornell uh oxford actually the one by by oxford was called hume's abject failure his argument about miracles wow somebody so abject failure is in the title of the book the title of the book somebody responded uh reviewed that and said well you just don't like his argument because you're a christian and the author said no i'm actually not a christian in any traditional sense i just thought it was a bad argument and needed to be responded to from a philosophic perspective so uh it wasn't one of hume's strongest arguments okay of course it's easy to critique him now that he's dead that's posthumous critiques [Laughter] okay so quickly just if you can summarize it the argument that you made and why it's why it's failed yeah it's it's in two parts the first part is that miracles are violations of natural law natural law can't be violated and therefore miracles can't happen which is entirely it's a play on words like what i just did with hume's name um it's based on a conception of natural law that is no longer our conception of natural law and it also doesn't work with the conceptions of natural law in its day i mean he was he was using the work of newton and the newtonians but newton and the early newtonians didn't believe that god was subject to natural law they believed that he structured the universe according to natural law but that god was free to do miracles because he was he was above nature and and not subject to rules that he himself designed so to hold the the creator by creaturely laws doesn't make any sense it sounds like he basically baked into his his definition the fact that he was right yeah which is not it's not the way he himself usually argues but let's say i drop this pen if i catch the pen i'm not violating the law of gravity i'm simply working within nature what kind of god would be impotent compared to me i mean what kind of god couldn't work with in nature if i could i mean you have to start with either atheistic or completely deistic premises which is basically what hume does but doesn't give his audience the courtesy of explaining that that my argument only works if you're a deist or an atheist to begin with and then the second part of his argument which i think is kind of the basis for his first but there are different different interpretations of this why why should we trust any miracle claims you never have any adequately trustworthy witnesses for them and then he goes on to dismiss all sorts of categories of people well if they're not educated they don't count they have to be respectable people who have something to lose and you can't you can't count anything that's not from the western world uh he was he was very racist wow in that i mean everybody today would recognize that some of his stuff was was racist um it's more explicit in some of his other writings but that's right there in his argument about miracles there are a bunch of other subsidiary claims but just summarizing so i mean i think today we would know better than to say you know you have to exclude on i mean he actually says elsewhere in his writings that no civilization has ever produced any great works of art or science or anything except white civilizations so dismissing ancient chinese civilization dismissing african empires dismissing you know and treating some other civilizations like egypt and so on as if they were completely white it's it's uh it's very biased it sounds like he's saying on some level he's a priori like already writing off anybody who would discount his argument again and saying that anybody no uh thinking human would believe in miracles therefore miracles just don't happen today yeah and you have no credible witnesses so what happens if you do have credible witnesses well then hume goes back to saying well they can't really be credible right because they believe in miracles so um one of his uh one of his things well okay what happens if it's somebody from the west if you've got educated people saying this so the example of blaise pascal's niece she had a running eyesore emitted a foul loader it was clearly organic and she was touched with a holy thorn from jesus crown of thorns at a jansenist monastery now i don't believe it was really a thorn from jesus holy crown of thorns i think luther was probably right there were enough um enough nails from the holy cross to shoe every horse and saxony just did there were a lot of relic sure but but it was a contact point for her faith she was instantly and publicly healed in the sight of many witnesses the queen mother of france and her own physician who confirmed the miracle but hume how does hume deal with that he says well this is medically documented this is witnesses we would consider credible but we know this didn't happen and they weren't even white yeah we know this didn't happen so why would we believe anything else and then he moves on that's his argument and he could get away with that because nobody liked jansenists there were two augustinian for french jesuits at the time and they were too catholic for the protestant audience in the british isles and so hume got away with that argument but i don't think hume would make that argument today i mean that there are no credible witnesses because like there's this 2006 pew forum survey of pentecostals and charismatics in just 10 countries and in that survey among or pentecostals and protestant charismatics in those 10 countries you have somewhere around 200 million people who claim to have witnessed divine healing and if you don't like pentecostals or protestant charismatics well you've got the control group which was other christians those who don't claim to be pentecostals or protestant charismatics 39 of them in those 10 countries claim to have witnessed divine healing so i mean we're talking about hundreds of millions of people now nobody would say that all of those are actually explicable only as miracles probably nobody would say that all of those are are miracles but but you can't start with the apriori premise but there's no credible witnesses that uniform human experience is against miracles when you've got hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions of people and china wasn't included in that survey and it's really hard to get uh statistics religious statistics in china but there was a source within the china christian council affiliated with the three-self church which is like the more government approved body around the year 2000 they said that roughly half of all conversions in the previous couple decades have been due to faith healing experiences and the house church estimates are often even higher than that so i mean these are people who didn't start with christian premises and to some extent many of them were abandoning centuries of other traditions people who already had indigenous religious healing traditions in china and in a number of other countries i mean krsna's sharma dr balkrishna from nepal told me that 80 of converts to christian faith in nepal are due to healings and deliverances and so i mean we're talking about millions of people not starting with christian premises who became christians often at great social cost to themselves because they were persuaded by something some sort of miracle some sort of healing that was more dramatic than you know just whatever they normally experienced wow so uh so you share some statistics that are pretty overwhelming because i mean 200 million even if it's one percent two million people right like if only one percent was accurate and most would say probably more than one percent of people are not lying and um but i know your book was largely focused on documented cases and that's so hard to find could you share with us how would you like to go about this we can go by classifying miracles into resurrection miracles uh people who had congenital issues people who had you know deafness blindness we can go like that uh we could just throw it over to you willy-nilly you just start telling us miracle stories but we we'd love to just begin to tackle some of these stories i think the over arcing question in that book it would be is there a case to be made for miracles happening today and so uh and and you can't dismiss it as being merely anecdotal when you look at the evidence and i think that so so how would you make that argument what's the best way to go about it i i do i do want to first say something about what you said about documented because uh part of it depends on what you mean by documentation so in some cases we have medical documentation in a number of cases we have doctors reports of these things then there are some cases where what we have are eyewitness testimony now eyewitness testimony is a form of evidence in journalism i mean some there's some settings where we couldn't do without it journalism law historiography where i work but also sociology anthropology and so on you you have to you have to work with that and and normally when you're dealing with eyewitnesses i mean if you have a traffic accident and and witnesses are being interviewed and somebody says that's not what happened i know that's not what happened because i didn't see it because i wasn't there you know we wouldn't take that seriously but with miracles that's how people often think because i wasn't there so there are different levels of documentation but whenever i can get multiple independent witnesses or if it's somebody whose credibility i have really good reason to trust and they meet all of hume's criteria i have a number of cases where the eyewitnesses they have phds they are um i mean these are these are people who are witnesses for food multiplying for storm stilling for rational people yeah people being raised from the dead uh just instant disappearance of goiters and lumps and things like that um but also we have cases with medical documentation and um doctors have interviewed and wow and you've also been an eyewitness yourself to some miracles yeah no i mean not i haven't seen somebody raised from the dead i have seen a storm stilled right after prayer i have seen yeah i've seen some things but not we haven't even hear that story though let's just pause there yeah go there tell me about the storm distilling all right well yeah we were i was teaching it in hbcu or actually i was teaching at the seminary attached to it and we were going to have an outreach on the on the college campus that day and then um some students from another hbcu were were coming to join us for the outreach but you know we couldn't plan ahead for a storm it was pouring down rain it was supposed to be pouring down rain all day long and well we were going to try to do our best to do outreach in the rain but there weren't going to be too many people outside but then one of the one of the visiting students a sophomore biology major from the other college she said well let's just pray and see what god will do well it couldn't hurt so we all joined hands and prayed she led us in prayer she finished the prayer the rain stopped and a few minutes later the sun came out and it didn't rain again the rest of the day so that's you know people say well that's a coincidence but i've got a whole bunch of those from a bunch of different eyewitnesses um but anyway yeah okay well okay so if you're going to make the case for different kinds of documentation and and this criteria being the way that you look at it um you know eyewitness accounts by multiple people that are credible witnesses what would you say give us one of those resuscitations from the dead oh can i give you two sure i'll give you two from doctors okay um chauncey crandall cardiologist in west palm beach was making his rounds in the hospital i think this was a saturday when he was called to the i think the er somebody had collapsed with chest pains and he'd been flatlined for about 40 minutes so they had been trying to revive and done everything they could nothing worked dr crandall had to make the cardiologist decision to sign the death certificate they followed all the american heart association protocols so nothing more could be done so he he was going he signed the death certificate was going back to his rounds when he felt the holy spirit prompt him to go back and pray for the man to have a second chance to know the lord which obviously isn't you know what usually happens but so he went back and oh and that could cost him his job i mean something like that well it could i suppose uh he one of his colleagues came back in with him and the nurse was sponging down the the body to get ready for the for the morgue and yet some of the stuff was still hooked up um but still flatlined so dr crandall laid a hand on the man's head and said god i pray you'll give this man a second chance to know you and he tells me the nurse was glaring at him like dr crandall you have lost your mind and he turned to his colleagues said shock him with a paddle one more time you know and being a doctor you ought to you know use every means at your disposal that's the ethical thing to do so his colleague is like you know we all agreed but look if you want i guess there's no harm shocks immediately the heartbeat is normal which you know after after a couple minutes you don't normally get a normal heartbeat after one one defibrillator shock and the nurse starts screaming dr crandall what have you done because you know six minutes with no oxygen irreparable brain damage started in his systems had shut down the man was not just dead he was very obviously dead he was a white man but his extremities had turned black from cyanosis so they're assuming you know he's going to have irreparable brain damage and everything but a couple days later dr crandall's making his rounds visits jeff markin the auto mechanic who had this heart attack in the hospital and the guy has no brain damage and he does come to know the lord and um dr crandall sends me a picture of him participating in jeff martin's baptism and they go around and share their testimony together now and another account from a doctor is from sean george sean george has all the medical records sometimes it's hard for people to get the medical records they don't know how to get it i think it may be easier to get them now at least for the person it's really hard for somebody other than the person to get them but anyway sean george has all the defibrillator logs and everything he went into cardiac arrest and he was um he was considered dead for like an hour and 50 minutes when his wife sherry jacob got there and she uh you know they said just say your goodbyes to him and and instead she she cried she's also a physician she cried out for for god to heal him and suddenly the heart monitors sprang to life and they all as doctors his colleagues did what they knew to do but they were thinking like this is going to be terrible because all his systems have shut down his brain damage she's going to have to take him off life support you know we're basically what we're doing is putting him on life support now but he's dead you know there's nothing keeping him going except the machine but three days later he wakes up no brain damage reads his own chart he's he's back to work he's a consultant physician at gurley hospital in australia some of his colleagues were muslims or hindus and they all agree this was a miracle this was not something that could be medically explained go ahead okay i didn't want to change the subject i want to stay here but yeah no well i i think you know there are going to be some people who say well hey there was a defibrillator involved in this or there was a life support machine you know for us we feel uh convinced by this because there are other factors at play too such as you know if you go this long without oxygen you should be brain dead so you mentioned some details that were miracles in addition to the miracle if you will the fact that there was not ongoing damage and so uh i i'm i am curious and uh if this if you need to hijack this question feel free michael uh but i am curious for the the skeptical person out there um you know on the field in africa you know somebody who's just prayed over there's no defibrillator there's no life support that you know do we have anything like that oh yeah we've got lots of those that the reason they went for the doctors is because people often say well you have a doctor's report and if you're going to have a doctor involved there's going to be medical intervention it's not ethical for you to not to not use that so let's say you don't have a doctor involved here's the case this one that was actually a turning point for for my thinking it's not the most dramatic that that i have but it was a turning point for my thinking for reasons that you'll soon understand but uh i'd heard this story about antoinette malonbay so when i was in congo brazzaville i interviewed her and she had she she said that when her daughter therese was two years old she she was bitten by a snake she wasn't breathing the mother there was no medical available in the village so antoinette malombe strapped the child to her back ran to a nearby village where family friend coco and gomo moise was doing ministry kokomoise prayed for the child she started breathing again the next day she was fine i said how long was it that she wasn't breathing and antoinette malombe hadn't really seemed to think about that before so she had to stop and think to get from this village to that village she calculated was about three hours now three hours with no oxygen i mean six minutes with no oxygen irreparable brain damage starts in so this one was kind of dramatic to me even though it's not the longest period where i have eyewitness evidence but this one was kind of dramatic to me because antoinette malombe was my mother-in-law therese is my sister-in-law she has no brain damage she has a master's degree she just recently retired from from the ministry work she was doing wow wow i was i was thinking of the gospels where it talks about how uh those who are raised from the dead many of them are still with us to this day yeah quadratus in the early second century says that okay i mean that what's the significance of a statement like that i mean this is after the lord has uh died after he's been raised from the dead after he's ascended and yet we're talking about other people that he raised from the dead that are still with us yeah yeah i mean quadratus is writing that in the early second century and he says into our own time so presumably into his lifetime so by the late late first century so you could have people like jairus's daughter the widow of nayan's son and you know some people live a really long time maybe even lazarus but um but certainly the children who were raised in somewhere around the year 30 could still be around in the late late 1st century wow okay so i'm interested in another resurrection story of uh of something that maybe happened where there was no medical equipment available to to intervene because you mentioned without one you said it's it's not the most it's not the most dramatic story it was only three hours but it is still dramatic and personally significant for you um maybe just share maybe uh one more resurrection story that stands out to you okay this one's from sri lanka and um no fernando had a heart attack he was declared dead in the hospital they the the doctors valiantly were trying to revive him they broke three of his ribs in the process but that's you know that's acceptable i mean if you can save the person's life if you don't save the person's life he's not going to need the ribs anyway but they didn't have the person who needed to sign the death certificate available so they the person was out of the hospital at that time so they put the body aside for a while well people have been praying for him and actually i had this story originally from a couple westerners who both both knew him but later i got it from his i actually was able to get the information directly from his wife his widow because he did eventually die but not of what he died from at that point he died of something else a few years later but he was he was uh his body was there over 24 hours and but word had gotten around to pray for him but word hadn't gotten around that he died and so after 24 hours he spontaneously came back to life and there was nothing wrong with they were saying he must have brain damage he had no brain damage he was interpreting in three languages afterwards he was the interpreter for two of the westerners that i knew he was a pastor um the only thing wrong with him was he had three broken ribs but um other people were coming to him uh hindus and muslims in the hospital were asking questions about what his afterlife experience was to see if it compared with you know their afterlife beliefs but yeah he was yeah anyway that's another account that one's a bit longer than three hours yeah no kidding when in the fact that his ribs were still broken so i've i've shared stories about this where i've seen broken bones and torn tendons get healed i remember we had a guy at wellspring years ago who had torn his groin and i mean that's a significant thing it was the most awkward he asked me to pray for him uh pray for the i have him put his hand there and i put my hand on his arm prayed for him to be healed and then he comes up to me on sunday at church he pulls his shorts up and shows me the bruise and you're talking like a significant one but then he starts stretching out his legs so there's no pain i'm completely healed the groin is healed uh why do you think that is why did the ribs not get healed just like the bruise stayed as sort of evidence this really happened yeah yeah well jacob had his limp and you see sometimes with leprosy being healed and i think leviticus 13 and 14 where the scar is still there so god heals enough to do what we need it for but he doesn't always seal everything when it chooses a greater purpose right to me it shows credibility because there would be a temptation to exaggerate a story and but the fact that you includes something like my ribs are still broken shows this is not actually it would at least suggest this is not an exaggeration because while when you had the chance to exaggerate you didn't you said my ribs are still broken there's a story from the uh apostolic faith movement right from like 19 i think it's 1907 from their um their magazine that went out just at the beginning of the pentecostal movement where they cited the healing of of uh eula wilson i think was her name and it said that she had gone blind she had all these other things but that she she died and then she was raised from the dead and completely healed including a blindness well we we traced the story back i had somebody help me on that because this stuff wasn't online yet it is now but this person traced it back the story was from the the nazarene messenger and so it seemed like the story grew in the process because it mentioned all the things that were healed except the healing of the blind eyes it didn't mention that didn't say they weren't healed but it didn't mention that they were healed so we thought maybe maybe it exaggerated that but then you know the nazarene messenger cited the source and so my friend went back and checked in the archives of the the newspaper that goes back to like 1906 and in the archives of that newspaper it gives the report of the doctor i think it was ao burton and he says uh yes and her her blindness was also healed when she was raised from the dead yeah so it wasn't exaggerated it was just maybe a logical inference that god did everything so sometimes he does do everything and actually i have accounts of that like one one person uh delia knox this is you know you've got videos all over the internet because she was a uh she was paralyzed for 22 years and she was singing from her wheelchair but she was a gospel singer so a lot of videos 22 years i've talked with a lot of people who knew her when she was paralyzed who would help her you know push her wheelchair up the ramp into the into the van and so on um and one one time in a in a meeting where people were praying she felt healing come back to her legs she was healed enough that she could actually move her hips and her own power but her legs were still atrophied so she had somebody hold her up on either side but she's moving her legs under her own power and people skeptics would see the video they'd say ah look you know you call that walking that's what they said a month later you know now she's had time her her muscles aren't his atrophied she's been able to work with them she walks into church and is praying for other people and what did the skeptics say on that they said she must have faked being paralyzed for 22 years look if that's the best you can come up with it's like a david hume level right there i mean come on i mean who's going to do that just so they can claim that healing after 20 for 22 years suffering that and then but on the other hand there's somebody else that i interviewed barbara kamiski snyder she she had severe multiple sclerosis and she had been declining in health for about 15 years she spent about half of those in the hospital she was sent home to die the doctor said she won't be back here again she was on a ventilator she her diaphragm was paralyzed she couldn't move her her lungs by herself she in her own words she was curled up like a pretzel she was um she also had gone blind from this when suddenly she heard a voice saying my child rise up and walk well she couldn't move her muscles but she springs out of bed first thing she notices is her feet are flat on the ground second thing she notices her hands are not curled up third thing she notices she's seeing these things with her eyes and she ends up running out of the room and and waltzing around with her father wow god had healed her to the extent that her muscles weren't even atrophied you say ah that's just her report that is also the report of her three physicians one of one of whose accounts i've read and the other two i've read their accounts and i've also interviewed them and so how i mean this this is and it wasn't just temporary either this was 1981 she said no recurrence wow so you know you want to explain that away i mean at least at least at least don't say that the miracle accounts in the gospels have to be made up because eyewitnesses would never claim something like that because we sure have eyewitnesses who claim stuff like that today and often as in this case we have the physicians are testing it so i'm curious i've never seen i've seen um recently about two months ago saw a partially blind eye open uh completely deaf ear open i've never seen blind from birth this is somebody who had diabetes and because of diabetes she lost her sight um but yeah never seen blind from birth but you have stories like that in your in your book and i'm kind of curious to know uh one about the testimony but then secondly uh what that must have been like for that person to suddenly had never seen before and now they can and the the uh emotional uh psychological effect on that person after the fact let me give you three stories okay if i have time yeah um the the first one is a case in in north india where the man had clouded eyes so i guess i don't know if that well it seems like they'd be cataracts but from the rest of the story it seems like he must have been blind from birth i i don't know what it was but in any case um this was a friend of mine who prayed for him and also i consulted some of the other witnesses he was he was instantly healed of of blindness he he walked around just looking at everything just in amazement and that night he was giving his testimony and it was at an orphanage and and all these all these kids were there and he began to weep and they said why are you weeping he said because i've always heard the sound of children but i've never seen their faces oh wow and and another case uh someone i interviewed from from canada now in her case it it was not from birth this she had diabetes and that's why she'd gone blind but i mean it was organic and so she had been blind for 12 years and there was a visiting evangelist who was there to pray for the sick and preach it was a pentecostal church and he he was walking around preaching and he stopped by where she was and he said to her uh well he he commanded her blindness to leave and he said look at me and and she tells me that she thought to herself well i can turn to you but i can't look at you because i'm blind and she looked at him and she could see him wow and he called her up front and had her you know how many how many fingers am i holding up and so on and this is all captured on video this is public information and her pastor tells me that he still keeps her white cane in his office she's still but she still has diabetes so i mean she wasn't healed of everything but she was healed of that and and real quick quickly um if it's publicly available is this do you know is it on youtube or do you put a link on i'd have to i don't i don't know the link from memory but um but i can find don't memorize hyperlinks also he's got everything else we'll we'll look for that and put it in the show notes show notes later okay yeah and and then there's another another case where the person is blind for 12 years where there's an article on it because it's medically documented and and they're they're just other their other stories i just mentioned the third one i could mention some other ones where the experiences that they had but i know we're short on time so uh okay i'm curious so when we talk about uh from birth i'm curious about deformities i don't know if i've never heard of this but something like somebody who was down syndrome or somebody who was a dwarf [Music] something like that or just anything that was a deformity do you have some stories about that i i've heard some recently that i have yet to follow up actually my book was already done by the the the book that's coming out i can't add anything to it i didn't i decided to ask for the most extreme so i did i did interview somebody a while back actually i interviewed three people who knew about it about um some fingers that grew back uh while they were praying jack has one of those stories too yeah and and also i have uh i've interviewed people where goiters went away including um the the person he's he's now retired he's he's working somewhere else but when uh juan suk ma was the director for oxford center for mission studies i actually told his story at a conference at oxford and then just walked down the street afterwards and told wansook and julie his wife they were both witnesses that i just used their story but they had lots of stories of healings but one of them was a person in the in the philippines with a visible large toxic goiter dying and they prayed and instantly the goiter disappeared in the sight of many witnesses so we do have things like that disappear just vanish just visibly vanished yes wow yeah and so there are a number of cases like that i have other friends who've seen things like that in terms of an organ regenerating there's also the case of bruce van netta who was bruce van notta sorry uh he was not a mechanic and the diesel truck he was working on the back the axle broke or fell out and he was crushed like down to just like maybe one inch on his abdomen his small intestine was completely messed up they had progressive surgeries they eventually had to take most of it out so he he has he doesn't have enough small intestine left to be able to digest food the fact that he survived the whole thing is a miracle he should have bled to death but um a friend of his from new york thought led the fly to wisconsin wisconsin where where bruce was and prayed for him he felt like a jolt in his in his body and after that he was able to digest food and they you know i mean they're not gonna to actually measure they would have to unroll his small intestine and this would kind of defeat the purpose of being healed because he'd die from that but anyway they they uh but his you know from what they could tell his small intestine small intestines they can they can grow wider but in an adult they don't grow longer but it grew it it more than doubled in length and it grew to sufficient length to to uh be useful for him so we we do have accounts of things like that they're not as common as the healings of blind eyes or raisings from the dead so far as i know but we do have accounts of that we've got 10 minutes left on this show and i i just want to leave room for any other testimonies that you would want to share some of them were something that's maybe more marked you or personally impacted you oh let me let me give one more that has some some medical some medical documentation we have we have 10 i think so okay so right 15. oh wow cool more story they cut out the ads that's right this this one in mozambique actually there are a lot of places where revival takes place and and god is doing these things in the cutting edge of evangelism that's where you most often see things like this in the gospels and acts i mean these are the cutting edge of the kingdom breaking mission going forth yeah and so um it's not to say god doesn't do it anywhere else i mean barbara kamiski snyder it wasn't on the cutting edge of missions so to speak but um i mean she is involved in ministry she's a pastor's wife and and so on now but uh in the in the case of uh barbara have you told that story yeah yeah all the names yeah yeah sorry that was that was earlier yeah okay which one would she heal from she was uh sh she was paralyzed she was she was curled up gotcha that's awesome so we have um in in northern mozambique there are people that i know who who've who've been there have seen this eyewitnesses and i know the people are leading this as well but they they go to these villages they preach about jesus or they show the jesus film and then they say bring us your death and they they pray for the deaf people the deaf people are healed almost always uh especially when you know it's when the people are gathered there and one one case that another person told me about um they didn't even they didn't even start praying for anybody they were preaching about jesus and suddenly somebody in the back starts screaming this deaf person had been healed then a blind person is suddenly healed and then they said okay well let's start praying for people because god was just spontaneously doing it he wanted to he's just reaching out to these people completely unchurched villages members of another faith tradition so they can know how much jesus loves them and the next day they start a church in the village so two of the people who who told me about one of these cases they they were there in this one village the uh wendy dykman she's a professor of church history and used to be i think the president at united theological seminary in ohio and also andrew sun park who's a theology professor there they were both there and they saw blind eyes opened and of course everybody in the village knows these people so when they see that they realize oh wow jesus is alive this is this is for real and the next day a church was planted in the village so there was a team that went there and did medical tests as best as you can do in rural mozambique and came back and they published the study in southern medical journal because sooner or later somebody has to you know test this stuff empirically and they published it this was uh i forget maybe 2010 southern medical journal well the response on the internet was like people went berserk well testing conditions in rural mozambique aren't really that good okay that's true i mean they did the best they could testing conditions in rural mozambique are not ideal but one of the authors of the study candy gunther brown professor at indiana university followed up on this with with much more detail in her book published by harvard university press in 2012 called testing prayer and she has a chapter on that study and you can tell from that chapter i mean people went from being blind to seeing people went from being deaf to hearing it's really clear and anyway you have to want to explain it away you have to want to explain it away to not believe it and of course a lot of people do want to explain it away i mean that's what we're schooled in i mean i did possibility structure right it's your plausibility structures i mean i i was in a class my uh i think it was yeah it was one of my one of my doctoral classes the professor was a bulmanian uh for those who don't know bulman was a major mid-20th century new testament scholar and he he had some good ideas and had some bad ideas and one of his bad ideas was that well these miracles can't actually reflect something that actually happened because we know that eyewitnesses would never claim this because nobody in the modern world believes in miracles and so that's the end of his case you know nobody in the modern world believes in miracles well what does that say about his modern world i mean he's he's working from a you know an echo chamber he's an echo chamber so i i said i mean i think it's like somewhere around 79 to 80 percent of people in the u.s believe in miracles and uh one study i think like one-third of people in the us say that they've seen something that they would consider to be miraculous but anyway so i i was doing the class presentation on boatman and i and my professor was about money and then i said i think bulman's fatal flaw was he said that nobody in the modern world believes in miracles therefore these things we don't even need to take into account that they might have happened but by saying nobody in the modern world believes in miracles he excludes all traditional jews christians muslims traditional tribal religionists two-thirds of the doctrinal students sitting around this table basically most of humanity except for his mid-20th century western academic elite and the professor turned red and said well uh bolton had his present decisions but you have your presuppositions i said that's that's true when i was an atheist i didn't believe miracles could happen as a christian i believe miracles can happen but let's take a so-called agnostic neutral starting point say maybe they happen maybe they don't and then we can look at the critical evidence and evaluate critically rather than just a priori and then i began to recount cases of instantaneous healing that i had witnessed or experienced and after i'd given a number of these i said now if you want to say that these things don't happen you'll need to discount my credibility as an eyewitness whereupon he changed the subject um but when we talk about miracles they're cool to see yeah i wish i could have been yes that's a throw down i would be like well i mean he he was he was he i think he was polite i don't think he believed me but uh but he also he didn't think i was lying he probably thought he didn't know what to do probably thought it was nuts but whatever uh but when we talk about miracles i mean they're not they're not just one offs in a sense i mean they're like historical events you can't experiment on them they're not replicable like you kill somebody again to see how they died but but they're not one-offs in the sense that there's no context to them there is a theistic context to them so in in john the baptist he's in prison he's waiting for the kingdom he says uh sends messengers to jesus saying are you the one to come or should we look for somebody else i mean um you were supposed to baptize the holy spirit and fire we don't see any fire did i get this right and jesus sends back to him through the messengers and says tell john what you've heard and what you've seen the blind sea the deaf here the disabled walk lepers are cleansed the dead are raised and good news is being preached to the poor so that's his answer you know and blessed is the one who doesn't stumble over me matthew 11 5 luke 7 22 well he's he's using language from isaiah 35 and isaiah 61 these are passages about what in new testament terms we call the kingdom the restoration of god's people the good news our god reigns god is going to make a new heaven and a new earth it's it's restoration language and what jesus is showing is these miracles are a foretaste of what's to come amen and and the same with the same with uh matthew 12 28 and luke 11 20 where if if i'm driving out demons by the finger of god or the spirit of god then god's kingdom has come upon you so in other words these are signs of the kingdom there are foretaste it doesn't mean that everybody we pray for i mean on the cutting edge of evangelism it happens pretty regularly but it doesn't mean that everybody we pray for always gets healed as most of us know from experience but sometimes god does it and when god does do it it's meant to be a gift to all of us whether whether we have experienced that healing or not because it's a reminder to all of us that a time is coming when there's going to be no more sickness there's going to be no death he's going to wipe away every tear from our eyes and so it's not it's not the it doesn't do away with all the world's problems people are still hungry we still need to work to feed them people are still sick we still need to work for health care in africa where lots of people experience miracles because they have to to survive in many cases you still have 10 times the the maternal mortality and childbirth that you have in many developed countries um in well parts of africa are more developed than others but you know where my wife is from in africa it's very difficult and so um jesus miracles show us what jesus cares about and we need to work for those things whether by healing or by schools for the blind or whatever you know for because we should care about the same things he cares about yeah absolutely uh okay so we just we have a few more uh minutes here and what i'd love to do is is kind of round out our miracles discussion with a a new category nature miracles okay so not entirely new you told the story about the storm i'd like uh i'd like to are there stories of i mean walking on water multiplication um philip is preaching one day and one day he's somewhere else you know gets lifted up by his hair yeah so that one was said to be visionary so we don't know i am curious couched within that how you understand the first corinthians 12 gift of miracles so i might even mix in there a little exegetical question i like to i like to throw out like 13 questions in one and just let you run and then you give me two minutes to answer exactly exactly uh well there'll be more in the book miracles today coming out lord willing october of 2021 but yeah all of those categories we do have eyewitness testimony for obviously we don't have medical documentation for walking on water yes that's not a medical thing uh we do have media with the water ice i actually i did try walking on the frozen puddle and the ice cracked ah but anyway but we do have meteorological documentation for some of the nature miracles and actually they don't all come from from charismatics by the way but um but yeah i've interviewed a couple people from indonesia both of whom testified about walking on water and indonesia has lots of water so they really needed it there it wasn't just to entertain them it wasn't just to practice yeah we hear those stories right just have a swimming cool kind of deal but it was it was in the course of mission they were doing it they didn't know that they were walking on water they assumed the water was shallow until somebody else tried it and so a couple stories of that in terms of the and they're more stories but those are just the ones i could interview and another uh the case of food multiplying you have that happening in mozambique and again i have friends who've seen that while they were there the anglican bishop of the horn of africa he's from he's from canada but he was the anglican bishop of the horn of africa for a while uh he's a professor at uh trinity school for for ministry and i think cambridge pennsylvania he he told me that when they had some refugees come on to where where he was working there they uh they didn't have enough food to show them proper hospitality they had enough crackers for maybe a dozen people to each have one but all they could do they prayed over it and started giving it out they had like 100 refugees there everybody ate and everybody wanted to have seconds so i mean that's not as dramatic as five thousand but uh we do have a number of cases like that and what was the other one that you asked about oh and and a bunch of ones with stealing of storms one of my uh one of the doctoral students here in old testament was sitting in on one of my new testament classes my historical jesus course and he was telling us about a uh a storm that he was caught in he was in a ship and it was the last ship that was that was going to this island for a week because the storm it was i think a hurricane coming through and no ships were able to come after this one well the captain's chair broke the the the wind was coming so hard but finally he said um the captain pointed to somebody in the back who was wearing a christian t-shirt said you get up here and you pray a person came up and and and got down on on on her knees and prayed the storm stopped and and didn't start again until after they were safely at the island wow so um moral of that if you uh wear a t-shirt be a christian t-shirt be ready for somebody to call on you to pray that's awesome that's awesome do you have any more questions michael um i'm gonna have a million questions i i could keep going on this conversation for a long time so i i think we'll just uh tie it up maybe make some uh some close or share some closing thoughts i'll share first with you michael and then uh with you craig and then uh what uh the way i'd like to finish the episode uh to conclude it would be um i'd like for us to pray for people because one thing that i've noticed is that when you share healing stories and miracle stories faith builds and so uh so for anybody that's watching that you uh you have uh some sort of infirmity or handicap or you know somebody who does we wanna we're gonna pray for that at the end of the episode so uh with that said michael i'll defer first to you closing thoughts that you'd like to share yeah i think the probably the more encouraging part was you sharing about how not everybody gets healed the the point of this is to show that there's coming a day when that will all stop that to me i mean i i i felt a lot of emotion about that there was a a time where i prayed for somebody in kuwait who was riddled like you described that young woman and had opened sores uh with mucus just pouring through it was one of the most gruesome things i'd ever seen in my life and it it broke my heart and and the crazy thing is i have seen a lot of stuff i've seen crazy miracles and yet i saw this this guy suffering horribly and didn't get healed and um that just it again was sort of comforting to know that there's coming a day where that won't be the case anymore or even that person that didn't get healed on that day will not have to live in that condition and so um yeah i think it's just a great reminder yeah yeah for me the whole experience of of hearing these stories my if i if i came in with like this much faith i mean i feel like now i've got like this but now give me another hour or two and it'll slowly deplete but um but it just really builds our faith to hear these stories so so thankful for you to have taken the time to research to investigate this it's so such a service to the body of christ uh so uh closing thoughts for you uh craig there have been times when i've been healed i mean the only reason i can yeah you could hear my ankles crack the only reason that that my ankles have always cracked but the only reason that i'm able to run today and jog today is because the lord healed me after a time when i think i think my ankle was broken i was so poor i couldn't go to a doctor but for two years i couldn't run and then one day just sparked faith in my heart healed me i ran up six flights of stairs to test it out but the greatest miracle in my life was actually the day that i was converted from atheism because i became a new creation in christ amen and that that's part of that foretaste to the world to come being raised up with christ inside that's the that's the best that's the best okay hey i remember one thing that we forgot i want to just come back to this uh just before we end so new testament gift of miracles first corinthians 12 how do you interpret it well he mentions gifts of healings so gifts of miracles a gift gift of miracles must be something that is maybe it can include healings but healings don't have to be dramatic they don't have to be it could be a headache or god can use god's still answering periphery uses medicine but miracles tend to be more dramatic um their demonstrations of power is literally what the what the word means okay so so like if if you tend to run out of bread have a guy on your we get out of we run out of bread team like you can just call on like he's gifted in miracles like can a single individual possess that or would you say that like uh anytime that miracle happens and like it's not a residential gift per se would you would you buy into that i think it can happen different ways i don't think somebody always well i don't think people normally always will have something happen just because they're gifted they're usually gifted in it but i think paul is also listing gifts kind of randomly that's why he has different gift lists with different things in them so i don't think it's there's just nine gifts of the spirit or something like that i think i think sometimes people want to explain well this gift means all of this and actually um paul didn't stop to explain it maybe the corinthians didn't know what all of these exactly were he's just illustrating god can do all these different kinds of things okay so prophecy actually when you look in the bible prophecy includes a whole range of things but he just mentions it as prophecy so yeah okay well that's that's wonderful so we said that we wanted to to pray for people so uh if you have a handicap if you have an infirmity of any kind or you know somebody does who does no matter how extreme it is no matter how many times they've prayed for it i believe god's built the faith and even if all you have is a mustard seed and you kind of maybe you you don't even have that you kind of just think that he won't do it but you have enough faith to pray with us i want to encourage you to to just maybe put a hand on that part whatever it is that you need healed and uh and the point of the mustard seed is not how big is your faith the point of the mustard seed is how big is the god in whom is our faith amen so uh so craig could you just pray for those with any kind of infirmity to be healed yeah father you do things for the glory of the name of your son jesus you have arranged history so that the cross of christ is the climax of history and lord you paid for the whole of the new creation and so god we pray for signs of that new creation now we we pray for samples of that new creation now we pray that you will honor the name of your son jesus by by healing people people who are watching people are listening people for whom we are praying lord we look to you for miracles signs and wonders the things that get people's attention for the kingdom and also gifts of healings that whether they're dramatic or not because we are members of christ's body and for our fuller functioning god we know that you can do anything you can you can make limbs grow out and you can you can heal congenital conditions you can do anything and whether we consider it big or small nothing is too big for you so we ask not because we're big not because our faith is big but we ask because the name of jesus is big yes and is worthy to be honored yes so for the honor of jesus in the name of jesus we pray that you will bring healing amen amen well uh we look forward to hearing you guys share those stories with us so please send us a message and uh if you were blessed by this episode please consider a donation you can look for it in the link and and also hit that subscribe button if you haven't already we're coming out with content just like this all the time god bless you guys and have a great week

Channel: The Remnant Radio

Views: 7,249

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Id: EoJOmxcNL5I

Length: 66min 15sec (3975 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021