tumbleweed is offline tumbleweed Post #1  October 4,2009, 7:47pm
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this has always puzzeled me,, the bible records a lot of what god has done and then poff hes gone , not herd from in almost 2,000 years?
 
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lindseyk is offline lindseyk Post #2  October 4,2009, 8:21pm

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There's a really good book by Philip Yancey that talks about this. It's called Prayer: Does It Make a Difference? In it, he talks about how God has communicated with people over time. I hope you don't mind if I write out what he said - his words are better than mine. It's a little long, but worth reading, I think. He writes:

Some years ago I wrote a book (Disappointment with God) in an attempt to understand these interruptions [God's miraculous interventions in everyday life] and why they seem so sporadic. The ten plagues orchestrated through Moses, for example, followed four centuries of God's silence. The prophet Samuel's call came at a time when "the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions." In search of a pattern I studied every miracle reported in the Bible, every appearance by God, every word that God spoke.

I concluded that much of our current disappointment comes from an expectation that God will act in the same spectacular ways today. We too want to hear God's voice from a bush ablaze, to have our diseases healed and our relatives resurrected. We read the rousing stories from the Bible, hear stirring sermons about them, pray in faith - and don't get the same results.

Looking closer, I detected an Old Testament pattern of God as the reluctant intervener in history. God waits, chooses a partner, moves with agonizing slowness, does a few miracles, then waits some more. In the Gospels supernatural activity again bursts out, with power radiating from Jesus. Yet Jesus, too, intervened selectively, performing miracles not as a cure-all but as signs of God's rule.

Jesus also announced a major change . . . when questioned by the Samaritan woman about the proper place for worship, Jesus replied: "A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks." He dislocated God's presence from its traditional space in a building (which he predicted would soon be destroyed) and relocated it in a most unlikely place: ordinary people like the Samaritan woman herself.

As the apostle Paul would later explain, Jesus repaired the rupture between God and human beings. We no longer have to approach God through a priest who requires ritual sacrifices. We ourselves are God's temple, the Spirit's home. God lives inside us. And that is the decisive reason Jesus gave in explaining why he must depart: "Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you."

God did not design this planet as an arena in which to demonstrate natural law-bending skills, much as we humans may crave that at times. Mainly, God wants to relate personally, to love and be loved. Restoring such a relationship has been painfully slow, fraught with error, and punctuated by fits and starts. Compared to Old Testament stories of miracle and triumph, it often seems like regression. To the contrary, the New Testament presents a long but steady advance in intimacy with God.

I know Christians who yearn for God's older style of a power-worker who topples pharaohs, flattens Jericho's walls, and scorches the priests of Baal. I do not. I believe the kingdom now advances through grace and freedom, God's goal all along. I accept Jesus' assurance that his departure from earth represents progress, by opening a door for the Counselor to enter. We know how counselors work: not by giving orders and imposing changes through external force. A good counselor works on the inside, bringing to the surface dormant health. For a relationship between such unequal partners, prayer provides an ideal medium.

Prayer is cooperation with God, a consent that opens the way for grace to work. Most of the time the Counselor communicates subtly: feeding ideas into my mind, bringing awareness to a caustic comment I just made, inspiring me to choose better than I would have done otherwise, shedding light on the hidden dangers of temptation, sensitizing me to another's needs. God's Spirit whispers rather than shouts, and brings peace not turmoil. Although such a partnership with God may lack the drama of the bargaining sessions with Abraham and Moses, the advance in intimacy is striking.

- Prayer: Does It Make a Difference? p. 102-03
 
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jsbach is offline jsbach Post #3  October 4,2009, 9:22pm
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I enjoyed reading this. And I learned.
 
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graceventually is offline graceventually Post #4  October 5,2009, 4:28am
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Love that book, lindsey, and so did the study group at my church that read it about six years ago. It's well worth the read. Thanks!

There's other thing that Yancey says, and I don't remember if it's in that book or it is in What's so Amazing about Grace? He makes the point that those dramatic, Old Testament-style miracles don't seem to have had the impact on people's faith that we might expect. The Red Sea is parted; the people of Israel are worrying and complaining only a short time later. God provides a miraculous supply of one food, and they want another. We read Exodus and we see that Moses cries out prayers of frustration with these people. Go to the New Testament, to the Gospels, and we see a strikingly similar pattern. The disciples are slow to catch on to who Jesus is, and spend much of their time puzzled by his teachings; and even after all the miracles they've seen, not one of the twelve disciples has the trust in him (or maybe just the courage) to go with Jesus to his trial. Yancey concludes that big, spectacular miracles simply aren't the life-changers and the faith-builders that we might think they would be.

I suspect that he's right. Faith grows more steadily in small steps; through a more disciplined approach. Perhaps there are limits on the use of such spectacular miracles because they don't do much to bring about God's goal, which is to draw us into a deeper relationship with God.
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jsbach is offline jsbach Post #5  October 5,2009, 11:06pm
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graceventually wrote :
Love that book, lindsey, and so did the study group at my church that read it about six years ago. It's well worth the read. Thanks!

The disciples are slow to catch on to who Jesus is, and spend much of their time puzzled by his teachings; and even after all the miracles they've seen, not one of the twelve disciples has the trust in him (or maybe just the courage) to go with Jesus to his trial. Yancey concludes that big, spectacular miracles simply aren't the life-changers and the faith-builders that we might think they would be.

I suspect that he's right. Faith grows more steadily in small steps; through a more disciplined approach. Perhaps there are limits on the use of such spectacular miracles because they don't do much to bring about God's goal, which is to draw us into a deeper relationship with God.
Perhaps I'm mistaken Grace, but I thought the Apostle John was the one out of the twelve who didn't run away that last week before Christ was crucified. Of course after Jesus rose from the dead and showed himself, the rest of disciples became decidedly fixed in their faith. As a side note, this has been seen as a testimony to the belief that Jesus was God. Why else would this group of cowardly men all of a sudden become fearless? And I believe that the Apostle John was the only one of the twelve that didn't die a martyr's death. That is if you substitute the Apostle Paul for Judas.

Back to the effects of miracles vs. small steps. It appears to me that while miracles can be spectacular crowd pleasers, God prefers to use the method of process to change us into the image of Christ. God takes us through the trials. And when we look to Him for help, everyone wins. Becoming more Christlike is a miracle that is performed by process.

Little by little everyday
Little by little in every way
Jesus is changing me

For some reason the above song just popped into my head.

Sometimes I think it's as if our lives take place on a stage. All the important and not so important details of our lives are simply props. The real story is what we do with Jesus. How we serve and live for Him. That is what will count in eternity.

I'll close with a quote from Jim Elliot. ( A martyred missionary) He was referring to a Christian giving his life to God.

"He is no fool to give what he cannot keep,
to gain what he cannot lose."
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DreamingOfAtlantis is offline DreamingOfAtlantis Post #6  October 5,2009, 11:08pm
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It really depends on your belief. Friends (Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers as commonly called) believe that God reveals himself to us regularly. Many Friends worship in silence, sometimes called "Waiting on the Lord." When called, one will stand up with a spoken message they feel they have been called to present. Friends also believe in "That of God" within each of us.

Also there are recent works that many consider as inspired by or communicated to us by God. For example, A Course in Miracles, which has an interesting story behind it and was written by someone who was essentially an atheist. There's also Conversations with God. There are those who take some religious scriptures literally who consider them blasphemy, but Course in Miracles, particularly, ties in with Bible verses including statements that God will reveal more to us later.
 
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graceventually is offline graceventually Post #7  October 6,2009, 6:06pm
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jsbach wrote :
Perhaps I'm mistaken Grace, but I thought the Apostle John was the one out of the twelve who didn't run away that last week before Christ was crucified. Of course after Jesus rose from the dead and showed himself, the rest of disciples became decidedly fixed in their faith. As a side note, this has been seen as a testimony to the belief that Jesus was God. Why else would this group of cowardly men all of a sudden become fearless? And I believe that the Apostle John was the only one of the twelve that didn't die a martyr's death. That is if you substitute the Apostle Paul for Judas.

Back to the effects of miracles vs. small steps. It appears to me that while miracles can be spectacular crowd pleasers, God prefers to use the method of process to change us into the image of Christ. God takes us through the trials. And when we look to Him for help, everyone wins. Becoming more Christlike is a miracle that is performed by process.

Little by little everyday
Little by little in every way
Jesus is changing me

For some reason the above song just popped into my head.

Sometimes I think it's as if our lives take place on a stage. All the important and not so important details of our lives are simply props. The real story is what we do with Jesus. How we serve and live for Him. That is what will count in eternity.

I'll close with a quote from Jim Elliot. ( A martyred missionary) He was referring to a Christian giving his life to God.

"He is no fool to give what he cannot keep,
to gain what he cannot lose."
I totally agree with your comments about the dramatic change in the formerly fearful disciples, jsb; I've always regarded it as one evidence for the resurrection. Something pretty dramatic had to have happened to effect such a change.

You're quite right that the apostle John (or, more properly, "the disciple whom Jesus loved" - whom we assume was John) was at the cross, but I was speaking only of the trial - one of the gospels (it's late and I'm not remembering which one) says, right after Jesus' arrest: "all the disciples forsook him and fled".

I think you are exactly right about the small, incremental changes in the Christian life - they do indeed seem to be the way God chooses to make the most lasting change! I suppose that not all miracles need to be big nor obvious.
 
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jsbach is offline jsbach Post #8  October 6,2009, 8:42pm
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Thank you, Grace.
 
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acelticsteve is offline acelticsteve Post #9  December 5,2009, 6:49pm

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tumbleweed wrote :
this has always puzzeled me,, the bible records a lot of what god has done and then poff hes gone , not herd from in almost 2,000 years?
He is right there next to you wishing for you to reach out to Him, you just haven"t knowest Him.
 
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