You say you believe the Bible, but then you explain away every supernatural gift in it. How does that make any sense?
I don’t explain away the supernatural gifts in the Bible. I believe they happened.
I believe the apostles healed the sick, demons were cast out, people spoke languages they had never learned, prophecy occurred, Peter’s shadow fell across sick people and they were healed, and handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul were carried to the sick and diseases left them. Scripture says these things happened, so I believe they happened.
Our disagreement is not over whether the gifts were real. It is over whether Scripture teaches that these particular gifts were intended to function normally throughout the entire life of the Church.
We already recognize that distinction elsewhere in Scripture. Moses performed miraculous signs before Pharaoh. Elijah called down fire from heaven. Elisha raised the dead. Believing those accounts does not require us to believe that every faithful Israelite possessed the same abilities. God gave particular people extraordinary abilities at particular moments for particular purposes.
Nobody accuses me of denying the supernatural because I cannot turn the Nile into blood.
The question is whether the New Testament gives us reason to understand the apostolic sign gifts in a similar way.
Paul describes what happened among the Corinthians as “the signs of an apostle,” which were worked among them “in signs and wonders and mighty works” (2 Corinthians 12:12). That is significant language if signs and wonders were intended to be ordinary features of every Christian generation. Paul associates them particularly with his apostolic ministry.
Hebrews makes a similar connection when describing how the gospel was established:
“How will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation—which at the first having been spoken through the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard, God also testifying with them, both by signs and wonders, by various works of power, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to his own will?”
Hebrews 2:3–4
The message was first spoken by the Lord and then confirmed by those who heard him, while God testified alongside their proclamation through signs, wonders, miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit. The miracles were not religious entertainment or demonstrations of how spiritually advanced the apostles had become. They accompanied and authenticated the revelation being proclaimed.
Acts describes the same relationship. When Paul and Barnabas preached in Iconium, they spoke boldly for the Lord, who was “testifying to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands” (Acts 14:3). The signs testified to the word.
It is also worth paying attention to what those signs actually looked like.
Peter encounters a man who had been lame from birth and tells him, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk!” The man immediately begins walking and leaping (Acts 3:6–8). Peter later encounters Aeneas, who had been bedridden for eight years, and tells him, “Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed!” He immediately gets up (Acts 9:34). Tabitha dies, Peter prays and tells her to arise, and she opens her eyes and sits up (Acts 9:36–41). Paul encounters a man in Lystra who had never walked, commands him to stand upright, and the man leaps up and walks (Acts 14:8–10).
These are public, objective and unmistakable acts of divine power.
That creates a problem when cessationism is criticized by pointing to modern claims of healing and asking why we refuse to believe God still does what he did in Acts. I do not refuse to believe God heals. I question whether everything presented as the biblical gift of healing resembles what Scripture calls the gift of healing.
If someone claims to possess the gift described in Acts, Acts is a perfectly reasonable place to determine what that gift looks like.
The man born lame walked.
That is what made the sign a sign.
None of this means God cannot heal someone today. If someone I love becomes sick, I pray for healing because I believe God hears prayer and can heal. Cessationism does not require believing that God stopped acting supernaturally when the apostles died. God has not ceased being God.
What ceased were particular revelatory and sign gifts associated with the foundational period of the Church. God’s ability to perform miracles was never dependent upon someone possessing one of those gifts.
That distinction gives us a perfectly ordinary way to understand a Christian praying for someone with cancer who subsequently recovers. We do not have to choose between saying that God did nothing and declaring that the person who prayed possesses the apostolic gift of healing.
God can simply answer prayer.
The same problem appears with prophecy. Scripture unquestionably describes genuine prophets speaking revelation from God. Peter says that “no prophecy ever came by the will of man: but holy men of God spoke, being moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). If someone today tells me, “God told me to tell you,” he has made an enormous claim. The biblical prophets did not merely offer strong spiritual impressions that might contain a mixture of divine revelation and human error. They spoke from God.
If someone claims the biblical gift, the biblical gift should establish the standard.
Tongues should be treated the same way. At Pentecost the disciples “began to speak with other languages, as the Spirit gave them the ability to speak” (Acts 2:4). The people listening responded, “How do we hear, everyone in our own native language?” (Acts 2:8). Luke then lists the peoples and regions represented.
Whatever disagreements Christians may have about every occurrence of tongues in the New Testament, Acts 2 gives us an unmistakable example: people miraculously spoke languages they had not learned, and people who knew those languages understood them.
This is why I think the accusation that cessationists explain away the gifts gets the situation almost backward. I take the biblical gifts seriously enough to let Scripture define them.
If someone claims biblical healing, biblical healing is the standard. If someone claims biblical prophecy, biblical prophecy is the standard. If someone claims biblical tongues, biblical tongues are the standard.
We should not redefine the gifts until whatever is happening today can fit comfortably inside them.
There is a larger biblical pattern behind this as well. Miracles are not distributed evenly throughout biblical history. Scripture covers an enormous span of time, yet signs and wonders appear in especially concentrated periods surrounding particular messengers. Moses and Joshua stand out. Elijah and Elisha stand out. Christ and the apostles stand out.
Generations of faithful believers lived between those periods without routinely performing signs and wonders. God had not abandoned them, nor had they become less faithful because they could not reproduce the ministries of Moses or Elijah. Miracles appeared when and where God chose to use them for his purposes.
The greatest concentration naturally surrounds Christ. Jesus heals diseases, casts out demons, controls nature, gives sight to the blind and raises the dead. These works are not incidental decorations around his ministry. They testify to who he is. When John the Baptist sends messengers asking whether Jesus is the one who is to come, Jesus points them to what is happening: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor receive good news (Matthew 11:4–5).
The apostles then carry the authorized testimony of Christ into the world, with God confirming their witness through signs and wonders.
Paul describes that ministry as foundational when he says that the household of God was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20).
A foundation has a particular function. It is laid so that the building can continue upon it.
The Church continues. Christ continues building his Church. The Holy Spirit continues dwelling in believers. God continues saving sinners, answering prayer, providentially directing events and doing whatever he wills within his creation. None of that requires the foundation to be laid repeatedly in every generation.
It also means I have no theological reason to accept every modern claim of supernatural power simply because I believe the supernatural accounts in Scripture. In fact, believing those accounts gives me the standard by which modern claims should be tested.
When someone claims apostolic power, I compare it with apostolic power. When someone claims prophecy, I compare it with prophecy. When someone claims tongues, I compare it with tongues. When someone claims the gift of healing, I compare it with the healings Scripture describes.
That is not explaining away the Bible.
Explaining away the Bible would be looking at the obvious differences between what Scripture describes and what someone standing in front of me claims to possess, and then changing my definition of the biblical gift until the differences disappear.
I believe the supernatural gifts in Scripture precisely as Scripture describes them. I also believe they served particular purposes within redemptive history, and that the apostles and prophets occupied a foundational place in the establishment of the Church.
If God heals someone tomorrow, I will thank God. If he answers prayer in a way for which I have no natural explanation, nothing about cessationism requires me to deny it. God remains perfectly capable of acting supernaturally without giving someone a supernatural gift.
So the question is not whether I believe God still performs miracles.
Of course he can.
The question is whether the person claiming to possess a biblical supernatural gift actually possesses what the Bible describes.
If we both believe the Bible, using the Bible to find out seems like a reasonable place to start.