“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised, and the poor have good news announced to them. AND BY THE WAY, YOUR HEAD WILL BE CUT OFF AND YOU WILL BE MARTYRED. -Matthew 11:4-5

Jesus didn’t tell John the last part that’s in all-caps even though He knew what was in John’s future. It would have been far too terrifying!

The reality is that the same Jesus who performed amazing miracles and made sure that they were reported back to John the Baptist, did not step in to prevent John’s imprisonment or his gruesome death. John did not get a miracle. He had his head chopped off and put on a silver platter to be paraded before Herod’s narcissistic and depraved wife.

Not everyone gets the miracle, not everyone gets the healing, not everyone gets freedom from unjust suffering.

It’s hard to imagine anyone with more faith than John the Baptist. He lived a solitary life in the desert until he appeared with his firey message of repentance.

John was the first person listed in the New Testament to express his faith in Jesus.

I myself did not know Him, but the One who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit descend and rest is He who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God. -John 1:33-34

But John’s preaching of righteousness eventually got him in trouble with people in high places. Not one to speak in generalities, John called out the lifestyle choices of Herod Antipas’ family. It ended up costing him his life.

For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife. -Mark 6:18

He threw him in prison before killing him. Things were looking very bad for John. He was hearing of the miraculous things that Jesus had been doing, and yet John was rotting away in prison.

To get some perspective on what John the Baptist was dealing with, Herod Antipas was the uncle of King Herod Agrippa. This is the man who had male children aged 2 and under slaughtered to try and prevent the birth of Christ! His uncle, Herod Antipas, not only had John the Baptist beheaded, but he’s the one that sent Jesus to Pilate. (Pilate was the one who handed Jesus over to be flogged and crucified.) So John the Baptist was dealing with some really powerful people who lived privileged and wicked lives. This was a totally messed up family! He called them out on their moral depravity and was tossed in prison for it.

John had to be asking himself the hard questions…

I thought Jesus was the Messiah. Why am I rotting in prison? This is not how it’s supposed to work out!
I saw the Spirit come down from Heaven upon Jesus. I was so sure He was THE ONE. Why hasn’t He come to visit me in prison?
Other people seem to be getting good news. Why are things so bad for me?

Shaken to the core, John sends some of his disciples to go to Jesus and ask Him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

Jesus had his disciples report back to John all the amazing things He was doing that were so miraculous in nature- even to the point of raising people from the dead- but Jesus never told them to tell John, “I will do the same thing for you”.

Jesus didn’t do the same miraculous things for John the Baptist as He did for many other people.

John needed a miracle to be let out of prison.
John needed a miracle so that they wouldn’t chop off his head.
When they killed John and put his head on a platter, John needed a miracle to be raised from the dead!

JOHN DIDN’T GET ANY OF THOSE THINGS.

John suffered a horrible death. Jesus could have stepped in and performed a miracle, but He didn’t.

Why not?

The answer is simple.

Every miraculous thing that Jesus did was always determined by the will of God. We cannot copy and paste miracles into our lives.

Just because Jesus has done miraculous things, or is capable of doing miraculous things, is not a guarantee that He will step in and perform a miracle.

The Bible is not a document that allows us to copy and paste what happened there directly into our lives. God is not a machine and He does not act mechanically. Failure to acknowledge this basic truth has led to serious error in the Signs and Wonders Movement. God does not do signs and wonders on demand!

James Is Put To Death

“About that time King Herod Agrippa began to persecute some believers in the church. He had the apostle James (John’s brother) killed with a sword. When Herod saw how much this pleased the Jewish people, he also arrested Peter. This took place during the Passover celebration. Then he imprisoned him, placing him under the guard of four squads of four soldiers each. Herod intended to bring Peter out for public trial after the Passover. But while Peter was in prison, the church prayed very earnestly for him.” -Acts 12:1-4

James was the first Apostle to be martryed. God could have spared his life, but He didn’t! The Apostle Peter was arrested next, but before he could be put on trial God sent an angel to miraculously rescue Peter from prison. Why did God allow James to be killed and yet He rescued Peter supernaturally by sending an angel?

Not everyone gets the miracle.

Triumphalism is not the same thing as faith. Triumphalism is a false expectation that we put on God that actually comes from inside of us. When God puts faith in the heart of one of His children that a miracle will take place it will absolutely happen because God is the one who authored it. When a person is walking in triumphalism they expect miracles even when God has not authored them! God is under no obligation to perform miracles that He has not authored.

Does God guarantee miracles?

God parted the Red Sea one time. He’s completely capable of doing it again if wanted to. It was an amazing miracle but it was not meant to be reproduced again and again “by faith”. I cannot walk up to the Red Sea with a staff in my hand and expect the same results that Moses saw.

I think there are some people who believe that if we only gather enough christians together in a stadium and hold an event that miracles will break out all around us. Nothing could be further from the truth! You could gather every Christian on the planet and have them pray that the Red Sea would part, and it will do no such thing unless God’s the one authoring it!

How foolish we are to think that all power and authority is in our hands when it is actually in the hands of God.

There’s a popular song that says, “When I open up my mouth miracles start breaking out.” Excuse me? Who in the world do we think we are?? We don’t have the ability to speak a blade of grass into existence! Unless God authors something, it’s just us bragging!

We’re all familiar with the story of Jericho.

So when the rams’ horns sounded, the people shouted. When they heard the blast of the horn, the people gave a great shout, and the wall collapsed. Then all the people charged straight into the city and captured it. -Joshua 6:20

Joshua did not wake up one morning with the bright idea to march around Jericho, to blast some trumpets, and to shout! God actually gave Joshua explicit directions telling him exactly what the people were supposed to do.

Then the LORD said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands…” -Joshua 6:2

God’s the one that authored it!

It worked great for them because God authored it. It’s one of the most miraculous military moves that has ever taken place in planet earth, but nobody today is employing this as military strategy.

We have no power, we have no authority, to make miracles happen. God is the one who makes miracles happen, and He doesn’t perform them on demand.

I am quite certain that if God wanted to part the Red Sea again, or have walls come crashing down, it would absolutely happen. Jesus is “the same yesterday, today, and forever”. There’s no reason to believe that He can’t do the same thing today, but it’s totally foolished to think that God is going to do the same thing again unless He has explicitly given us faith that it’s actually His plan to do so.

What does real faith look like?

I heard a pastor tell about the miraculous story of the birth of one of his children. The doctors were giving him and his wife two options and neither of them were good. As he tells it, “faith rose up in his heart”, so he called upon God, and stood in faith, and his child was born healthy.

I believe the operative word here is “faith rose up in his heart”. The Holy Spirit gave him faith for his particular situation and a miracle happened.

What this pastor experienced was GOD GIVEN FAITH. This is not the same as picking a promise out of the Bible and just hoping!

I’ve experienced this kind of God-given faith in my own life. I was holding my mother in my arms waiting for an ambulance to arrive while she was gasping for breath. She was very close to death when I heard God tell me that she was not going to die that day. As soon as He spoke to me it was as if the entire room flooded with peace. I reassured her she wasn’t going to die. As far as I was concerned it was a fact. When medics arrived they could barely get a reading for her blood pressure, but she lived just as the Lord said she would.

The voice of God brings unshakeable faith.

I wasn’t trying to make myself believe something (as is so often the case with what we call “faith”). I knew positively that she would continue to live because God spoke directly into my situation.

This was quite different then what it was like as we were praying for my mother to be healed of cancer. We were all hopeful, and had a certain amount of what I would call “faith”, But it was not the same thing as what happened the day that God spoke to me directly. As much as I wanted my mother to beat the cancer and to continue to live here on earth there came a point where I also heard God speak clearly to me that that was not going to happen and that He was going to take her to be with Him.

How God decides to answer our prayers is completely up to Him.

The stories of healings and miraculous events in the Bible are not given to us as a guarantee that God will do the exact same thing in our situation.

In the Gospel of John we learn one of the reasons that miracles were recorded in the Bible.

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name. -John 20:31

Miracles were not recorded in the Bible to tell us that Jesus will do exactly the same thing in our situation. They were written down so that we may believe that He is the Son of God and may have eternal life through faith in Him.

The stories of faith nobody wants to tell

Not everyone who finds himself in a dire situation gets a miracle. Daniel was thrown into a fiery furnace and lived to tell about it. John the Baptist was thrown into prison and had his head chopped off!

In Hebrews 11 we’re given a long list of people who did mighty exploits by faith. God answered their faith by supernatural intervention and many of them escaped certain death! But in the same chapter we also read this…

Others were tortured and refused their release, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Still others endured mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they were put to death by the sword. They went around in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, oppressed, and mistreated. The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and hid in caves and holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet they did not receive what was promised. -Hebrews 11:35

Those who suffered, were tormented, and went through tremendous agony, were commended for their faith just as much as those who received miraculous intervention.

We love to tell the stories about the heroes of the faith who escaped death, but how often do you hear about the ones who didn’t get the miracle but trusted God anyway?

“They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they were put to death by the sword.”

The Word of God tells us in Hebrews they were sawn in two because of their faith– Not because they lacked faith, but rather, IT WAS EVIDENCE OF THEIR FAITH.

It would be nice if everyone escaped all suffering. It would be nice if everyone got the miracle. But that is not what the Word of God teaches on this subject.

I for one am not willing to live with the cognitive dissonance that occurs with an exaggerated theology of miracles. Beyond the frustrating mental gymnastics that need to take place in order to prop up the false notion that signs, wonders and miracles are happening every other moment, I simply want to walk in the truth!

It gave me great joy when some believers came and testified about your faithfulness to the truth, telling how you continue to walk in it. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth. -3 John 1:3