Tag Archives: blessing of Abraham

Miracles Are The Message

Miracles Are The Message

The miracles of Jesus are not the trailer for the gospel. They are the movie. Vincent Cheung nailed it when he said miracles “were not merely signs to authenticate the message – they were the message. The kingdom of God is a kingdom of power, and the gospel is a gospel of blessing and deliverance” (The Answer to All Your Problems, Borders Vol. 3). This is why they keep coming. Signs point? Sure. But the reason they’re such a perfect sign is because they are the thing itself.

Think. Everything the gospel delivers when it crashes into your life is a miracle. Forgiveness of sins? Miracle. Healing? Miracle. Prosperity? Miracle. Baptism of the Spirit? Miracle. The whole package is supernatural from top to bottom. When the finished work lands on a person, reality bends. That’s not an accessory. That’s the product.

Cessationists love their little song: “Signs are miracles. Signs have ceased. Therefore miracles have ceased.” That’s the same brain-dead logic as “Dinosaurs are animals. Dinosaurs have ceased. Therefore animals have ceased.” Both arguments are equally stupid. One just happens to get preached from pulpits and called “sound doctrine.” People would never be so careless in normal speech as to say something that irrational, yet they will dare to play those games with God’s word. The cessationist brain is a fossilized fossil arguing fossils don’t exist.

The issue with sign miracles is that they are both signs and the message. They are such good signs because they are the message. Why do I need to explain that to adults? The grand opening of a sourdough bread shop, giving away free slices, is a good sign of the message (the bread) because it is the message. Some miracles are more directly seen as signs, such as Jesus saying “that you may know…,” but that still does not stop the sign miracle from being the message itself.

Even if, for the sake of argument, some “sign gifts” clocked out when the canon closed, it has zero logical relevance to healing and miracles on the demand of faith. Just because a pizza does not have olives does not mean it stops being a pizza. Abraham’s blessing, secured by the blood, still stands. Jesus still said whoever believes will do the works He did and greater ones (John 14:12). That is common discipleship, not a limited-edition apostolic promo. The only way common miracles stop is if God rips Abraham’s blessing out of the DNA of Abraham’s children. He hasn’t.

Why is healing such a perfect sign of the kingdom and the gospel? Because healing is the gospel. “By His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Matthew 8:17 confirms it’s physical: He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases. That is pure substitutionary atonement language. The same word used for the scapegoat carrying sins into the wilderness is used for Jesus carrying sickness. Thirty-nine stripes in exchange for zero sickness. Jesus took the curse so you get the blessing. If you want the cleanest picture of what the cross actually did, look at a healed body. Nothing is more gospel than that. Forgiveness is the appetizer. Healing by stripes is the main course of the substitutionary feast.

Same deal with prosperity. Jesus became poor so that by His poverty you might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). Same with the Spirit and miracles. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, so that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith (Galatians 3:13-14). Paul defines that blessing as the Spirit and miracles. The age of the gospel of Abraham is the age of miracles. They are interchangeable. If this gospel stands, it is an age of miracles.

Jesus showed the Father. “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). When you read the Gospels, two things dominate the record more than His sermons: healing the sick and working miracles. That is not coincidence. That is revelation. God is a healer by nature, not by contract or mood swing. Healing is who He is, the same way He is the Word, or Love, or Power. Satan victimizes through sickness (Acts 10:38). The Father counters with healing and miracles. Every restored body is the Father dismantling the devil’s work. If healing were optional, Jesus wasted daylight. But since it is central to God being God, those miracles were the message. Because the message comes from God and healing is God, the message is about healing, and so a few signs will be used to authenticate this message, which is about healing. If the gospel is brimming with promises of physical healing, deliverance from oppression, and resurrection power through faith, then how does it make sense to say the signs pointing to that message deliver more substance than the message itself? The pointer becomes mightier than the pointed-to. The banner becomes greater than the king. That’s a gospel that’s all sizzle and no steak—a cruel joke only Satan could have conceived.

Look at the paralytic. “Your sins are forgiven.” Then “get up, take your mat and go home.” Both are the message. Forgiveness is a miracle of the mind of God. Healing is a miracle of the body. Same blood, same substitution, same “it is finished.” Jesus wasn’t doing a two-for-one special with a coupon. Both were the exact same gospel cashing itself out. Forgiveness didn’t clock out when the canon closed. Neither did the rest of the finished work. The atonement is finished. The results keep landing. That’s the point.

Cessationism is the theological equivalent of looking at a fully stocked Costco of finished atonement blessings—forgiveness on aisle 1, healing on aisle 2, prosperity on aisle 3, Spirit power on aisle 4—and declaring the whole store closed because the “Grand Opening Sign” banner got taken down. The banner was never the product. The product is still on the shelves, paid for in blood, and the Manager (who happens to be the Son seated at the right hand of Power) keeps handing it out to anyone who walks in by faith and says “I’ll take that.”

Or it’s like someone who saw the “Open” sign on the store once, concluded the store closed forever after the grand opening, and now starves outside complaining the bread is only for the original customers. Jesus didn’t do a soft opening for the kingdom with a few demo healings and then lock the doors. The power is still on because the King is still on the throne. Miracles aren’t the movie trailer for the gospel; they’re the IMAX experience of the finished work slamming into reality. The samples were the product. And the product is still on the shelf, fully stocked.

The only thing that ceased is the unbelief that refuses to cash the check. Sickness is Satan’s glory. Healing is God’s glory. Accepting illness as “God’s plan” hands the devil a trophy Jesus already crushed. The Father is not glorified in your pain; He is exalted when faith claims the healing His Son bled for. “The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up” (James 5:15). That’s not a lottery. That’s a guarantee on the demand of faith, the same way forgiveness is.

So go do the message. Reach. Lay the hand. Open the mouth. Command the mountain. The blood still speaks. The name still works. The Spirit still moves. Forgiveness keeps minting new saints every day. The same miracle package that includes healing, prosperity, and power keeps shipping to the same address: anyone who believes. The gospel isn’t a brochure that used to have miracle samples. It is the miracle. And it continues.

God Is Always Willing

God Is Always Willing

A leper drops to his knees in the dust. Skin is rotting, social death is already complete, and he looks up at this traveling rabbi the crowds are calling a prophet. “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus reaches out, touches the untouchable, and answers with zero hesitation: “I am willing. Be clean.” Instantly the rot reverses. The man walks away whole.

Vincent Cheung nails the face-value point in “Healing and God’s Salvation.” The leper is not probing the eternal decree of the Godhead. He is talking to a man he sees as a powerful prophet or minister—the same way people once asked Elisha if he would bother to help them. It is the closest anyone in the Gospels comes to asking about “the will of God” for healing, and even then it is not that. Jesus answers the question that was actually asked: yes, He is willing to minister healing. And He never turned away anyone who insisted by faith. “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” The people who got healed usually did not even bother asking if He was willing. They assumed it, or they simply took it. God endorsed that boldness with an avalanche of miracles.

So if you treat the leper story as a direct, standalone proof-text that “God is always willing,” you are reading it wrong at the surface level. Charismatics who wave it that way are sloppy. But the story does not stay at the surface. Jesus later looks His own disciples in the eye and says the line that ends every argument: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” He is not offering a warm metaphor. He is declaring a one-to-one correspondence. What you watch Jesus do is what the Father is doing. The willingness you just saw is not the temporary mood of a local prophet. It is the Father’s nature on display in flesh.

Now stack the track record on top of that declaration. Jesus healed everyone who came to Him. Crowds full of adulterers, tax collectors, hotheads, and ordinary sinners lined up, and He healed them all. No sin audit. No “have you been behaving?” No “let’s talk about last night’s choices before I touch you.” He did not make them earn it. He simply healed. The only place the flow stopped was Nazareth, where unbelief choked the pipes. Everywhere else, when people asked in faith, the answer was yes and the result was immediate. That is not a sample size of one leper. That is the consistent pattern of His entire public ministry.

So here is the math. You have the perfect reflection of the Father saying “I am willing,” and you have that same perfect reflection healing every single person who came asking in faith, with no exceptions except the unbelief we saw in His hometown. When you look at Jesus, you are looking at the Father. Therefore the Father is willing. The Father always heals when He is asked with faith. That is not a contract clause we have to negotiate. That is who He is.

The substitutionary atonement makes the same thing explicit. “By his wounds we are healed.” Jesus carried the sicknesses the same way He carried the sins—scapegoat style, finished, once for all. The Abrahamic promise that is now ours in Christ includes health and long life as part of the package. Those are real, blood-bought, past-tense realities. But they did not create God’s healing nature. They revealed it and locked it down so we would never have to guess. God is the Lord who heals you long before any covenant is cut. The covenants exist because that is who He already is. He delights to heal. He sees the need and moves toward it. That is the heart you are dealing with.

People in the Old Testament operated with a much smaller window. They knew God was good and that He helped those who called on Him. On that thin slice of knowledge they still pulled down massive miracles. Now the window is fully open. We do not just have promises and blood. We have the incarnate Son standing in front of us saying, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father,” while He is in the middle of healing everyone who asks. The nature is no longer inferred. It is displayed.

So stop asking the question. “Is God willing to heal me?” is no longer an open inquiry. It is answered in the affirmative by the one who is the exact representation of the Father’s being, backed by a perfect record and sealed by finished blood. Any other picture of God—the one who might or might not, the one who needs to be persuaded, the one who uses sickness as a teaching tool while claiming to be the Healer—is not a reflection of the Father. It is a different deity. It is not the God Jesus put on display.

He is willing. He is very willing. He wants to help. That is God. Ask in faith, and watch the same nature that touched the leper touch you.

A king and his son on a castle balcony overlooking a valley

You Have Not, Because You Ask Not

If you have them, you can’t be tempted to get them.

James drops it plain in chapter 4: “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.” The context is not some ethereal spiritual hunger for more invisible holiness or a better prayer life. He’s talking about people who want stuff—good sex and marriage, a solid house, property, money, success, relationships that actually work. They want the good material things that make life livable, and because they don’t have them, their lack of self-control sends them into murder, adultery, envy, and coveting, whether they do it with their hands or just in the secret chambers of their hearts. That’s the setup. The problem is lack, and the lack is driving the sin.

Self-control is good. It is a fruit of the Spirit, and we reach for it hard because God said it is. We want the Spirit’s fruit, not a limp version of it. But the same God who lists self-control right there in Galatians is the same God who looks at the man murdering in his heart over a wife he does not have and says, “Ask Me for the wife. I’ll hand her over. Then the temptation dies because you already have her.” One is Spirit fruit. The other is God removing the lack that makes the fruit fight an uphill battle every single day. The monastic crowd wants you fasting in a stone box until desire flatlines like a dead car battery. God wants you with a full fridge, a solid marriage, and a bank account that doesn’t make your neighbor’s house look like a target.

What’s wild is that James doesn’t pivot to the usual religious script. He doesn’t say, “Stop wanting the bigger house. Stop wanting good sex in marriage. Stop wanting more success. Get more self-control and lock yourself in a cold monastery tower until the desire dies.” No. He says ask. Get those material things from God, and the temptation evaporates because you actually have them now. You can’t be tempted to steal a car when the keys are already in your pocket and the title is in your name. You can’t be tempted to murder your neighbor for his wife when God has already given you a good marriage that satisfies. The logic is brutal and simple: if you have them, you can’t be tempted to get them through unlawful means. That’s the argument. God is not calling you to become a monk who freezes in some stone tower while muttering about contentment. He’s saying, “I know you need those things. I know you want those things. Ask, and I’ll give them to you.”

God’s only real warnings are the ones He actually wrote down. Directly in the James passage, don’t ask for sinful things that break a commandment—murder, adultery, the actual violation. And then the basic excess: ask for all the good foods you want, just don’t be a glutton. Asking for steak isn’t the sin. Being the guy who eats the whole buffet then hides in the bathroom like a raccoon in a dumpster—that’s the excess. Same thing with money. The only rule is don’t love it as your true god and provider. Look to God to provide it. Job had it. David had it. Solomon had more gold than a dragon’s hoard, and God never once wrote “loved money too much” on his problem list. Turns out you can swim in abundance without drowning in idolatry. Who am I to add more rules than God already gave? Ask for the good things. Just don’t turn them into the commandment-breaking version or the glutton version.

This is the opposite of how the faithless and the religious operate. They treat material desire as the enemy and self-control as the only weapon, so they end up producing a generation of people who are constantly fighting their own legitimate wants instead of receiving the supply that kills the fight. God’s response is to remove the lack. Nathan told David the same thing after the adultery with Bathsheba. God had already given him his master’s house, his master’s wives, the kingdom of Israel and Judah—multiple wives, which meant multiple sex, multiple good relationships, multiple children, military victories, fame, and success in everything. Then God said, “And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more.” If David had wanted more wives, more kingdom, more gold, more everything, God would have given it. After having the more, the temptation would have been gone because he would have had it. That’s how God thinks. The faithless reverse it and act like wanting more is the sin, when the real sin was taking it by murder and adultery instead of asking the One who already proved He was willing to hand it over.

Jesus seals it in the Sermon on the Mount. “Your Father knows you need these things. Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you.” The “these things” are exactly what the pagans seek after—wealth, health, food, clothing, material prosperity at the level that makes unbelievers chase them like gods. Jesus doesn’t say those desires are wrong. He says seek the kingdom and the things the pagans are running after will be added to you. The point is not that you stop wanting them. The point is that God is so concerned about them that He guarantees they will be supplied when you put Him first. It’s not based on some bare-minimum need calculation. It’s based on your wants, and He wants to give them to you so you are not sitting around being tempted by the absence.

The atonement already purchased this package. Jesus became poor so that through His poverty you might become rich—not spiritual poetry, but the same substitution that took your sickness and your sin also took your material lack. The blessing of Abraham, which was mainly material favor, land, increase, and success, has come on the Gentiles through faith. You are predestined to ask and receive. So ask. Ask for the good sex and marriage you want. Ask for the house, the land, the money, the success. Ask bigger than the monastery version of Christianity ever allowed you to imagine. When you have them, the temptation is gone. That’s how God designed it. That’s how His love works. Stop treating lack like a spiritual badge and start treating the promises like the finished reality they already are. You have not, because you ask not. Ask, and watch the temptation die because the thing you wanted is now in your hands.

To Reject Healing Is To Reject The Kingdom

To Reject Healing Is To Reject The Kingdom

Jesus did not hand the seventy-two a clipboard titled “Repent of Your Sins or Burn” and send them out as traveling guilt machines. He told them to walk into the house and drop an authoritative pronouncement: “Peace to this house.” If a son of peace is there, the blessing stands. If not, it returns to you undiminished. Stay. Eat their food. Heal the sick who are there. Then announce, “The Kingdom of God has come near to you.” Matthew stacks the power works right after the announcement—heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received; freely give. The direct words Jesus gave them do not open with “tell them to repent of their sins.” Mark later summarizes what the disciples actually did, but the commission itself packages the spoken blessing, the healing, and the Kingdom announcement as the entry point. That is the picture.

The rejection that gets the dust wiped off the feet and Sodom-level judgment is rejection of that package. The messengers brought an authoritative peace that touches material life, demonstrated the Kingdom by healing the sick and breaking Satan’s oppression, and announced that the Kingdom had drawn near in connection with those works. People get offended at God wanting to bless them with physical wholeness and material goodness. Think about that for two seconds. The faithless preach the opposite. They act like the core charge is “repent of your sins or you’re toast,” and treat healing and material blessing like optional extras or even spiritual dangers. But in the text, the Kingdom comes near by healing the sick and casting out demons. The authoritative peace is loosed over the house. What you bind on earth is bound in heaven; what you loose on earth is loosed in heaven. You go in and loose the blessing of God for healing, goodness, and prosperity in that life. If they reject that, they reject the King who brings those things.

Jesus answered John’s disciples the same way. They asked how they would know it was Him. He did not send back a hellfire pamphlet. He said, go tell John what you see and hear: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Then He added, blessed is the one who is not offended because of Me. He was not warning people against being offended at a sermon about sins and hell. He was warning them against being offended at the good things—the physical and material blessings God was doing. The faithless get particularly unbelieving right there. They can talk about spiritual goods all day, but when God shows up to heal the body, cast out the demon, and speak material peace and wholeness into a life, they flinch. That is the offense. And the judgment still stands.

The gospel is a whole package. Good things, both spiritual and material. Forgiveness is in it. Righteousness is in it. The blessing of Abraham is in it. Healing is in it. By His stripes you were healed. The same blood that purchased the removal of the record also purchased the removal of the curse, including sickness and poverty. God wants to give these things more than you want to receive them. The initial breaking-in is the healing and the blessing. You demonstrate that the Kingdom has come near by the power works. Then you tell them, you see all these good things—the healings, the peace, the demons fleeing—you cannot have the fullness of this unless you repent and believe, and then all those good things are yours. Enter in. But the proof that the Kingdom has drawn near is the healing. The way the Kingdom proves it has come near a person is the sick rising and the demons leaving.

Our responsibility is still to do it. Go pronounce “your peace” in authority. Heal the sick. Cast out the demons. Announce that the Kingdom of God has come near. If a ministry refuses to do this, boycott it. Reject it. They are a ministry of the faithless doing faithless things. They are not advancing the Kingdom; they are stalling it while Satan uses the body as a middle finger at the finished stripes and the enthroned Christ. The dust is for those who reject the package. For those who receive it, the peace sticks, the sick rise, and the Kingdom expands in power, not just words.

Speak the peace. Command the healing. Receive the good things God already purchased. The Kingdom has come near. Do not be offended at it.