Acts: Signs, Wonders, and Miracles, Part 6, a Final Word from the Life of Paul

I would like to move on from this subject, and the last post was probably a good place to wrap it up. But I wanted very quickly to turn to Paul as an example of where the extraordinary fits into the normal Christian life. Now we know that Paul’s Christian life started in an extraordinary manner on the road to Damascus. And he certainly experienced extraordinary events throughout his life.

In Acts 13 we have this episode recorded:

But Elymas the sorcerer (for that is what his name means) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith.  Then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit,looked straight at Elymas and said,  “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord? Now the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind for a time, not even able to see the light of the sun.”

Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he groped about, seeking someone to lead him by the hand. When the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord.

In Acts 14 we read:

In Lystra there sat a man who was lame. He had been that way from birth and had never walked. He listened to Paul as he was speaking. Paul looked directly at him, saw that he had faith to be healed and called out, “Stand up on your feet!” At that, the man jumped up and began to walk.

In Acts 16 this happened:

Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her.

And you may recall that the prison in Philippi, which held Paul and Silas, broke in two when they praised God and lifted up their voices to Him.

Luke records in Acts 19 that “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.”

And then we have Eutychus in Troas in Acts 20:

On the first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the people and, because he intended to leave the next day, kept on talking until midnight. There were many lamps in the upstairs room where we were meeting. Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When he was sound asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up dead. Paul went down, threw himself on the young man and put his arms around him. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “He’s alive!” Then he went upstairs again and broke bread and ate. After talking until daylight, he left. The people took the young man home alive and were greatly comforted.

Amazing right? And because of Luke’s compression of time, these extraordinary events appear to happen one upon another. Boom boom boom. Except they don’t.

In real time, these events happen over the course of at least 30 years—that’s three decades. And they occur, not because Paul is seeking them out or advertising for a healing service. Paul is no carney barker. He is bringing the message of the good news in and through Jesus Christ to the Gentiles. The extraordinary events are not impediments to his mission; sometimes they remove impediments to his proclamation of the truth as with Elymas or the slave girl. Other times an extraordinary event moves hearts to repentance like the Philippian jailer and his family.

Eutychus’s case is instructive. In Troas, Paul is sharing his heart with a flock that he may never see again. He talked on and on not because he liked to hear himself speak, but because he knew wolves would come and savage these sheep and lambs — and he also knew he could not be there to step in and protect them. So Paul pours out his heart to them—his last words, the most important ones, ones he wanted them to remember long after he had gone.

And then Eutychus falls asleep and out the window and dies. Nonplussed, Paul walks downstairs, raises him up, and goes on talking to his flock until dawn. Incredible. His words were stronger than death; death would not get in the way of what he had to say in order to edify, strengthen, and encourage them. The raising of Eutychus was secondary; the word was primary, the flock was primary. Paul was not a showman; he was a shepherd. The raising of Eutychus as a brief interruption from what he was about in Troas was consistent with that disposition.

The point here is that Paul didn’t seek out extraordinary events; they found him it seems, albeit infrequently—a handful of times over the course of a very active and very full ministry that spanned 30 years. He did not eschew extraordinary events; he did not treat them as limited to Jesus or the Twelve; but, his emphasis was the Word, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Paul spent the bulk of his time in the ordinary: making tents, preaching the word, bringing the word to God’s people wherever he found them.

Paul was compelled to get the word of God out to both Jew and Gentile, and to glorify His Name. Often that was mixed with demonstrable power:

Our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake. 1 Thessalonians 1:5.

Yet the thrust of his life was his earnest desire to take hold of Christ in the same manner in which Christ had taken hold of him. See Phil. 3:12. And he wanted to imbue everyone else with the same zeal for Christ Jesus. Be imitators of me, he said. See 1 Corinthians 11:1.

What should we take away from this? We can and should expect to experience and see extraordinary events throughout the course of our normal Christian lives (if they are in fact normal in the way Luke presents here in Acts); but we do not need to go searching for them. God will distribute these things according to His will and through the marvelous agency of the Holy Spirit as He chooses. See 1 Corinthians 12:11.

For our part, we can and should let this mind be in us, which was in Christ Jesus:

who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Phillippians 2)

and we should:

forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead,  pressing on toward the goal, for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3).

Amen.