Prayers In The Name Of Jesus Still Works! (Modern Miracles)

            Could we still pray for miracles?¹ Yes, most certainly.

            God continues to be active. Miracles do occur.

            Christian apologist Sean McDowell mentions two recent² instances of the miraculous. The first instance, published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, was that of a 23-year old man who was miraculously healed from gastroparesis – a condition he was suffering for 16 years. Sean writes: [Emphasis Mine]³

Last week as I was teaching on the topic of miracles in my Resurrection class at Biola University, one of my students shared a remarkable instance of a miracle story from a peer-reviewed medical journal. He is working on a documentary of modern miracles and also spear-heading a movement to document recent miracle claims in peer-reviewed journals.

The journal article is available online with public access, so you can check out the details for yourself. Essentially, the case is about a 23-year old white male who experienced intermittent cramping and projectile vomiting at one week of age. He was soon was diagnosed with gastroparesis (a chronic, lifelong condition that is known to significantly impact the quality and length of life).

Maximal medical treatment was administered, but ineffective. For the next sixteen years, his symptoms remained severe and refractory and he was dependent on a feeding tube.

Intercessory Prayer

Yet in November 2011, he experienced “proximal intercessory prayer” (PIP) from an evangelist who reported his own story of having his life spared when his intestines were severed in a serious car accident. With the permission of the family, the evangelist prayed in the name of Jesus for the healing of the boy.

Halfway through the prayer, the boy described experiencing a shock throughout his body. That night after the prayer, the boy ate a meal for the first time without any complications. According to the article, this kind of sudden, lasting recovery from gastroparesis is unique in the scholarly literature. The journal authors write:

“For 16 years the patient was totally dependent on j-tube feedings and could not tolerate any form of oral feeding. After receiving PIP, his intolerance to oral feedings was completely resolved. He was able to tolerate oral feedings and was completely taken off of the j-tube feedings one month after the PIP experience” (p. 291).

            Regarding the prayer in the name of the Lord Jesus - a means to the miraculous healing, the journal authors write:⁴

This case report ¹⁵ examines proximal intercessory prayer (PIP) as an intervention to resolve symptoms related to gastroparesis when maximal medical management was administered but not effective. PIP, as described by Brown and colleagues¹⁶ refers to direct-contact prayer typically less than 15 min, frequently involving touch, by placing hands on the recipient and sometimes embracing them in a hug, keeping the intercessor’s eyes open to observe results. The prayer is typically done in “soft tones”. The intercessor may “petition God to heal, invite the Holy Spirit’s anointing, and/or command the healing and departure of any evil spirits in Jesus’ name.”¹⁶

            The journal article also mentions the testimony of the person who was miraculously healed: [Emphasis Mine]⁵

“Living with feeding tubes was a struggle, to say the least. Growing up being an active child, it was difficult to get the hydration and nutrition necessary with a drip feeding process. During the prayer, I felt an electric shock that started from my right shoulder traveling down through my stomach. That was the moment that I knew I had been touched by the holy spirit. Since I have been healed of my illness, I have had more energy than ever before, and have thoroughly enjoyed the new adventure of trying all different types of foods. I have entered into the medical field in search to help the sick and needy, and to give back the great care I received as a patient.”

            The second instance of the modern miraculous mentioned by Sean is that of a blind woman receiving sight:⁶

Last summer a student of mine in the Talbot M.A. Apologetics program sent me a remarkable case of a modern miracle that was peer-reviewed in a medical journal. Amazingly, he just sent me another modern miracle case from Explore: The Journal of Science & Healing.

This case is about a young woman who was legally blind, but after receiving prayer, had her vision restored immediately and permanently. You can read the journal article directly, but here are the relevant details.

Receiving Sight after 12 years

The young woman was diagnosed with Juvenile Macular Degeneration (JMD) and lost her vision over three months in 1959 when she was eighteen years old. Initial reports show that her vision was 7/200 in each eye.

In 1972, after being legally blind for over a dozen years, she received proximal intercessory prayer (PIP) from her husband, which is a kind of direct contact, petitionary prayer that often lasts over fifteen minutes. They went to bed at midnight, which was later than normal for them, and he read her two Bible verses and then began to pray. Although he had never heard of a miraculous present-day healing, and he did not speak in tongues, fast or perform other common spiritual practices associated with Pentecostal or Charismatic circles, he began to pray boldly for her healing.

According to the authors of the article, “At the close of the prayer, his wife opened her eyes and saw her husband kneeling in front of her, which was her first clear visual perception after almost 13 years of blindness.”

In 1974, her visual acuity was 20/100 without correction, and then in 2001, she vision had improved to 20/40 in each eye. Except for common age-related problems, her sight has remained intact for the past 47 years.

            Find below an excerpt from the journal article about the healing prayer, which the husband prayed over his blind wife:⁷

When the couple went to bed later than normal (after midnight), her husband performed a hurried spiritual devotional practice (reading two Bible verses) and got on his knees to pray. She describes that they both began to cry as he began to pray, with a hand on her shoulder while she laid on the bed, and with great feeling and boldness he prayed: “Oh, God! You can restore […] eyesight tonight, Lord. I know You can do it! And I pray You will do it tonight.” At the close of the prayer, his wife opened her eyes and saw her husband kneeling in front of her, which was her first clear visual perception after almost 13 years of blindness.

The couple were not cessationists (i.e., believing that spiritual gifts such as glossolalia, healing, and prophecy are not for the present age), but they had never heard of anyone receiving a miraculous healing in the present day. The patient reported, “The only healings we knew about were in the Bible”. She indicated that her husband had never before prayed for someone who subsequently experienced a remarkable recovery. Their only prior experience with prayer for healing seems to be when the patient and her husband had briefly visited the meeting of a well-known healing evangelist, but they left before the time in the meeting when the healing practices began. The patient and her husband were involved with a Baptist church at the time that did not practice the laying on of hands while praying for the sick. They also did not practice glossolalia, nor fasting, which are more commonly associate with Pentecostal or Charismatic sects that believe miraculous healings happen in the present age as opposed to only in the ancient world.

            Here’s the testimony of the woman who was healed of her blindness: [Emphasis Mine]⁸

“What people need to understand is ‘I was blind’, totally blind and attended the School for the Blind. I read Braille and walked with a white cane. Never had I seen my husband or daughters [sic] face. I was blind when my husband prayed for me- then just like that- in a moment, after years of darkness I could see perfectly! It was miraculous! My daughter's picture was on the dresser. I could see what my little girl and husband looked like, I could see the floor, the steps. Within seconds, my life had drastically changed. I could see, I could see!”

            Please observe that these are not random reports of the miraculous without credibility. These instances of the miraculous are credible because they have been published in peer-reviewed medical journals. So miracles happen in our time and age.

            As prayerful Christians, let us continue praying in Jesus’ name for the miraculous healing of our relatives and friends. If God so wills, HE will heal. Meanwhile, let us keep praying without giving up (cf. Luke 18:1-8).   

Endnotes:

¹Dr. William Lane Craig defines a miracle as, “So a miracle, I think, properly defined, is an event which the natural causes at a time and place cannot produce at that time and place. Or, more succinctly, a miracle is a naturally impossible event – an event which the natural causes at a certain time and place cannot bring about. It is beyond the productive capacity of nature…” (https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/when-is-It-rational-to-believe-in-miracles/)

²The term recent refers to the date in which the healing was published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

³https://seanmcdowell.org/blog/a-remarkable-case-of-a-peer-reviewed-modern-miracle

⁴https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965229918313116

⁵Ibid.

⁶https://seanmcdowell.org/blog/the-blind-receive-sight-a-peer-reviewed-modern-miracle

⁷https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550830720300926?fbclid=IwAR0tgsnm-fRTDImK5eGZSndVW1bNzfijdyIiqF9pkZo07ywT3wHyFWfkr-Y

⁸Ibid.

Websites were last accessed on 25^th April 2020.

Why Do Scientists Believe In Christ’s Resurrection?

            Historic Christianity is predicated on Christ’s resurrection. If Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile (1 Corinthians 15: 12-17, NIV).

            Those who invigorate a war between Science and Christianity (e.g. scientists subscribing to atheism and skepticism) claim that Christ did not resurrect. Richard Dawkins - a professor at Oxford University until 2008 - is one among those who reject Christ’s resurrection, “Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.”¹

            But Christian scientists believe in Christ’s resurrection! Ian Hutchinson is one among them, “I’m a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. So do dozens of my colleagues. How can this be?...We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT – and millions of other scientists worldwide – somehow think that a literal miracle like the resurrection of Jesus is possible…The founders of the scientific revolution and many of the greatest scientists of the intervening centuries were serious Christian believers. For Robert Boyle (of the ideal gas law, co-founder in 1660 of the Royal Society) the resurrection was a fact. For James Clerk Maxwell (whose Maxwell equations of 1862 govern electromagnetism) a deep philosophical analysis undergirded his belief in the resurrection. And for William Phillips (Nobel prize-winner in 1997 for methods to trap atoms with laser light) the resurrection is not discredited by science.”²

            Dr. John Lennox, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, cites famous contemporary Christian scientists who believe in Christ’s resurrection, “…there are eminent, scientists, like Professor William Phillips (Physics Nobel Prizewinner, 1998), Professor Sir John Polkinghorne FRS (Quantum Physicist, Cambridge) and, in the United States, the current Director of the National Institute of Health and former Director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins (to name just three) who…affirm their belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which they regard as the supreme evidence for the truth of the Christian worldview.”³

            Why and how do Christian scientists believe in Christ’s resurrection or the miraculous?

            Christian scientists know that science can investigate the miraculous, but science cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, “…while science can’t logically rule miracles in or out of consideration, it can be a helpful tool for investigating contemporary miraculous claims. It may be able to reveal self-deception, trickery, or misperception. If someone has been seen levitating on a supposed flying carpet in their living room, then the discovery of powerful electromagnets in their basement might well render such claims implausible…Science functions by reproducible experiments and observations. Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.”⁴

            Moreover, Christian scientists reject the reasons offered by non-Christian scientists. The argument employed by atheists and skeptics to reject the miraculous is grossly invalid.

            Miracles are rejected on the premise that they go against the laws of nature. But this argument, as Dr. John Lennox explains, is invalid, “Hume denies the miraculous, because miracle would go against the uniform laws of nature. And yet elsewhere he denies the uniformity of nature. He famously argues that, just because the sun has been observed to rise in the morning for thousands of years, it does not mean that we can be sure that it will rise tomorrow. This is an example of the Problem of Induction: on the basis of past experience you cannot predict the future, says Hume. But if that were true, let us see what follows.

            Suppose Hume is right, and no dead man has ever risen up from the grave through the whole of earth's history so far; by his own argument he still cannot be sure that a dead man will not rise up tomorrow. That being so, he cannot rule out miracle. What has become now of Hume's insistence on the laws of nature, and its uniformity? He has destroyed the very basis on which he tries to deny the possibility of miracles.

            In any case, if according to Hume we can infer no regularities, it would be impossible even to speak of laws of nature, let alone the uniformity of nature with respect to those laws. And if nature is not uniform, then using the uniformity of nature as an argument against miracles is simply absurd.”⁵

            Dr. Lennox posits God’s intervention into nature as a reason for the miraculous, “…from the theistic perspective, the laws of nature predict what is bound to happen if God does not intervene; though, of course, it is no act of theft, if the Creator intervenes in his own creation. It is incorrect to argue that the laws of nature make it impossible for us to believe in the existence of God and the possibility of his intervention in the universe. That would be like claiming that an understanding of the laws of the internal combustion engine makes it impossible to believe that the designer of a motor-car, or one of his mechanics, could or would intervene and remove the cylinder head. Of course they could intervene. Moreover, this intervention would not destroy those laws. The very same laws, that explained why the engine worked with the cylinder head on, would now explain why it does not work with the head removed.

            It is, therefore, inaccurate and misleading to say with Hume that miracles "violate" the laws of nature. We could, of course, say that it is a law of nature that human beings do not rise again from the dead by some natural mechanism. But Christians do not claim that Christ rose from the dead by such a mechanism. They claim that he rose from the dead by supernatural power. By themselves, the laws of nature cannot rule out that possibility.

            When a miracle takes place, it is the laws of nature that alert us to the fact that it is a miracle. It is important to grasp that Christians do not deny the laws of nature, as Hume implies they do. It is an essential part of the Christian position to believe in the laws of nature as descriptions of those regularities and cause-effect relationships built into the universe by its Creator and according to which it normally operates. If we did not know them, we should never recognise a miracle if we saw one…

            …To suppose, then, that Christianity was born in a pre-scientific, credulous and ignorant world is simply false to the facts. The ancient world knew the law of nature as well as we do, that dead bodies do not get up out of graves. Christianity won its way by dint of the sheer weight of evidence that one man had actually risen from the dead.”⁶

            Therefore, the reasons offered by the non-Christian scientists to reject miracles are weak and invalid.

            There are, however, compelling evidences that persuade Christian scientists to believe in Christ\s resurrection, “Most of our evidence comes from the New Testament and it may surprise many that, in comparison with many other ancient works of literature, the New Testament is by far the best-attested document from the ancient world…It is the constant and unvarying testimony of the Gospels that the tomb was found to be empty when the Christian women came early in the morning of the first day of the week, to complete the task of encasing the body of Jesus in spices. And when the apostles went to investigate the women's report, they likewise found the tomb empty…But it was the way in which the grave-cloths were lying that convinced St. John of a miracle. So, could someone have taken the body and rewound the cloths deliberately to give the impression that a miracle had happened? But who could this have been? It was morally impossible for the followers of Christ to have done it. It was also psychologically impossible, since they were not expecting a resurrection. And it was practically impossible, because of the guards. It would be absurd to think of the authorities doing anything remotely suggestive of a resurrection. After all, it was they who had ensured that the tomb was guarded, to avoid anything like that!

            The early Christians did not simply assert that the tomb was empty. Far more important for them was the fact that subsequently they had met the risen Christ, intermittently over a period of forty days. According to Paul's list in 1 Corinthians 15, there were originally well over five hundred people who at different times saw the risen Christ during that period…To anyone who knows anything about the ancient laws regarding legal testimony, it is very striking that the first reports mentioned in the Gospels of appearances of the Risen Christ were made by women. In first-century Jewish culture, women were not normally considered to be competent witnesses. At that time, therefore, anyone who wanted to invent a resurrection story would never have thought of commencing it in this way. The only value of including such a story would be if it were both true and easy to verify. Its very inclusion, therefore, is a clear mark of historical authenticity.

            The evidence of the empty tomb, the character of the witnesses, the explosion of Christianity out of Judaism and the testimony of millions today are inexplicable without the resurrection. As Holmes said to Watson: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"” (Emphasis Mine).⁷

Endnotes:

¹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/richard-dawkins-you-ask-the-questions-special-427003.html

²http://www.veritas.org/can-scientist-believe-resurrection-three-hypotheses/

³http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/04/16/3986403.htm

⁴http://www.veritas.org/can-scientist-believe-resurrection-three-hypotheses/

⁵http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/04/16/3986403.htm

⁶http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/04/16/3986403.htm

⁷Ibid.

Websites cited were last accessed on 25^th November 2017.