Only God’s people can perform miracles.  Right?  Wrong.  What is lost on the miracle performer, the miracle recipient and those who witness and hear about the miracle is WHY GOD PERFORMED THE MIRACLE in the first place.  What message, if any, is He sending?  The answers remain unknown because those involved in His miraculous acts refuse to study the Bible in search of His Truth.  They study only those few passages that, when taken alone and assigned the wrong context, seem to confirm their handed down church doctrine, which consists of what man wishes God had said.  For example, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” To which the church adds:  “Then you need only to attend church, tithe and repent after each inevitable sin.”  An honest, Truth-hunting study of God’s Word reveals that there is much more to attaining salvation than what church people are told.  Because Satan’s lies have been passed off as God’s Truths, His message behind the miracles is hidden to the church member who strolls through life “knowing” that, having performed the prescribed ritual, he/she is saved, born again and ready for the rapture–not one word of which is Scriptural.  And when these Satan-deceived souls are shown in their own Bibles that they are not merely wrong, but are dead wrong, their eyes glaze over, their shoulders shrug and their lips utter such things as, “Well, that’s not what my denomination teaches.”  THEIR DENOMINATION TEACHES SATAN’S PERVERTED GOSPEL (Gal. 1:6), one that hides God’s soul-saving Truth from those trapped in the devil’s religious sewer collectively known as “the church.”  The fact that GOD IS IN THE DETAILS remains hidden from them because the “know” they are saved, etc.  Like Adam and Eve, they “know” that, though they deliberately disobey God’s stated commands, they “… shall not surely die.”

In Matthew 10:17 we find Jesus, having called His disciples together, has given them power over unclean spirits (devils/demons) and to heal all manner of sickness and disease.  In verse 8 He commissions them to “… heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils ….”  It is assumed by those within professing Christendom that the disciples were right with the Lord, otherwise He would not have given them power to preach His gospel and perform miracles.  The Scriptures reveal that this is not so.  Recall that one of them was a thief who routinely helped himself to the group’s money. Another one would deny three times that he knew Jesus of Nazareth.  All of them would abandon Him when things turned deadly.  Biblical facts: If the disciples had not turned to and embraced Jesus following His death and resurrection they would have remained as lost as those to whom they ministered.  The same is true of Jesus who, being a man, had to obey God in order to be welcomed back into the Father’s presence.  If He had failed one time, God would have had to spend eternity alone.  Jesus was a man like all other men; He was tempted as are all men, yet without sin.  God had given Him power over all the power of the devil.  HIS VERY ELECT HAVE BEEN GIVEN THAT SAME POWER (Lk. 10:19).  Just as He resisted Satan’s pull to sin, they must also resist him.  They must “Go and sin no more” as He commanded the prostitute and the man at Bethesda’s pool.  He is no respecter of persons; what He commands of one He commands of all.  IN ORDER FOR THE DISCIPLES TO INHERIT ETERNAL LIFE THEY HAD TO “WALK AS HE (JESUS) WALKED” (1 Jn. 2:6) and to “OVERCOME (SATAN) EVEN AS I (JESUS) OVERCAME (HIM)” (Rev. 3:21).  Contrary to popular opinion, no amount of wishful thinking and Scripture twisting can annul Christ’s Words.  He said in John 12:48-50 that He will judge every human being ever born BY HIS WORDS.  No amount of religiosity will change that Law.  L.J.