"FOR OUR SALVATION, THE ASCENDED LORD ASSISTED HIS DISCIPLES WITH THE PROMISED SIGNS."

Singing: (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Hymn 31:1,5
Psalm 79:3,5
Psalm 73:8
Psalm 105:2,3
Hymn 29:1,2

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ! 

We remembered the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost some five weeks ago. We drew out at the time the fact that the outpoured Holy Spirit would lead God’s people into all truth (cf Jn 16:13). That is: the Holy Spirit would cause the Word of God to be written and to be proclaimed to sinners. Through the Word and its preaching, the Holy Spirit would work faith in sinners’ hearts, and so direct them to Jesus Christ.

As it turns out, many and various teachings have appeared over the years and centuries that in effect twist the work of the Spirit. One such teacher who wrongly portrayed the work of the Holy Spirit was John Wimber. Wimber (he died last November in California) insisted that all Christians –they had the Spirit, did they not?- should be able to perform miracles as speaking in tongues, casting out demons, faith healings, etc. Such miracles, Wimber taught, are highly effective tools given by Christ to every believer so that each Christian can in turn compel the unbelievers of our day to come to faith in Jesus Christ. As Scripture evidence for his position, he points to a passage as Mk 16.

It leaves us with questions. Mk 16 does speak about casting out demons in Jesus name, about speaking in tongues, about picking up serpents (vss 16f). We’ve also heard reports of miracles of healing, speaking in tongues, demons being cast out. Yet I have never hear of anyone in our midst laying hands on a sick person, and I doubt we’re about to try it. Nor do we speak in tongues, and we’re hardly game to try that either. And certainly we’re not about to pick up a dugite in an effort to bring someone to faith. Yet here’s a text of Scripture which speaks about the signs which follow believers: "in My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will take up serpents," etc. And we wonder: doesn’t Scripture say that we should be doing these things? Should we maybe learn from the practices of the charismatics?

Now that Pentecost has come and gone, I want to show you that No, you and I ought not to expect to do miracles. Rather, the ascended Christ performs miracles through whom He would, and that is first of all the disciples. And He performed miracles through the disciples so that we in turn might believe the Word God in mercy has given to us. It’s not signs and wonders that characterise the Christian; what characterises the Christian is simply faith in Jesus Christ, faith in the Word of God.

I summarise the sermon with this theme:

1 You will puzzle, I suppose, at the theme I have chosen for this sermon. "The ascended Lord," I had said, "assisted His disciples with the promised signs." We’d prefer to word it differently; Jesus - sovereign God as He is- should not be presented as "assisting" man, surely. Yet I put it to you, brothers and sisters, that this indeed is what the ascended Christ is doing. Notice what Mark is moved by the Spirit to write in our text: "they went out and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them." The prime action is placed on the preachers, and Jesus is distinctly presented as "working with" them, accompanying their labours with His labours, assisting them. That may sound rather strange to our ears, but that is distinctly what the text says. And so we are to leave it that way. Yet, as we shall find out later, the sovereignty of the ascended Jesus still means that He takes the initiative.

Who, now, is Jesus pleased to assist? The question is important because people of John Wimber’s mould see in this passage evidence that every Christian should be able to perform miracles; according to these teachers, the Lord Jesus is today "working with" each believer and so confirming the word through the signs we all should be able to do. If you have adequate faith, it’s then said, miraculous things will be done by you.

Who is Jesus pleased to assist, who are used by Jesus to perform signs? The context leaves no doubt who is meant by the word ‘them’ in our text, who it is with whom Jesus worked. The persons caught by the pronoun ‘them’ is the people to whom Jesus spoke prior to His ascension (cf vs 19), and vs 14 leaves no doubt as to who they were; this is "the eleven", the body of the remaining disciples.

This conclusion, brothers and sisters, is something I want to stress. Unless we read the bible carefully, we have no defence against the charismatic Christians around us who would have every Christian performing miracles and speak in tongues. Precisely because mention is made of the last verses of Mark 16 to prove that all Christians should perform miracles, do we need to read these words carefully. The first thing we need to note, then, is the question of who receive Jesus assistance. In our text it is not all Christians who receive assistance from the ascended Lord in the sense that He confirms their words through signs, nor even all pious Christians. Our text tells us instead that the ascended Lord was pleased to work together with the disciples, the eleven. Their labours are under-girded by His assistance. That’s vs 20: "They went out and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the word through the accompanying signs."

Indeed, it’s actually not even so surprising to read in our text that the ascended Lord "worked together with" these eleven. He had once called these eleven (plus Judas Iscariot who betrayed him and then killed himself) to be His particular disciples, and in the course of His ministry Jesus had prepared them to be sent out to the ends of the earth. Before His ascension into heaven, Jesus had told these eleven of the task He had laid aside for them. It’s vs 15: though Jesus would ascend into heaven, the disciples were now to "go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." That task was important because, as Jesus stressed in vs 16, one cannot be saved unless one believes. And faith comes through the hearing of the gospel (Rom 10).

As it turns out, the disciples were nothing to write home about. They were weak men, uneducated, common folk. And they were prone too to all the weaknesses we battle with. Yet it pleased the victorious Christ to commission these eleven sinful men, to tell them to move out from Jerusalem and travel throughout Judea, even to Samaria, and from there to the ends of the earth with the message of Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. Quite a mandate, indeed! And No, it was not for the disciples to protest; it was for them instead simply to go and do what the Lord in wisdom told them to do. And they were to believe that with the task God would give the strength.

That, now, is vs 17: it’s Jesus’ promise that signs would accompany their efforts. Through their teaching various would come to faith. And then Jesus adds concerning those who shall come to faith through the labour of the disciples: "these signs will follow those who believe". Notice that the text does not say that those who believe shall themselves perform these signs; rather, these signs shall follow them, these signs shall accompany them, shall be there with the believers. Who actually do the signs? Yes, vs 17 says: "in My name they shall cast out demons; they shall speak in new tongues; they will take up serpents...," and that prompts us to think that the new believers themselves would do the miracles. And no doubt: the ascended Christ is able to perform signs through any believer. But Jesus’ point here is not that all believers would do signs; Jesus’ point is rather that only believers-as-opposed-to-unbelievers would do signs. And which believers would do the signs? Again, not necessarily all of them. Rather, God would determine through whom He would do a sign. And Mark tell us in our chapter that the Lord was pleased to perform particular signs through the disciples.. That’s our text: the disciples preached everywhere, and as they did so, the ascended Christ worked with these initial preachers of the gospel and confirmed "the word through the accompanying signs." And we’re not so very surprised to learn this either; these eleven were but simple, common men who needed the blessing and strength of the Lord so much if they were to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth.

That this is the pattern by which the Lord operated is evident from what the Lord Himself wrote elsewhere in the Scriptures. Nowhere in the Bible after the ascension of the Lord do we read of the average believer - people like you and me- performing miracles. We do read of the eleven disciples (strengthened by the addition of Paul) doing them. Beyond these twelve, only those immediately associated with the twelve are used by the Lord to perform particular signs. Consider the following:

• Paul in Philippi instructed the demon to come out of the slave girl who hindered his work in that town (Acts 16:16ff).
• Think of Pentecost day; it was the disciples themselves (together with those immediately connected with them) who spoke in other languages (Acts 2:4ff). (Sure, Scripture tells us that in Corinth the believers spoke in tongues, but we are to realise that the Corinthians did not speak the "new" tongues promised in Mk 16; the church of Corinth experienced a different phenomenon.)
• It was Paul who ended up with a deadly serpent around his arm, and it harmed him not (28:3f).
• We read nowhere of any apostle drinking a deadly poison and remaining untouched, but we do read of the apostle Paul, eg, being stoned and left for dead one day and walking out of town the next (14:19f).
• And as to the reference to healing the sick, recall Peter’s healing of the lame man in the temple (Acts 3), Peter’s healing of paralysed Aeneas in Lydda (8:33), Paul’s healing of the cripple in Lystra (14:9), etc.

In fact, we read of Paul the following in Acts 19:

In his letters to the various churches Paul alludes repeatedly to the miracles which the Lord God was pleased to work through him. Says Paul in Rom 15:

So too the letter to the Hebrews: the apostle writes that God Himself bore witness to the preaching "with signs and wonders, with various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit" (Heb 2:4). To the Thessalonians Paul says that "our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power..." (I Thes 1:5). All of it together, beloved, leads to the conclusion that as the apostles travelled hither and thither preaching the gospel of Christ’s triumph, they repeatedly performed signs and wonders in the towns they visited. The Scriptures themselves confirm what is written in our text: "the Lord [was] working with them and confirming the word through the accompanying signs."

Yes, charismatic circles around us appeal to Mk 16 to insist that today’s common believers ought to perform miracles. Yet comparing Scripture with Scripture leads to the conclusion that this is not what the Lord teaches in this passage of His Word. What the Lord rather said was that the disciples (and those immediately associated with them) would perform particular signs and wonders.

2. That brings us, brothers and sisters, to the next question that presses itself on us. That second question is this: why would the ascended Lord seek to work with His disciples by means of signs and wonders? What’s the purpose of these miracles-by-the-disciples?

Mark gives the answer in our text. The Lord "worked with" the disciples, says Mark, "confirming the word through the accompanying signs." The word translated as "confirm" gives us the reason why Jesus was pleased to cooperate with the disciples by causing them to perform miracles. The word used means "to make firm", to "verify". That’s what Jesus did with the signs He prompted His apostles to perform: through those signs the ascended Jesus verified, demonstrated the truth of, confirmed the word the disciples spoke.

No, that’s not to say that the Word of God’s gospel in Jesus Christ was not valid until it could be proven by these signs. Rather, by the signs which the Lord worked through the disciples He sought to impress on people the truth of the Word they heard. Those signs called the people’s attention to the preaching of Christ crucified, more, they demonstrated to the people that what they heard in the preaching was true, was fact - Christ had indeed been victorious. Consider the particular signs mentioned in Mk 16.

• Jesus says that the disciples would "cast out demons". Yet to cast out a demon, one must be stronger than that demon, yes, the devil behind the demons must be defeated, bound. And is that not precisely the message of the gospel?! Christ’s triumph on Calvary means at heart that the devil has been bound. In a word: the sign confirms the preached Word.
• So too with regard to the next sign, about speaking in new tongues. It was the evil of man’s heart as displayed at the building of the tower of Babel that prompted God to confuse the languages in the first place (Gen 11). Christ’s triumph on Calvary, though, meant that the power of sin in man’s heart was broken. So the cause of the barrier of language was taken away, and that’s what was spelled out on Pentecost day when the disciples spoke in languages they did not know (cf Acts 2) - the sign confirmed the preached Word.
• Again, Jesus said that the disciples would "take up serpents". It was through the serpent that Satan had deceived Eve, and so the serpent became in Scripture a symbol of Satan. But because Christ had triumphed on Calvary was Satan defeated, the serpent had lost its bite. It’s that defeat of the devil that would be demonstrated when the disciples picked up serpents and were not be harmed – the sign confirmed the preached Word.
• Once more, the disciples would lay their hands on the sick, Jesus said, and they would recover. Sickness was the distinct result of sin, but Christ had broken the power of sin on Calvary, and so sickness had lost its strength too (cf Is 33:24). In a word: the sign confirmed, verified, demonstrated the truth of the disciples’ preaching.

That being the case, beloved, we cannot be surprised to find out either that the disciples’ labours had wonderful effects. The command Jesus had given to His disciples had been that they were to "go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mk 16:15). What happens? Vs 20: "And they went out and preached everywhere." You heard that? "they went out and preached everywhere." And that means exactly that, beloved: they preached everywhere, to all creation. As Paul also wrote to the Colossians:

How it was possible, you ask, for these disciples –simple men as they were- to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to all creation? That, beloved, is due to the fact that the ascended Lord from heaven above worked with the disciples, assisted them. Assisted them how? By causing the gospel they preached to be confirmed by the particular signs He worked through His apostles.

How Christ’s work of confirming their preaching through the signs and wonders He caused them to do prompted the gospel to reach all men? We read from Acts 5 that "many signs and wonders were done among the people" through the apostles. No, it wasn’t that the signs and wonders prompted faith; faith comes through the preaching. But the passage certainly demonstrates that the signs and wonders done by the apostles caught the attention of the peoples so that they crowded around the apostles and even benefited from the triumph Christ achieved on Calvary - "they were all healed" (vs 16). Make no mistake, beloved: those healings certainly helped the disciples to reach all creation with the Word of life (cf Acts 19:11ff). All who heard of the words and deeds of the apostles were confronted with the reality that the power of the devil was broken, confronted with the fact that God’s kingdom had come in Jesus Christ. News like that spreads, and so none was without excuse.

And there’s the truth, beloved, that pertains specifically to us as well. No, God does not today commonly work miracles through His people; nowhere does the Scripture say that believers today shall perform signs and wonders. But the gospel of Jesus Christ was preached to all creation by the apostles long ago, and Jesus Christ Himself confirmed their word by the accompanying signs - why? - so that we too might be confronted with the reality of Christ’s triumph and Satan’s destruction. We don’t see the signs today, but we do have the Scriptures which record the signs Christ was pleased to work. Those signs which Christ was pleased to work –demons were cast out, new tongues were spoken, serpents were taken up, poison was drunk, the sick were healed- those signs which Christ worked through His disciples confirmed that the words these disciples spoke of Jesus’ victory on Calvary were definitely true. So we today have every reason to embrace the gospel of Christ crucified and risen as preached by the apostles and recorded in holy Scripture; we have every reason to believe it because Christ Himself gave concrete evidence long ago already of the truthfulness of that gospel. And let’s be honest: if one isn’t about to believe that Jesus confirmed the apostles’ preaching long ago through those signs and wonders recorded in the book of Acts, he won’t believe it today either if the Lord were to perform a sign today.

What, then, of the signs and wonders the charismatics claim they perform? With regard to them, beloved, we remember two things.

• In the first place, God has not said that today’s believers shall perform miracles of healing and of demon exorcism. God, however, remains sovereign, and He certainly can prompt a miracle as this to happen today.
• In the second place we need to remember the word of the apostle to the Thessalonians:

No, my beloved, we shall not believe that every believer ought to be able to perform miracles today. We shall not believe it, because the Scriptures do not teach that the Lord still wishes to work miracles through His people today. So we shall not envy those who say they can perform signs, nor shall we wish to see signs ourselves. And certainly we’ll not want to do signs in order to confirm to ourselves that we really belong to God. Rather, we shall simply believe the Word we have received from the apostles, the gospel of Christ’s triumph over sin and Satan. After all, Christ confirmed their word by the accompanying signs so that we might believe the victory He has accomplished (Jn 20:30f). Amen.