While I have become a fan of stories of miracles, I have to admit that even if we experience a miracle, it means the work of discernment has just begun. Pretty much every religion claims miracles. And to say that just because something supernatural happens, God must directly be at work, would be error for everyone except for maybe the pluralist.
So while I want my content to be primarily devoted to accounts of contemporary miracles, I want it to be a reliable resource that encourages discernment. And so each article, in addition to having at least one story of a miracle, will have some Biblical root to it as well. As well as simple, good logical argumentation.
So I start this article with a brief logical argument against pluralism. It almost certainly isn’t the best argument out there for this cause (Ronald H. Nash has a great one accessible from equip.org). But I’m not sure I’ve heard an argument quite so brief. (My pastor Darren used it in a sermon and he said he adapted it from Kevin DeYoung).
One argument I’ve heard for pluralism is the analogy of different blind men at the feet of an elephant. One blind man is near the head and feels the trunk. One feels a foot. One is at the tail and feels it. They all come to different conclusions about what it is in front of them (as maybe one thinks a snake and one thinks a tree but none think of an elephant). When in reality it is bigger than what all of them thought. And so the pluralist says God is bigger than what any one religion can know about Him. And they all have some truth but none has exclusivity on the truth.
This analogy quite simply makes a straw man of every religion I’ve studied (which admittedly isn’t all of them) except for one. The only religion I know that is different in that it was a human who claimed that through his own intellect alone, he figured out what he needed to know about the divine. That would be Buddhism. All other religions, including Christianity and Mormonism, claim that God has spoken to us what we could not have known about Him otherwise. So in the elephant analogy, you would have to have the elephant be able to speak to the blind men in their own language, and say different things to each different man that don’t align with one another at all but in the end contradict, and then say that each one doesn’t know the elephant. Well, what you have there is either a deceptive elephant, or… I’m not sure… a bunch of crazies who think an elephant is talking to them when it isn’t.
So what do I make of the different religions of the world? The answer is in fact deception. I don’t actually think that the majority of Mormons or Muslims or even Christians for that matter are crazy. I think that we all can be lied to by powerful and tricky spirits. But that there also is a truthful and Most Powerful God with truthful angels at His disposal.
I lived among Mormons in Utah for about 5 years. Most of them are, in human terms, great people. Hardworking, dedicated, helpful, resourceful, talented. Far from perfect, just like all of us. But I moved to Utah to do ministry there, intending to evangelize to many of them, since what I had learned about them is that they in fact do not believe very much the same as Christians do about Jesus and God. To be fair to them, however, I wanted to learn from them what they believed instead of just assuming that the Christians I had learned about Mormons from had it all correct. There was of course the chance that the Christians were malicious and just wanted to persecute a group that genuinely was quite similar enough at its core, but just looked a little different on the outside. Well, that’s not what I found. More likely, and what I did find to be somewhat true, is that Christians often have misconceptions about Mormons for one reason or another, and while I can’t blame anyone who taught me about Mormonism, I can say that I did hold some misconceptions myself. And so I’m glad I spent so much time learning from them what it is they do believe.
And so one thing I learned that actually is not a surprise really is that Mormons claim to know God because of miracles that have happened to them. Actually, they probably hold much more value in miracles than contemporary evangelical Christians. Not only is it claimed that their founder, Joseph Smith, was visited by Jesus once and angels on multiple occasions, as well as given a supernatural ability to reproduce scriptures and receive prophecies, but there has always since been up until this day a group of Mormon prophets that regularly hear from God. In addition to this, most if not all Mormons will tell a story of praying if the Book of Mormon is God’s word and and receiving some supernatural confirmation that it in fact is.
I learned a lot, in fact, about what Mormons believe. And, yes, compared to evangelical Christianity there are contradicting beliefs that are significant. For a pluralist or anyone else to say that a Mormon and a Christian will both get to that same God would be to admit that at least one of them is quite wrong about who God is, because Mormons and Christians do not agree on very foundational things about God. There’s a lot of resources on these differences (and one I suggest is Adam’s Road which you can google), but one thing Mormons believe is that God was once a mere human who took the path that we all can ourselves take to becoming a god. And then God and his wife who is now also some kind of god and holy mother have had a lot of spirit babies and those babies are you and I and every human on earth from the beginning of earth until the end of earth. We once all lived with God as spirits in a preexistence before being sent to earth, if we wanted to be tested here and maybe become a god ourselves. Jesus is our brother, as is Satan. This differs from Christianity in many ways, most importantly about God, who has always been God and was never a human, and about Jesus who has also always been God and at some point in history became fully human with a fully divine nature, the only such human ever.
This is all pertinent to my miracle story in that, during a several-hours-long conversation on a Utah college campus with an LDS return missionary named Chris, he asked me to pray to God a test about if Mormonism is true. It wasn’t the typical prayer about the Book of Mormon that LDS missionaries often ask seekers to perform. It was a different test in which I would ask God if I was indeed His child.
Anyway, a side note here about praying about the Book of Mormon and also about how I believe there is a lot of spiritual power, albeit deceptive, around Mormonism. In my time in Utah I visited some Mormon religious services. The one I frequented the most was the Institute, a college-like series of lectures about Mormon doctrine for college students and other community members between the ages of 18-31. Every time I visited the institute, I felt a heavy pressure on my chest. It wasn’t pleasant, but it also wasn’t incapacitating. Anyway, I’m not totally sure, but I’m guessing it was the oppression of some demonic force, perhaps trying to get me to feel some “burning in my bosom,” which while it comes from Luke and Jesus on the road to Emmaus, is (heretically in my opinion) used by Mormons as one of the signs someone can get when praying about the Book of Mormon.
Back now the other test… I went ahead with it and agreed to pray that God would reveal to me if I was His child. I didn’t get any kind of answer or feeling or anything right after praying. In fact it wasn’t until the next morning which happened to be a Sunday that I was visiting a Christian church (this was early on in my time in UT- before I had even chosen a church to go to regularly). I remembered my test and asked God again if He could let me know if I was His child. That’s when I clearly thought the scriptural reference “Ephesians 1.” I certainly had not (and still have not) memorized any parts of that chapter that I can recite off of the top of my head, much less a whole chapter. I couldn’t even recall at all what that chapter dealt with much. (I have a better idea now though)! But, right then and there I opened up my Bible and read the chapter. When I got to verse 5, I knew I had just had a prayer answered in a very specific and miraculous way. Ephesians 1:5 explains that those who are redeemed by Jesus have been adopted by God as children. Children by adoption. This is a valid answer to my question I had asked God. And quite clearly distinct from what Mormonism taught.
I’m so glad that God gave me that miracle early on in my time in Utah. It is a miracle I trust greatly to this day, not in a small part due to it being a miracle that depends on the Bible. You see, in 1 John 4, we are urged to test spirits, and the test is that if it agrees with correct doctrine, it is a good spirit. So this miracle meant more to me than just confirming evangelical christianity over mormonism. It confirmed to me that God wants me to have correct doctrine and not just tolerate every belief of others who disagree for the sake of some false “unity,” as pluralism would suggest. I will always work to respect others and be at peace with them as much as I can, but I will not simply agree that someone’s view is correct if I know that it differs from what God has told us.
And so that is an important thing to remember while reading the rest of these articles. And even more importantly, whenever faced with claims of miracles. I believe that miracles can happen and can be from sources other than God. The Bible has other tests, that we will know false teachers from their fruit being another major one. So I will end my discussion on this miracle with this test. Because, someone might ask, “if you believe miracles can come from sources other than God, how do you know that you aren’t being lied to about Ephesians 1? Maybe God is really as the Mormons say and you are the one being deceived?”
For that answer, I encourage you to research the lives of Joseph Smith and of Saul of Tarsus. Compare how they lead the people they lead and the kind of lives they had morally. Which man displays good fruit? And which one displays bad fruit? Which one was power hungry and violent and bent on justifying the indulgence of his immoral pleasures? Which one peacefully put up with persecution though he wasn’t a criminal and used persuasion instead of manipulation or coercion?
As we continue to discuss miracles, please don’t throw away the other ways to discern truth from error. On the other hand, because we have these other tools, we don’t have to fear talk of miracles but we can know when it is likely that God has been at work among us in supernatural ways even to this day.
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