We interrupt our series on Otis Q. Sellers’s biblical research into nephesh and psyche (“the soul”) for a refreshing prophetic pause. For today I resolved, at least to my own satisfaction, a problem that had been nagging me, and I’d like to share its resolution.
If asked what Jesus’ first miracle was, every biblically literate believer will answer, “His changing water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana.”
This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him. John 2:11 (KJV)
John, carried along by the Holy Spirit, called that displacement of liquids the “beginning” (ἀρχὴν, archen), so it falls to the faithful believer to believe that.
But what about Jesus’ “pre-beginning” escape from certain death at the inception of His public ministry?
After hearing Him declare from the synagogue’s pulpit (in what was probably the shortest sermon in history) that one of Isaiah’s prophecies (Isaiah 61:1-2) was fulfilled in the hearing of everyone assembled, they
rose up, and thrust him [Jesus] out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong. But he passing through the midst of them went his way. Luke 4: 29-30 (KJV)
Was that not a miracle?
Who else but God could have restrained that murderous crowd, perhaps by what today some would somewhat irreverently call a “Jedi mind trick”?
Why does this not qualify as “the beginning of miracles”?
If it does qualify, does that entail the occurrence of a miracle before “the beginning of miracles”?
It does, and at the cost of Scripture’s internal coherence, but the problem arises from the KJV translator’s misrendering of the God-breathed word in John 2:11, σημείων, semeiōn, as “of miracles.”
σημείων is the genitive plural form of σημεῖον, semeion, from which our word “semiotics” derives. The ō in the English transliteration, semeiōn, represents the Greek letter ω, omega; the o in semeion, ο, omicron.
Not every divine intervention in nature or history is a sign, something that conveys information from the sign’s sender to the sign’s perceivers.
If, for example, God acts exclusively in grace in this Dispensation of Grace (Ephesians 3:2) to alter the trajectory that events would take absent His intervention, He does so silently and in secret, that is, untraceably.
God’s ways (ὁδοὶ, hodoi) may be searchable—search to your heart’s content!—but they’re untraceable (ἀνεξερεύνητος, anexeraunétos). Romans 11:33
But if the receiver cannot trace the gift back to the giver, the gift cannot serve as a sign from the latter.
The believer may be convinced that the undeserved kindness or grace was a miracle, that is, inexplicable apart from God’s action, a favorable answer to prayer.
Since His grace is untraceable, however, it’s not a sign.
That is, one could not tell others and (a) expect them to believe solely on one’s testimony (b) what one believes about God, and (c) to give Him glory for it.
Jesus’ divinely assured safe conduct through a mob that would have sent Him over the cliff was not a sign, to them or to anyone else.
It therefore could not mark not the beginning of signs.
The water-to-wine displacement, however, did; God tells us so.
Jesus’ immunity from the mob’s wrath didn’t manifest (ἐφανέρωσεν, ephanerōsen) His glory.
As a result of that divine intervention, no one believed on (ἐπίστευσαν, episteusan) Him, that is exercised faith (πίστις, pistis, the root of that verb) in Him.
It was a miracle, to be sure, but not a sign.
The Scripture cannot be broken.
Note
[1] NB: Jesus stopped His reading of Isaiah 64:18-19 in the middle of the 19th verse. He preached “the acceptable year of the Lord” (19a), but left “the day of vengeance of our God” (19b)—an event future to His earthly ministry, to His audience, and to us—for others to describe, e.g., Acts 2:20, 1 Corinthians 5:5, 2 Corinthians 1:14, 1 Thessalonians 5:2, 2 Peter 3:10, Revelation 6:17.