Acts 11:27-30
This week’s section opens up with a prophet named Agabus coming down from Jerusalem to predict an up coming famine. This famine would be wide spread, covering most of the Roman world at that time, and was quite severe in Jerusalem. History records the literal fulfillment of this prophecy with a famine happening around AD 46.
We know very little about Agabus, and Acts will only record him present on one other occasion. He must have been well known as a prophet, and we can assume that God used him other times to predict the future, but none of that is recorded. The question that always comes up when we hit passages like this is, are there prophets today? And when that question is asked, they usually mean by “prophet” one who can predict the future. This goes back to an earlier lesson, and the question at that time was if God was moving so mightily in the book of Acts, why is he not moving so mightily today?
There are a couple ways this is traditionally answered. Probably the answer I hear the most often goes something like this: At the time that the book of Acts was happening they did not have the New Testament scriptures that we have, and things were changing from what was taught in the Old Testament. To validate this change, and to validate the scripture that was in the progress of being written at the time God used miracles to show his validation of what was going on. Today we have the complete New Testament so we no longer need miracles to show us what is truth, we can just look it up. This is often referred to as a cessationist point of view, that is that the “sign gifts” have ceased.
Another popular way to answer this is to question the assumption behind the question. The assumption is that the book of Acts describes a time when miracles were rampant everywhere. This is not necessarily true, what we have in Acts is a bird’s eye view of a handful of key events from about a 35 year period of history. In that span of time we see only a handful of actual miracles recorded, and are limited to a small number of towns. It is easy to infer from the recording there will a zillion miracles a day, and they were virtually common occurrence back then. While it is easy to come up with that, the book of Acts tells us these were unusual events (Acts 19:11). This minimizing view is not very popular, at least not in my experience.
A third possible argument is that the other assumption that is wrapped up in the question is wrong. That is that the question assumes that we do not see miracles like this today. Those that hold to this point of view can usually point to miracles in their own lives, or lives of people they know. They would hold that nothing that we read about happening in the Bible is impossible today. They would also point out that there is no clear scriptural support to say that miracles will ever cease, never mind have ceased.
Take for example the gift of languages as described in Acts 2:4 where the first disciples spoke in other known languages that they themselves did not know. There are plenty of stories from the mission field of this very thing happening. A missionary visits an unreached people group, and no one knows their language but some how the missionary is able to talk with them and get the Gospel to them in their own language with out the help of a translator. Other stories are told about droughts ended by prayer, complete healings, and so forth
So one either has to say that all these stories are false, coincidental or trivialize them in some other way, or accept that miracles happen today. If you accept that they happen today, then the real question needs to come back to why do they happen, and when a much prayed for miracle does not come, why not?
Since Acts was written about 20 years after the event that is recorded in our current chapter, we can see the result of the prophecy. Agabus predicts the famine, and a collection is taken up right away. Notice that this is proactive, meaning they collected money before the disaster even happened. They believed that Agabus spoke for God, and they believed God so completely that they started raising funds to help a famine stricken land before any famine happened.
Here we see the model for New Testament giving, each member of the church gave what he or she could, and there was not a fixed rule that everyone gives a certain percent. Some may have given ten percent, some may have given ninety percent, but each gave what they could. That is what God expects from each one of us, not ritual giving because you see some kind of law or rule, but a gift from the heart to help those in need.
There are a couple more things to note about this giving. One is that it is a primarily a gentile church gathering money for the primarily Jewish church in Jerusalem. Another is that they give the money to Saul, the former terrorist to bring back to Jerusalem. What we have here is a group of Gentiles giving money to be help to a group of Jews which would be delivered by a former terrorist into a town where he was run out under threat of death just a decade earlier.
The end result of all of this was a coming together of the church to help each other and bridge the gap between Jew and Gentile. God used the Agabus to be the catalyst that started the event. God seems to use miracles in this way that is to move forward His plan in some way.
So in the end I believe there is truth in all three positions I presented. In Acts the miracles were primarily for the validating of scripture, and probably were not common every day occurrences. We already have the scripture so they are no longer needed for that and are not necessarily used in the same way today. They do still happen today, but are still ultimately to further God’s goal of reaching the entire world with the Gospel that leads to salvation.
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