How do you know when someone is "from God," that what she is doing represents or embodies God in some way? What are the hallmarks one would expect to see, and what would reveal that the person is actually a fraud?
Those questions arise when Jesus heals a man blind from birth. Jesus complicates matters for himself by not simply healing the man. He also "spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes," and he did all this on the Sabbath. Now healing someone's blindness is a pretty impressive feat which leads some to conclude that God is clearly at work in Jesus. And yet, Jesus works on the Sabbath, in violation of God's law, which leads others to conclude that Jesus cannot be from God.
It's pretty hard for most modern day folk to get worked up about whether or not making mud on the Sabbath disqualifies Jesus as a viable candidate for Messiah. We decided centuries ago that Jesus' opponents misunderstood or misapplied the Law. They ignored the clear evidence of God at work in Jesus because there seemed to some problem with his paperwork.
My denomination has been fighting over religious credentials for quite some time now. I've been a Presbyterian pastor for just over 15 years now, and I have never known a time when we weren't debating, arguing, or fighting about whether or not we can ordain people who are in gay/lesbian relationships. As with Jesus healing on the Sabbath, the issue is often framed in terms of what disqualifies someone from representing God. Some Presbyterians see the biblical injunctions that speak against homosexual behaviors as clearly disqualifying those who don't abide be such injunctions (though it should be pointed out that such injunctions are scarcely detectible compared to biblical commands to keep the Sabbath).
I wonder how our denomination would react if some gay candidate for ordination starting healing people. Would we still say that regardless of such miracles, violating God's standards clearly disqualified anyone from being ordained? I realize that is a rather remarkable, and perhaps unlikely, scenario. But what about simply seeing clear gifts of the Spirit that empowered someone to proclaim the gospel in ways that drew people to the faith and revitalized a dying congregation?
How do we know when someone is or isn't from God?
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