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Can Satan’s Followers Do Miracles?
by Gary Demar – original source here – https://americanvision.org/22443/can-satan-and-his-followers-perform-miracles/
Christian commentators often turn to the story of Moses and Aaron and their encounters with the magicians of Egypt as evidence that demonic miracles are real and can rival God’s miraculous works. If miracles are a way to demonstrate God’s power and authority over the created order, then “if something or someone other than God can perform miracles, then the value of miracles for attesting to Christ’s divinity is negated.” [1]
When Aaron threw down his rod before Pharaoh (Ex. 7:8–12), it became a serpent by the power of God. We shouldn’t be surprised that God can perform such a miracle since He created man from the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7). For God, turning a dead stick into a serpent is child’s play. Could Pharaoh’s sorcerers and magicians also perform creation miracles? The Bible describes their “powers” as “secret arts,” or more accurately, “deceptive arts” (Ex. 7:11).
These were developed skills—conjurors tricks—that were concealed from Pharaoh and the general public. The livelihood of the magicians depended on their ability to convince Pharaoh that they had miraculous abilities. Pharaoh’s tricksters had no more power than the “magicians” who served in Nebuchadnezzar’s court and could not tell the king the contents of his dream.
Turning a staff into a serpent was a simple magician’s trick. Jannes and Jambres, the names that Paul gives to Pharaoh’s court magicians (2 Tim. 3:8), probably performed this spectacle quite often. It was their signature trick. But how did they create the illusion? Dan Korem, a trained magician, reminds us of similar illusions performed today. “The most practical method to duplicate the magicians’ feat is similar to a trick performed today where a magician changes a cane to a silk handkerchief, rope or a handful of flowers.” [2]
Modern magicians regularly work with animals, so we shouldn’t be surprised if ancient magicians did the same. Here’s how it could have been done. Susan Schaffer, a reptile curator at the San Diego Zoo,
explained that to measure the length of a snake, she takes a tightfitting tube and coaxes the snake into it, as snakes like dark, tight-fitting environs. To replicate the illusion of changing a rod into a snake, a telescopic shell must be constructed to house the snake. Given the materials available during that time period, such as a piece of pliable papyrus, this could easily be made. With the snake concealed inside the “staff,” the magician would simply have to pass his hand over the shell, collapsing it at the same time, leaving the snake in its place. This action could be covered by the motion of throwing the staff to the ground, creating the illusion that the staff visibly changes to a snake. [3]
Lighting would have been poor indoors, so the sleight of hand would have been easily concealed. A good magician could come up with several ways to perform this trick in a way that would convince the casual observer who probably saw what happened around Pharaoh’s court from a distance.
Here’s a short video of a trick I do to make a playing card float in mid air:
After church on Sunday, I picked R.C. Sproul’s book Moses and the Burning Bush that was on display. I was surprised to read the following and how it agreed with comments made by Korem and Kole:
Satan cannot perform miracles. The Bible warns us against the signs that Satan will perform, deceiving even the elect; but those signs are described as lying signs wonders. That doesn’t mean that they are true miracles that are performed for satanic purposes. Rather, they are false signs or tricks; they might be more astonishing than the most impressive magic acts, but they are still tricks. Satan is not God. He cannot do the things God can do. Real miracles that authenticate God’s messengers are acts that only God can do, such as creating something out of nothing or raising people from the dead. Satan can’t control the laws of nature; he’s just a magician. He’s good at his craft, but his craft is altogether evil.
We saw how that took place in the confrontation that Moses had with the magicians of Pharaoh’s court (Ex. 7:10–13). Moses took that rod), threw it on the ground, and it turned into a snake. But the magicians of Pharaoh just yawned and threw their sticks on the floor too—and they all became snakes. It was the oldest trick in the history of sleight-of-hand: inside each of their sticks was a snake. The sticks collapsed, so the snakes that were already in there could come out. Pharaoh’s court thought that was all Moses was doing, too. But Moses’ “trick” was real; his snake ate all of their snakes. Those magicians were no match for Moses—because they were no match for God. [4]
But didn’t Pharaoh’s magicians turn water into blood and produce frogs on command, replicating the miracles brought about through Moses? The miracle performed by Moses turned the Nile into blood as well as the “rivers … streams … pools … reservoirs” as well as the water in “vessels of wood and in vessels of stone” (Ex. 7:19). Pharaoh’s magicians did the same “with their secret arts” (7:22).
Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
There were “magicians, conjurers, and sorcerers” in Babylon who served under Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 2:1). If they truly had supernatural powers, they would have been able to interpret the king’s dream as well as to tell him what he dreamed. This they could not do (2:4–14). In fact, they admitted that it was impossible: “‘There is not a man on earth who could declare the matter for the king. . . .’” (2:10). Thinking Straight in a Crooked World explains why. If you are looking for a book to help with biblical apologetics, this is the book to start with.Buy Now
Their trick was to turn a small amount of water into blood. They must have gone to Pharaoh with a small pot of water and showed him how they too could turn it into blood. Magicians turn milk into confetti, a common trick performed by many stage illusionists. [5] Turning clear water into “blood” would be simple. Holding a pouch of blood in the palm of the hand—there was enough of it around—it would have been a simple thing to open it into the water. “Presto-change-o.” Water into blood!
The real miracle would have been for the magicians to turn some of the bloodied water throughout Egypt back into fresh water! This they could not do.
The plague of frogs, like the bloodied waters, occurred throughout Egypt. Once again, the court magicians went to Pharaoh and showed him that they could also produce frogs. “Magicians today produce live doves in the middle of a stage from handkerchiefs; and doves are far more difficult to handle than a docile frog.” [6] Like with the bloody water, the real miracle would have been to rid the land of frogs.
Reginald Scot, author of The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), takes an equally skeptical view of miraculous demonic powers being attributed to Pharaoh’s magicians. “If Pharaoh’s magicians had suddenly made frogs, why could they not drive them away again? If they could not hurt the frogs, why should we think that they could make them? … Such things as we are being bewitched to imagine, have no truth at all either in action or essence, beside the bare imagination.” [7]
If someone begins with the assumption that the devil can impart the ability to perform miracles, then he will see miracles in what the ancient and modern art of stage magic is. The replication of frogs was the last trick performed by Pharaoh’s magicians. They ran out of tricks. By the third miracle, “the magicians said to Pharaoh, ‘This is the finger of God’” (8:19). They knew a miracle when they saw it.
- André Kole and Jerry MacGregor, Mind Games: Exposing Today’s Psychics, Frauds, and False Spiritual Phenomena (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1998), 79.[↩]
- Dan Korem, Powers: Testing the Psychic and Supernatural (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 174.[↩]
- Korem, Powers, 174.[↩]
- R.C. Sproul, Moses and the Burning Bush (Sanford, FL: Reformation Trust Publishing, 2018),99–100.[↩]
- Korem, Powers, 175.[↩]
- Korem, Powers, 175.[↩]
- Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 180.Scot’s work was originally published in 1584, and only 250 copies were reprinted in 1886. It was reprinted once again in Great Britain in 1930. The 1972 Dover edition is the latest reprint, retaining the spelling of the original edition.[↩]
Finding Dispensationalism
Article “Dispensationalist Charges William Lane Craig with ‘Willful Ignorance” on the Rapture by Gary Demar – original source – https://americanvision.org/22432/dispensationalist-charges-william-lane-craig-with-willful-ignorance-on-the-rapture/
While doing my daily trek through Facebook looking for relevant news stories, I came across a post with a link to an article with this title: “The Willful Ignorance of William Lane Craig.” The author of the article takes Dr. Craig to task for his comments on the historicity of the rapture in his short video “Is the Rapture a Biblical Doctrine?”
Eschatology is not Dr. Craig’s main field of study.
In recent years, several scholars have worked hard to prove that dispensationalism existed prior to John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) around 1830. Here’s the standard argument: “Dispensationalists … argue that while Darby may have been the first to order dispensational distinctives into a lucid system, other theologians held certain dispensational-like presuppositions far before Darby.” [1] For example, William C. Watson’s Dispensationalism Before Darby: Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century English Apocalypticism (2015), a book that is loaded with great historical sources, argues this way.
I contend that every prophetic system can make the same claim. For example, dispensationalists are premillennial, but premillennialists often argue vociferously against dispensationalism. Consider historic or classical premillennialist George Eldon Ladd:
We can find no trace of pretribulationalism in the early church, and no modern pretribulationist has successfully proved that this particular doctrine was held aby any of the church fathers or students of the Word before the nineteenth century. [2]
Also, apocalypticism and dispensationalism are not synonymous since amillennialists believe in an end-time apocalypse. Neither is a belief in a future great tribulation, the rise and demise of antichrist, or the future redemption of Israel. These and other prophetic doctrines can be found among most prophetic systems.
For example, in the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer (“Thy kingdom come”) of the 17th century Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, the following is found: “we pray, that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, [and] the fullness of the Gentiles brought in … and that he would be pleased so to exercise the kingdom of his power in all the world, as may best conduce to these ends” (Larger Catechism, Q/A. 191).
A dispensationalist could agree with what’s stated above, but only within the context of its system. It’s dispensationalism as a system that does not have historical support.
Long before dispensationalism, many Christians commenting on eschatology, most of whom would be described today as postmillennialists, taught the future conversion of the Jews. What they did not teach is the “rapture of the church” prior to a seven-year period in order to separate a remnant of Jews from a new entity called the “church.” See Chapter 3 of my book 10 Popular Prophecy Myths Exposed and Answered.
So much of what we read in the historical record on the topic of Bible prophecy is marred by a failure to consider the nearness of certain prophetic events that Jesus and the New Testament writers specify. Watson and Craig are aware of preterism but do not do a good job dealing with preterist arguments from a biblical perspective.
Watson has numerous entries of preterism in his subject index. He mentions and quotes John Owen (1616–1683) who believed in a future papal antichrist, a belief common to most of the Reformers, many of who were historicists. There is no way that anyone would identify Owen as a dispensationalist even though dispensationalists and Owen (among others) believed in a future conversion of the Jews.
As Watson admits, Owen was mostly a preterist who believed that in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) Jesus “came to destroy Jerusalem and put an end to the Jewish state and dispensation.”
Owen had this to say about 2 Peter 3:10 and the passing away of heaven and earth, a position that dispensationalists, premillennialists, and most amillennialists and postmillennialists would not agree with:
On this foundation I affirm that the heavens and earth here intended in this prophecy of Peter, the coming of the Lord, the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men, mentioned in the destruction of that heaven and earth, do all of them relate, not to the last and final judgment of the world, but to that utter desolation and destruction that was to be made of the Judaical church and state — i.e., the Fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. (John Owen’s Works (9:134–135).
Dr. Craig has addressed the subject of preterism from a biblical perspective here. My responses are here, here, and here.
Craig and the dispensationalists share a similar textual fault by failing to account for audience relevance and the timing of prophetic events.
Craig’s views on eschatology are all over the map, but he does seem to share some of the same tenets of dispensationalisms, for example, the belief that “[t]he fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 may have been just a foreshadowing of a final great tribulation and fall of Jerusalem that will take place again at the end of the age. Although Jesus may have thought that many of ‘these things’ would take place within his generation, I don’t think we have any solid grounds for saying that Jesus believed that the coming of the Son of Man was going to take place within the lifetime of his contemporaries.”
To repeat, to hold similar positions on some prophetic topics does not mean that the people who held these similar positions can or should be identified as proto-dispensationalists.
Many premillennialists and amillennialists hold a similar mixed view of the Olivet Discourse but would not see eye-to-eye on the rapture of the church. See Chapter 4 of my book Prophecy Wars for my response to this interpretation.
Prophecy Wars
Prophecy Wars covers topics related to (1) the time texts, audience reference (the use of the second person plural), and prophetic signs that are described by Jesus in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21), (2) the claim made that preterism is based on the historical works of first-century Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (AD 37–100), (4) the meaning of Jesus’ use of “this generation,” (5) John Murray’s (1898–1975) interpretation of Matthew 24–25, (6) Isaiah 17: Prophecy Fulfilled, (7) Blood Moons, Prophecy, and the Integrity of the Bible, (8) “Just Like the Days of Noah,” (9) Calculating the Number of the Beast, and (10) Refuting the Charges of “Replacement Theology.”Buy Now
If there is something in the historical record that aligns with something dispensationalists teach, then that source is often used by dispensationalists to support their claim that dispensationalism was taught before the 19th century. For example, in the first chapter of the book Ancient Dispensational Truth, the author states the following as if it’s historic evidence that dispensationalism existed before Darby and Co.:
Ancient writers called the various ages in which God dealt with mankind in different ways, “dispensations.”
This claim isn’t new to critics of dispensationalism. The system called dispensationalism is more than differences between the covenants or the fact that theologians divided redemptive history into dispensations. “Rightly dividing the word of truth” (a more accurate translation is “accurately handling the word of truth”: 2 Tim. 2:15), a favorite Scofieldian phrase, does not mean dividing up the Bible into sealed off redemptive divisions. The NT itself makes this clear by declaring that there has been a change in the operation of God’s covenant as is obvious from the book of Hebrews and Paul’s writings.
In reading some of these early authors, the word “dispensation” is most often used as a synonym for “covenant.” For example, from John Chrysostom’s “Letter to a Young Widow”: “And God has furnished us with certain tokens, and obscure indications of these things both in the Old and in the New Dispensation.”
Chrysostom is saying nothing more than that both the Old and New Testaments have something to teach widows. This is hardly an endorsement in any way of modern-day dispensationalism.
Dispensationalism, as a system, is not found prior to the 19th century. There is no such system among the early church fathers since their writings lack the necessary elements of the system that defines dispensationalism.
Alan Patrick Boyd, author of “A Dispensational Premillennial Analysis of the Eschatology of the Post-Apostolic Fathers (Until the Death of Justin Martyr),” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Theology (May 1977) at Dallas Theological Seminary, sums up his detailed study of the period with the following:
It is the conclusion of this thesis that Dr. Ryrie’s statement [that “premillennialism is the historic faith of the Church” [3]] was the view of the early is historically invalid within the chronological framework of this thesis. The reasons for this conclusion are as follows: 1). the writers/writings surveyed did not generally adopt a consistently applied literal interpretation; 2). they did not generally distinguish between the Church and Israel; 3). there is no evidence that they generally held to a dispensational view of revealed history; 4). although Papias and Justin Martyr did believe in a Millennial kingdom, the 1,000 years is the only basic similarity with the modern system (in fact, they and dispensational pre-millennialism radically differ on the basis of the Millennium); 5). they had no concept of imminency or a pre-tribulational rapture of the Church; 6). in general, their eschatological chronology is not synonymous with that of the modern system. Indeed, this thesis would conclude that the eschatological beliefs of the period studied would be generally inimical to those of the modern system (perhaps, seminal amillennialism, and not nascent dispensational pre-millennialism ought to be seen in the eschatology of the period).
This means, if premillennialism is not the historic faith of the Church, then neither can dispensationalism be. The system known as dispensationalism is a 19th-century invention.