Blurry Creatures - EP: 170 Miracles with Dr. Craig Keener

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

There are countless stories and documented accounts of supernatural experiences that defy our understanding of life on Earth. Those who have faith in God, call these miracles. Due to the skeptical nature of humanity, there is often a reluctance to share these experiences. How can we make sense of "miracles" or quantify or document them as reliable and verified experiences? This week, we welcome author Dr. Craig Keener, of Asbury Theological Seminary to discuss his research, discoveries, and experience writing a best-selling book on miracles. A theologian, biblical scholar, and professor who studied the New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University for his Ph.D., Dr. Keener has sold well over a million copies of his thirty-plus books in circulation and won thirteen national and international awards. He is an expert in the phenomenon of the miraculous and this is a fascinating discussion of the blurriness and the enigma of miracles. We dive deep into the compilation of Dr. Keener's well-documented cases of miracles that have no other answer than divine intervention. When, where, and why do these miraculous events seem to happen? What constitutes a miracle? How do we see miracles playing out in the modern day?  Tapping into the wealth of knowledge of the preeminent expert on this subject provides a fascinating look into the unexplained nature of the miraculous.  Guest: https://craigkeener.com [e-mail] blurrycreatures.com Socials www.instagram.com/blurrycreatures www.facebook.com/blurrycreatures www.twitter.com/blurrycreatures Music Kyle Monroe: www.tinytaperoom.com Aaron Green: https://www.instagram.com/aaronkgreen/ Mastering: Brandon Weaver https://ironwingstudios.com Outro Song: TimeCop1983: www.timecop1983.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Luke so often, people email us and they have this story. They're out in their woods and they're looking in the bushes. what's that? And when you are pouring your dog food and your dog's bowl, that's the last thing you want to say. What is that? What is the stuff coming out of this bag? You know, I don't think a lot of us think about maybe what we feed our dogs. And that's why we partner with rough greens. Most of us would love to have our dogs, you know, live as long as possible. I mean, I just lost my dog in December. And I would have just, I would have loved more time with Carl. And one of the things you can do to get more time with your dog is to feed them better. Dog owners don't usually realize that live nutrients, that their dog is, needs to thrive or missing from the food. You just talked about. What is that, right? That's where Rough Green comes in. It's America's number one dog supplement that you sprinkle on top of their food. It's packed with prebiotics, enzymes, omega oils, and 20 live vitamins and mineral support digestion, energy and overall health from the inside out. It's all natural made in the USA and thousands of dogs are feeling younger, more energetic and healthier than they have in years. That's why we love it.

I'm giving it to our two dogs. You know, I've got older dogs, Nate, as I said. And so, you know, since they've been getting rough greens with their food, I've noticed they have more energy. their joints hurt less, they're older. I mean, they were talking 12 and 13 years old. And Rough Green's really made a difference in their energy levels and the pep in their step. So if you want to do what we did, you can get a free jumpstart trial bag for your dog today. Just cover the shipping. Go to Rough Greens.com and use discount code blurry.

That's RUFFF Greens.com discount code blurry. Rough Greens makes any dog food better. I have a friend from Nigeria when I was working on the first book. I just asked him because a lot of my friends from Africa had seen things more often than here, although they happened here too. I asked him,

have you seen any miracles? He has a PhD now. He was doing research in some different villages in Nigeria, and neighbors came to him and they said, you're a man of the high God. Can you do something?

Here's our child who died. And he says he took the child aside for a couple hours praying and then handed the child back to them alive. And I thought, well, maybe he just hits it lucky once in a while. Maybe they've been misdiagnosed as dead. So maybe if he prays for everybody who's dead, maybe once. So I said, how often did you pray for somebody who died? He said only twice.

The other was my best friend. He didn't come back. And at that point, he had to say, God, you are worthy of my trust. Not because of this or because of that. you're worthy of my trust because you're trustworthy. And I'm going to keep believing you. You know, we live in a world of sin and death. And Jesus speaks of these as signs of the kingdom.

So we don't have the fullness of the kingdom. If, you know, if everybody could get healed when somebody prayed for them, we would still have the first century apostles with us, right? The history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine. The Smithsonian, that if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere, was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right, it bust the paradigm. It all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural.

This backdrop is just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Herman event. And this guy defects from. the kingdom. That's a big deal. Welcome to Blurry Creatures podcast. We are a podcast that gets into the unseen realm. We talk about cryptids, alternate history, all the weird stuff in between. We filter it through the biblical narrative. If you're new to our show, thank you for coming aboard. We have a good time here exploring all the weird ideas and topics that a lot of people don't want talk about, especially the church. Today we have Dr. Craig Keener on, who's written many books about miracles and all the weird stuff that comes along with that.

We sold millions of copies. Really good guy. And we appreciate him for coming on our show. We just wanted to say thank you to all the people out there that listen to this show. In the last couple months, we've had several meetups with BlurieCon. And we just had a barbecue last weekend. You guys have come up to us and said so many amazing things about what this show means to you. And Luke and I are perpetually blown away about what blurry creatures has become to so many.

And honestly, from the bottom of our hearts, we say, can't say it enough, but thank you. Thank you for telling us. Thank you for sharing the show around and leaving a review and just telling your friends about the show. It's huge for a podcast like ours and the sea of podcasts. If you're not following us on Instagram, go to Blurry Creatures. Check us out. We're there most active there. We're also on Facebook and Twitter.

Connect with us on social media. Send us your stories. And if you want to sponsor the show and keep this show ad-free for everyone, go to Blurrycruits.com slash members, become a member of the show, and you get access to all kinds of things. We're going to start uploading full videos for gold members on the back end of the website. Starting to edit those with the audio. Luke and I are not really big on the video side of being in a podcast.

That's why we started a podcast and not a YouTube channel. But for gold members, we're going to give that as a perk. along with movie nights. So go to blurrycreatures.com slash members. Let's get Dr. Craig Keener on this show. Thank you guys so much for supporting this podcast and helping it become something much bigger than we ever anticipated.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Craig Keener. I'm your PhD from Duke University, and you've sold over a million copies of your books, winning six awards. And you wrote a book about miracles, and that's what we hear today talk about. It's a two-volume set, And we talk a lot about blurry stuff on our show, Dr. Craig.

We get into, we talk about creatures. That's obviously, it's in the title of our show. And we have a fun theme here. We kick it off. We ask everyone, there's no right or wrong answer. Craig, what are your thoughts on Bigfoot? What do you think Bigfoot is? Do you have any thoughts on Bigfoot?

Oh, those would be hard shoes to fill. This is starting out so good. Yeah. Tushay, right? He doesn't, he doesn't wear shoes. He just goes, he just goes. Those are tough, those are tough ones, man. He got his size 36.

Those, you can get those at foot locker. Any, any thoughts on, on Bigfoot at all? Oh, for real. For real, yeah. For real. We kind of, we ask everyone. Foot Locker, maybe think of tone nails because you, anyway.

So, or being in lockstep. Yes. But I guess maybe Bigfoot, I guess my guess might be just, with some leftover big primate or maybe a giant bear, I have no idea. Okay. That's great. No, we don't either. That's why no one really knows, right?

So we're out here asking a question. And, you know, when Nate introduced you, you've written a lot. You have a four part on Acts alone, which I think plays into this, right? And so listeners, if you want to read, Dr. Keener has an amazing bunch of volume on X, And then you have a two volume on miracles in the New Testament. But the newest book, it's called Miracles Today, the supernatural work of God in the modern world. And that's kind of what we're going to talk about. Miracles are very blurry in the sense of they operate in this space that defies the laws of nature.

And we heard about you, I think, initially through our friend and the late great Dr. Michael Heiser, you're on the Naked Bible podcast. And so a chance to reach out. But one of the things in your bio is you currently are a New Testament professor at Asbury. theological seminary. And if anybody has been awake in the last month, then you would have heard about Asbury in the sense that there

is a purported, there was, is a reported revival there. So I know the pre-roll I'd ask if it was okay if we asked this, but I was curious because you're there and you teach there, you teach New Testament, and your thoughts on the revival, did you actually go down to the chapel and did you experience

any of that? Were there any miracles? I mean, we have to ask that too, right? curious, curious, because it's not often we get to have somebody like a man on the streets here in a sense. And what's going on down there? Blurry correspondent, Dr. Craig Keener, what happened at Asbury? Yeah, I loved what was happening in the chapel. Now, technically that, that's across the street at Asbury University. Two separate institutions now, but, I mean, it's just across the street. So definitely there was overflow, spillover to the seminary. And It actually started, just the gospel choir was worshipping, and the worship kept going and kept going and kept going.

I found out about it like that evening of the day that it started. And I was there, I think my son and I were both there for like three hours. He had just recently graduated from the university that night. And then I was back more. We were back more after that. and just a lot of people's lives were changed. Now, in terms of miracles, you know, there's a tricky definition of what a miracle is. But if you're talking about healings, I've heard that there were some.

I didn't witness them. I wasn't in the auditorium most of the time. So a lot of the time I was down in the intercessor room or like helping be at a door, a doorkeeper, or things like that. But I did hear that some of those things happened. And actually, when they moved the space to the nearby city downtown, there's actually a video of somebody who was healed. But I wasn't there. I'm not a witness.

You're not a witness. You know, miracles. So this is sort of the, this is the theme that we want to talk to you about because this is kind of ends up in your wheelhouse. And so I was curious, you wrote two huge volumes and three books essentially on this topic. What got you into this in general? I mean, you teach a New Testament. So if you wrote four books on Acts, it would make sense. Axes full of miraculous things, right?

And then on our show, Craig, we like to talk about the weird stuff in the Bible, you know, talking donkeys and, you know, the Nephilim and giants and the things that people gloss over. But I think we forget sometimes that some of the craziest things that happen in the Bible are in the ministry of Jesus. You have walking on water, of multiplying of food. You have lame walk, the blind sea, the dead are raised. When Jesus is resurrected, dead come out of their tombs.

These are miraculous things that I think that, you have. And I don't know why, but I feel like sometimes we, they become so normalized that maybe they don't, I don't know, it doesn't, maybe it loses its shininess. I don't know how to explain it, except we kind of just consider it to be ho-hum. And we talk about this in the show, Nate. Like, you know, people have a hard time believing in some of the weird stuff, just in general around us, right? But they have no problem in a virgin birth and a resurrected Christ and your transfiguration and all that stuff. But that's not here nor there. I'm curious.

So how do you get into miracles? Is it because you're a New Testament guy? and that was one of the things? Because this is kind of become your thing. Sometimes it feels like when you get that phone bill, it's like the crash site document. You can't read it. There's a bunch of numbers,

random fees, vague language, stuff's blacked out. You're like, what am I actually paying for? I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. I like to be simple.

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It doesn't have to be. Dr. Judd Burton's out there dialing up blurry every day, giving us the scoop on what's going on in the academic world and the ancient world on Mittmobile. Loud and clear on the job sites, way out in the middle of nowhere, Texas. And if you want to save money, just like the illustrily, Dr. Judd Burton, switch to Mint Mobile. If you like your money, say where it is. Metmobiles for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash blurry. That's mintmobile.com slash blurry. Up front payment of $45 for three-month five-gigabyte plan required equivalent

to $15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. No. No, my thing is still New Testament scholar. But I had to digress to deal with this because it, like you said, it comes up so much in the New Testament. So my PhD technically is New Testament and Christian origins. So partly it's dealing with historiography, dealing with the history of the earliest Christian movement. And when I was, I mean, I dealt with my Matthew commentary, a little bit in my John commentary, didn't deal with it, my background commentary much.

But when I got to the Acts commentary, one of the main reasons that people who become skeptical of the historical reliability of the Gospels and Acts, some people have become skeptical, was because they recount miracles. I mean, one third of the gospel of Mark, one fifth of the book of acts deals with healings and exorcisms, and in the case of Mark, nature miracles, like walking on water, stealing storms, and multiplying food. So in wanting to deal with that, I was looking at the traditional skeptical prejudice against the miracle accounts, And it is that, well, these accounts must be legends that arose over a long period of time, even over generations. Some of them had said that goes back to David Friedrich Strauss.

They said, it must have arisen over a long period of time because it can't go back to eyewitnesses. And I'm like, I know eyewitnesses who claim to have seen some of these things. In fact, I've seen some of these things. I've never seen walking in water. But I have seen the storm stilled when somebody prayed. Okay, we've got to come back to these stories. because I want you to continue. You're the eyewitness.

That's wild. All right. Continue that one. Yeah. But I, so I was going to have just a footnote in the historical introduction to my act's commentary. The footnote was just going to refer to some sources that would list a lot of these. I figured, you know, miscellology dissertation or someplace where they'd been medically documented.

Initially didn't find enough. So I was having like this source that recounted this, this source that recounted. that. And then the footnote kept growing and growing. Eventually I did find some more complete sources, but by that time, the footnote was already 200 pages long. Oh my gosh. So, you know, we were done with the footnote stage, and it was 1,100 pages by the time it came out. I had to be a lot more selective, or maybe I should say I got to be a lot more selective with miracles today, just because I'd already done the philosophic, heavy lifting, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, and so on in the first, you know, the big volumes. So

miracles today could be, you know, just mainly telling, telling some of the stories that would, and, you know, citing the doctors and so on who supported the evidence. You know, you're probably wondering somewhat of like, why we asked you the Bigfoot question, you know, right off the, right at the top of the hour, because like, we got into this, I feel like we have similar, you know, you get into this understanding of what is belief. We have a belief problem, right? and how our show started as we started talking about, people see creatures. They have encounters with all kinds of weird spiritual things, whether it's a Bigfoot, people run into these giants, they run into like spiritual entities,

and they don't have a lot of, the church doesn't want to talk about these things, right? So Luke and I started this podcast talking about things like Bigfoot and all these encounters, and we tried to filter it all through the biblical paradigm, and it's sort of exploded because in the same way there's a belief problem, but people have had experiences, people have had encounters, and people have eyewitness all these weird creatures. And so that's kind of where, what our angle is. And I know we kind of hit you out of left field with the Bigfoot question.

But it's a similar problem, right? Is it people don't believe. They have a belief problem. And we help people kind of understand the supernatural in the Bible because they've experienced something that's not in the Bible, right? These creatures that people have seen to this day, they don't know how to make sense of them. But they do believe, it helps them believe the supernatural. and the weird stuff in the Bible. So that's kind of a little crash course to kind of, you know,

I see what you're saying and I like it because we run into the same problem, but we're not heavy. You know, we're not theologians. We're just a couple of dudes that ask questions about the weird stuff. But, you know, people see UFOs and all this other odd stuff.

And I think it's in the same category. It's just different roads going towards this, can we believe in the weird, the weird Nate, I like that point though because Craig, like, it's funny, as I'm listening to you tell, it's like you were looking for the source

and you end up becoming the source, right? Because you're looking for a compilation of these things and then as you compile them, you realize that you're actually writing the source book, a source material because it's here and it's here and it's there and it's everywhere else, right? And Nate says an interesting point,

like it's not that we're, it's like we were footnoting some of this stuff and realizing that there isn't, people aren't talking about it. So we might as well talk about some of that stuff. But I love that. And so I think off the top then, if you're compiling and you, I know you've an exhaustive two volume and the new one, the newest one, Miracles Today is, like you said, is a collection

of stories. It's a shorter version. But if we're going to talk about this, can you give us, because I know you're very empirical about this was what I really like because I think, as you said, right, there's this idea that things are legend and you can't really quantify it because, you know, over time these stories just grow or they and you would just say something then I know I know what your answer is going to be here is why I'm going to ask for our listeners but you said I didn't witness these so but I know that it happened so when you're when you're compiling this and in

source becoming a source authority on really on this stuff like what by definition then are are we calling a miracle because I think it's important to contextualize that for our listeners and for the conversation because this is how the data becomes factual right is that you have you frame it and define it in and define it in a certain way. Yeah. Miracles have been defined so many different ways. David, David Hume,

philosoph, tried to philosophically define them out of existence, which wasn't his normal way of arguing. His essay has been critiqued so much, including for being inconsistent with the normal way that he argued. But he defined them as violations of nature, said that by definition, nature can't be, nature's laws can't be violated. I mean, it's not, he wasn't using the definition, though, of nature's laws that we would use today, which are more descriptive. He wasn't using those of his day either. Newton and the Newtonians actually believed in biblical miracles. So it was just a, you know, it was a word game in a sense, but historically, people have usually defined miracles as an experience that is different from the order.

course of events, because Christians believe that God works through ordinary things, too. I mean, that God set things up to work in certain ways, but out of the ordinary course of events that generates awe towards God. Now, or today a lot of times theologians define it as special divine action, the closest thing in the Bible, the word that's translated in miracles there, it just means acts of divine power. But the closest idea of the way we use the term miracles today probably has to do with what Luke Acts calls signs. So there's God's ordinary way of working. It's all around us. I mean, you can't get much more miraculous than DNA when you think about it. But in terms of something that really gets people's attention because it's out of the

ordinary. So there are ways that God heals us that just, you know, he works through medical science. He works through the stuff in our bodies. But when he does something dramatic enough to get people's attention, that's usually what we mean by miracle. And when I say usually again, there's no one definition that everybody agrees on. I like that. I think that's good to lay that out for people because obviously we're going to get into that. And I was thinking, you know, Dr. Craig, that when Christians think about these things, there's, it seems to be there, there's three camps a little bit. Like, you have Christians who sort of think that, I heard you in a couple of podcasts and kind of talk about how, like, you know, in the academic world, like you said, these stories just became

legend over time and they never actually happened. There's a lot of Christians who believe that. And then you have these other Christians who just kind of believe, well, that happened in the Old Testament, but it didn't really happen. And it doesn't really happen that way anymore. And Heiser said something really great on one of our first episodes with him. He says that a lot of people believe that God is less active today than he was in the past, but not true. It's not true at all. And so then you have this third camp. And I think that's a lot of people who listen to our show who are coming around who believe that it's always been weird and strange. And it's always been going on around us. And we are just asleep to it in this modern Western culture. So that's where we are. And

So you can dump the heaviest stuff on us, but I kind of think there's three, kind of three camps of Christians. And there's people outside of the Christian realm who just think it's all, we're all crazy, right? So, but that's kind of what, that's my experience. That's kind of the, you know, when I see in our channels, that's sort of where people fall, if that makes sense. I want to, I want to ask you on top of Nate's point, why do you think a lot of Christians, because we're all Christians here, why do you think people are hesitant or maybe a little bit adverse to this? idea because Nate made a good point there. There's people that believe that like during Jesus' ministry he did all these miracles and then it's kind of stopped after that, right? And I think that's not an uncommon worldview in a lot of ways in the Christian church. But why do you think

there's there's a hesitance or maybe an adverse reaction to the idea of modern day miracles and a lot of Christians, honestly? There are some historical reasons that provided the context for this. I mean, one was what I mentioned with David Hume. I mean, Christians wouldn't normally embrace David Hume and say, we agree, nothing miraculous happens, because David Hume was using it actually to explain away, you know, the miracles in the Bible and so on. Christians normally, by definition, believe that there's a God who did at least something so that we could exist. And by definition, believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and so forth. But it introduced a lot of skepticism.

And also, historically, there was another thing that combined with it, but wasn't as severe until, you know, Hume's emphasis. And that was, there were a lot of medieval claims that were not well grounded, or they were based on fake relics, but I believe God can still, you know, touch people through things that may be fake, but it's a contact point for their faith, But in any case, there was a reaction in the Protestant Reformation. Some of the early reformers were like, no, that's a Catholic thing, talking about miracles. Missions, miracles, all those things are Catholic, so we don't do those things.

And so when somebody would get healed, like there was, one of the cases was during a scripture reading of the paralyzed man being healed in Mark Chapter 2, a woman who hadn't walked for a year suddenly got up and started walking in church. and the Puritans were trying to figure out, how do we define this? We can't call it a miracle, that's what Catholics do. We'll call it a special providence. Okay, you know, so all right, whatever you would call it. Semantics, right, exactly. Special providence.

But you had things like that. And then so much of that has been absorbed from the culture, like from the secular culture, the human perspective, secular academic culture, which I was steeped in. And then also just some of us come from church traditions that trying to honor God by explaining why we don't see these things. And then when we do see these things, we have to come up with another explanation for them because we've already explained them away. We've already honored God for not doing these things, right? That's wild.

I mean, I want to get into stories because I know that you've got a bunch of them. But I think I have one more question before we would do that, because is you're, you're going to be. collected this data, right? So you've got voluminous amounts of data. So how do you, reporting of miracles? When you're collecting the criteria, because I want to lay this out for the listeners to be like, these are not just anecdotal. We are talking like Dr. Keener has put in the work and he has a set amount of protocol that qualifies these to say, this is miraculous and this is why. And I think it's very important to be like, hey, this isn't just, I love miracle stories. Get me wrong. I have my own. Things when I was a YWamer and I was young, things in my family.

But when we're writing a work and a source work, as you did, talk about real quick, and then I want to get to stories because I think it adds a ton of credence to this. It's not that you don't have and your reputation precede yourself, but I think it's important to understand how you collected the data and then how you qualified, you know, what would be, what you would qualify as a miracle in recording it. Now, here there's a range of, I guess when we talk about epistemology, there's a range of certainty. Some things are more certain than others. And, you know, as a historian, I have to deal with that all the time, that some things we have really strong evidence, some things we have weak evidence, but it's still better than no evidence.

And then some things we just think they're no good at all. Although I found some of those actually, I found data later on that verified some of those. But with this, the main things that I looked for were that we had eyewitnesses, especially if I could get multiple eyewitnesses. And for, well, it depended on the kind of thing. Like, you can't get medical documentation for a storm stilling because it's not a medical event. Although you can check weather records sometimes. But where possible, I also wanted to get medical confirmation.

I'm not a medical doctor, and so, you know, I wanted to check, is this something that normally goes away on its own? Is this something that never goes away on its own? Most things, you have at least some exceptions. So, you know, I was recently in a dialogue with a doctor who, you know, we talk about blind eyes being opened and deaf ears being opened, you know, instantly during prayer. And his response was, they must have just been psychosomatically blind or psychosomatically deaf.

So always going to that explanation. Some things are psychosomatic. There's no question about that. I don't think blindness and deafness usually fall into that category. And when you've got a bunch of people, all that happening at the same time, that seems to me to be a problematic explanation. But in some of these cases, we actually have medical documentation before and after for it being organic and not being explained psychosomatically. So in cases like that, so some cases are just, you know, I think they're pretty close to open and closed.

And the best resource for that right now that I know of is a global medical research institute, GMRI. So what they do, they run it through these different filters. They say, okay, do we have the medical documentation before? Do we have it after? Is there something that ever goes away on its own? And so, you know, there are a lot of things that God does that we can't, you know, they may not fit that filter. But the more opportunities we give them to run through things like that through the filter,

the more cases we're going to get. So there was Joshua Brown, who's a neuroscientist. at Indiana University, he has been heading that up, and they've been publishing in medical journals of their findings. So one was a case of a woman who was organically blind 12 years, and her husband, who was, I mean, neither one of them were used to miracles. It wasn't like they were saying, God can't do this. But it wasn't like they were accustomed to it or had heard of it happening,

but the husband just one night in their devotions together, he just, in desperation, God, please open my wife's eyes and suddenly she could see. And we have the before and after medical documentation. And another one that Joshua brings up is a case of gastroporesis healing. Now, that one takes a little bit more work to figure out because most people don't know what gastroporias is. But in that case, they had to, from the time that he was a baby, he had to have a feeding to inserted to feed him directly because he couldn't ingest anything directly through his mouth without a projectile vomiting where it could come out way far away.

It was just for his life he needed that. And then there was a brother who prayed for him and he felt something as they were praying. The time they finished praying, in this one who had been a baby and had gastroporice since then, He was now a teenager. Immediately after that, he went out and ate a regular meal and had no problems thereafter. That's all medically documented. But what I find interesting that actually GMRI couldn't deal with, for reasons I'll mention, is the person who prayed for him had a lot of faith for healing because of his own experience.

He had been an auto mechanic. he was crushed under a diesel truck when the axle gave way. And it crushed his abdomen down to he estimated like one inch, which he should have bled out. I don't know if we have records of anybody else who's ever survived all of that. But they ended up, his small intestine was so damaged, they had to remove most of it. And he didn't have enough left. He couldn't digest anything. So he was slowly starving to death. He'd gone down from 180 pounds to 125. pounds when a friend of his felt led to just come and pray for him in person. And when he touched him, he felt led in the name of Jesus, small intestine grow. And suddenly Bruce felt better. And after that,

he was able to eat and digest. And the doctor, the radiologist, to examine him, said his small intestine more than doubled in length. And in an adult... It doesn't happen. It can grow wider, but it can't grow longer. And so that's like, you know, people talk about, well, nothing ever grows back. Well, something they did in that case. But GMRI couldn't use that because even though the radiologist could give an estimate, he couldn't give an exact figure without cutting Bruce open, unwinding the small intestine, which, of course, would kill him, which, you know, is kind of counterproductive to the medical to begin with.

You know, it's funny because, I mean, it's, you're getting a lot of this from, doctors. You're getting a lot of this from people who are in academia. And what we've seen over the last couple of years is a lot of people have these conversations around the water cooler, but they're afraid to have these conversations in the public. And that's kind of why we do our podcast, because it's just two of us and we can talk about whatever. And I think a lot of people are going to channels like this because people want people to speak freely. They want doctors to say, well, this is what happened. It doesn't make sense in an academic sense, but it happened, take it or leave it. And I don't know why people are so afraid of that. I remember

Luke and Craig one time I remember I stopped going to a church because the pastor was talking about the 10 plagues, you know, and every single one was this rational answer. Like, oh, well, there's algae plumes and that could be why the river turned to blood. They look like blood, but it was just an algae growth. And then, you know, the darkness was just, there was an eclipse. And it just got dark for a day. And they all interpreted these things as supernatural events, but really, they're just normal, natural things. And I, It took everything in me to sit through it, and I just got up and left, and I'm like, I don't understand how people have that mentality, but they're still interested in faith. They're still at the table having a conversation. You know what I mean? It's, there's still a lot of people like that. And unfortunately, I feel like it's a lot of people in control of teaching the next generation of people. So these ideas continue and they continue. And then it's, everyone on the outside is a skeptic or a conspiracy theorist, you know, so. So a, so a lot of the, lot of a lot of the miraculous stuff you record is is healings um i know that we talked you talked about

nature miracles on the top and i know that's part of one of the sections your book um as well but in the healing section i love those two stories are there any other that you that just like are that you thought that were so impactful upon hearing because i love this part of it too that you were that you're talking about because these get published in medical journals i want to reiterate that part that like the validation one and then two the fact that a medical journal would publish that with their reputation and everything else that comes alongside that means that it has to be like you got you got to have teflon bulletproof evidence this actually happened right so these are this is legit god you know god inspired miracles but with that in mind are there were there any

others that just stuck out in the healing range to you that that you're just like man this was wild sometimes you know an editor of medical journal can label their line their neck on the line too if you know, even if the ducks do seem to be in a row, some things are just too controversial. So that apparently caused a little bit of, well, there was a big kerfuffle. I'll just say that. It's the same kind of setting you find in the Gospels and Acts, the cutting edge of the kingdom going forth in places where Jesus was not being exalted before. There were no known followers of Jesus. So in this one area of Mozambique, there were teams going in, and they would pre-execerect.

about Jesus, they pray for the sick, and the Lord was healing so many people visibly in front of their village where there were no churches. People were being healed of deafness and blindness publicly, so the next day they'd be able to start a church in the village because everybody saw what the true God had done. So there was a team that went from the US to check it out and actually checked people for vision and hearing before and after the prayers, and they were able to document major changes in visual and auditory acuity. In other words, changes that would on the scale of legal blindness have gone from legally blind to being able to see before and after the prayer. And this was published in Southern Medical Journal in September of 2010.

the backlash online was, as you can imagine, rather strong. And people said, yeah, the testing conditions of Rulamuzebik aren't that good. But Candy Gunther Brown, one of the authors of the study, published a book called Testing Prayer with Harvard University Press in 2012 and has a chapter in there on that study. And it's quite compelling for those who actually would read it. So you have obviously backlash because, again, people have different presuppositions.

Sean George, consultant physician in Calgary, Australia, went into whole cardiac arrest. He was like an hour and a half after he had been in cardiac arrest. His heart hadn't been working that for, well, maybe an hour and a half. I think it was an hour and 25 minutes. Anyway, I don't have the precise number of minutes there. But he himself was a doctor, so he knows how to get medical documentation, which removed some complications. When his wife prayed for him, his heart started again.

Was he dead? Well, that's what the doctors around him said. I mean, his fellow doctors who included Hindu and Muslim doctors, so they weren't all Christians. They all regard this as a miracle. His heart started again after all this time when she prayed for him. And he has the documentation online. So it's publicly available.

So people say, if there's no evidence, well, you just have to look in the right places to find it. But some of the things that have been most compelling to me have been, obviously, of course, if I witness something myself, but when somebody that I know and trust witnesses things, so when I was in Congo Brazzaville where my wife is from in Central Africa, we interviewed a number of people during the three weeks we were there from the mainstream Protestant church there. We could have found it from Catholics. We could have found it from more Pentecostal churches or whatever, but this was the mainstream Protestant church there. Seven eyewitness accounts of people being raised from the dead.

Oh, my gosh. There wasn't medical ways to verify them being dead in the sense that we can do, say, with Sean George or Chauncey Crandall, another doctor who pronounced somebody dead. and then prayed for the person who'd been flatlined for 40 minutes, the person came back. We don't have that for those places, and I think one of the reasons they needed a miraculous intervention was precisely because they didn't have medical help available. I think medical help is a gift. We should use it where we have it.

But one of these cases was the one that got my attention. I mean, there are cases where the person was, so far as anybody could tell, dead a lot longer than this, but this one got my attention for reasons I will shortly explain. I heard the story about Antonet Malambay's daughter Theraz, but I wanted to interview her. So when I interviewed Antonet Malambay, she said that when her daughter Teraz was two years old, she cried out that she was bitten by a snake.

Her mother got to her, found her not breathing. There was no medical help available in the village. So she strapped the child to her back, ran to a nearby village, where a family friend Cocoa Mouiz was doing ministry. Cocoa Mouis prayed for the child. She started breathing again. The next day she was fine.

And today she has a master's degree. And she's just recently retired. So this is like over a long period of time. Wow. So I asked Antonet Malambay, how long was it that she wasn't breathing? She had to stop and think. And she said, you know, to get from this village to that village,

she said it was about three hours. Now, five or six minutes, with no oxygen, irreparable brain damage starts in. Therese had no brain damage. And what got my attention in this case is that Therese is my sister-in-law. Oh, wow. Antonet Malambay was my mother-in-law. And not to doubt one's mother-in-law, but we did confirm it with Cocoa Moise as well.

So we got two independent witnesses. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, because you make a great point. Like you talk about the doctor praying for the person that had been dead for 40 minutes and you have three hours, you're a vegetable. If somehow you even get, you get shocked back and your heart starts again, you don't, you don't survive. Yeah, you don't, yeah, even 40 minutes. That's, man, you know, I love this because, you know, raising the dead is, you know, Jesus did this, right?

And that's like one of the crazy of all crazy miracles, right? is that people, I love that our God has the power, like, as he said, over, over sin and death, right? It is, nothing more blurry than that, Nate, think about being dead and then alive. I mean, I have a couple questions, Dr. Craig. What about miracles where people see or interact with angelic beings? Is there any, you know, being saved by angels or being, because I mean, that's kind of what we talk a lot about. We consider those blurry creatures as well, because they're around us, but we don't, you know, we don't interact them with them on a daily basis. Have you found any miracles involving anything in that space?

I've read a number of those. But the first thing that came to my mind when you said that, since my mind was on my mother-in-law actually was something that happened to her before she was a Christian. And it wasn't something she saw, but she was a child. She was crossing a river on a log, and she fell in. And she felt like she was drowning when somebody grabbed her from the back and pulled her up on the log. And she looked around and there was nobody there.

And she said, some spirit must have saved me. But after she became a Christian, she said, now I understand who the spirit was, that this was God. Or it could be an angel that God was using to do this. One of the stories I read, and this was actually from a doctor. Again, it's not firsthand for me, but it's from a doctor. It's a book that a number of doctors contributed to about strange things they had seen. And this was of a child who had drowned in one end of the pool, but the people didn't know that she had drowned. And the sibling, who I think was like five years old, I'm not getting the exact thing right,

but went, dove in and pulled the other child out. And the other child was resuscitated then. And the resuscitation, there were miraculous things surrounding that. But then they asked the one child, how did you know that she was down there and that you could actually pull her out? She said, oh, the man in the white robes told me to do it. And so they said, okay, let's give this family some swimming lessons so they won't need an angel to help them. Chet, right? Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. I mean, we hear those stories all the time. you know on our show people email us their accounts and I just think that's always interesting you know these these miracles aren't just it's not just supernatural healing people a lot of times are saved well it's like signs and visions too right like isn't there like some and this is totally maybe out of the realm but like the idea that in the Muslim world there are people that have dreams and visions where Jesus appears in their dream and they get saved like yeah that's pretty miraculous I don't know how you quantify that. I mean, that's a tough one to put in a medical journal, but I just,

it is, then that kind of, maybe there's a question here. Why do you think God chooses to act in a miraculous ways? And maybe in what circumstances do you think? And why do you think ultimately that that happens to some people and then not, not to others? I mean, that's always the question, right? It's like, you know, I remember Mike, Mike Heiser talking about how many friends he had that were healed from pancreatic cancer. He talked about that. And it wasn't for him. And that's a tough one.

That's a really tough one to understand. And I don't know that we know a good answer. But what are your thoughts on why and when perhaps God chooses to intervene? Yeah. Because I know Jesus says if you have faith for it, right? And I think sometimes we do have the faith. And yet, God still either chooses not to or then oftentimes or does. And I'm curious your take on that.

And sometimes he does it when we don't have the faith. Yes. Well, yes. Some of the things I've seen were not my faith, definitely. That's my story, too. It was actually the quite opposite. Some of the miraculous things I've saw, one of the most miraculous was recovered from paralysis when I was a Y-wammer.

And it was the day that I was like the biggest turd. And I didn't want to go pray for this person. And it wasn't anything. And it was a group of us. And there's nothing. So I think when God was saying, it is nothing of you. Exactly. You did nothing.

I did it all. Anyway, so I'm curious. Yeah, and even some of the people I know who see this happen regularly on the cutting edge of evangelism, which is, again, the kind of situation where you have in the Gospels and Acts, even some of those initially for like three years, they would pray and nobody would be healed. I mean, normally, some people get better, you know, just accidentally, right? But they, and then suddenly, like in one case, nobody had been getting healed for a year, and then suddenly three blind people were all healed in one week.

And I think it sends the message, and I talked with them about this, it sends the message that it's not us that did something different. It's God. And God did it. God gets the credit for it. And you see that in the book of Acts. I mean, in Acts 312, Peter is like, why do you look at us as if by our own power or holiness, this man stands before you whole? It's the name of Jesus of Nazareth.

And in Acts 14, it says that God was bearing witness to the message of His grace, performing signs through the hands of Barnabas and Paul. So I have a friend from Nigeria when I was working on the first book. I just asked him, because a lot of my friends from Africa had seen things more often than here, although they happened here too. I asked him, have you seen any miracles for things we'd call miracles? And he said, well, not very much. So he sent me just back seven pages. But one of the accounts in there was a place where he was a place where he was doing research. He has a PhD now. He was doing research in some different villages in Nigeria. And

neighbors came to him and they said, you're a man of the high God. Can you do something? Here's our child who died. And he says he took the child aside for a couple hours, praying and then handed the child back to them alive. And I thought, well, maybe he just hits it lucky once in a while. Maybe they've been misdiagnosed as dead. So maybe if he prays for everybody who's dead, maybe once. So I said, how often did you pray for somebody who died? He said, only twice. The other was my best friend. He didn't come back.

Chauncey Crandall, whom I mentioned earlier, a cardiologist in West Palm Beach. When he prayed for Jeff Marken, who had been flatlined for 40 minutes, Jeff Marken came, he did shock him with the paddle one more time. But again, it shouldn't normally do anything. And the nurse started screaming,

what have you done? she thought like Frankenstein's monster, the guy's a vegetable, all his systems that shut down. But the guy did have a second chance to know the Lord. Chauncey Crandall participated in the man's baptism. They go around and share the testimony now. But Chonsie Crandall also prayed for one other person to be raised. And that was his own son, Chad, who died of leukemia. And he wasn't raised.

And at that point, he had to say, God, you are worthy of my trust, not because of this or because of that. You're worthy of my trust because you're trustworthy. And I'm going to keep believing you. And like a year later, when God let him to pray for Jeff Marken, God did it. You know, we live in a world of sin and death. And Jesus speaks of these as signs of the kingdom. So we don't have the fullness of the kingdom.

And if, you know, if everybody could get healed when somebody prayed for them, we would still have the first century apostles with us, right? Right. They'd still be, yeah. Yeah, they'd be like the guy in Indiana Jones. Yeah. To hang out by the cups. He'd still be around.

It kind of reminds me a little bit of our discussion with Heiser. He was saying how, you know, the Bible, we get snippets, right? Right. So we get the highlight reel. And the problem with modern day people is they read the highlight reel. they go, well, that's crazy. None of that happened, right? But, you know, he made a good comedy. He's like, I think most of the time Moses was sitting around bored, just like we're bored. You know, we get bored and we think, you know, we read the Bible and we're just, we're looking at the highlights.

And then our life is just a bunch of strikeouts most of the time. And we're like, well, what, what am I doing wrong? How come I'm not, you know, when we have this sort of magic, we think Christianity is this magic, right? If we just participate in the magic, I'm interested in you know, something crazy is going to happen. And I think that it's, you're right. It's when God chooses to act. It's when something happens. And same with supernatural experiences, because a lot of people will see things.

And some people look their whole life. Some people are bigfoot enthusiasts. They spend their whole life in the woods. They never see something. And then some lady will hit one with her car five times. And it's like, what is that? You know, like she doesn't want to see it. And she has this interaction.

And then a lot of these people, their whole life has changed because they've seen something that shouldn't exist. To them, it's a supernatural experience. And there's no answers for it, you know? And even when you're a young kid, you get pulled out and put on the log, it's probably years later before you even realize what happened to you. And so many people will say that to us. They'll say, you know, I saw something as a kid that shouldn't have been there. And it wasn't until I was 40, 45, somewhere in there, where the lights came on like, oh, yeah. The world is mysterious.

and I have I have had these experiences but people interact with things I'd love to hear more some more do you have any more angel stories those are always just really encouraging to me if yeah I could just to make sense of that world

I could tell you a demon story too that was sure although those aren't as is edifying so well a lot of people have that and their faith is their faith is strengthened by the darkness as well

it's not just one of the others. So those, in an odd way. In some circles, demons don't like to show themselves because they'd rather keep people in the dark about the dark. But also, what we were saying about, you know, when it happens sometimes and when it doesn't, I think it's important to remember that when it happens at all to anybody,

I mean, the good stuff from God, it's a reminder to all of us that he hasn't forgotten his promise. these are signs of the kingdom there are foretaste of the coming world where everything's going to be made right every tear is going to be wiped away from our eyes it's going to be no more sickness there's going to be no more death and so you know when it happens to one person

even if it doesn't happen to us we can take encouragement from that because it reminds us God has the future under control God is in control he doesn't leave us without evidence I just think it's so powerful, Craig, that those two stories especially that God intervenes in the miraculous because of their faith for a stranger. And yet when it came to their best friend or to their son, and it's just heartbreaking and tragic.

But at the same time, it's like, God is always working. I'm convinced, Nate, as we barrel down through this show as well, that when we understand that God's ways are higher than ours, And there's things that we'll never understand about an all-knowing and unseen God that we just won't understand a lot of things this side of heaven, right? And one of the things with the book of Acts, especially, and then also these miracles. It reminds me of a story, right, is that it always seems to also be about evangelism, right? It's about God intervening and then also saving someone literally and then also saving them internally. And it was one of our interviews. It was an anecdotal story, but it was about.

but missionary. And way out in the jungle, and I think it was a brother of someone we interviewed or a brother of my friend. I'm going to butcher the story. But the story itself is what matters is that they would go into these remote villages and they would ask if they could pray or do anything and they would say, no. Like we don't want you here. Our gods won't like that.

But he says, and Emily, what happens is that someone in the village gets sick and then there would be a messenger or a call. And it would be, hey, so-and-so is sick, the witch doctor and the gods can't save this person. Can you do something? can your God do something? And what would happen is they'd go up and they'd pray and the person would be healed. And then the entire village would convert.

They'd say that your God is higher than our gods. So we want to serve your God. And I feel like that's just who God is, right? At the 11th hour and it's showing that like, look, I am the I am. And I love that. But I do think there's a divine mystery here too, right, about why some and why not? And I think that's a pain point for a lot of people. I mean, why did God not do this?

Why did God not save Grandma or why did God not save my son or my, you know? And that's another reason besides the philosophic, theological, historical reasons I gave earlier for why some people don't believe. You know, some people, it's more on the emotional level they've been hurt. I mean, my wife and I went through seven miscarriages. And so, you know, we, you know, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, We've seen the other side, and we have our own health issues at our age, and so those things are real. But God does answer prayer.

It's not just in an evangelistic context, but man, in those evangelistic contexts, the best man in my wedding is from Nigeria. And when he was a child, his father was planting churches in an unreached part of Nigeria. and they were in this one village. They just moved there. He was trying to get a roof on his dwelling, but it was going to take four more days. And people were mocking him and saying, everything you have is going to be ruined

because this is rainy season. Everything is going to be drenched. And he lost his temper, which is not the fruit of the spirit. We're not supposed to do that. But he lost his temper and said, it's not going to rain one drop of rain in this village until I have a roof of my house.

And they laughed at him and walked away. and he fell in his face before God and said, oh, God, what did I just do? But for the next four days, it poured down rain all around the village, but not a single drop of rain fill in that village. And at the end of those four days, there was only one person in that village who had not become a Christian because of what they witnessed. Dude. I mean, that's...

Yeah. There's always a reason. You can't have good times all the time, or you don't... You can't have the sweet without the sour. You and I think a lot of times human beings where we do have a belief problem. We started the show with that. We have a belief problem. And it's almost like we have to stay ready. We have to stay in that. I think God wants to know us. And I think we have a tendency to just when there's easy times, we just fall away. We don't, I think there's like a scrappiness to Christianity to you. You got to stay scrappy. You know, and who knows. It's true. It's like, you know, like, and also, you know, like sometimes in the Bible, there's like these numbers, 40 years. You know, You know, people wandering for a long time. And then, like, there's these numbers of completion. Like, you have to go through the desert to get to the other side. And it's years often.

You know, I want it now. I want my miracle today. And if you didn't pray for 10 years, you know, your faith wouldn't be that strong, right? Abraham and Sarah, I mean, they had a long wait. Job had a long wait. David, being chased in the wilderness by Saul, had a long wait. You know, Elijah calls down fire from heaven. Okay, now everybody's going to be converted.

Jezebel sends a message to him. You're dead. It didn't, you know, it doesn't always go as quickly as we would like. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Well, let's get to that angel demon story. I think that would be.

Oh, boy. Yeah. Oh, I shouldn't have brought that up. Oh, come on, Craig. I don't like talking about these, but this was after we, I don't want to give glory to that. I can do it if you really, really want me to, but. If you're not comfortable, that's fine.

This is not about glorifying the darkness. This is about, this is about our dominion over that through the blood of Jesus. And I mean, we talk about some dark things on our show, Craig. I think our take on it always is it's the, we are in a world of war and it is better that we know our enemy. Yeah. Then not. It's the art of war like, you know, Sun Tzu, it's the idea that we are at, we are at resistance. The kingdom of darkness is a real, is a threat.

But listen, the kingdom of heaven is advancing. And it's taken hold by violent men. And we want to be those violent men. So it's going to last forever. Yes, 100%. So I, yeah. If you're not comfortable, obviously, but like that for us it is, you know, it's exposing, but expose the darkness.

I'm trying to think of the verse. It's Ephesians 5, I think you're. Yes. Yeah. It was supposed to work to the darkness. And I think that's kind of where some of what we do is to open people's eyes to that and say, listen, like this stuff is real, but it doesn't have power like our God does. When we came back from that trip to Congo where I was getting all this information,

There was a period of intense spiritual attack. At the time, I wouldn't have described it that way. I didn't have a category for it. But the first day was a certain kind of thing, and I was fighting it off based on scripture. Same with the second day. And then the third day, I was recovering. I felt exhausted.

My wife and I and our son, who was pretty young at that point, we're out for a walk. We stopped under a tree trying to decide which way to go. go and my son said let's go this way. No sooner had we stepped out from under the tree than the tree split at the roots. It wasn't uprooted. It just split at the roots. I mean, we took pictures of it. The wood looked pretty good, but it came crashing down right where we'd been standing. We would have been crushed to death. It had, you know, low, low branches and we would have been crushed to death.

So I was like, whoa, look what God protected us from. Well, meanwhile, back in Congo, my wife told her brother about what happened, and he was with somebody who was praying, and the person who was praying said, okay, I see. And she described what I had gone through the first day. She described what I went through the second day. And then she said, I see this spirit that was sent against them going into the top of a tree. and twisting it around, what's that about?

Wow. And then there was another person, a friend of mine connected me with a friend of his in Ethiopia, who was known for really hearing from God very clearly. This friend said, okay, this is why this happened. He said some other things to me that were spot on, and then he said, the devil wanted to stop you because of two big books that you're writing, and the second one will be bigger than the first. Now, he didn't know that I wrote books.

My friend hadn't told them that. But what struck me at that point was this can't be right. The second one can't be bigger than the first because it was written in my four-volume ax commentary. And in the Miracles book, I was expecting that, the big one was expecting that to come out after the acts commentary. However, the publisher switched it around and the 1100-page first Miracles book came out, and then the 4,500-page Acts commentary came out.

So the second one was bigger than the first, and I didn't even know that myself at that point. But God knows. And so, yes, God is bigger than the devil. He protected us. And I could give other stories like that as well. On that note, what are your thoughts about miracles as spiritual warfare? Yeah, miscellologists talk about power encounters, and I've talked with so many brothers and sisters in different parts of the world where that's happened.

Tandiranda is a brother in Indonesia. He did his DEMN, not demon, but DEMM, doctor of ministry degree here at Asbury Seminary. The irony. We're back to Indonesia, and there were people who tried to cast sports. spells against him and stuff like that. But he persisted. God protected him. And he has led lots of what he would call witch doctors to faith in Christ because they saw that the power of God was greater than the power that they had before and that they were wrong. And this is the true God. He sent me pictures from a few years back. He sent me some pictures where he was

baptizing 28 of them who had just become believers. 28 witch doctors? 28, 28 newly converted former witch doctors. Wow. And no longer, yeah. The former retired, yeah. Wow. I mean, that's incredible, right?

I love that. It's a show of power. It's a Trump card, right? And I think you started out talking about how miracles can be defined as things to defy or break the laws of nature, right? They're outside of that. And I don't think God can do that. And that's what I think is amazing about, in blurry, as we say, about miracles,

is that they break, in a sense, the laws of nature. I think they're outside of the norm, what we'd expect. Dead people don't come back to life, right? Blind people don't see again. Yeah. You know, people with, you know, who haven't walked in 20 years, don't just pop out of a wheelchair and run around. But.

Yeah. We have some good accounts to that. too. What's it? You want to lay one on us or what? Oh, sure. Yeah. Actually, that one was kind of a synthesis of a couple of them.

The one where she ran around is different from the one that was 22 years. But the one where she ran around that was like 15 years, she'd been, her health had been deteriorating due to advanced a very severe form of multiple sclerosis. This was Barbara Kamiski, later Barbara Kamiski Snyder. She'd spent like half of 15 years in the hospital, but this time she'd been sent home. The doctor said she won't be back here because there was a don't resuscitate order. They said, you know, it's at the end. She was, in her words, curl up like a pretzel. They had to uncurl her hands every couple months just to get the dead skin out.

Her feet were curled up. Her muscles were so unable to function that her diaphragm didn't work properly. So she had to be hooked up to a machine to enable her to breathe. And there is a context of prayer with this, but just to keep the story fairly concise, she heard a voice off to the side saying, my child rise up and walk, which of course was impossible in her condition. But impossibly, she jumped out of bed. The first thing she noticed was her feet were flat on the floor.

second thing she noticed was her hands weren't curled up. Third thing she noticed was she was seeing these things. I neglected to mention she'd also gone blind. And she ended up running out of the room. Well, she had to unplug a bunch of tubes, but she ended up running out of the room. And her father was just astonished. But he waltzed around the room and she ran outside in the patio. And I mean, her muscles weren't even atrophied, which is the, I mean, normally your muscles

are going to be atrophied after you haven't walked that long. But this was like a miracle on top of a miracle because, you know, even most miracle accounts, they're still atrophying, but not in this one. I have the account. It's been written up by her three doctors at the time. I interviewed two of the doctors, and they all agree this could only be explained as a miracle. And she didn't have a relapse of multiple sclerosis. She did pass away two years ago, but she remained healthy for 40 years. She was healed in 1981 on Pentecost Sunday and remained well until 2021.

That's the juice right there. That's wild. You're getting told to rise up and what? I mean, that's straight out of the Gospels, right? What was the 22-year one? Oh, that was daily a Knox. I interviewed so many people who knew her beforehand that it became superfluous to interview anymore, but I still kept hearing from people who knew her before.

And, of course, afterwards, I talked with her pastor and her sister and so many other people, somebody who would push the wheelchair up into the, up the ramp. But there are all these videos of her, too, for 22 years after she was injured in an automobile accident, she couldn't feel anything below her hips. She couldn't move her hips under her own power. and she got tired of people talking about healing. I mean, she was still praying for healing herself, but there were people who, you know, this is the other side of it.

You know, somebody would grab her by the hand and say, rise up and walk, and she wasn't healed, and she couldn't. And so those things were very difficult. But then one day after 22 years, she was praying for somebody else in a service and suddenly feeling returned to her legs. she willed herself up front and said, please pray for me. And this was captured on video, but, you know, there's a person on either side of her helping to hold her up.

Her muscles are still atrophied. But now she's moving her hips under her own power. And the skeptics comments, not every skeptic is a mean skeptic, but the mean skeptics comments were, ah, you know, you call that walking, that can't be real. Well, her muscles were atrophied. She really had to, you know, get some muscle tone back. But a month later, there's another video of her as she walks into a different church, and she starts praying for people. And nobody's holding her up this time because she's had time to, you know, strengthen her muscles.

The closest to potentially logical comment I heard from a skeptic attached to that video was that she must have faked her paralysis. for 22 years so that she could claim a healing afterwards. Now, if that's the best explanation you can come up with, I think it's time to be skeptical of the skepticism. That's a real long game. That's a long game. You're like, well, that reminds me that, that pastor at that church.

It was, it was these kind of, you know, it's like some people will go to the greatest lengths to not believe. It doesn't, it isn't, they will jump through, you know, hoops that are just, nobody else would jump through in order to not to not say it is what it is. And the same thing happens, you know, I know it's completely different, but people are told they're crazy when they see these creatures. Like, hey, you're nuts. They tell their family members, their wife, their husband, or whatever. And it's just sad to me. And I think one of the things our show does is try to give people the permission to have these conversations. Because somebody out there is

bottling it all up, right? They've, they want to tell people, I was in a wheelchair for 22 years, and this happened. And then what are they met with? They're met with so much skepticism. No, that didn't happen. It didn't happen to you. And it's a little harder, you know, obviously if you're good friends with someone in a wheelchair. I mean, it's, it's harder for you to dismiss that. But something about a human being, it's like we're, we have such a hard time believing. And I think when you do a podcast like this and you just, you've been doing it, you hear weird story after weird story after weird story. It's almost like, we have the opposite problem of, okay, we believe that all this stuff is probably happening, but we almost

believe too much. Gollibility is the other side of it. And yeah, we need to, we need to check, check into things. But there's a sister in the Philippines when I was doing some teaching there, and she was the person arranging my schedule. And she was really reluctant to share her experience with me because of what she'd been met with in the particular church that she'd been part of when it first happened. But she'd actually been thrown out of the church when she shared this. But she had been diagnosed with liver cancer. She had no access to medicine. She couldn't afford it.

I think she told me she took like one aspirin the whole time for the pain, and that's all she had access to. And she finally was pronounced dead in the hospital and was sent to the morgue, and there was a sheet over top of her. Her abdomen had swelled from the liver cancer. and when she was pronounced dead, her friend was there with a minister, and they prayed for her. I said, what did they pray? Or why would they pray for you if you were dead?

She says, I don't know. I was dead. I wasn't paying attention. But she said, you know, they saw her moving suddenly, and they pulled back the sheet thinking a mouse had gotten in there. But her abdomen was no longer swelled. She'd come back to life. Some people told me about afterlife experience. is her case, she didn't have any that she remembered.

But when she recounted that, they threw her out of her church saying, you're not supposed to believe in all that stuff, but she was alive now. And she had shared the story confidentially with a few other people who since then have confidentially shared it with me. So, I mean, she had shared it with some other people, but she didn't like talking about in public because of her experience with it. Craig, I've got a, maybe one last question. And that would be, there's this common idea.

And maybe, I think sometimes I see it as well, that these things don't happen as much in the West. Like that we live in a very academic post-enlightenment paradigm in Western civilization. Because you hear stories, right? The Philippines and in the Congo and Zimbabwe. And I myself saw things in Southeast Asia. I was in the Philippines. I was in Thailand and saw God do crazy things.

There's this idea that it happens a lot of other places and not here. And I say here, you're in the United States, we're in the United States, we're in Tennessee, and you're in Kentucky, right? And what are your thoughts on that? Is that just a stereotype belief? Or do you think that there is something to things that maybe happen with more veracity or more often in the developing world or outside of the West? We should keep in mind that there's going to be more accounts of it from the rest of the world

since whatever people in the U.S. think about ourselves were only about 6% of the world's population. Obviously, but there are also, I think, other factors to be taken into account. God doesn't do miracles to entertain us. He does them where they're needed. So Jesus fed the 5,000. And I have eyewitness accounts from food being multiplied. Not that much. But Jesus fed the 5,000, but then he told his disciples,

gather up the fragments that remain. They weren't going to need a miracle for their next meal. And so, like, we pray for a daily bread, but we also, you know, most of us go out and work if we can. But also another factor is, so, you know, where we have medical technology, that's God's gift. Don't expect, you know, I mean, you can pray, and if God heals you, you don't have to go to the doctor, but, you know,

if you need to use medical technology, be grateful for that gift. Another factor is the cutting edge of evangelism. That's where we see the more dramatic things most often. That's not to say God doesn't heal people in all sorts of other ways, but some places it needs to be dramatic to get people's attention. But I think another factor also is the factor that you brought up earlier, which is faith. God will often do this like he stilled the storm in Mark chapter 4.

The disciples actually didn't have much faith, for the storm to be stilled, but you know, he still did anyway. Moses didn't have faith to make the burning bush burn, obviously. But he does respond more to faith. Sometimes I think we have it wrong, though, what we think of faith. Sometimes I think we envision faith as make-believe or wishing really hard or trying to chase away all the doubts. You know, it doesn't work that way.

we have faith in the one who's faithful, we trust in the one who's trustworthy, we rely on the one who is reliable. In other words, it's because of who God is, because of how he's shown himself to be, we rely on him. It's not a matter of, you know, chasing out doubts or it's a relational kind of faith. And I think in some parts of the world, for certain kinds of things, people have their faith muscles, more developed than we do, partly because for certain things they need those, and partly because we've learned to rely on all the other gifts God has given us instead of on, you know,

we could be relying on God through those gifts, but I think sometimes we take a lazier way, we don't really flex our faith muscles. And I think that humian skepticism, you know, where people will, meet you with just this dogmatic disbelief. I mean, I've had a couple atheist friends, fellow professors, not where I teach, obviously. That'd be odd at the theological seminary.

Yeah, atheists. Well, I don't know, some seminars, maybe, but they both, when I said, would you believe if somebody were raised from the dead in front of you? And they said, no. And they were just a matter of fact, like, you know, who would believe in a miracle, no matter what. I think some people get intimidated by that and kind of absorb that. Well, you don't have anything that will convince everybody. Well, no. I mean, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and some people believed who were there,

and some people went their way and reported him to the authorities and said, you've got to deal with this guy. Pharaoh, I mean, he'd seen enough, you know. And I do know what your pastor was talking about earlier. There are certain dimensions of the Egyptian ecosystem that would be played on there. But the kind of spectacular level of this, you know, and wind set down can part a body of water. But the timing was rather precise. You know, it's like this is not something, it's something that Pharaoh should have recognized,

but his theological presuppositions were, no, my gods are more powerful, even though the plagues according to Exodus 1212 were against the gods of Egypt, Pharaoh thought himself a son of a deity. And so, you know, he'd have to give up his theology to believe that this is going to work for Moses, not going to work for him. So all the chariots go in and all the king's horses and all the king's men get wiped out. Yeah. Yeah, they go swimming.

I know I think a lot of times we grow up in in church culture and community and we we recite the verses you know and you know you grew up a lot and and you hear the you know do not conform to the pattern in this world you know but transform and renew your mind and you know and you think about that and I think sometimes we we care so much what other people think about us right and that's really where our minds are but we have to transform be like we should should only care what God thinks about us. And that is faith when you start to just, you don't care. You know, you're willing to have that at the center of your mind.

And I think a lot of Christians struggle with, especially in academic spaces or places where, you know, you're trying to uphold a reputation. And you know what you looked at is crazy or cuckoo or stupid. Yeah, like with Pharaoh, it's a paradigm, right? Like you can't put Yahweh on top of your. your deification, right, because it destroys your paradigm, because you're no longer, yeah, you're no longer the exalted one. It's interesting, Craig. I think my thought on that is that, like, when I, the miracles I witnessed personally,

I have, it was because there was no other option. Yeah. There wasn't, the, the man that was, that I was in the room with when he was, he was healed from paralysis from a stroke and he hadn't been able to speak or get out of bed. His kids who were six and four were going to work. and his family was beginning to starve and I feel like there's something to God intervening when there is no other option we we don't have the the opportunity to you know for whatever maybe Medicare or or hospital or you put it there and

there's there's something to that I think I think that's not a there's no secret sauce this thing you've laid that out pretty pretty pretty astutely but I I do I do know that God loves to to show up when he is the only the option and um there's something to really ninth hour really amazing about that i think as well i uh man i love i love this i i think if you if you listen to this and you're not encouraged and you and you because i you know we talk about blurry stuff on here that's become an adjective nate you know and what is more blurry than god intervening in doing something miraculous that that breaks the the breaks laws of nature and breaks really paradigms of reality and

And Craig, thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. Talk to us about, tell everybody where they can find you. And you've got, you've written a lot of books. You've sold a million copies, but where they can find your work, specifically stuff on miracles I know as well because that's what we touched on on this show. But yeah, let everybody know where they can. Yeah, and if you can't, you can't see Craig right now, but you've got books stacked to the

roof behind you. So do a lot of research, it seems. I need to, yeah, I need to, yeah, figure out of the other. That's good. Stack them. I bet you know where everything is. I bet you know where everything is, though, right? That's all it matters.

You don't tell my wife, at least. Well, a lot of the books that I write are academic. They're just in my discipline. Although what you said about academic paradigms and sticking your neck out, if I weren't teaching where I was teaching, I might get myself in some trouble with some of this stuff. Happily, they don't mind me writing about this stuff here. But a couple books that are for a broader audience.

One is the IVP Bible background commentary, New Testament, which gives cultural background, ancient Greek and Jewish Roman background, on each passage of the New Testament. So, you know, when you're wondering about the head coverings or wondering about the six water pots set aside for purification in John 26, or whatever. There's a lot of symbols in Revelation, what would be the background

for understanding of those things in antiquity? So that's at a fairly accessible level for anybody. Also, Miracles Today is written at that level. And then my wife and I's love story. So we've got 34 books, but most of them are academic books. My wife and I's love story, Impossible Love, is fairly popular. So it's Craig Keener, K-E-E-N-E-R, There's a website, Craig keener.com, and my YouTube channel where I do have some fairly nice videos.

And then some of the older ones, the video quality isn't that good. A little grainier. A little grainy. But if you just don't listen, it's no problem. So I've got a bunch of free lectures. I've got, I think, 23 hours on acts. I've got 16 hours on Romans, you know, and a bunch of other things. So those are all available at those places.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Greg. Yeah, thanks for hanging out. Thanks for being responsive and wanting to come on a little show. We appreciate everything. It's been awesome. It's encouraging.

I think that being reminded that God acts and is active. Because we know, you know that in your head, you know, but like to be reminded that God is active today. is doing miraculous things, you know, and these are happening across the globe. It is just, you can't, I don't think you cannot be encouraged and also just stupefied and and amazed at the things that are happening. So thank you, thank you, thank you, Craig. It was, it was a pleasure.

It's been great to, great to be with you. And God is so good. I mean, from day to day, it's so easy to forget. And, you know, from day to day, there are certain things we, we just, need to do. We need to keep doing them regularly. But God doesn't answer prayer, not always as fast as we want, and not always the way we want, but God is God, and he's worthy of our trust. Amen to that. Awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, great. Yeah. Appreciate. Thanks, spend some late, late night hour out. Well, not, it's a little later there. I think you're ahead. You're a hour ahead, but thanks to spend

a couple late, late hours with us here. We appreciate it. It's great to be. Thanks so much. Thank you.