Signs and Wonders

It’s no secret: Our God is a God of miracles. Life itself is a miracle. They say the human heart beats approximately 100,000 times every day. That’s more than 2.5 billion beats in an average lifetime.[1] Then there’s the human eye. Evolution offers its complex, 600-million-year theories about how the eye happened to eventuate into its remarkable existence, but the fingerprints of God are all over it. Truly we can say, along with Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:3, “How great are His signs, and how mighty His wonders!”

With this backdrop in mind I was excited to discover Isaiah 8:18, which says, “Here am I and the children whom the Lord has given me! Weare for signs and wonders in Israel from the Lord of hosts, who dwells in Mount Zion.” While Isaiah’s words were specifically related to his natural family (that is a study in itself), interestingly Hebrews applies this verse to Jesus and His spiritual family. In other words, just as Isaiah’s own family were living witnesses to the truthfulness of God’s Word, so too our lives— transformed by God’s grace—are to be living witnesses for the power of the gospel of Christ.

In short, we are to be as signs and wonders in this world. And this happens—miraculously so—when we spend time with Jesus, allowing the Holy Spirit to fill us day by day, so that we are daily delighted by His matchless, unfailing love.

“There’s the wonder of sunset at evening,
The wonder of sunrise I see;
But the wonder of wonders that thrills my soul
Is the wonder that God loves me.”[2]

God’s love realized and embraced in our lives enables God to make us His signs and wonders in the world!

This idea has tremendous end-time significance. Revelation 12:1 says that when John saw God’s church prophetically symbolized, he said, “A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars.” The King James Version says she appeared as “a great wonder in heaven.” God’s end-time people are as signs and wonders in this world, most especially because they keep and treasure God’s commandments—including the fourth, concerning God’s seventh-day Sabbath (Rev. 14:12). As Ezekiel 20:12 says: “Moreover I also gave them My Sabbaths, to be a sign between them and Me, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them.”

We are to be as signs and wonders in the world.

“If we would close the windows of the soul earthward and open them heavenward, every institution established would be a bright and shining light in the world. Each member of the church, if he lived the great, elevated, ennobling truths for this time, would be a bright, shining light. God’s people cannot please Him unless they are surcharged with the Holy Spirit’s efficiency. So pure and true is to be their relationship to one another that by their words, their affections, their attributes, they will show that they are one with Christ. They are to be as signs and wonders in our world, carrying forward intelligently every line of the work.”[3]

Satan’s big-time end-time strategy is deception. “Take heed that no one deceives you” (Matt. 24:4) were literally Jesus’ first words in response to the disciples’ question about the timing of His return. Verse 24 adds, “For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (cf. 2 Thess. 2:9). In today’s world, where seeing is believing and where Satan, the master of deception and confusion, is seeking to sweep the world into his web of lies, God, and God’s truth, need to be seen for who He is. May God help us to be as signs and wonders in this world, for His name’s sake, so that people can see the real difference that Christ and Christ alone can make.

[1] https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/how-a-healthy-heart-works

[2] George Beverly Shea, “The Wonder of It All,” in The Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal (Washington D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1985), no. 75.

[3] Ellen G. White,Selected Messages (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1958, 1980), book 1, p. 113. (Italics supplied.)