Miracles and the Miraculous One

Let us look back! Jesus came to found the kingdom of God; to lead men into it, and thus bring them to a voluntary submission to God's government.

The proper means for that is the preaching of glad tidings which only he can accept whose heart is changed, whose mind is directed toward repentance. But it belongs to the Messianic task to overcome not only the ethico-religious wretchedness of remoteness from God and of being forsaken by God, but also physical natural misery in its different forms. This natural suffering Jesus regards as the disorder of the divinely arranged relations in the human world, in which Satan's rule has entered. The complete victory of God belongs, indeed, to the future; but the blows which Jesus strikes the power of darkness are an earnest and pledge of the world's renovation. So far as saving miracles are signs, they are not such for the divine authority of Jesus, but only of the love of the heavenly Father and the coming of his kingdom.

This ethico-religious regeneration is not merely the more important element in the endeavor of Jesus; it is also the essential preliminary condition for the effectuation of the love which shows itself in Jesus's miracles of mercy. His miracles can only take place where there is a disposition toward God, or has at least commenced. No miracle is done to break unbelief; but where it is broken, God's power is visible. For an extraordinary physical event has never the ability to convince men who are lacking in religious and moral willingness; and, because miracles, on the one hand, are the accessory phenomena of the Messianic work, and on the other, must remain unintelligible to unbelief, Jesus never referred to them, properly speaking… Being conscious of possessing [miraculous power] in consequence of his immediate communion with God, he was not afraid to convey it to everyone who, like him, lives in the will of God. This trait makes clear anew the difference between the Messiahship and the miraculous power of Jesus; the former belonged to him exclusively. When thinking of it he emphasized his person as unique which, unlike anyone else, stands in essential connection with God. He and he alone has to bring the glad tidings. He and he alone can give remission of sins and establish the kingdom of God. But the power of working miracles he gave to undefiled faith generally. Where there is a man who in every moment is absolutely sure of his God—to whom, indeed, also absolutely moral purity belongs—there "all things are possible" (Mark 9:23)...

Jesus himself is the great miracle, given for a sign to humanity; who, therefore, in his sinlessness can dare to convince all of their sinfulness, can dare to convince all of sin and to call all to repentance; who, by virtue of a divine authority subjects all hearts to himself. This is Jesus's own declaration, and, let us add, also the declaration of his great apostle Paul. He traversed the world with the message of Jesus, the Miraculous One, who works in the souls of men the miracle of miracles. But nowhere in his epistles does he refer in proof of it to a single miraculous deed of the Lord, just as he never mentions any of the miracles performed by himself as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, although he had occasion for doing so. The only historical miracle to which his preaching refers is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead; but this event stands for him in the center of his entire view of life. Beyond this, miraculous events have evidently no significance for his view of the world, or for his religious experience. He knows that in all his labors he is directly under the miraculous guidance of Almighty God, and that he receives from the Lord Christ spiritual power which is made perfect in weakness. He lives with the conviction that Jesus is the Messiah sent of God; that from the place of his heavenly exaltation he establishes, increases, preserves the holy congregations on earth. 

– Karl Beth, The Miracles of Jesus