I was working my way
through the Book of Acts recently, and Philip really caught my
attention. Philip is awesome!
Then Philip went
down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ to them. And the
multitudes with one accord heeded the things spoken by Philip,
hearing and seeing the miracles which he did. For unclean spirits,
crying with a loud voice, came out of many who were possessed; and
many who were paralyzed and lame were healed. And there was great joy
in that city. [Acts 8:5-8]
Philip has some of
the coolest stories. One day God said, “Go over there,” and he
met a senior administration official from Ethiopia, a guy who has
come almost 2000 miles to worship God, who had questions about the
Messiah from his readings in Isaiah. Phil introduces him to Jesus and
the guy wants to get baptized in the first puddle they pass.
When they come up
out of the water, God transports Philip to Azotus, a coastal town 30
miles north. That’s just plain cool.
As I was enjoying
the stories about Philip, my mind recalled, “This is Philip the
rookie Deacon, not Philip the apostle.” Besides, these are the
actions of a young and enthusiastic revivalist, not a senior church
leader.
I considered, “Some
of those deacons did some pretty great things!”
And as I was
thinking this, it seemed that Father whispered, “Correlation is not
causation.”
OK, that caught me
off guard. I waited. He didn’t say any more, but I realized I was
correlating “Philip is a deacon,” with “Philip has some awesome
God stories!”
Both statements are
true, but they are not necessarily connected. Just because Phil was a
deacon, just because Phil served widows does not explain Phil showing
up in the middle of Azotus, dripping wet from the baptism, with no
wet footprints behind him. (No wonder people listened to his
preaching!)
The principle
strikes me as much bigger than Phil’s wet footprints in the desert.
Just because Jesus
spit in the dirt and rubbed the resulting mud in a blind guy’s eyes
does not mean that spitting in dirt is the way to heal blindness.
[See John 9:6]
Just because Jesus
was the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” does not
mean that God set Adam & Eve up to fail.
I’ll bet you can
think of some other correlations that we are tempted to think of as
cause-and-effect stories.
On the other hand,
this principle does not prohibit deacons from doing amazing things in
God, and does not prohibit God from healing blind eyes with mud. God
knowing what’s going to happen does not imply that God caused it to
happen.
It seems to me that
we’ve been too darned lazy in our faith. We see two things together
and we’re quick think “Cause and effect!” And if I’m honest,
too many Bible teachers are quick to point out such correlations,
because they preach well and because digging deeper is kind of a lot
of work! And so we just believe them.
So this is going to
be another point in my ongoing story of “Believers need to think
for themselves, durn it!” We need to think things through with the
insight of Holy Spirit more than … well … more than short-cutting
the process.
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