“The normal Christian life," truth, lies, snakes and poison

It’s not often that I begin a blog with one of my least favourite passages in the Bible, but nevertheless, here it is:

“And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” Mark 16:17,18

Now there are several reasons why this passage is fast becoming my least favourite. My biggest objection to it is that it is not supposed to be in the Bible! Not because I dislike it but simply because there is compelling historical evidence that vs 9-20 in this chapter are not the words that Mark originally ended his book with. I wont bore you now with a detailed explanation of why it is still in our Bibles, for that you could read in the footnote of any decent study Bible.

But there are other reasons why I dislike it (of course, if I were convinced that it was inspired scripture then it would probably be my favourite, but alas!) It is one of those texts that have been subject to radical misinterpretations. I have kindly illustrated one such misinterpretation with the pictures I have uploaded for you here. This brave group of individuals handle snakes and drink poison in the Sunday service to strengthen their faith J 

The other unhelpful take on these verses was unfortunately very prevalent while I was growing up in my faith. It was the belief that these words described the “normal Christian life." According to this way of thinking, these few verses set the benchmark for the believer, and if this is not your ordinary day to day experience then you still have a long way to go in your spiritual growth, or worse, you are not saved at all! Now in one sense this is true. God has called us to an extra-ordinary life in which we set about liberating people from the bondages of Satan. We do this using the considerable force and spiritual gifts at our disposal. And yet this expectation can make a bitter pill for a young believer to swallow later in his journey because it is not entirely true (again, if it were true then I must just suck it up and get growing!)

The bitter pill is the realisation that following Christ is not about being a super-hero with spiritual super-powers. We plunder the enemy as a cohesive army of believers through which the gifts of the Spirit are distributed widely. “These signs” will follow us as believers for sure! But not necessarily through individual believers living each day in the “normal Christian life” as modern-day miracle workers. Even if this passage was inspired by the Holy Spirit, this is the sober reality. 

My experience has been that there is something very cruel about telling a young believer later in life that the gospel message just “is not quite as good as you think it is”. The gospel is not supposed to be like that. It is called good news, I shouldn’t have to sober up and face the cold facts that somebody added to the gospel and that it’s not all that they made it out to be. That’s horrible. Which is why I don’t like these verses, or the "benchmark" mentality that often comes with them. The real truth is brilliant enough, but it gets a distasteful flavour to it if you hear this inflated version first. It’s like waking up and thinking its Saturday. It would have been fine waking up knowing that it was Monday, I could handle that. But when you wake up thinking its Saturday and then realise it’s actually Monday and that you need to get ready for work, it’s almost unbearable!

  

It gets even worse than this I am afraid. This fallacy skews your ability to judge true maturity. It’s an easy logical progression to make from, well if these signs follow all who believe, then what about those who claim to be leaders and yet don’t seem to have these obvious “signs” following their ministry? Are they frauds? But let’s examine this application of “the benchmark” with just one example. Jesus spoke of John the Baptist as the “greatest of all the prophets”, but how could he be? What about Elijah and Elisha? Surely they were the heavy weights? Calling down fire from heaven, I mean, surely it doesn’t get much better than that? And what did John the Baptist have to show for his ministry? Not a single miracle. And yet he spoke with such authority and was honoured so highly by Jesus. Without a single miracle performed he still accomplished God’s calling for his life. He wasn’t a fledgling, he was a giant! If we had to “benchmark” him we would do ourselves a huge disservice. Which is why it makes me sad every time I hear people speak about some travelling speaker that has just come to town with a ministry of miracles as “solid”, you know, “the real deal”, “the whole package”. Jesus said we should judge a tree by its fruit; that is, fruits of the Spirit, none of which include “gift of miracles”. Yeah, God does confirm his word with miracles sometimes. But that’s exactly it, it’s “His word” which he confirms. And how he chooses to confirm the word is not always the same.

I guess what I am trying to say is, I wish somebody had told me right at the beginning, “Luke, following Jesus is the most incredible, exciting, meaningful and worthwhile thing you will ever do with your life. But it’s going to be hard, really hard. Some of your friends and family will suffer terrible things. Some of them will endure the most disgusting sicknesses, some will even die, and it’s not your fault. Jesus said not to worry. Jesus said that he will work even the worst tragedies for his glory, and every story has a happy ending with him.” I wish somebody had told me, “Jesus cares. More than anyone in the whole world. And he cries. He even cries with those who suffer. And he is good, soooo good it will blow your mind. This world and its suffering will bring you to your knees with sadness sometimes, and then Jesus will pick you up with tears of joy. He is the great deliverer and he loves to rescue people. And he is going to use you Luke, in the most powerful and wonderful ways. But it’ll be different to how you imagine. He’ll give you gifts and he will bless many people through your life, but he will use the painful lessons you have learned even more than the spiritual gifts he has given you. The goodness of the righteousness that he will work into you will shine more brightly than your mightiest work. And sometimes you will get so frustrated that you'll just want to die. But keep going and eventually you will work things out with God, and it will all make perfectly good, glorious, miraculous sense.” I wish somebody had told me that. Just saying.