Posted on 03/07/2007 2:09:33 PM PST by SirLinksalot
People have been coming back from the dead by the hundreds during the past 15-20 years. All over the world, stone-cold-dead people are being resurrected by the fervent, focused prayers of Christians praying in the name of Jesus.
By now, the totals are likely over a thousand. No exaggeration, no joke. My own book "Megashift: Igniting Spiritual Power" documents 52 countries where at least one person has been raised from the dead – with named eyewitnesses ... who have street addresses ... and phone numbers ... and fax numbers ... and e-mail addresses. I even throw in a few photographs. In other words, my little shoestring-budget book clobbers the nonexistent scholarship of James ("Titanic") Cameron. What he doesn't know about resurrections could fill a book – and it does: mine!
So now that Cameron has been trashed by, umm, pretty much everybody who ever got past the eighth grade and has access to a computer, it's time to state a monumental fact that even our better-informed intelligentsia have failed to notice:
Resurrections have become commonplace.
The main factor that has made the resurrection of Jesus Christ so iconic and yet so arguable for 2,000 years is its seeming uniqueness.
That seeming uniqueness has made His resurrection more lustrous, yet also more debatable. While it continues to add an aura of awesomeness to the Christian Gospel story, it also appears to complicate the problem of proving the resurrection through purely scientific means. Science labs don't welcome non-repeatable, sui generis events; and emotionally loaded, one-off events from 20 centuries past are even less welcome.
But now the situation has changed. Boy, has it ever. Christ's resurrection is still definitely unique in demonstrating the certainty of the Father's forgiveness of sin at the cross. But as a simple, biological return from death, it is now just one instance in a very large, growing and increasingly believable category.
Today, China and Mexico are the foremost countries in the world for resurrections. My best estimate for Mexico is well over 300. That count is mostly from U.S.-based Freedom Ministries, who eventually got so annoyed at American tourists coming down to wander around, take photos and gawk at the natives that they stopped counting at 300 about five years ago.
The raised-body count in China could possibly be even higher. Lots of stories cross my desk, but they're still hard to tally because public reports on activities of the underground house churches draw heavy persecution, even in these "enlightened" days when Chinese pols are trying to clean up their wretched public image before the 2008 Olympics.
But to give you some feel for the situation, I'll describe one incident. It concerns my friend Curtis Sergeant, who is now on Rick Warren's staff at Saddleback. On a recent intelligence-gathering visit to South China, his first stop was a top house-church leader. They had hardly started talking when the phone rang. After a brief conversation, the leader hung up and started packing his suitcase, saying, "Sorry, have to go."
Curtis was understandably put off. He protested, "Hey, I came a long way to talk with you! What's the rush? Why can't you at least wait a few hours?"
The distinguished gentleman replied, "I just got word that two of our national leaders have been murdered in the Northeast, and I have to go see if God will bring them back from the dead."
... to which Curtis could only answer, "Oh."
Such is daily life these days on the front lines of the great invisible war between, good and evil, life and death – or to put it more concisely, God and Satan.
Those who would try to disparage the long-ago resurrection of the Lord now face a far harder problem: explaining away the many hundreds (or thousands) of today's easily verifiable resurrections that are staring us in the face from 52 lands, including the U.S. and Canada.
They cannot defend their outdated skepticism by arrogantly claiming that third-world peasants are too dumb to recognize final death and often lack scientific instruments to show a flatline. When a Christian from, say, rural Mexico sees a body with no pulse, no breathing, dilated pupils and stiffening limbs, I think he's well within his rights to reply, "We don't have to show you no stinkin' flatline!"
And please, the reports in "Megashift" are not "near-death experiences" (NDEs) under anesthesia where a patient passes out for a few minutes, goes down a long tunnel, sees a bright light, then encounters Jesus (or Mary if he's a Catholic or Buddha if he's a Buddhist, etc.). Six percent of all resuscitations from cardiac arrests now produce such NDEs.
No, what we're seeing today is the real thing. For instance, you've seen my periodic reports about the work of Iris Ministries in Mozambique run by my friend Heidi Baker and her husband, Rolland. When I spoke with her last fall, she said they've now counted 60 resurrections in their ministry.
And exactly who is doing all these resurrections? Heidi herself? No, Iris Ministries has now taken in 5,000 orphaned children – whom they somehow feed day after day, with no visible means of support (hint, hint). And while Heidi has seen many people healed through her prayers (very often deaf people), she has had only one resurrection. What about the other 59? They've almost all been done by the kids.
Moral #1: God really hates to disappoint children.
Moral #2: James Cameron and his clan have no clue what kind of world they're living in.
---------------------------------------------
James Rutz is chairman of Megashift Ministries and founder-chairman of Open Church Ministries. He is the author of "MEGASHIFT: Igniting Spiritual Power," and, most recently, "The Meaning of Life."
Uh, it's in the book. Do you need someone to read it to you? I'll volunteer, if it will help your unbelief.
You forgot the part about being wrapped up and sealed in a tomb for three days.
Who posted this drivel anyway?
Don't hide the light under the bushel basket and demand payment for it, like Simon Magus.
If God is resurrecting people in the here and now, he's not doing it as a parlor trick for an author to make money.
If you have the book, give me the pictures, names and addresses of three, just three, that's all I ask. I'll put tremendous resources into investigating it, and, if it turns out to be true, you will hear it shouted from the rooftops of this land, I guarantee you. It will get the full play, and the conversions and changes of heart - the Christian salvation - that will occur from those public revelations will dwarf anything that has ever happened at Lourdes.
If it's true, it should be examined and revealed. I can do both of those things on a grand scale.
If it's not true, then it's a scam, and someone is playing Simon Magus and preying on the gullible. God did not resurrect people so that this man could keep the information to himself and have a nice lucrative life.
Anyone interested in buying this book, I have some cave-paintings for sale that would illustrate it nicely.
Wouldn't a peer-reviewed article be more appropriate for a claim like this?
Interesting.
I have friends in the missionary field who report
incredible miracles - in remote villages of China,
the Middle East, Africa and South America. Something
is going on and what better way to remove all doubt.
Modern medicine works both ways, it can validate a
resurrection or it can take credit by intervening
with science.
Charasmatic fantasy ...
I remember attending one of these "power of God at the fingertips of man" type churches where miracles were supposedly commonplace. The pastor, who called himself an apostle, told the story of a friend of his that walked into a funeral in some third world country and grabbed the corpse and threw him up against the wall a few times and resurrected him.
Where were the cameras? the film at 11? there is nothing to verify the events ever took place.
Too often people today seek the miraclous, they try to outdo each other in fantastic stories that long for the miracles of the New Testament ...
The world is full of false teachers and false prophets. And I recall the two OT tests for determining whether a prophet was from God or not. Everyone pays attention to the first condition but ignores the second.
The first was "If what the prophet said does not come true, that prophet is not from God."
Fine, we all understand that this disqualifies Swaggart, Tilton, Oral Roberts, etc. They have made plenty of predictions that have not come true.
But there is another condition ... which is more important I think. That is simply this "If what that prophet says DOES come to pass ... BUT he leads you away to follow other Gods, that prophet is not from God."
Im not saying I believe that people are raising others from the dead today ... because I dont. But even if they were, that is no guarantee that this person is from God ... their doctrine confirms that they are leading people astray from Biblical Christianity by their teachings.
What a crock.
Some of your notices seemed relevant:
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Yes. Please read it for me.
Or rather, just cut to the chase and send me three names, with addresses and pictures, in the Anglosphere or Francophonia. If these things are true, the resources that will be devoted to the investigation will reveal that - it is not hard to prove a resurrection. The guy was dead. Medical care ceased. He was given a death certificate. He came back to life.
And with that proof, the guy will sell a billion books because the whole world will know, and they will believe the source too.
If it's not true, well, that would be a disappointment, wouldn't it?
[...he relies heavily on eyewitness accounts...]
It is the eyewitness testimony of over 500 people
who give credibility to Jesus resurrection.
In a backward community, there is no video or
electronics to manipulate. Eyewitness testimony
is still relied on in our justice system.
You don't say?
Would you like assistance, as in I shall buy the book, sift the lists, and you can then peruse the addresses to decide which you would like to investigate. Or do you have someone on staff to do it ...
Here's his Email address at WND:
jrutz@worldnetdaily.com
Let us know what you discover.
No, because, to an unbeliever, anyone willing to review this would not be credible...
I too would enjoy the disclosure ... and to me, ONE proof would cancel many many mistaken identifications of a resurrection. Incidentally, there is a case of a man who was flatlined and sent to the morgue in some city here in the US, where the attendant started to process the body and the man revived. Was he dead? The attending was convinced of it and the man remained in that diagnosis for more than thirty minutes. The case was discussed here at FR a few months ago and a Cardiologist in Nashville has spoken of this particular case though I cannot recall it presently.
I think a good question for people is "if you saw somebody who you knew was dead, resurrected before your very eyes, would it change your belief in God?" Just something to think about.
And eyewitness testimony often turns out to be wrong.
Man, I'd love to see James Randi or Penn and Teller give this a good thrashing :-)
If you go on missions trips to places like India, Africa, South America, ressurection is a fairly common claim. I have spoken with one person that claimed to have seen an infant resurrected, and spoken to man that claimed to be resurrected. Both of these cases were in India. I am not convinced, not that people did'nt seem sincere and their stories seemed real, just the fantastic nature of the claim is a HUGE barrier to full belief for me. I do believe that God will do full on miracles when he wills it and they are to glorify Him.
I would like to see one once, but don't really need to. The healings I have seen with my own two eyes were remarkable enough. And if I ever walked into a church where the pastor called himself "Apostle _____" I would probably be thrown out ( and need to be, since I would be laughing so hard I would'nt be able to walk ).
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