The mistake of assuming that God’s power can only come as a gift

God has always provided the world with sufficient reasons to believe in him. A crucial element of such evidence consists of continuous demonstrations of his power throughout time. The most effective way God has to help his children to believe he exists, know what he is like, and persuade them to be like him is to send to earth those who are more like him than those they are sent to minister to. The more like God one of his messengers is, the more they will be able to demonstrate his character qualities to the people with sufficient demonstrations of his power to prove that they are his emissaries. Unfortunately, the more like God a person is, the more they are rejected and persecuted. God is extremely merciful, and in times of great wickedness,² he still makes his power known through giving his power not through merit but as a gift.³ Because the righteous are so rare and the wicked so abundant, most examples of God’s power are in the form of a gift.

Miracles performed through God’s gifts are usually held up as the epitome of faith, when in actuality they are the result of a lack thereof. The gifts of God are so minuscule in the share of God’s goodness, purpose, and power that it is not appropriate to speak about them in the same frame as God’s power through merit.

God’s power through gifts is a form of palliative care—a limited lesser blessing given to those who refuse the improvement necessary to continuously perceive, receive, and value greater blessings. While God is able to demonstrate more of his power to the wicked through gifts than he can through merit, this mechanism makes it more difficult for the people who witness the gift to understand his character and less likely that they will make the changes needed to become more like him. During his mortal life, the Lord ministered to a people primed to think of God’s blessings as gifts detached from merit, whose promises came from the worthiness of distant ancestors. He continuously struggled to persuade them to seek their own righteousness rather than the rewards earned by others, but the Jews’ desires for gifts from God far exceeded their desire to become like him.⁴

God’s gifts are very limited in their ability to show how God is, because they can only show the outcome of his power, not its source. Because gifts come independent of the worthiness of the individual receiving them,⁵ they offer no evidence of the merit of the character of the person possessing them. The generative version of God’s power not only shows that God exists and has power, but also certifies the virtue of the person wielding it, as generative power is an outward indication of how much the character of a person aligns with the character of God. The generative power of God cannot be shown without also showing how to obtain it via the demonstration of the character of the person who has it. For example, while the gift of healing can reduce suffering and may perhaps demonstrate something about God in the process, the generative power of God will provide all of these benefits along with a demonstration of God’s character in the form of the person performing the miracle. The purpose of miracles isn’t to reduce suffering; it is to increase godliness. Generative miracles do this much better than miracles by gift. While the gifts of God provide fruits of his power plucked from the vine, the generative power of God provides continuous access to the vine that produces them.

The most common reaction to demonstrations of God’s power is to set up the demonstrated power as an idol—something sought after or worshiped apart from God who gave it. When people worship miracles instead of God, they tend to set up fake mechanisms for transmitting God’s power. While this never works, it doesn’t seem to stop it from happening. Institutions following this pattern respond to the lack of real miracles by inflating common occurrences to the status of miracles and claiming that God’s authority can be transmitted separate from God’s power. God’s gifts cannot be transmitted through those who possess them because they do not know and do not possess the character qualities that generate the power organically, including the power to give it as a gift. Someone who has generative power from God also knows something about his character, and can impart power to anyone who is willing to become as he is.