Mighty to Save: Discovering God's Grace in the Miracles of Jesus

by Richard D. Phillips

Calming the storm. Healing the sick. Raising the dead. These are just a few of the wondrous works of Jesus Christ. Yet these miracles are only a small glimpse into his most wondrous miracle of all—redeeming his children. Examining thirteen miracles of Jesus in the gospel of Luke, Richard Phillips traces their underlying significance straight to the cross. In this exciting study, Phillips expounds the true meaning and intention of these miracles and shows how each one reveals God's mighty saving grace.

248 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2001

About the author

Richard D. Phillips (MDiv, Westminster Theological Seminary) is the senior minister of Second Presbyterian Church of Greenville, South Carolina. He is a council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, chairman of the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, and coeditor of the Reformed Expository Commentary series.

Reviews

[E · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a ton of respect for Rick Phillips, but this book, written nearly twenty years ago, was not my cup of tea. Instead of taking the miracles at face value, he turns them all into enacted parables. That is to say, in a way, that he moralizes, even allegorizes. Yes, the "moral" is always the gospel, but I'm not sure every miracle, and every main facet of every miracle, is supposed to point somewhere else. It's okay to draw some of those connections in a sermon, within reason, but chapter after chapter of treating every miracle as merely (and I do mean "merely") an illustration of our salvation? I guess I could have stopped after the first chapter and gotten the message of the entire book!

You would do much better studying the miracles as miracles, using a study Bible or a good commentary, than using this book, unless you want to be continually frustrated. And as an aside, despite all the meaning he assigns to miracles, he never gets to the what I believe is the actual import of the miracles--the inbreaking of the new creation through the personal work of the cosmic Redeemer, the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. How could he miss that?