tdidymas
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where does Heb. 2:4 say these have ceased?
He is talking about eye witnesses of Jesus' ministry and resurrection,
He says that miraculous signs and gifts they did were for authenticating the message,
He speaks of those signs as being in the past, not the present.
He makes no claim of doing anything of the sort, which implies he had no such gift: "confirmed unto us by them that heard" - he is excluding himself from those performing the miracles, and including himself in those who witnessed the performance.
"both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost" - he is including gifts of the Spirit (of the 1 Cor. kind) in the miraculous acts which he is laying no claim to.
The distinction I am making is there is a difference between having a gift to perform miraculous acts and God performing isolated miraculous acts. The gift (of the 1 Cor. kind) is where a certain individual repeatedly performs those acts as they will, or that God performs them through that particular individual, so that those miracles are associated with that individual. When God performs isolated miracles, there is no particular individual that is associated with it, therefore, there is no person who has a gifting of the 1 Cor. kind. Those gifts were for authenticating the gospel message and eventually passed away as Heb. 2:4 indicates.
I'm simply trying to point out that the scripture itself has an indication that there was a time in the 1st Century that those activities stopped happening. We know from history and legend (Foxe's Book of Martyrs) that occasional miracles happened after that time (like John living through boiling oil), but it certainly was not as it was in the days of the gifts and working of miracles. Even today miracles happen, but they are few and occasional. Most of the "miracles" that people claim today are not miracles. In fact, many so-called "miracles" are fraudulent.
TD
BTW, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the writer of Hebrews didn't perform miracles or speak in tongues.
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