God. Real. Right.

I have done a few brief interviews (here is an example about 12 minutes long) on Jerry Johnson Live to address whether sign-gifts such as healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy, and the Word of knowledge are valid gifts for the church today. I do not believe they are. The Criswell Theological Review published my explanation of the cessationist position (the view that the sign-gifts have ceased) in the Fall 2006 issue. That article is available in its entirety here. That argument, however, is too long and a bit cumbersome for most people who might want to understand my view. So here is a very brief overview of what I try to defend more fully in that explanation:
First: it is not insulting to God to say that some gifts are not valid for Christians today. To say that God does things differently at different times in no way questions His ability to do those things, but rather acknowledges that He is deliberate and personal in His activities.
Second: sign gifts are not important because of what they do directly, but because of what they signify. The gift of prophecy is not about the content of what is said but about the fact that there is a special message from God being given. Healing is not about biological improvement (which happens every time someone gets better) but about the improvement coming in an unusual way through a powerful source.
Third: unfortunately, however, what people believe those gifts signify has changed from the time of the New Testament to now. In New Testament times, the sign gifts signified the authority of the gift-bearer. Today, however, people take sign gifts for what they were never intended to be, evidence of what the culture broadly accepted in New Testament times–that is, evidence that there is something supernatural. Arguments against “miracles” (by David Hume, for the best example) are so compelling only because they argue that things like sign gifts cannot produce faith, by which they mean a belief in the supernatural. But a clear understanding of history and scripture reveals that sign gifts were never intended to produce that faith. The New Testament culture presumptively believed in the supernatural, with only a handful of exceptions. What required evidence was that a particular truth related to the supernatural–that is, they needed a reason to believe a particular messenger, which was provided in the New Testament with sign gifts.
Finally: the transformed purpose of sign gifts (to justify faith in the supernatural) cannot be justified biblically and produces at best only tenuous faith and in reality no faith at all. The original purpose of sign gifts cannot be practiced today without giving an authority to revelation on par with scripture itself. The sign gifts have either no signficance whatsoever today, or they justify ongoing special revelation from God–a position incompatible with Galatians 1:8-9 and 1 Corinthians 14:37.
This overview is not sufficient to prove each point–just to make the points known. For instance, the most immediate reply to this view is probably that sign gifts could be practiced and produce only statements compatible with scripture, in which case supposedly there would be no problem. However, this claim misses the whole point of the argument. If the message associated with the sign gift must be legitimated by Scripture, then there is no authority in the sign and the “gift” again becomes useless. For a defense of these claims, I suggest the ungainly task of reading the article itself.