Miracles

Why you are here.

It all began with a miracle. That’s the way it always begins.

The most evil lie you have ever heard and possibly even agreed to is that you were an accident, a big mistake. Nothing could be further from the truth, regardless the particular circumstances surrounding your conception and birth.

Furthermore, we are mysterious miracles. We walk and talk, laugh and cry, love and hate, and all we know is what we experience and are able to imagine, which, on the one hand, compared to a rock, is quite a lot, but compared to everything we know we do not know, let alone all that we don’t even know we don’t know is infinitesimally insignificant. A drop in the ocean actually overstates our understanding of things.

So of course we start, and even live within mysteries and miracles, and yet, ironically dismiss both as having little of anything to do with our rational lives.

Perhaps it would help to state what I mean by the word miracle. This is more than some  event I cannot explain. It is one that defies normal life processes. If given more time and all the scientific equipment available or even not yet invented, a true miracle can only be explained as something outside our ability to reproduce ever.

Anyone who has taken the Universal Studios Tour in LA knows how to part the Red Sea using water tanks and pumps along with camera equipment aimed in one particular direction. It’s an entirely different thing to step into the actual Red Sea and have it part down the middle from one side to the other so you and a million or more others could walk through it. It’s as if an entire nation was baptized together — going into death and coming out the other side no longer slaves. And this after four hundred years. That’s a miracle.

Which brings me to this final thought for today. People want to understand God but limit their bandwidth to only philosophical concepts. This was what the Enlightenment period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was all about. It was the rich soil out of which modern science was born but it was also the age that started dismissing the idea of a God who performs miracles. He was relegated to the dust bin of ancient superstitions, and this has affected mankind’s understanding of God and themselves ever since.

Looking back now we can see man has developed great weapons of mass destruction but has been unable to improve his basic human nature. In fact, there is a good argument that can be made that it has gotten worse. As a civilization we are not kinder or gentler than those who have lived before us. In fact to live in this world as Jesus lived in his is just as dangerous. For all of our current dangerous global problems to work out for mankind’s good will require a miracle. Fortunately, what is impossible for man is completely possible for the God we read about in the Bible.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash