Mysteries and Miracles
We are surrounded by what we do not know, and yet are the proudest creatures on the planet.
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.
It 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 can 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 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 ourselves 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 to be made that our collective humanity has gotten worse.
We are not kinder or gentler than those who lived before us.
Fortunately, what is impossible for man is completely possible for God.
For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”
Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?”
But he said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”
Luke 18:25-27 (ESV)
