What exactly ARE miracles?

Are miracles just things that we can't explain? Are they violations of natural law? Are they figments of our imagination? Are they really acts of God?

The concept of miracles, how to describe what they are (and by extension, what they are not) and how to identify when one has occurred is a very tricky thing, indeed. The very idea of a miracle is difficult to get our minds around. Popular culture and bad rhetoric from non-believers just make it all the more challenging.


For one thing, the term "miracle" is often misused in many people's every day speech. People will use the term to describe some highly improbably turn of events, like the Cardinals winning the Super Bowl or their 7 year old using their manners and politely declining a second dessert after dinner at their friend's house.

If a sports team not known for making it to the playoffs and having winning seasons makes it to the championship, that is not a miracle. It is the result of a combination of hard work, determination, good decisions, good timing and executing better than the other teams. All of these things are explainable by normal, ordinary, mundane facts. Yet, many people will mistakenly use the term "miracle" when such things happen.

When it comes to this sort of thing, let's please agree to be more careful when we use this term as we are guilty of abusing it to the point that it has little meaning any more. But that leads us to the question, when is it appropriate to use it?

Well, perhaps the first thing we should do is define what we mean by a legitimate "miracle." A miracle is merely an instance of God acting in the world in a less common manner than usual. That certainly doesn't seem to help much at this point, though, does it?

The reason for defining it this way is to attempt to be careful about how miracles have often been defined for a number of years. It is common for people to think of a miracle as a "violation" of natural laws. This seems to be a poor definition, however, as it puts God in a position of being some sort of rule-breaker. Or, since He is the rule-maker, He may be thought of as acting as though He were "above the Law." Since God is a God of justice, and since He is the Law, he neither breaks rules nor is immune to them.

According to Colossians 1:17, "in Him all things hold together." The Bible teaches that God is the cause of the fact that the laws of physics work the way they do from one moment to the next. When a piece of wood is subjected to a flame, God has established and maintains physical laws which result in the wood catching fire. However, sometimes, He does not allow things to work the way they normally do...much like when Sadrach, Meshack and Abednego were put in the fiery furnace and were not burned.

So, it's not a matter of God violating any law of nature. He simply will occasionally choose not to allow certain physical laws to work the way they normally do in similar circumstances. Most of the time, God seems to choose to allow material objects interact in particular ways most of the time...but not all the time. The reason the physical laws appear to be so consistent is because, provided that God is not working toward a specific end that requires a different type of physical interaction, He tends to be quite consistent over the course of thousands and thousands of years. (I, on the other hand, have difficulty remembering how I made a particular dinner a few months ago and would not be able to repeat it precisely.)

Is it possible that miracles are merely figments of our imagination? Our minds playing tricks on us so that we see things we really want to see, rather than what actually happened? In many cases, I will admit this can be the case. However, certain events seem to be miraculous which cannot be simply imagined as they involve other people in other places over periods of time. For example, Mary did not simply imagine that she became pregnant prior to consummating her marriage with Joseph. There really was a baby! And Joseph obviously was aware of that fact, too.

Imagination, it seems, while perhaps able to dispel a number of individual miracle reports involving only a single witness and over a brief period of time, is incapable of explaining the virgin birth, the feeding of the 5,000, the disciples seeing Jesus (and Peter) walking on water, Jesus turning water into wine, Jesus healing lepers and other illnesses and, of course, His resurrection! These events were witnessed by too many people and the results of the events remained, indicating that they were not merely imagined. (You may have noticed that imagined things have very little staying power in the real world.)

For more resources:

• Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts - Craig Keener
• Miracles - C. S. Lewis
• Creation, Providence and Miracle - William Lane Craig
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