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What exactly ARE miracles?


MiraclesAre 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.)

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2 comments:

  1. Fascinating column. And it helped me realize that there are indeed two (or probably three) classes of "miracles" ...

    1) Very everyday things that are a result of God's interaction with us or His creative power, which most people would not call a miracle. For instance: The way He has changed my heart, and enabled me to love someone who is difficult to love. Or, the beauty of a flower unfolding its petals to the morning sun.

    2) Things which are outside of normal which COULD be explained by coincidence or some other natural means, but really are God's intervention on our behalf. For example, the time I crashed my mountainbike in the wilderness and was seriously injured. I had had no cellphone signal all morning. When I prayed for help. I watched my cellphone bars go from 0 to 5 and I was able to call 911. After they dispatched help, the signal died back down to 0. Could be coincidence ... but I know it wasn't. God acted to save my life after I prayed. (See http://www.shblog.org/2010/09/simple-lessons-are-sometimes-hardest.html for details on this and other such "miracles" in my life.)

    3) Those acts of God which you mentioned in the article, which truly are far "beyond normal" and cannot really be chalked up to coincidence. Jesus (and Peter) walking on water; the feeding of the 5,000; Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, all great examples. (And yes, I believe God also occasionally does this category of miracle today. In college I met a man who was in the middle of a revival of the church in Saigon just before Vietnam fell, and he told me personal firsthand accounts of many people being healed from grievous wounds and even one young man being raised from the dead.)

    My question is, you mentioned that God never violates His own laws, but obviously some if not all of this third category involves a violation of physical laws. Walking on water clearly involves a violation of the law of gravity or at least one of the laws of thermodynamics. I've never found it unreasonable to assume that God cannot "set aside" such physical laws at will. And what about Joshua 10:13, where "The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day" in accordance with Joshua's request to the Lord, to allow for victory over the Amorites?

    If that doesn't involve a suspension of the physical laws that govern God's created universe, I'm not sure what does.

    For a discussion of how we think about miracles, and the impact on our lives, please see this blog post: http://www.shblog.org/2014/01/whats-miracle.html

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  2. Larry,

    Thanks for your comments. I really like how you've broken down miracles to show how different types of situations can be miraculous and that not all miracles may "seem" as miraculous as others. Under your first category, I would include things such as holding together all creation and allowing for all the things that are happening at any given moment.

    As to your question, I think we may actually be in agreement more than one might think. I generally try to avoid the terminology of "violation" simply because I think it paints what God is doing in a negative light.

    In the examples you give, I don't see those so much as a "violation" of physical laws as much as an "intervention." Just like when a ball is falling and a person catches it, the ball no longer moving downward, but no law of gravity was violated. There was merely an intervention of an agent who introduced another force into the circumstance and stopped the downward motion of the ball.

    Now, you also mention something about "suspension of the physical laws." That is another way to view these situations. Again, I would say that whether the correct way to understand it is "suspension of" or "intervention in" the physical laws, in neither case would I describe those as "violations."

    I hope the distinction is clear. As I said, I think we pretty much agree on this to a large degree. It seems to be largely an issue of semantics.

    Thanks again!

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