Saturday, October 24, 2015
Miracles
I saw the before and after x-rays; a picture
of the spots on the lung and another, taken later, with no more spots. I have watched people get out of wheelchairs,
remove casts and recover from health issues the doctors predicted would be
fatal. I have personally prayed for people who were healed of cancer, deafness,
back conditions, and many other ailments.
I know several people who died and came back to life. I have witnessed
miracles.
I
also love Science. The Bible advises,
"Prove all things; hold fast that
which is good." (1 Thessalonians
5:21 KJV) The Message
paraphrase puts it like this: "On the other hand, don't be gullible. Check
out everything, and keep only what's good." There is nothing like a fair and
objective look at things. In fact, it is
because of good Science and advancing technology that we can now do a better
job of identifying the miraculous.
Miracles have been observed since the
beginning of civilization. For
believers, they have been a source of wonder.
For skeptics they have been inconvenient
"coincidences". Some
unbelievers are disconcerted to the extent that they work feverishly to
disprove the miraculous. The Jewish
leaders of Jesus' day tried to kill Lazarus because he was walking proof that
people could be raised from the dead (John 12:10). Those same religious leaders tried to silence
the man born blind because they couldn't explain how Jesus made him to see. The miraculous has always boosted the faith
of believers and unsettled the minds of unbelievers.
It should be noted, however, that the
miracles and Science are not enemies.
Faith and Science are not incompatible.
In fact, good Science, is often a great source of faith. Many skeptics who have set out to disprove
things like creation or miracles have applied fair scientific methods only to
be thoroughly convinced that there is a Creator and that He still does
miracles.
In his scholarly and insightful book titled
"Miracles", Eric Metaxas makes this observation: "The list of
contemporary men and women of science who believe in the God of the Bible and
in miracles is virtually endless. We are only surprised by this— if we are—
because our culture has so forcefully promoted the idea that faith and science
are at odds, but the ironic and virtually unknown reality is that modern
science itself was essentially invented by people of Christian faith. That’s because they believed in a God who had
created a universe of staggeringly magnificent order, one that could be
understood rationally, and one that it was therefore worth trying to
understand. Many of them believed their scientific work was a way of glorifying
God, because it revealed the spectacular order and manifold genius of God’s
creation. Isaac Newton himself was a serious Christian, and Galileo, who
because of his battles with the Catholic Church is often thought of as a
scientist at odds with Christian faith, was in fact a committed Christian. To
add just two from the many others we might name, John Clerk Maxwell and Michael
Faraday were both men of deep Christian faith, whose breadth of scientific
genius can hardly be overstated, and whose faith explicitly underpinned their
zeal to understand the laws governing the universe."
Miracles are not un-provable imaginations of
emotionally and mentally unstable people.
Miracles are continuing evidences of a Creator God. Miracles are reminders that God is in
control. Miracles will continue to
withstand the scrutiny of good Science and frustrate the skeptics. Why fight
the miraculous? Why not enter the realm
of faith and enjoy the miracles that God sends your way?
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