What is a Miracle?

The message I heard in church this week caused me some cognitive dissonance. That’s another way of saying it made me think I was thinking something different from our pastor. That’s not unusual, but when it happens, I feel the need to discern whether my disagreement puts me in the right or the wrong. It also forces me to decide whether I need to discuss the differences with my pastor. There are many things of a non-essential nature that honest Christians can disagree about; few of them rise to the level of necessary confrontation. If you have not noticed it yet, my wife will confirm for you that I am way too concerned about semantic details. Words mean things, and I want to use and hear them used the with right meanings.

This week’s message was from the book of Acts where a lame man was healed and a woman, Dorcas/Tabitha, was raised from the dead. The point our pastor drove home was that many people believed in Jesus because of the miracles they witnessed. He asked us if more people would believe today if they saw miracles. Then he stepped of the cliff, semantically speaking, to suggest that we do see miracles every day. He suggested that our advanced scientific knowledge has revealed “miracles” at many levels. A tree is a miracle. The structure of an atom is a miracle. The wonder of the stars is a miracle. Hmmm.

At that point I was wriggling in my seat and biting my tongue. My wife gets righteously upset when I allow my semantic proclivities to rise while we are still in the pew, so to speak. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it, so here I write. Strictly speaking, a miracle is a departure from what is natural. The Oxford Dictionary says a miracle is, “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.” Lame men walking and dead women rising is not natural – it’s supernatural or miraculous. To say that God’s creation is miraculous does not fit the strict definition.

However, the next entry in the dictionary says, “an amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something” might be called a miracle. My semantic accuracy meter begins to rise. My pastor may have been correct that an atom or a star is “amazing.” God’s creation is certainly amazing, but if we use the word “miracle” this loosely, I fear we devalue the true worth of the miracles performed by Peter or anyone else reported in the Bible record. When God intervenes to suspend or reverse the course of nature, He shows His sovereign power over that which He has made. He can break the rules, if you will, and do truly amazing things, things that are not part of the course of nature.

The paradigm shift away from a position of faith to one of reason that began with the so-called Enlightenment was based on the belief that science, aka nature, would reveal her secrets in such a way that faith in a divine Creator would no longer be necessary. And here we are. We can explain all sorts of things that were considered “miraculous” in the pre-scientific world. However, there are a few things that still have the scientists baffled, chief among them are where the universe came from, and what the essence of life is. Darwin and the Big Bang are proving to be a bust where origins are concerned. And no one anywhere has ever created life from scratch. We don’t even know what life is, really. We talk about organic and inorganic as categories, but we have no idea what makes a thing organic – alive.

The Bible teaches that God created our known universe out of nothing. He spoke; it became. The Bible also teaches that life comes from God. In Genesis God breathed life into Adam and presumably did something similar for all the living creatures He made. From that point on, the creation of life became procreation or continuation of what God had started. Because of Adam’s rebellion, the life he received from God was limited by the introduction of death and decay. Sin’s death sentence puts an end to the miracle of life for all creatures. But there is another miracle waiting.

Paul makes an interesting statement in 1 Corinthians 15 about life. He states that each form of living thing – humans, animals, birds, fish – have a distinct flesh. The word “flesh” is a biblical synonym for life. He goes a step further to say that when a believer dies, his earthly body is “sown in corruption… dishonor… and weakness” meaning that it decays. He says it is sown a “natural body,” but it is raised a “spiritual body.” In the coming resurrection, the restoration of all things perfect, Paul says we will have a different kind of life. That will be a true miracle because it will not be natural, but supernatural. That’s the miracle I’m waiting for.

Related posts: Think Supernaturally; What’s Glorious