The Miracle of the Church

Miracles are intriguing things. They engage the imagination in much the same way that parables engage the mind.

Because of this, it is common to hear Christians appeal to the miracles of the Bible as evidence for both the existence of God and the rightness of the Christian faith. It is common to hear Christians point to the novelty of turning water into wine or the sheer audacity of walking on water to demonstrate the deity of Jesus; it is, after all, unthinkable that anyone should refuse to believe in a man whose actions disregard the most basic principles of chemistry or scoff at the notion of liquid viscosity. Only a man who was also God could transform a few pieces of bread and some fish into a meal for thousands; only the Son of God could still a storm with His words.

But we must be cautious. These miracles may be miraculous to the Christian, but the forgotten fact is that the miracles of the Bible are far too removed to serve real apologetic purpose.

    

As Christians we can marvel at serving a God who can part a sea, rain fire from heaven, or choose to destroy a city with either fire and brimstone or the sound of trumpets, but we must be aware that these stories are less than worthless to anyone who does not already believe. Just as the Apostle Paul said that “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God,” this may be applied equally to any of the other miracles of the Bible. For it should go without saying that to disbelieve in God is undoubtedly to disbelieve in His miracles. No secular humanist will ever be swayed by the assertion of even the most heartfelt Christian that Jesus once made money appear in a fish’s mouth or cured blindness with mud. Those who disbelieve in God do not merely believe in a natural law, but in a natural law that is, by definition, immutable. Rules, to the naturalist, are not proved by the exception; they are proved by the fact that no exception exists. How could any such skeptic be expected to accept the presence of events which, by definition, ignore such laws? If miracles could be explained, after all, then they would cease being miracles altogether. True miracles are not just difficult to rationalize, they are impossible to rationalize, therefore making them truly beneficial to only two groups of people: those who witness the miracles firsthand and those who already believe in them.

Then are miracles without value to the non-believer? Far from it! Though the apostolic age of great public miracles may be in the past, it just so happens that two of the greatest miracles performed by Jesus Christ are ongoing. These great circumventions of the law of nature were not just momentary glimpses into His deity, but are enduring and undeniable even after two thousand years.

To the Christian, the greatest of Christ’s many miracles is undoubtedly His resurrection from the dead; not just a physical body returning to consciousness like Lazarus, but the pure, unchangeable body of a King ready to take his throne. It is one of only two miracles (along with the incarnation) for which there is a holiday that has overtaken the world. To those who believe that it happened as described, there is no more joyful cry than that of “He is risen!” for if this is true, then it is not only Christ who has been freed from the grave, but we as well. Now, says Malcolm Muggeridge, “After his death on the Cross, we are told, he was seen by the disciples and others on numerous occasions; the stone in front of the tomb where he had been laid was found to have been removed, and the tomb to be empty. These are matters of legitimate historical investigation; what is not open to question is that today, two thousand years later, Christ is alive. The words he spoke are living words, as relevant now as when they were first spoken.” Indeed, the first enduring miracle of Jesus is that He is alive today; it is miraculous that His words have not lost their meaning; He is still worshiped as God in an age when such a thing should be unfathomable; He died, and yet He undeniably lives.

The second miracle is, in some sense, the very same as the first, though it is one that might be more readily understood. This is the miracle of the church. The church—the living body of Christ on Earth—is perhaps the most overlooked miracle in the world, though it is no less miraculous than the raising of the dead. Augustine of Hippo considered it a miracle as early as the fourth century: “...the very manner in which the world's faith was won is found to be miraculous if we consider it. Men uninstructed in any branch of a liberal education, without any of the refinement of heathen learning, unskilled in grammar, not armed with dialectic, not adorned with rhetoric, but plain fishermen, and very few in number—these were the men whom Christ sent with the nets of faith to the sea of this world, and thus took out of every race so many fishes, and even the philosophers themselves, wonderful as they are rare.” If the continued existence of a church founded in such humility was so remarkable even in the fourth century, how much more profound must it be after sixteen hundred more years?

But it is not just that the church has survived—certainly there exist devout pockets of long-thought-dead mythology and every form of paganism that ever caught the hearts of men. Cults and sects come and go and sometimes remnants remain far longer than any would expect. No, it is not just survival, it is that the church, born from the humblest imaginable circumstances, proceeded to conquer the world with its message. It is not remarkable that there are loud, unshaven men on street corners with provocative signs or that there are devout ascetics in caves in the desert; it is that the growth of the church has meant both the rise and the fall of great governments, the subject of historic works of art and unfathomable conquests.

Still more remarkable, the miracle is not just that the church has conquered, for the hearts of men are fickle enough that such things can happen—it is that Jesus Christ insisted that it would happen long before it did.

The world may question the validity of Jesus’ words all it likes—we may even argue about whether or not the man even existed in the first place—but there can be no question that the sayings bearing his name were first put to papyrus long before there was any reason to believe that this little Jewish sub-sect would become anything of note. There is no doubt that by the end of the first century it was well known that Christ affirmed: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” There is no doubt that, before the church ever made it as far as Rome, Jesus declared to his disciple: “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Whether these were the words of a God or not, they were words that, centuries later, have been left unshaken.

The audacity of Christ in declaring that His message would survive Him first began to circulate among a bold, but persecuted church trying to gain a foothold within the greatest empire the world has ever known; there were signs of encouragement in the growth of these communities, but there was nothing to suggest that the gospel should have the power to, not only conquer the empire, but to survive, and even thrive, long after the empire collapsed.

To the first churches in Asia Minor it must have seemed an unbelievable thing that the Apostle John should prophecy not just the survival of their diminutive communities of believers, but of a thriving church that would overtake the world: “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the lamb!’”

To the reader who does not yet believe, I can only suggest that they look more carefully at the history of the church, for it has survived and thrived beyond all reason, and in perfect accord with the assertion of Christ. And to the reader of faith, who already believes in and is encouraged by the many miracles of the Bible—to the one who bears witness to the continued miracles of the church and the resurrection—I say this: “God is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness.” We can take solace that the last and greatest promise of Jesus continues to hold true: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”