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.”
