Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.
Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
The ontology of miracles is a difficult subject to grasp, even for a person who has experienced them first hand. There are far more miracles taking place than any human being could appreciate or understand.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55:8-9 KJV
Nonetheless, here we go…
- Biblical Miracles
- Sensory Miracles
- Memory Miracles
- Wisdom Miracles
- Guidance Miracles
- Vicarious Miracles
- Scientific Miracles
- Engineering Miracles
- Natural Miracles
- The Existential Miracle
- The Miracle of Freedom
Biblical Miracles are the miracles performed by Jesus in the New Testament, healing blindness, paralysis, casting out demons, resurrecting Lazarus, and perhaps greatest of all forgiveness of sins. While clearly the most wonderful and amazing category of miracle, sometimes we are blinded by their brilliance and limit the Lord to only these past instances.
Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
John 20:29 KJV
Sensory or Perception Miracles are very subtle and easy to miss. Have you every felt your eye drawn towards an important detail that might have escaped your notice? The Lord can help you by either making you notice something good, or causing you to overlook something that would affect you negatively. For example, you’re driving your car and are distracted by the phone or passenger or your emotional state or obsessive thinking… and out of the corner of your eye you notice a car swerving towards you. You focus your attention and avoid a collision that could have been catastrophic or even fatal. Was it your skill that saved you? Luck? Or did God intervene on your behalf making sure you saw exactly what you needed to see? Or more precisely, notice what you needed to notice in your field of vision.
Memory Miracles can take two different forms, either remembering something important at exactly the right time for it to be helpful to you. Some people are gifted by the Lord with incredible memories that allow them to remember stories, scripts, musical arrangements, mathematical formulas, or how to build things properly. We tend to dismiss all these examples as the result of hard work or natural talent (although natural talent has even become politically incorrect because no one can be better at anything than other people because that isn’t “equitable”). But there is an undeniable supernatural quality to memory, and if you are honest with yourself you don’t understand why you remember some things and forget others. There is a space there for the Lord to work, to intervene on your behalf. The other form of Memory Miracle is forgetting things that would cause you harm or prevent you from growing spiritually. Perhaps akin to forgiveness, when we hold on to bad memories and replay them over and over in our minds obsessively they can damage our psyche and keep our spirit in a disturbed state. When the Lord steps in and blocks those memories out of your consciousness, allowing you to move on in forgiveness and grace, the only possible word for it is Miracle.
Wisdom Miracles harken back to Solomon, legendary even to this day, who prayed for wisdom above all other wishes.
And the speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. And God said unto him, Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life; neither hast asked riches for thyself, nor hast asked the life of thine enemies; but hast asked for thyself understanding to discern judgment; Behold, I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee.
1 Kings 3:10-12 KJV
The same is available to all who pray earnestly:
If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.
James 1:5 KJV
So take into account Sensory Miracles and Memory Miracles, and it isn’t a great leap forward to reach Wisdom Miracles – the Holy Spirit simply causes correct understanding and right interpretation to flow into the mind of the believer highlighting the correct aspect to be focused on and the context for it and the feeling that flows from the right understanding. Simply, Wisdom. It can include intellectual understanding, but is not limited to cold logical analysis or recitation of facts but rises to a higher level of reflection that knows what to think, and what to think about that thought, and how to feel about the infinitely complex tower of thought revealed in an instant before receding away from our limited, finite human brain.
And again, we tend to dismiss these miracles as pedestrian examples of human effort and the unlimited potential of humanism. But if you study the beauty and simplicity of calculus or Newtonian physics, and you are honest with yourself, you realize the only way such secrets have been exposed is through divine revelation – not hard work, dumb luck and happenstance discovery.
Guidance Miracles are simply being nudged by the Holy Spirit to go this way, not that way. Or to avoid those people and be drawn to these people. It can be as simple as “wait a few minutes”, or as complicated as “talk to this person, but don’t say how you really feel”. Unlike Wisdom Miracles, understanding is not required or provided – instead faith is required.
And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.
Matthew 17:20 KJV
The more frequently you obey God, the more frequently you will receive guidance. Sometimes, after the fact, you will find out why, but much of the time we will never find out why here on earth. This may be because we simply cannot understand the way God does, seeing the beginning and the end at the same time and knowing how one small decision fits into the infinite multitude of possibilities stretching across time and space. Sometimes, following the Lord will lead to obvious benefits or avoid harms, but sometimes it will put us in difficult or stressful situations or even get us hurt or killed. None of us are able to follow perfectly the example of Jesus Christ who went to the cross willingly on our behalf to save us from eternal damnation.
As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:
Romans 3:10 KJV
But Christians do step in front of bullets, stand in front of bullies, and go to work every day in a dark, lost world shining the light of truth and witness wherever they go. But they know also that it isn’t anything special about them, but rather that Jesus Christ acts through them despite their failings and weaknesses.
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.
Ephesians 2:8-9 KJV
Vicarious Miracles occur when God acts through other people like doctors, strangers, family members. Granted it is difficult to identify such miracles, and even harder to prove them, but nonetheless I steadfastly believe that such miracles are exceedingly common. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I have found throughout my life that I have been guided to a certain place and time to help a specific person. Again, I’m not talking about Biblical knock-your-socks off miracles, but if your heart and mind are open you will begin to see that at least some of the things that happen in your life are not random occurrences, or the result of your own will power, intelligence or inherent goodness.
Scientific Miracles are technologies and processes that we once again are happy to attribute to human beings and our cleverness or luck. Whether it be microwave ovens, chemotherapy, MRIs or space travel, why do we see such things as proof that God does not exist? If you look deep enough into the matter, even with years of intense study of engineering and scientific theory, ultimately you will find that human beings don’t actually understand exactly how or why things work the way they do. They may have mathematical formulas and scientific models that allow them to reliably reproduce phenomenon and construct technological artifacts, but deep down inside at a molecular or subatomic level we reach a point of explanation that sounds something like this: “it works this way after repeated experimentation”. Medicines are very similar, if you read the insert of any medication from the pharmacy, you will eventually find buried in the fine print a statement that says it works “through an unknown mechanism”. As we become more an more comfortable living in a constructed environment, driving cars we don’t understand how they work and can’t fix, cooking with appliances that would be dangerous for most of us to even open, receiving electric power over a grid built by other people years ago that we don’t appreciate, etc. etc. It becomes easy for us to simply overlook the miracles of science as mechanistic, deterministic result of human endeavor and to far overestimate other human beings true understanding of how things work and WHY.
Engineering Miracles are very similar to the scientific miracles described above. Let me just expand to a larger scale with a less theoretical and more practical bent. Artifacts of modern life we can interact with on a daily basis: internal combustion engines, bridges, sky scrapers, jet airplanes. Each represents a miraculous demonstration of God’s power and engineers are people just like you and I.
Let’s continue one step further from miracles that are casually contributed to man, to miracles that are instead repurposed to make a man feel small and insignificant. Natural Miracles can include a range of observables from rainbows to beaches, canyons to the milky way, even the creatures inside God’s creation such as a rainbow trout can be amazing and awesome when viewed with the eyes of a child. But we humans manage to simultaneously look at such displays of God’s ultimate power and intelligence and think firstly that we can deconstruct them, understand them, in a purely mechanistic even robotic manner, while at the same time feeling the weight of our own insignificance in the vast web of the cosmic ecosystem – because we don’t recognize that the creator of the universe made us purposefully in his own image. If you are nothing more than an ant, nee an amoeba, living within the infinite clockwork of a mechanistic universe, why wouldn’t you logically and immediately commit suicide upon such terrifying horrific realization?
This leads us directly to the Existential Miracle, a frequently trivialized and dismissed “thank the Lord for the air we breathe” miracle. It’s sort of like, of course this is true, but where do you go next with it? But consider the great lengths mankind has gone to explain away this most fundamental fact: from inventing the “Big Bang”, to accidentally detecting cosmic background radiation, to the casino-like randomly disappearing and reappearing subatomic foam that we can’t even detect or measure below the size of Planck’s constant. These matters are swept aside as either philosophical questions that don’t concern ordinary people, or assumed to have been adequately explained by scientific theories. We can even wrap all the way back to Sensory Miracles because they also have been tackled by philosopher’s and scientists (psychologists) who confidently explain that not only can we not trust our own eyes, but that we can’t even understand the relationship between the real world and the cognitive model our brain constructs inside our heads. So best to just leave such existential questions to nihilistic scientists and arrogant philosophers lest we go insane trying to find the truth.
The Miracle of Freedom God gives different types of freedom and the word can be interpreted variously. Those who deny God’s existence are most concerned with free will – they rejoice in the gift of being made in God’s image and being blessed with the free will to make their own decisions and choose their own path in life. However, at the same time they probably blame God for everything wrong with the world – sin and death, selfishness and lack of compassion. You must be able to contemplate paradoxes since the world is full of them and God isn’t limited by them – it can be true that God exists and is in control of everything, and also that he chose to give you free will since he made you in his image. It can be true that the world is full of evil, and also that God is good and made a way for you to be reconciled with him despite your sinful nature.
Another type of freedom is similar but worldly, Moses led the Jewish slaves out of Egypt to the promised land, and slaves were set free as a result of the Civil War in the United States. Unfortunately, slavery still exists because sin still exists in this world and only Jesus can free the world from sin.
This is the final and perhaps truest form of freedom, freedom from sin and temptation. If you freely give up your self will and allow the Holy Spirit to guide your life, you will find yourself released from the shackles of sin – no longer carrying a ball and chain around your ankles wherever you go. No longer obsessing about your next cigarette, your next drink, your next smoke, your next hit, or your next sexual partner.
I want to point out a final paradox; every miracle can be attributed to God or to man or “nature”. You can feel that the good things you do are the result of your own inherent goodness (probably leading you to be arrogant) or you can realize that God gave you the ability to distinguish right from wrong and only by becoming a better listener and follower can you do better (leading you to be humble and grateful). When you marvel at God’s creation, you can either feel special and lucky that the Lord created this entire universe just for humans to exist (and be thankful for it) or you can view yourself as just one tiny cog in the grand machine of happenstance millennial cosmology making you feel like nothing you do matters and humans are worthless compared to the expanse of the multiverse. Do you want to be free from guilt, or free from sin?
You may ask, what if I don’t believe in God? How can the Holy Spirit help me if I haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour? The Lord knows who will ultimately accept his invitation of faith, but nonetheless he speaks to all persons. Some will hear the call and heed it, some will reject it. The paradox is that the decision is up to you, so you can be confident that God will honor your decision as to where you wish to go when you die.
Lastly, let’s take a look at some definitions of the word from the Internet and see where they might go wrong.
Here is the top result from a Google search for miracle, notice the emphasis on “natural or scientific laws” and the deemphasis “considered to be” and the rather ambiguous “divine agency”. The example sentence is arguably about Jesus but nowhere is He mentioned in this definition. How about “miracle: a work of God”.
Here the anonymous author from Wikipedia tosses in the word “supernatural” which once again is like calling white the “unblack” color. We’re not going to say it’s something only God could do, instead we invent a made up category of events which aren’t easily dismissed or explained by human scientific understanding or attributable to cold, indifferent natural phenomenon like evolution or Schrödinger’s cat. Furthermore, not only are we not going to mention God, we are going to list a bunch of other things which clearly are more likely to be an explanation for a miracle such as magician, the redundant “miracle worker” (one who works miracles, no doubt), or saints or religious leaders – but definitely NOT Jesus, no way, not Him!
Note the emphasis on “believed”, although this definition from M-W actually is the best we’ve seen so far. It actually includes the words “power of God”, although now less emphasis on the lack of other explanations – miracles are merely unusual or wonderful events. In the second definition we can see the explicit Engineering Miracles which might have something to do with my inclusion of that category in my miracular ontology above. Praise Jesus, we finally end up with a mention of “the healing miracles described in the Gospels”, but once again why “described in”, why not “the healing miracles performed by Jesus in the Gospels”? The Christian Science definition at the end is just weird, “divinely natural” and “experienced humanly”? That is one oxymoron followed by one redundancy. And I’ve heard of fulfillment of prophecy, or fulfillment of The Bible, but what exactly is “spiritual law”? I’m not interested in any religion that doesn’t have Jesus Christ as its Chief Priest and that doesn’t speak in plain terms.
For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.”
1 Corinthians 14:33 KJV