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Thursday, August 02, 2012

Public and private miracles

This is a sequel to Jason’s post:


One objection of unbelievers is to assert that if God isn’t currently performing miracles like he reputably did in the Bible, then there’s no reason to believe in Biblical miracles, either.

For now I’d like to make one point: although the Bible contains many reported miracles, we need to distinguish between large-scale and small-scale miracles. Most biblical miracles are small-scale miracles. Likewise, many Biblical miracles are acts of divine mercy.

To take a few examples of each: the fate of Lot’s wife, Balaam’s talking donkey, God answering the prayer of Abraham’s servant, the burning bush, multiplying the widow’s oil and meal, healing Peter’s mother-in-law, raising the daughter of Jairus.

We only know about these miracles (and others like them) because the Bible records them. So even though the Bible contains many miracles, most of these are not on a scale that would normally leave a physical trace or leave a literary record.

And by the same token, we’d expect the same thing in church history. Most answered prayers are acts of divine mercy. God isn’t trying to prove himself to the world. Say a mother on a Nebraska farm in 1870 prays at the sickbed of her ailing teenage son, and God heals her son. That’s not going to make it into the record books. And most miracles will be of that nature. God answering the prayer of a desperate Christian, or arranging events in the “nick of time” to deliver a Christian in a bind.

That’s entirely consistent with Biblical priorities. Unbelievers create an artificial expectation, then pretend that what happens in the “real world” is at odds with what we’d expect if God exists. But that’s a straw man. Even in Scripture, most miracles are fairly private rather than public.

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