Jun 11
5
Are Biblical Miracles Real or Just Fairy Tales?
Those who do not take the Bible as God’s Word feel the need to explain away the miracles it contains. Are they offended by the miracles? Embarrassed? Whatever the reason, some Christians are teaching that the miracle accounts of the Bible are myths. How tragic!
Don’t be misled by so-called experts who say that people back in Bible times only believed in miracles because they lived in a pre-scientific age. The young virgin Mary didn’t have the knowledge of today’s gynecologist, but she knew where babies came from, and she knew that virgins didn’t have babies. She recognized that the child growing in her womb was something out of the ordinary, something special. A miracle!
You see, the real issue is this: God tells us there is more than just the material world. Only those who don’t want there to be a God are afraid of miracles.
If you believe God actually exists, miracles present no problem. God created natural laws that the world normally follows. But God is perfectly capable of suspending those laws at special times and places to show us there is more to life than just this materialistic life.
It is only those who don’t want there to be a God who say everything must be explained naturally.
You are free to doubt all this, but not on the basis of good science. Science has nothing important to say about miracles. It has no place even venturing an opinion about them. Science is all about documenting natural laws through observation, and rigorous scientific testing cannot add one thing to the question of whether these laws can be interrupted by something or someone that exists outside of them. And science should not complain too loudly that it has never seen a miracle, for neither has it seen a “Big Bang,” nor any bit of life spontaneously forming out of nonlife, nor even a single of the most critical processes that evolution requires. The best that current naturalistic science has to offer us is that it all “takes a lot of time.” It takes more faith to believe that kind of science than it does to believe a miracle.
Let’s face it – miracles are rare. God created natural laws, and most of the time, our world behaves according to them. What’s neat about being a Christian is that I am free to accept or dismiss anyone’s claim of a miracle based on honest investigation. The naturalistic mind is not. It has its mind made up in advance. It refuses to consider a mountain of evidence that may suggest a miracle has occurred. Naturalism has a doctrine against miracles. It is the naturalist, not the Christian, who is constrained by a creed.
That’s tragic. The naturalistic mind ultimately has no intellectual freedom.
The naturalist is forced to accept the wildest, most improbable explanations – only because they are supposedly “natural.” They end up believing that life “naturally” and spontaneously sprang out of non-life (which goes against the scientific law of biogenesis – all life comes from existing life).
Here’s the tragedy for Christians who buy into this sort of thinking: Consider the ultimate miracle upon which Christianity depends. Was Christ raised bodily from the dead? The naturalistic mind is forced to say “no,” and instead believe tales of mass hypnosis and of tens of thousands of people telling a lie because they enjoy being persecuted for it.
So, although some try to demythologize the Bible, realize that a miracle-less Christianity is not possible. From conception to resurrection, Jesus’ life is one grand miracle. In the person of Jesus, God himself intervened into our lives. Immanuel (which means “God with us”) came to rescue us from the sting of eternal death. You see, there IS more.
Those who dismiss miracles as fairy tales end up missing the incredible “big facts” in any human birth – not just Jesus’. Next week we’ll see how the “everyday miracle” of life argues loud and clear in favor of a divine Creator.
