Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Are Miracles Real?



The Bible contains many incredible accounts of God miraculously intervening on behalf of His people. The Old Testament especially is rich with these events: Jonah in the fish’s belly, and Daniel in the lion’s den; escaping a fiery furnace, and flying in a fiery chariot; parting water with a stick, and using a stick to get water from a rock. We could go on and on with similar occurrences that many of us learned in children’s church.

Obviously there is no way to prove the validity of these stories; they defy science, and the only record of them is in the ancient pages of Scripture. We must take these accounts in faith, believing that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” Critics, however, seek to disprove these events, dismissing them as stories, fables, or myths that only the weak or simple minded could still believe in once they have graduated from children’s church. Some of those critics seek to attach a logical explanation to biblical accounts, thus explaining them away naturally, and removing God from the miracle. One of those natural explanations comes with the parting of the Jordan River.

In Exodus God parted the Red Sea so the Israelite slaves could pass over on dry ground, but He repeated that miracle a generation later, parting the Jordan to give entrance into the Promised Land. Joshua 3 records the crossing of the Jordan this way: And when the soles of the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off from flowing, and the waters coming down from above shall stand in one heap (v.13).” Christians call this a miracle.

But there is a naturalistic explanation offered. In the year 1267, on December 7-8, “The water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away[1].” This was the result of the dunes upstream collapsing, completely damming the Jordan up from midnight until 10:00 the next morning. Is this true? Does this explain away the miracle? Absolutely not! “This is not to take away the miraculous timing and nature of this event, but merely to provide an explanation as to how God may have done it[2].”

Yes, God is a miracle-working God, and sometimes He does things out of thin air, but other times He may use explainable, naturally occurring phenomenon. There may be an explanation as to how the waters stopped flowing, but the why and when are only because God wanted it to. Don’t get tripped up by people who offer naturalistic ways to undermine God’s miracles; instead, celebrate the fact that our God is sovereign over the universe He created.




[1] Nowairi, Al, Early History, p.607
[2] Kaiser Walter, and Wegner, Paul, A History of Israel: From the Bronze Age Through the Jewish Wars, p.220

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