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.
