Pastoral Musings

Many years ago one of the fundamentals of the faith that the historic fundamentalists contended for was that Christ truly performed miracles.

Sometime in the future I shall deal with this issue more in depth, the Lord willing.  At this point I would simply like to point out a few things  that should be considered about miracles in general.

1.  Jesus Himself spoke of the miracles that He did as being real.  (Jn 10:37,38;14:11-13) To deny miracles is to deny the words of Jesus.  One must deny the truthfulness of Jesus’ statement.  Of course, one could always enter into the higher critical mode and declare that those were words attributed to Jesus and not something He truly spoke.  When we do that, we open up even another can of worms.   The problem simply grows larger the harder one works to deny the miraculous.

2.  To deny the miraculous is to deny much of the history of the book of Acts as well as the Gospels and even the teaching of some of the Pauline epistles.  To top it off, one would also have to deny much of the content of the book of Revelation and of the Old Testament, too.

3.  Of course, one would also have much to deny about the nature of God if they reject the supernatural.  What kind of god is it that cannot/does not perform miracles?  What kind of god is not supernatural?

4.  Finally, one would have to be God to truly be able to state conclusively that miracles do not happen.  They would have to be both omnipresent and omniscient to ever be able to truly make that statement.  All of our experience deals with our short life.  God is timeless and is not limited by time and space constraints.  He knows all things, too.  He alone is omniscient and omnipresent.  We will never have enough knowledge to declare conclusively that miracles do not happen, or that they have never happened.

This leaves us with the necessity (if we are to be intellectually honest) of at least allowing for the possibility of miracles.

Just musing…