Miracles of Jesus

Douglas Murray is a prolific humanist writer and social critic who has authored two bestselling books. He finds himself in the odd position of being a self-professed non-believer who nevertheless has great respect for Christianity and the positive role it has played in building Western civilization--to the point of calling himself a “Christian atheist.”

On an episode of the Unbelievable podcast, Murray was asked, “Why don’t you just believe in God?” His response has always been that he genuinely finds it difficult to accept certain aspects of the Christian argument. Belief in God, he noted, cannot be faked or forced.

Esther O’Reilly, also a guest on the program, noted that if men are rational animals, then God must deal with them as such. Therefore, there can be evidence that fully satisfies man’s search for these truths, both intellectually and spiritually, as opposed to requiring a blind leap of faith. The historical reliability of the New Testament, for instance, is one such piece of evidence, since it attests to the truth of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This evidence is available to all who wish to judge it, point by point.

The host of the program, Justin Brierley, asked Murray what it would take for him to make a return to faith in God and Christianity. Murray said “I think I’d need to hear a voice.” Brierley asked “Literally a voice from beyond?” “Oh yes,” he replied, “I mean it literally.”

He admitted to being fascinated by the lack of such experiences in the West when compared to places like the Middle East or Africa. He also cited the utter incredulity with which Christians in the West treat individuals who claim to have had such experiences. He said, “this has historically been one of the ways in which religion has thrived, in visions.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God has given us evidence for belief in him through creation (Psa. 19:1-6; Rom 1:4), through fulfilled prophecy (Isa. 7:14; Micah 5:2), and through the resurrection of Christ (John 20:1-9; Rom. 1:4) to name a few. But there are many who simply choose not to believe.

In talks on university campuses, Christian physicist and MIT professor Ian Hutchinson asks “Can a scientist believe in miracles?” (He’s also written a book with the same title.) Hutchinson sometimes begins his talks by jokingly saying, “Can scientists believe in miracles? We can answer that question pretty easily—I’m a scientist, and I believe in miracles. So the answer is yes.”

He notes that most of us don’t understand the Bible’s view of miracles. He says, “We tend to view God as mostly hands-off, standing on the sidelines, letting nature look after itself, but then on rare occasions reaching in to tweak things by the odd miracle here and there.” But Hutchinson argues that according to the Bible, “[God] continuously holds the universe in the palm of his hand … It exists because of his continuous creative power and will: If he were to stop exerting that upholding power, stop paying attention to every part of the universe, it would instantly cease to exist.”

Thus, he defines a miracle this way: A miracle is “an extraordinary act of God” by which God “upholds a part of the universe in a manner different from the normal.” He adds, “Yes, we know more today than people did long ago, but what we know today makes the universe seem, if anything, even more open."

A 67-year-old woman scheduled for routine cataract surgery thought it was just dry eye and old age causing her discomfort. But the real cause of her discomfort was much more concerning: 27 contact lenses, stuck in the woman's right eye in a "blue mass."

Rupal Morjaria, a specialist trainee in ophthalmology, said the woman hadn't complained about any visual trouble before the operation. But when the anesthetist at the hospital started to numb her eye for surgery, he found the first cluster of contacts. Morjaria said, "He put a speculum into the eye to hold the eye open as he put the anesthetic in, and he noticed a blue mass under the top eyelid."

Eventually they found a mass of 27 lenses. "We were all shocked," Morjaria said. "We've never come across this." A representative from the American Academy of Ophthalmology said he's seen patients have one lens stuck, but never 27. "This is one for the record books, as far as I could tell," he said.

The woman had been wearing monthly disposable contact lenses for 35 years, but it's unclear how long they had been gathering in her eye. Sometimes when she would try to remove a contact from that eye, she couldn't find it. The patient had just figured she'd dropped it somewhere, Morjaria explained, but it was actually getting stuck in her eye with the others.

Possible Preaching Angles: Miracles; Jesus; God, power of; Gospel—Instead of going to the doctor and seeing the person that could fix her blurred vision, she just tried harder. She kept adding something else, thinking that it must be the problem. What this woman didn't need was something else added to her life- She needed it removed.

What is a miracle? Webster's dictionary defines a miracle as an "extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs." More colorfully and memorably, C. S. Lewis once explained that a miracle is something unique that breaks a pattern so expected and established we hardly consider the possibility that it could be broken. "If for thousands of years," he said, "a woman can become pregnant only by sexual intercourse with a man, then if she were to become pregnant without a man, it would be a miracle."

The skeptic and philosopher David Hume spoke famously against miracles but defined them as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent." We can basically agree with Hume on this definition, which is probably as close to a standard definition as we will be able to settle on. But I would further simply say that it is when something outside time and space enters time and space, whether just to wink at us or poke at us briefly, or to come in and dwell among us for three decades.

In an article in The New Yorker about faith and belief, Adam Gopnik made the following confident statement: "We know … that in the billions of years of the universe's existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intervention with the laws of nature." In the same article, Gopnik also concluded: "We need not imagine there's no heaven; we know there is none, and we will search for angels in vain."

Author Eric Metaxas replies to these remarkable claims:

Of course, the reason [Gopnik] makes these statements has to do with his presuppositions that this world is all there is. That way of seeing the world dismisses outright any possibility of anything beyond the material world of time and space. It can be summed up in the words of the late Carl Sagan, who glumly intoned, "The Cosmos is all there is and ever will be."

In 1949, researchers asked a group of students at Ivy League schools to perform a simple task: identify playing cards. There were just two catches. First, these cards were shown very quickly. Second, the researchers were using a deck of four ordinary playing cards and six "trick cards" with odd colors and suits (red spades, black hearts, and the like).

The researchers discovered that it took the students four times longer to identify a "trick card" than a normal card. The students' brains struggled to process something as out-of-the-ordinary as a red six of clubs. Even after they had seen two or three trick cards, it still took extra time for them to identify trick cards.

In many cases, the students tried to "compromise" what they expected to see with what they actually saw. For instance, when they saw a red six of clubs they described it as "the six of clubs illuminated by red light." In other words, the participants often couldn't accept the facts of what they just saw because they didn't expect to see it.

The researchers called their study "The Perception of Incongruity," which simply means that when we encounter something that doesn't fit our worldview, we have a strong tendency to ignore it. Or we tend to compromise to make it fit into our assumptions about how we think the world should work. The researchers noted that even smart people (like Ivy League students) fall prey to the perception of incongruity.

Possible Preaching Angles: Miracles; God, power of; Supernatural; Demonic; Worldview—This study raises an interesting question: Is it possible to be confronted with God's power, the reality of miracles, or the presence of the demonic, and yet we deny it because it doesn't fit our worldview? We refuse to see the miracle because we do not expect to see miracles? We are guilty of the "perception of incongruity" and we have to "compromise" what we see so it fits into our worldview.

Did Jesus really walk on water? Or maybe he just surfed on a patch of ice. That's the conclusion of a 2006 scientific article published in everyone's favorite bedtime reading item—The Journal of Paleolimnology. The article was titled "Is There a Paleolimnological Explanation for 'Walking on Water' in the Sea of Galilee?" Dr. Doron Nof, an expert in oceanography and limnology (the study of lakes), and his co-authors speculate that an odd combination of atmospheric conditions may cause rare patches of floating ice on the Sea of Galilee. According to their calculations, the chances of this floating ice phenomenon happening are less than once every thousand years. But those odds didn't deter them from questioning whether Jesus walked on water after all. Perhaps Jesus just surfed a patch of floating ice.

To be honest, I'm not sure which one would be more amazing. Surfing a piece of floating ice across the Sea of Galilee would take miraculous balance. And if those patches of ice appear only once every thousand years, it would take miraculous timing too. I'd love to see a high-definition, slow motion instant replay of either one—Jesus walking on water or surfing on ice. But Dr. Nof's theory may reveal more about the human psyche than the circumstances behind Jesus' miracle. We have a natural tendency to explain away what we cannot explain. And that's why most of us miss the miracle.

In an issue of Christianity Today, a Muslim man describes his commitment to follow Isa al Masih, Jesus the Messiah. Suprisingly, a rather "ordinary" miracle caused this man to open his heart to Jesus. Here's how he described the miracle:

One night the only food my wife and I had was a small portion of macaroni. My wife prepared it very nicely. Then one of her friends knocked on the door. I told myself, The macaroni is not sufficient for even the two of us, so how will it be enough for three of us? But because we have no other custom, we opened the door, and she came in to eat with us.

While we were eating, the macaroni started to multiply; it became full in the bowl. I suspected that something was wrong with my eyes, so I started rubbing them. I thought maybe my wife hid some macaroni under the small table, so I checked, but there was nothing. My wife and I looked at each other, but because the guest was there we said nothing.

Afterward I lay down on the bed, and as I slept, Isa came to me and asked me, "Do you know who multiplied the macaroni?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "I am Isa al Masih [Jesus, the Messiah]. If you follow me, not only the macaroni but your life will be multiplied."

In the fall of 2000, doctors diagnosed Pastor Ed Dobson with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), an incurable and fatal disease. The doctors gave him two to five years to live and predicted that he would spend most of that time in a disabled condition.

Shortly after he was diagnosed, Ed wanted someone to anoint him with oil and pray for healing. And he wanted someone to pray who really believed in healing. So Ed invited a friend, a Pentecostal pastor who had regular healing services, to come over and pray for him. Here's how Ed described what happened:

It was one of the most moving evenings of my entire life. He began by telling stories of people he had prayed for who were miraculously healed. He also told stories about people he had prayed for who were not healed and had passed away, receiving that ultimate and final healing. Before he prayed for me he gave me some advice.

"Don't become obsessed with getting healed, Ed," he said. "If you get obsessed [with getting healed], you will lose your focus. Get lost in the wonder of God, and who knows what he will do for you."

This is some of the best advice I have ever received …. Since that night, I've been trying to get—and stay—lost in the wonder of God.

After analyzing 600 pages worth of arguments for and against the historicity of Christ's resurrection, Dr. Michael R. Licona concludes that "a good critical scholar must account for the facts with integrity" even when the facts are "in tension with [our] desired outcome." Then he uses the following example from American history:

Long before John Adams became the second U.S. President, in 1770 he was a respected lawyer in New England, where the Boston massacre had just occurred. No lawyers would defend the British soldiers involved for fear of the American public, which had now grown even stronger in its anti-British sentiments. But Adams believed that everyone was entitled to a fair trial. He took the case, the public turned against him, and he lost more than half of his clients.

In a courtroom that was described as crowded and "electrical," Adams argued that the soldiers were innocent …. He then added, "Facts are stubborn things and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of the facts and evidence."

Dr. Licona concludes: "No matter how much one may loathe the idea that Jesus rose from the dead and fantasize about other outcomes, the historical bedrock remains the same …. Jesus' resurrection is the best historical explanation of the relevant historical [evidence]."

In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, characters interpret ancient lore and rhymes in order to discern events in the present in much the same way that Christians interpret Old Testament prophecies to predict the coming of Christ.

In the third book of the trilogy, The Return of the King, the hero, Aragorn, who is the rightful claimant to the throne of Gondor, returns to the city Minas Tirith. He is victorious in the battle against the dark lord Sauron, but he's not yet able to claim the throne.

He enters the city in disguise in order to go to the Houses of Healing. There he seeks to heal his friends who were struck in battle. As he performs this healing, one of the attendants repeats an ancient verse: "The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known."

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the mad-house on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region called "the unknown" and calmly say that though you know nothing about it, you know that all gates are locked.

Many treatments of Jesus get bogged down in a discussion of the possibility of miracles; properly speaking, that is a philosophical rather than a historical or even a theological problem. ... [A]ll that need be noted is that ancient Christian, Jewish and pagan sources all agreed that Jesus did extraordinary things not easily explained by human means. While Jesus' disciples pointed to the Spirit of God as the source of His power, Jewish and pagan adversaries spoke of demonic or magical forces. It never occured to any of the ancient polemicists to claim that nothing happened.