11th May, 2006

JIM REIHER

In the light of the terrific news about the two miners who were recently saved at Beaconsfield, no one can deny that miracles still happen today.

But wait a minute, that is a kind of miracle, yes, but not a real miracle. A really 'long-shot' wonderful outcome like the miners being found and saved, is one thing, but when something happens that is not possible to happen scientifically - now that would be a real miracle. Right?

PICTURE: Dez Pain (www.sxc.hu) "If there is an all powerful God who made the universe out of nothing, then it is within the realm of possibility that the same God can do anything He wants to do. He can make a virgin pregnant; He can feed a huge crowd with almost no food (He could have done it with no food!); He can raise the dead; He can walk on water."

So the definition of a real miracle is one that is contrary to the laws of nature and science.

Do those kind of miracles happen today? Have they ever happened?

Clearly they have happened in the past. Jesus rose from the dead. That is not logical or possible under the normal constraints of science. Jesus made a blind man see; a leper be suddenly cleansed; He stopped a storm by speaking to it; he fed 5,000 people with a few loaves and fish. The apostles did similar things: bitten by a deadly snake but not being affected; raising people from the dead; healing cripples who had never walked.

I know that some old commentaries will tell us that some of these (or all of these) were not real miracles either. I remember reading Barclay’s Gospel commentaries when I was a young Christian. I would, even back then, shake my head in wonder at such a great scholar trying so hard to re-explain obvious miracles into human achievements. It has been about 30 years since I read those commentaries, but I still remember how the feeding of the 5,000 was really everyone bringing out their food and sharing it; the raising of the widow’s son in Nain, was really Jesus recognising that the young man was in a coma and was indeed just about to come out of it, so He said “Get up!” just at that point; the healing of the demonised man in the tombs was a psychological coup that healed a sick mind; and the angelic escape of Simon-Peter from Herod’s jai was a well executed escape by the disciples and told metaphorically.

I reject all that, to be honest. Miracles have happened. They are theoretically possible. If there is an all powerful God who made the universe out of nothing, then it is within the realm of possibility that the same God can do anything He wants to do. He can make a virgin pregnant; He can feed a huge crowd with almost no food (He could have done it with no food!); He can raise the dead; He can walk on water.

So that brings us back to the other question: do real miracles still happen in our modern day?

Catholics, Pentecostals and Charismatics will all say “Of course.” Some others have not been so quick to agree. They say that even though they might have happened with Jesus and the first apostles, the fact is that they stopped at the end of the apostolic age. They supposedly ended when the New Testament Scripture was finally written. They ended more or less around the end of the first century AD.

The difficulty of the position that says “no” to miracles today is that there are people who testify to having had miracles happen to them - real, impossible miracles: cancers being cured, when there was no 'hope'; someone brought back from the dead with prayer, not a defibrillator; that sort of thing.

The other problem is the poor handling of scripture that is employed by some who try to say miracles ended around the end of the first century.

For a long time the people who opposed miracles still happening in our modern day said that I Corinthians 13:8-10 “proved” their position. Miracles (and tongues and prophecy and other spiritual gifts) all stopped after the Bible was finally written. That Corinthians passage says: “Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away...But when the perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.” The argument was that “the perfect” referred to the Word of God (it is His perfect word for us, after all), and so now that it has “come”, the imperfect (the spiritual gifts) are done away with.

The problem with that interpretation is that it fails the first rule of hermeneutics (the first rule of “how to interpret the Bible”). It does not ask: what did this mean to the author who wrote it? And what did it mean to the people who first read it?

What was Paul thinking when he wrote these words? Was he thinking: “When my writings are collected along with some Gospels and Luke’s Acts, and a few other letters, and when the church realises that they are the very Word of God, and they are called the New Testament documents - then we will no longer need spiritual gifts in the church”? Was that going through Paul’s mind when he spoke of “the perfect coming”?

No. It is almost impossible to think that. Paul was not thinking about a future set of canonical scriptures. He was thinking about the return of Jesus Christ - the perfect one. When everything that has been dim is seen clearly; when all that has been imperfect is brought to perfection: that is when spiritual gifts will no longer be necessary for the church!

Do miracles still happen today? Yes: all kinds. The wonderful miracles that include the safe rescue of two miners from almost impossible conditions underground, to the supernatural ones as well. God is bigger than any 'miracle' we can ask of him.

Jim Reiher (BA (double major in history), BA in Theology, Dip Ed. MA in Theology (Hons)) is a full time lecturer for Tabor College Victoria, lecturing in church history and New Testament; and also has speciality interest areas in women’s ministry, creative ministry, and the New Age movement. His views are not necessarily those of other Tabor faculty members or of Tabor College.

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