Miracles

I just can't keep from drawing your attention to the good words of others that I share the blogosphere with. This morning I read a good, short post called Waiting On The Miracle, which I'd like to share with my friends. What I want to post of my own is my comment to the author, so you may want to read the post linked above before you continue with what I have to say on this bountiful topic. Here I go…

…I like what you’ve written in this post. Your reasoning is in a nutshell what C.S. Lewis discusses in depth and at length in his book, Miracles, which I like very much, and which some people I know like not at all. I’m sure you’ve read that book, but if not, I heartily recommend it to you.

The example of the boy wanting to kiss a girl being spared an awful experience by the miracle of turning aside to remove gum from his mouth, I think I’ve heard before. This is an example of a “good timing” miracle, what some of us consider an example of the proposition “there are no accidents.” I believe this proposition, again in Lewis’ idiom, by the extension that “it is all plan,” as he writes in his book Perelandra. Not that we as images of God do not have free will, but that God does in fact order things always for our benefit, though we are free to reject them. If He does so order things, then yes, “it is all plan,” but we can still resist.

People will judge a person, as a rule, from the starting point of whether they like him or not. The intensity of their like or dislike definitely affects their judgment. If I love a man, everything he does will meet my approval, even things that, if done by a man I hate, I would harshly condemn. That’s the natural man in me. It takes all that God can do to effect in me impartial judgment, whether of people, events, or ideas.

The same is true of our response to the report of miracles. If we love and want God, everything He does in our world will seem miraculous and providential. If we hate Him, then the opposite is true, everything is chaos, mindless and meaningless, and is headed for idiocy and annihilation. Most people fall between these two extremes. Indeed, most Christians seem to have a friendly interest or a friendly skepticism when confronted with the miraculous, precisely because they have a holy indifference to God Himself, and would rather just play piously.

When we can mean what we say in our prayer, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven,” then we will see and know, and not just believe in, miracles.