Miracles and Experience
Over the past year, I have begun to write a post about miracles no less than 5 times and until now have never posted one. It is such a huge topic, and I have such strong feelings on the subject, that it is difficult for me to cover what I want to cover in a way that is satisfactory to me. So for now I won’t bother being satisfactory. I’m not going to try and argue whether or not miracles happen; for this post I will assume that they do. I want to talk about some faith I learned with regards to my personal struggle with miracles: namely, if miracles can and do happen as I assume, why did they never seem to happen in my own experience?
I often thought that if only I could see just one big miracle - something that I could know, without a doubt, was a miracle from God - then I could say, “I really do believe.”
I suppose I should define terms first. When I am talking about miracles, I mean supernatural events in a broader sense. From the Bible, I mean things such as healings, casting out demons, speaking in tongues, prophesying, and other events that are harder to categorize.
I wanted to see a miracle that I couldn’t doubt. I resonated with the man who said to Jesus, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” My point of view started changing when I read the introduction to C.S. Lewis’ Miracles. Here’s what he wrote that caught my attention:
In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.
For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.
Upon reading this, I realized that the question of whether or not something is a miracle, and whether or not miracles happen at all anymore, is not a question of experience. I mean, how do you prove that something is a miracle anyway? You could always say, like Scully or Velma, that it probably has a perfectly reasonable explanation, we just don’t know what it is yet.
If it is not a question of experience, then to me it becomes primarily a question of faith. Do I believe Jesus when he says, “Anyone who has faith in me… will do even greater things than these“?
There are two parts to what the man I mentioned said to Jesus: “I do believe” and “help me overcome my unbelief”. I wanted the second part - to have God “overcome my unbelief” by showing me some great miracle - not realizing that I didn’t truly have the first. And the first - my own belief that God can and does perform miracles - is a prerequisite for the second. What the man was really saying was, “I do believe. Please prove me right!”
I no longer require the big, unexplainable miracle to support my belief. For me, it was a major step in my faith. Once I accepted that these supernatural events were real, and actually happened, certain parts of the Bible became more clear as well. So much so that I wondered how I had ever missed it.
So that’s what I submit to you for now. It’s not proof. It’s by no means comprehensive. But I hope that it can encourage those among you who felt like I did. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s talk about this - that’s what those comments are for anyway. And I might just post some more on this topic too, if I can condense my thoughts into words properly.
Adam, in a way you are falling into that trap that we all fall in to - “God, show me”. When I look at the patriarchs of faith in the Bible like Abraham, or my own life, I find faith is doing it and trusting God fully. No show me, just do. When God told Abraham to go to another country Abraham didn’t ask God to show him a sign that his faith was sufficient to go, he just went. When God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, he didn’t ask God to show that his faith was sufficient. He took his son and the fixings for a fire and went knowing full well that God would provide.
Your mom and I had a similar experience this past Christmas in Mexico. Simultaneously and within a split second we looked at each other and went from a no to a definite yes. My analytical mind says I need to calculate the risk and how much faith I need to apply to make this major move. But God intervened and no analysis was performed. Mom and I are still stunned by the miraculous change God caused in our hearts. Not just either one of us, but both simultaneously. From that we learned that faith doesn’t ask questions or look for signs. Faith is obediently going forward knowing that God will provide. Plus there is no looking back.
With regard to all the things we have to attend to relative to our move we KNOW that God will provide and take care and we are having a blast watching Him at work. Faith is doing and not asking. And because of this we are excited to see what God has in store for us. We don’t what it will be but we do know it will be far more exciting than anything else we have experienced.
It was interesting, yesterday I told Sam at Tera Research what our plans are and he felt we were moving in haste and operating on emotions. I love mom’s reaction to that. She said, “how do you explain to someone like that that it is not emotions but simply, through FAITH, DOING what God is asking you to do?”
As far as seeing “miracles” there is no question that there was a major miracle performed by God on 30 December of 2005 in you mom’s and dad’s lives. Some may believe we do things impulsively but we believe it is by simple faith.
So again, faith is doing not asking.
As someone that has seen big miracles I have a lot I could say on the subject but I won’t. I will keep it simple. Miracles were rare even in the time of Jesus. Even with Jesus healing entire villages or hundreds of people they were still rare.
I think often times Christians have this idea that miracles are by nature common. They are but they are also rare. A miracle for me is bending over or enjoying a shower or waking up. that to me is a miracle.
But I can tell you a story of a miracle or two because miracles are an expression of God’s truest heart. They are fun. I was healed of a virus in a prayer time and it was a huge miracle, one of those that reveal that there is a God. Then there is another one where my church prayed for a woman with cancer in our midst and she went back to the doctor it was gone. Then…I could keep going here but i have seen a lot of those and I do expect them but am not relying on them to build my faith.
I agree with your dad faith is about action and obedience but it is ultimately about trust and love. I realize that all my obedience means nothing if I don’t let the holy spirit do it within me. The holy spirit and i work together for us to obey God. Its about union. Miracles can help to build that trust but they can also tear it down.
Also there is nothing wrong with asking for signs of confirmation. Gideon did it, Moses did it and many others did it. heck even Christ did it in the garden but i think that again using miracles as the litmus test for faith is just silly. Then that would not be faith. Faith is uncertainity always trusting but never knowing for certain until later. It involves a wounding too. Look at Abraham. he was wounded by God in nearly sacrificing Issac and Issac was wounded in the faith experience.
We keep on seeing this over and over again faith involves obedience, pain and loss and eternal joy. Ok I will stop now but thanks for writing this I really appreaciated it.
p
Payshe wrote:
That’s exactly the realization I came to. Not that I didn’t have faith in God, but rather the miracles. I was always unsure whether or not miracles really happened, or whether Paul’s words about tongues and prophecies were meant for us, and so on. I didn’t have faith in what the Bible seemed to be telling me clearly because (1) it was not in my experience and (2) it did not seem to be in the experience of those teaching me, because they always had nice explanations as to why the “big” miracles never seemed to happen.
What this did, though, was that when I saw miracles, or heard about them, I always doubted whether or not they were really miracles. Having faith didn’t really end up changing my experience - at least not wildly, but it wildly changed my perception of what I was already experiencing. It helped that by this time I had begun to attend a church that did believe in miracles (in the sense that we’re talking about). If I hadn’t, I might not have ever been challenged on this point.
Surely Lewis meant to say that our senses are fallible, not infallible?
-Matt
I noticed that too (upon re-reading it 2.5 years later). I looked it up and it was supposed to be “not infallible”. This has been fixed.