What Is A Miracle?

 

One often hears an announcer or reads from a columnist who says concerning someone who was saved in some spectacular way from being killed: “It was a miracle that he or she was not killed.”  Or when some great scientist makes an unusually brilliant discovery or produces a great invention, we are prone to use the word “miracle.”  Many of my older listeners probably remember the excitement in the medical world and elsewhere when Sir Alexander Fleming, a British bacteriologist at the University of London, discovered penicillin.  It was hailed by the scientific establishment and by many in the media as a “miracle drug.”  Penicillin has saved countless thousands of lives.  It has indeed been a blessing to humanity.  But it is not now and never has been a miracle drug and cures brought about by penicillin are not “miracle cures.”

 

Do you fathers and mothers in my audience remember when you looked into the face of your newborn children?  Can you recall the flood of emotions that overwhelmed you?  How could anyone ever forget such a breath-taking and awe-inspiring experience?  It is not at all unusual to hear someone say at such times, “It is a miracle.”  I fully agree that the birth of a child is wonderful, beautiful and almost unbelievable, but it is not a miracle.  The creation of Adam from the dust of the ground was a genuine miracle.  The birth of Jesus Christ to the virgin Mary was a miracle.  But the birth of a child--even a grandchild--is not a miracle.  I do not mean that I can explain it.  There are thousands of natural processes I cannot explain.  But that does not make any of those processes miracles.

 

I knew a couple in the state of Kentucky whose car was hit by a train.  The driver of the car made the mistake of pulling his Model A Ford car on to the railroad tracks and was struck by a freight train.  The car was rolled into a ball and pushed down the tracks almost a mile before the train could stop.  When the man and his wife were pulled from their car, they were badly injured, but both survived for another fifty or more years.  I have no doubt that some of their family members and friends thought of their survival as a miracle.  But was it really a miracle--the kind of miracle Jesus and his apostles performed?  I am grateful to God they survived and became some of my best friends, but their survival was not a miracle.

 

Pat Boone recorded the following incident in this book, A Miracle a Day Keeps the Devil Away (Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1974): One day when he and others were making a film, the director, Tay Garnett, was showing one of the actors how to drive an automobile on a mountain road high above the Atlantic Ocean.  As he drove the car, he came as close to the cliff’s edge as he could.  He wanted to heighten the suspense of the scene.  When he tried to turn the car away from the cliff, the wheels slid in the gravel and plunged over the cliff.  Down the cliff about 400 feet there was a large tree.  According to Pat, it was the only obstruction for hundreds of yards.  The director’s car dropped into the tree.  The fall destroyed the car and broke the director’s back, but the tree prevented his falling into a deep ravine.  Pat gave this incident as an example of a miracle, but there are some serious problems with Pat’s example.

 

If this incident constituted a miracle, atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and other unbelievers could find no grounds for objecting to miracles.  In fact, they probably could produce examples that are just as miraculous as Pat’s story.  Similar events have happened to believers and unbelievers alike.  Nothing about this story even faintly resembles the supernatural interventions of almighty God.  It may be thrilling to hear and more thrilling, although scary, to see, but it is not a miracle.  Suggesting that it is a miracle shows one’s failure to understand the nature of biblical miracles.

 

What would it have taken to make the incident Pat described a miracle?  If there had been no tree to halt the plunge of the car to the floor of the ravine--in other words, if the car had stopped in mid-air with no visible means of support--or if the car had turned around in mid-air and returned to the road, we might have some basis for considering the incident miraculous.  Otherwise, there is absolutely no way such an event can be classified a miracle.  If Pat had done adequate research in scholarly literature, he would not have made such a logical and theological blunder.  Why do people write on topics about which they know so little?

 

We may use words like “marvelous,” “wonderful,” “incredible,” “inexplicable,” “stupendous,” and similar adjectives in describing the effects of penicillin on some dread disease or in reference to a newborn child--especially if he or she belongs to us--or in discussing the event Pat reports in his book, but unless we use the word “miracle” differently from the way the Bible writers did, we are not justified in referring to any of these as miracles.

 

But generally capable, intelligent, and careful scholars may also misuse the word “miracle.”  I could give you many misuses by scholars, but I shall take time to give you just one.  Dr. W.A. Criswell, former preacher for the First Baptist Church in Dallas, wrote a very useful book with the title, Why I Preach the Bible Is Literally True (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1969).  The book literally created a storm of controversy among some professors in Southern Baptist seminaries.  It was a book that certainly needed to be written.  I applaud Dr. Criswell for having the courage to write it.  I have received great benefit from reading it and have recommended it to some of my students at Freed-Hardeman University and to others.

 

Several times in his book, Dr. Criswell misused the word “miracle.”  For example, he speaks at length of the beneficent influence of Christian missionaries.  He writes: “This Christian man, who has come ashore without money and without army, works a remarkable miracle in the lives of those people” (p. 12).  Dr. Criswell writes of the radical changes wrought in men’s lives in the Amazon jungle of South America and then affirms: “This truly is one of the greatest miracles in modern history.  Our airplanes are miraculous, our radios are miraculous, but nothing is as miraculous as the glorious, Christian transformation demonstrated in the lives of these savage Aucas of South America” (p. 13).

 

Please understand that I am not for one moment questioning the sincerity of this highly respected and internationally known theologian, but airplanes and radios are not miracles—at least, not in the sense the Bible uses the word “miracle.”  Furthermore, rockets, space ships, and computers are not miracles, either.  All of these are marvels of modern science, but they are not miracles like the virgin birth of Christ or Christ’s raising Lazarus or his stilling the tempest.

 

What, then, is the meaning of the word “miracle”?  Three Greek words must be examined if we are to understand the New Testament’s teaching about miracles.  Those words are: miracle, wonder, and sign.  Peter used all three words in his magnificent sermon on Pentecost.  “You men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22).  Please listen carefully as I examine each of these words with you.

 

The English word “miracle” is a translation of the Greek dunamis.  The Greek is also translated “mighty works” and “power.”  In his scholarly book, Synonyms of the New Testament (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1948), Archbishop Richard Trench of the Church of England, defines the Greek as “outcomings of that mighty power of God, which is inherent in Christ himself that ‘great power of God’” (p. 343).  The truth is that miracles are the supernatural works of God almighty.  They could not have been performed by the simple ability of men like Peter or Paul or John.

 

The second New Testament word we must study is the Greek teras, rendered “wonders.”  W.E. Vine says the word means “something strange, causing the beholder to marvel, is always used in the plural, always rendered ‘wonders,’ and generally follows semeia ‘signs’” (volume 4, p. 228).  Richard Trench defines the word as follows: “It is the miracle as a startling, imposing, amazement-wakening portent or prodigy; being frequently used for strange appearances in the heavens, and more frequently still for monstrous births on the earth” (pp. 341-342).

 

The third word, semeion, translated “sign,” means, according to Vine, “a mark, indication, token” (volume 4, p. 29).  Trench makes these appropriate remarks on the Greek semeion: “Among all the names which miracles bear, their ethical purpose comes out in semeion with the most distinctness, as in teras (wonders) with the least.  It is involved and declared in the very word that the prime object and end of the miracle is to lead us to something out of and beyond itself; that, so to speak, it is a kind of finger-post to God… Valuable, not so much for what it is, as for what it indicates of the grace and power of the doer, or of his immediate connection with a higher spiritual power” (pp. 342-343).

 

Concerning all three words—miracles, wonders, and signs—Archbishop Trench observed: “These words have this in common, that they are all used to characterize the supernatural works wrought by Christ in the days of his flesh… They will be found, on closer examination, not so much to represent three different kinds of miracles, as miracles contemplated under different aspects and from different points of view” (pp. 339-340).

 

I could give you many other scholarly definitions of miracles, but I want to mention Pat Boone’s definition.  In his book, A Miracle a Day Keeps the Devil Away, Pat defined a miracle as “a touch of God in your life” (p. 10).  No, I did not read his definition incorrectly; nor did I take it out of context.  Those are exactly his words.  Do you understand what Pat Boone’s definition does?  It makes virtually every event, creature, and object in the entire universe supernatural.  Our water, food, air, houses, friends, family members and all else in our world are “touches of God in our lives.”  Pat has not ruled out the supernatural; he has changed everything into the supernatural.  He has ruled out the natural and completely destroyed the witness of scripture to the miracles of God.  I am sure Pat did not mean to do that, but that is precisely what he accomplished.

 

Pat conceded that there are “more complex, theological, philosophical, and all-encompassing definitions, including Webster’s.”  He cites one dictionary definition of miracles as follows: “An extraordinary event taken to manifest the supernatural power of God fulfilling his purposes (such as the healings described in the Gospels).”  But Pat decided to stick by his definition, especially in view of the so-called “thirty-one miracles” that happened in his family and among his friends.  He claims that some of the things he described were unquestionably miracles—by any definition—and others might seem to have been small and coincidental and not really worthy of being called miracles.  He encourages his readers to bear with him.  And then he makes this unscriptural and unreasonable assertion: “Because if God does it—it’s a miracle” (p. 10).  A few questions are in order.

 

Does God cause the sun to rise in the morning and set in the evening?  Does he send the rain on the just and on the unjust?  Does he provide for the birth of a baby and for its growth into adulthood?  Does he give us our daily bread?  Jesus told his disciples: “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much better than they?  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin… Wherefore if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Mt. 6:26, 28, 30).  There is no question of our Lord’s providing for the fowls of the air and for the grass of the field.  Does that mean his care for the physical universe must be miraculous?  Pat has totally eliminated the natural.  As every student of the word knows, Pat’s views are completely contrary to the teaching of scripture and to the universal experience of the human race.

 

Pat provides us with what he calls “my first miracle.”  He writes of having grown up in Nashville, Tennessee.  On one occasion, he was riding his tricycle toward the city street where he was very close to having a collision with a speeding city bus.  The tricycle rolled from under him.  Both the tricycle and Pat were heading straight toward the big tires of the city bus.  He says a big teenage boy from up the street just happened to be walking by at the precise moment when he saw the danger Pat faced.  The boy acted quickly and saved Pat’s life (pp. 19-20).  How did Pat’s so-called “miracle” compare with Christ’s turning water into wine, feeding the five thousand and raising the daughter of Jairus?  I am sure Pat and his family were grateful that the boy from up the street appeared at exactly the right time to save Pat, but was that a miracle?  Does God not care for the thousands and thousands of other children who are killed in similar incidents?

 

In 1982 Dr. George P. Fisher, professor of church history at Yale University, wrote a book with the title, The Supernatural Origin of Christianity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons).  Dr. Fisher gave the following definition of a miracle: “A miracle is an event which the forces of Nature, or secondary causes, operating thus under ordinary Divine preservation, are incompetent to produce.  Secondary causes may be concerned in the production of a miracle.  For a miracle (except in the case of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) is wrought in Nature, or in the realm of the secondary causes; but these are insufficient to explain it.  It is an event which only the intervention of the First Cause is adequate to produce…Pascal has exactly hit the true nature of a miracle, when he terms it a result of exceeding the natural forces of the means employed” (p. 477).

 

Archbishop Richard Trench, whom I have already mentioned, wrote a book many years ago entitled Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord.  Trench’s comments on the nature of the miraculous are very meaningful.  “The miracle is not a greater manifestation of God’s power than those ordinary and ever-repeated processes (of nature); but it is a different manifestation.”  A miracle, according to Trench, is “an extraordinary divine causality, and not that ordinary which we acknowledge everywhere and in everything, which belongs, then, to the essence of a miracle.  The unresting activity of God, which at other times hides and conceals itself behind the veil of what we term natural laws, does in the miracle unveil itself, it steps out from its concealment, and the hand works is laid bare” (pp. 10-11).

 

From the definitions I have given you today, we should be able to list several ingredients of miracles—not what some charismatic calls “miracles”—but what the Bible designates as miracles.  Miracles originate with God, even though God may use some human agency in accomplishing a miracle.  For example, God restored the life of Eutychus who had died as a result of falling out a window, but he used Paul in restoring Eutychus to life (Acts 20:9-10).  Miracles cannot be explained by any known natural law.  For example, what natural law could explain the resurrection of a man who had been dead four days (John 11:39)?  There is nothing any man can do to restore life to a body that has been dead four days.  The miracles were not just marvels or spectacular events; they were signs of God’s love for fallen men.  The miracles often caused amazement, but that was not their primary purpose.  On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit enabled the apostles to speak in tongues they had never learned.  “Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.  And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these who speak Galileans” (Acts 2:6-7)?

 

I have spent a considerable amount of time today discussing what a miracle is.  I had to do that so we could know what a miracle is not.  When you hear of someone who has made a remarkable recovery from a serious illness or near-fatal accident, that does not mean the person was miraculously cured.  We are grateful for those who have helped our loved ones win the battle against cancer or heart attacks or strokes.  But to attribute our loved ones’ victory over disease to the Lord’s supernatural intervention is going beyond our limited knowledge.  We must not be guilty of presuming to enter into the very mind of God.

 

We should pray to God that our loved ones and friends will remain healthy or recover from debilitating diseases.  James assures us that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much (Jas. 5:16).  But we must not assume that the person’s health and well-being are a result of a miracle.  Could not our recovery from an illness or an accident be God’s providential care and not a miracle?