Do you find the New Testament miracles hard to accept? For most of my life, I did. My skepticism led me to dismiss them. Are they not pretty easy to dismiss when we have never experienced anything like them? But are we simply finding it easier to discount than to try to understand? Are the stakes not pretty high? After all, if they are real, do they not prove Jesus was God Incarnate, as we explored in How Can a Man be God? If Jesus was God Incarnate, must not His Word be the Word of God? If so, is our fate not determined by how well we try to understand and act on His Word? Is it not time to try to understand?
For a start, are many miracles not simply Jesus, as God Incarnate, doing instantaneously what we know God does constantly? Does God not constantly turn water into wine through the fermentation of the juice in the grape vines He created? Does God not constantly feed every one of us with the loaves and fishes He creates through the fertilization of seeds and the spawning of fish that He created? Does He not heal all of us through the ability He created for the body to heal itself? Just as Jesus made the fig tree die, does God not constantly withdraw life from everything He creates? Just as Jesus calmed the storm, has God not caused every storm He creates to calm? Did God, at creation, not create life out of the inanimate, as Jesus did instantaneously with Lazurus? Does seeing Jesus as doing, in an instant, what we know God has done, and is continuously doing, not take the mystery out of miracles?
But what about Jesus’ miracles that were not what God always does? The New Testament claims that God not only raised Jesus from the dead but gave Jesus’ body new powers it had not previously exhibited. This is definitely not something God has always done. However, is it not something of which an all-powerful God is unquestionably capable? If God needed it done, must He not have done it?
Why did God need to become a man and resurrect that man? In Why Our Creator Keeps Itself Hidden From Us, we established that God wants us love Him as He loves us and, for that to happen, He needs to make Himself known to us without disempowering us by displaying His overwhelming magnificence. Revealing Himself through revelations placed directly into the Bible’s authors’, and our minds didn’t work. We discounted the Bible’s authors’ accounts because of their frequent misinterpretation of God’s revelation. We failed to discover His revelation in our minds because we didn’t realize we had to try. To make Himself known to us, He had to become a man and demonstrate that that man was God Incarnate by His words and miracles. We didn’t believe His words or His miracles. The only way God could prove Jesus’ words were His Word was to resurrect Jesus. Because God needed to this and is unquestionably capable of doing this, must He not have done this miracle?
What about the miracle of the Ascension? Is it credible that Jesus’ body ascended? We know His body was never found on Earth. To have left Earth, must it not have ascended? What about the miracle of the Transfiguration? Because the Resurrection and the Ascension must have been real, can there remain any reasonable doubt that the Transfiguration was real?
So, miracles are simply what God has always done or what God needed to do and of which He is unquestionably capable. Can there remain any reasonable doubt that Jesus’ miracles were real?
Del H. Smith conducts research into life’s meaning and is the award-winning author of the AMAZON Best Seller, Discovering Life’s Purpose.