laws beyond its own orbit.
Suppose I roll over a stone from the top of a hill. By natural law that stone is due to keep going until it reaches the bottom. Suddenly it stops half way down. What has happened? Let us say that it has run against a tree and there it stays. No laws have been broken. Two different laws have come together at a given point and have produced a different result. (We shall have more to say about this in the chapter on Prayer). Such an incident is easy to understand because two laws of the same kind have coincided.
Let us suppose again. This time it is a boy who falls in the water and is drowning. At the risk of his own life a man leaps in, drags the boy free of the inexorable law that humans can’t breathe water, and saves his life. What has happened? It is more than the physical act of pulling the boy from the water. The force of will-power made the man take the risk and his will was actuated by a consciousness of responsibility, by the claim of friendship, or perhaps by parental love if he happened to be the boy’s father. In a word, personality has entered the picture and because of it the results must be different. Personality is not something which may be weighed and measured, but it is a factor which may not be disregarded. If, then, it is possible for a human person to intervene and change the natural course of events, why should it seem strange for the Divine Person to intervene at times in the affairs of His own creation—not to disrupt it but to direct and control it?
Two kinds of corruption have made people somewhat skeptical of miracles in any form. One is the irrational flight of imagination eager to discover a miracle where it does not exist. Some people have an appetite for the bizarre. The simplest coincidence appears to them as a marvel. Their persistent exaggerations irritate their more sensible friends and invite disbelief in any supernatural occurrence. Some of these neurotics are deeply religious persons but they do damage to Christ by their hysterical credulity. When everything is a miracle, nothing can be miraculous.
The other corruption is, of course, the faking of supernatural powers. Those who trade in human weaknesses are not averse to carrying their deceptions into the very holy-of-holies. Religious charlatans always make life hard for the honest Christian. Sooner or later they are bound to be exposed but in the meantime they shatter the faith of those who have trusted them. The faking of miracles has aroused suspicion of anything that might be called miraculous.
Yet—let us consider our Saviour’s miracles. Some of them are not as strange as they appeared to be once. By modern methods of treatment we can now cure some of the same diseases which He cured in the days of His ministry. Is it so hard to believe that what we can do gradually with our limited powers, He could do instantaneously with His divine power? Some of His cures may have been merely a foreshortening of similar cures which can be wrought by our clumsier methods today. Possibly when we know enough we may be able to explain many others of His miracles which are still incomprehensible to us now. Life is full of unaccountable happenings. Some people are possessed of capacities far more sensitive than the average. Often they astonish themselves by exhibiting abilities which they themselves are unable to explain. Our Lord’s human life is unique in the annals of history. Such a life might well have been responsive to spiritual impulses beyond our broadest imagination.
Our Lord never performed any miracles in order to show off. At the beginning of His ministry He refused to dazzle the public with a spectacular exhibition, saying, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”1 He declined to perform wonders where faith was lacking and people were merely curious.2 He never used His extraordinary powers for His own benefit—not even on the cross when the scoffers challenged Him to save Himself from death.3 His miracles were signs and symbols called forth to authenticate His teaching for a people who expected unusual things from God. In the early years of the Church’s life extraordinary events continued to occur, and instances have not failed to appear now and then down through the ages. Rationalize all you please and there still remain many happenings, too well attested for doubting, which are far beyond the range of human comprehension.
Why should there have to be miracles anyhow? Would it not have been much simpler if the Christian faith could have been held within the bounds of that which was quite understandable and thus avoid all these difficult questionings? It might have been simpler—and it would have been deadly. Would anyone be willing that human progress should have come to a blank halt at the beginning of the Christian era? If Christ were to proclaim a Gospel which would be valid for an indefinite future, it was plainly necessary that He should incorporate into it elements which were above the reach of the people of His own day. Otherwise His Gospel would have been a temporary flash of human progress or would have come to a standstill rather than leave Him far behind. We might suggest three practical reasons for the presence of miracles in the Christian faith:
1. In order to illustrate the unique character of our Lord. From a Person who claimed spiritual authority in His own right, it would be expected that some unusual evidences of that authority would be forthcoming.
2. To encourage expectation of greater things to come. We need something to anticipate. We can’t keep grubbing along at the same old level and expect to rise to any heights. We need a lift, something to reach for, something to stretch our spiritual muscles.
3. To jar our complacency. We easily settle into the routine of ordinary living and allow our sensibilities to be dulled by commonplaces. We forget that there may be anything beyond the daily round of eating, sleeping and doing the regular chores of life. A wise God knows it is good for us if He occasionally breaks through to disturb our lazy equanimity. Now and then we need to be startled. In material matters, what would become of inventive genius if we lived on the stupid assumption that the pattern of life was complete and all that remained for us to do was to manicure it diligently and keep it in proper order? The same might be said of spiritual life. We would be dead on our feet if we were not spurred on by some extraordinary spiritual manifestations once in a while.
Surely there is no good reason for believing that the natural order as we know it in this world is the ultimate ceiling of all existence. Conscious as we are of the limitations under which we must struggle, we can scarcely escape the conclusion that there ought to be and must be a higher order of life unshackled by human handicaps. Indeed the logic of the situation demands it. We contemplate the ascending levels of vegetable life, animal life, and human life, and in simple reason we cannot stop there. We could not convince ourselves that human life is the top of everything. We are too well acquainted with its inevitable restrictions. There simply must be a higher order. We know that animal life runs the gamut of vegetable life—and more. We know that human life can reach down into animal life but also reaches much further in many other directions. Why, then, should it not be quite reasonable that there should be a still higher order which can penetrate human life without being confined within it? That means something above the natural—and that means supernatural. There is no sense in shrinking from the term. The separation between the two may not be nearly as impregnable as we often think it to be. God is a God of law and order, but we believe that the law of creation itself provides for a breaking-through of the supernatural into the natural order when circumstances may require it. God does not act capriciously—neither is He constrained within the narrow limits of human wisdom.
In the very nature of things miracles are possible. Well-attested events have occurred and do occur which cannot be adequately described by any other term. A personal God implies the probability of miraculous happenings. The Christian religion bears witness to the actual experience of such happenings. It is not afraid to face the supernatural because it believes that God has a right to speak to us in any way that will best suit His purposes.
REVELATION
A small child is a very helpless creature. If he is to survive the hazards of infancy he must be fed, clothed, protected, and generally cared for by his parents out of their mature experience. Later all of this early care must be supplemented by the instruction and training of his teachers who pass on to him the accumulated store of knowledge
