02-CHAPTER TWO: CREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES
CHAPTER TWO: CREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES THE SUPERNATURAL IN CLIMAX THE QUESTION of miracles is an age-long question. It is faced everywhere, in all the areas of life clear back from the beginning of religious history; and as we approach the life of Christ we are faced everywhere with evidences of the supernatural. The attestation of miracles in the ministry of Christ is a very vital matter as to our faith in Him.
If we deny miracles, then we put in the trash heap much of Christ, because His entire ministry is built upon the foundation of the miracles. Paul put the question straight to the face of King Agrippa in Acts 27:8 : “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?” The raising of the dead seems to be the climax of the miraculous. Power that can go into the grave and bring its victim out alive has exercised the highest expression of divine power. Miracles are everywhere.
- Creation is a miracle.
- Productivity is a constant miracle.
- Providence is a supreme miracle.
The holding and molding and making of the order of the spheres is not nature, it is God. The secret union of body, mind and soul and their interchanging cooperation is a miracle. Christ, His dual nature, His incarnation, His sinless life, His selfless life, perfect resurrection, is God’s climax in the miraculous.
There are physical miracles recorded in the Old Testament. There are many miracles recorded in the New Testament all of them evidencing power exercised beyond the ordinary routine of nature.
Regeneration is a miracle in spiritual transfusion, a holy mixture of truth, faith, Christ’s redeeming blood, His resurrection power, His divine life. In this spiritual operation performed by a loving Father and the human soul inoculated with the virus of sin, wherein the poison of this sin is taken out and new life and blood transfused into the soul, all this is a miracle.
Prayer is a constantly recurring miracle-a man, humble, trustful, talks to God over a spiritual radio. The answer comes back in the peace of the man’s mind, in some triumph in the life of the man for the glory of God. Christianity is a miraculous triumph in civilization. All of its holy tenets are based upon the incarnation of Christ, a miracle.
- The substitutionary death of Christ on the cross is another miracle,
- The resurrection of Christ’s body another miracle.
- The impartation of divine power to human weakness is another miracle.
Because nature performs its functions steadily and without break does not mean that it is all mere nature. It is God working in an orderly way. A miracle is not a violation of natural law: it is but a friendly interposition of higher law, the constructive law of love. The natural is really supernatural to us and the supernatural is natural to God. God works through nature in an orderly way, but reserves His authority to work in a higher, supernatural way.
In view of the mighty evidences of God everywhere, why should man, so blind to the divine, doubt and become incredulous of God’s working in a miraculous way? Why should it be incredible that God should raise the dead, or do anything else that He wishes to do?
If we will approach all the miracles in the Old and New Testaments and all the strange workings of God about us with the hypothesis that God is God, then we solve the problem or at least satisfy the mind of faith as to the handiwork of God in any expression of it, whether natural or supernatural.
SKEPTICISM’S LOOK AT THE RESURRECTION
Skepticism has searched heaven, earth and hell to push Christ off the map. It attacks God’s existence and personality, denies His hand in creation and providence, bitterly brands Christ’s whole career as an old woman’s lie, denies His superhuman birth, His holy life, His atoning death, His victorious resurrection, His ascension, and denies Him the privilege of a return.
It has picked His Bible to pieces and pitted each part against the other and the whole. It has belittled His churches and tried to ruin them from the inside out and the outside in. It has maligned His disciples and blasphemed against His power.
Look at infidelity’s attack on the resurrection. It tried to kill Jesus in infancy and a number of times in His earthly life. It put Him on the cross and in the tomb, and all hell broke loose in glee. He arose in spite of infidelity’s claims and then it tried to smother Him.
It denied His resurrection and for centuries has tried to impeach the witnesses of His resurrection. The outside infidels and the inside skeptics cloaked in the pious robes of radical criticism have sought and continue to seek to deny all Christian truth.
Infidelity plays upon the ignorance, poverty and lack of culture of the disciples, and their visionary excitement at the time.
It tries to destroy the witness of the writers of the records themselves, saying Luke, Paul and Mark were not eyewitnesses; that Matthew and John did not write the books attributed to them; that Luke and Matthew got their stories from Mark and that Mark’s work is not authentic; and that miracles are impossible anyway. Some go so far as to say that miracles are unmoral and reflect on the intelligence of God and man. All such effort is blinded skepticism and flies in the face of the overwhelming, infallible proof.
Christ appeared on probably six days out of the forty to one woman, to several women, to two disciples-Peter at one time and James at another-to two other disciples on the Emmaus road, to ten of the apostles, and again to eleven in a confidential conference room, to seven of the disciples on a fishing trip, then to five hundred on a Galilean mountain, then to eleven or more of the disciples on Mount Olivet. He appeared five times in one day in Jerusalem and at Emmaus, and then on the sea in Galilee many miles away, and then on a mountain in Galilee, then back in Jerusalem. Afterward He appeared to Stephen, of living, reliable witnesses and billions of dead Christians are God’s answer to infidelity’s boast, and that answer is that Christ is alive forevermore.
It is said that when Gordon’s tomb was discovered some years ago he got some great chemists to test the dirt in Joseph’s rediscovered tomb for evidence of decayed human bones. They found evidence of human decay in a hundred tombs around Jerusalem but none in Joseph’s tomb.
God’s people do not need a chemical test to prove the resurrection. They know by many experimental tests that Christ is not there. He is alive today and in love and pity looks down into the blinded eyes of infidelity. Christ is risen, is reigning, and is coming back some glad day.
It is more difficult not to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ than it is to believe in His resurrection. To deny His resurrection in face of the overwhelming, accumulating strength of testimony is to deny all history and take the foundations out of credulity. A failure to understand and comprehend any incident in life does not justify a denial of life and its mysterious nature.
It is difficult to understand how a good meal of substantial food taken into one’s stomach will be translated and transformed into the various parts of the human body, some of it into hair, some into bone, some into blood, some into flesh, some followed up through brain cells into thought and love and power; and yet the mystery of all this action of the human organs of life does not cause us to stop eating. We are surrounded by mysteries. Life itself is a mystery. Why not take the facts of the resurrection of Christ, established by reliable witnesses, and trust Him for the blessings of the resurrection, and glorify the Christ who is risen from the dead?
~ end of chapter 2 ~ <http://www.baptistbiblebelievers.com/>
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