Where Have All the Miracles Gone?

Mark Dunagan
05/19/13 - Sunday Morning

Where Have All The Miracles Gone?

I heard someone say recently, “Where are the miracles?  Today the world is such a mess that we need miracles to believe”.  I can appreciate both the fact that such a person sees that the world is in a mess and that it would be really encouraging to see God display His power during such confusing times.  Yet, the question is not a new one.

When the angel of the Lord showed up to Gideon and said that God was with him, Gideon said, “If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?  And where are all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’” (Judges 6:13).

Even in the Bible

From the above passage and others (1 Samuel 3:1), we learn that even in the Old Testament, God was not performing miracles everyday and there were long stretches in which no supernatural activity was displayed.

The Purpose of Miracles

In a nutshell the miracles were given as a way to confirm that the speaker, such as Jesus or the apostles was from God (John 3:2; Acts 2:22; Hebrews 2:3-4).  They were God’s way of confirming the authenticity of the message.  Yet the Bible equally notes that when all the books of the New Testament were written, the miracles would cease (1 Corinthians 13:8ff).  In this way, each generation is not given a new batch of miracles, but rather, each generation has access to the same miracles.  Every generation can read about the same events as recorded in Scripture. 

• “Many other signs therefore Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ…” (John 20:30-31).

One sees the same thing in the Old Testament.  God does not part the Red Sea again for each new generation, rather each generation is called upon to remember and read about God’s wonders that are recorded in Scripture (Psalm 105:5).  Faith is built and reinforced not by a new group of miracles, but in remembering those of the past (Nehemiah 9:6, 9-11, 13, 15).

“I Need a Miracle of Believe?”

The Bible argues otherwise.  Jesus in fact said that blessed are those who did not see the miracle of the resurrection and yet believed (John 20:29).  He also complained about people that would not believe unless they saw a miracle, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe” (John 4:48).  Consider the following:

• The children of Israel that saw the plagues in Egypt, the Red Sea parted, the events at Sinai, and bread from heaven---and still for the most part could not bring themselves to trust or submit to God:  “They forgot His deeds” (Psalm 78:11), “Yet they still continued to sin against Him” (78:17).
• Towns, like Capernaum that Jesus made His home and in which He worked many miracles, for the most part rejected Jesus:  Matthew 11:20-23.
• People that saw a number of the miracles, still claimed that they needed more to make a decision about Him: Matthew 16:1
• Others who experienced miracles in their life went away without even thanking God:  Luke 17:17-18
• Others saw Jesus perform miracles and yet refused to change and simply found another excuse as to why they did not need to believe in Him: Mark 3:22.

Yet There are Wonders to Behold!

On the one hand I can appreciate the desire to see God display His power in a miraculous fashion, yet on the other hand I am rather irritated by the complaint, “We need miracles to believe”.  Because it insinuates that God has left no wonders to behold, and this is simply not the case.  “Yet He did not leave Himself without witness” (Acts 14:17).

The Wonders of Creation:  Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:20

Have you ever considered the amazing qualities of something as common as water?  “While water itself is a very small molecule (just a three-atom unit of hydrogen and oxygen) it is a primary ingredient of our planet.  God's design of how water's specific molecules behave (and the impact water has on our entire planet) is an example of God's creative design and custodial presence, even on the smallest and largest scales. Water expands when it freezes, unlike most other substances. Ice and snow take up more volume than the same amount of liquid water. This makes water denser as a liquid than when frozen, so ice floats. If ice did not float on the surface of the water, the floors of oceans and lakes would be covered with glaciers of ice that would never melt. Surface ice also helps regulate the climate by reflecting energy. As a liquid, water’s temperature range is perfect for cycling water from the oceans to the land. Water requires a lot of energy to evaporate into a vapor and it releases this energy when it condenses back into liquid. This balances temperatures in the earth’s climate, as well as inside living cells. If less energy were required for evaporation, then streams, rivers, and lakes would evaporate away quickly” (Institute for Creation Research).

The Wonders of the Human Body: Psalm 139:14

The human body contains many “all or nothing systems”, that is, the entire system must be present, and if it is missing one detail, it does not work.  This implies that the system could not have evolved, but rather was built with all its parts intact.  For example, just as a woman would die without her heart, she would also die without the vital blood biochemical hemoglobin.  But even an intact heart and hemoglobin need regulation. A heart that beats too fast or too slow can be just as lethal as having no heart, and a body that produces too much or too little hemoglobin can be equally unhealthy. Thus, the systems that regulate heartbeats and hemoglobin must also have been present from the beginning.

DNA is the genetic blueprint present in all living cells. Our DNA, which would stretch to a thin strand about six feet long if unfurled, must twist itself up tightly enough to fit into the nucleus of each human somatic cell, which itself is too small to see without a microscope. The various arrangements and combinations of these “letters” in DNA provide all the information needed to instruct a single human fertilized egg to grow, multiply, and shape itself into a fully recognizable baby. Each of the cells in that baby contains a copy of that DNA with all the information to operate the human body for a lifetime. DNA is the most compact information storage system in the world; no computer of human invention can approach the quantity and complexity of information it contains.  DNA even contains the instructions to devise the cellular machinery to decode its instructions. Without a mechanism to decode the information, the DNA blueprint would be useless. Even if DNA had managed to evolve, the decoding mechanism to read it would have had to evolve at precisely the same time. This scenario is impossible because the instructions for building the decoding unit are contained in the DNA itself.

The Wonder of the Human Soul: Genesis 1:26

The Wonder of the Bible:

After thousands of years of attacks and persecution in both the Old Testament and New Testament it is amazing that the Bible still exists. 

The Wonder of Fulfilled Prophecy:

There are many passages that we could explore, but allow me to focus on one prophecy which was uttered some 500 years before Jesus was born and was in print and available in both Hebrew and Greek some 250 years before He was born:

Mark Dunagan | mdunagan@frontier.com
Beaverton Church of Christ | 503-644-9017
www.beavertonchurchofchrist.net