by Clifford Goldstein

 Imagine going back 250 years, to the mid-18th century—say 1750. Suppose, too, that you are living in colonial America. Suppose, like many colonists, you have relatives back in England, the home country. Then suppose one day someone comes up to you with a small box in his hand, a box just a few inches long and less than an inch thick, made of some sort of steel or metal casting. Suppose he starts pushing buttons on the box, which makes strange sounds—beeping noises unlike any you have heard before. The next thing he does is place the box to your ear, and he tells you to listen.

Suddenly, coming from the box is the voice of one of your relatives across the sea in England. You can’t believe it! Somehow his voice has gotten into that tiny box and is playing for you! But, no, that isn’t quite it. You are then told to talk into the box. Talk into the box? You’ve got to be kidding. But, stunned enough by hearing the voice of your relative from England, you talk into the box, only to have the relative respond back! It isn’t just some sort of magical recording of his voice; it is the person himself, actually responding to you from England!

 How can that be? England is thousands of miles away. It takes weeks and weeks of dangerous transatlantic travel to get back and forth, and now, with a tiny box in your hand, you are talking to someone there?  It can only be a miracle.

What Is a Miracle?
     Of course, today, we take something like that for granted. We give it no more thought than we do walking toward a door that opens without our touching it, or getting on a machine that lifts us into the air and takes us thousands of miles in just a few hours, or going to a doctor who puts us in a box that takes detailed pictures of our inner organs, or a police device that can tell if we are lying or not.  

 In short, there are so many things we do today, through technology, that years ago would have been deemed miracles—would have been deemed utterly beyond human comprehension, beyond the human understanding of how the natural world works. But were they actually miracles? Certainly to the folks who saw them at that time they would have been.

 What, then, is a miracle? How are we to define miracles? Can something be a miracle to one person and not to another? Why do we, supposedly, not see as many miracles today as there apparently were in Bible times?  

 Of course, none of these are easy questions to answer, and even to ask them assumes certain things which not everyone agrees on.

Miracles All Around
     Though some may not agree, miracles do occur all around us. The only reason we don’t deem a sunrise a miracle is that sunrises happen all the time. Imagine if only one time in your life a sunrise were to occur. You would think it one of the most amazing things in all creation. But because they occur daily, we don’t give sunrises a second thought—any more than we give a transatlantic cell phone call a second thought, or an x-ray of a broken bone.

 Simply defining a miracle is not an easy task. Because we now understand more than our ancestors did about the law of gravity and the motion of the planets in the cosmos, does that make a sunrise any less miraculous? Modern science reveals an incredible confluence of amazingly precise physical constants without which life as we know it could not exist—things of which the ancients had not the slightest notion. So one might argue that science shows us the miraculous in ways our ancestors could never have imagined. Would not the structure of an atomic nucleus or the intricacies of DNA replication seem miraculous to them? Do they to us?

Look at the incredible mysteries of cell reproduction! Almost every step contains elements that we cannot explain. Does that not, then, make them as miraculous as, say, the miracles that Jesus performed when He was on earth? After all, we can’t explain either cell reproduction or Jesus’ miracles.

Comparing Miraculous and Supernatural
     The fact is, the miraculous occurs all around us, and all the time too. Some “miraculous” occurrences might not have the “supernatural” character of the miraculous healings of Jesus, but that does not rule out their miraculous character. When we say that something is supernatural, what are we really saying other than that it is an event that occurs outside our understanding of the natural? 

The key phrase is our understanding of the natural. The fact is, things occur around us all the time that we cannot understand. But in our harshly modernist and materialist view of the world, we often are afraid to call them miracles.

 Who knows? Perhaps, in the new heaven and the new earth, we will discover that many of the “supernatural” miracles of Jesus can be explained by “natural” means. 
Someone might ask Jesus, “How did you heal the woman with the issue of blood?” For all we know, Jesus may launch into some sort of gynecological-physiological-molecular explanation that would seem as incomprehensible to us now as radio wave digital technology would to our colonial American ancestors. That does not mean it wasn’t a miracle; it means only that it occurred outside a particular, limited understanding.

 Miracles are just that: miracles. What makes them miraculous is that, to us, for now, they are beyond our comprehension—not only how they take place, but even when and why. 

The Greatest Miracle of All
     It is often said that there are fewer miracles today than there were in Jesus’ time. But how do we know that? The ministry of Jesus was, indeed, unique in a number of ways, but human history records many events that can only be deemed miraculous.  

 To those who are open to seeing it, there is something incredibly miraculous about life itself. It is a miracle that we are even here. The great news for us, as Christians, is that so many of the questions that science leaves unanswered, or can’t even approach, we have answers for. And those answers are found in Jesus: the true miracle of redemption, the promise of a new heaven and a new earth in which there will be no more pain, no more crying, no more suffering (Revelation 21:1-7).

 That will be the greatest miracle of all, one that even all eternity will not be long enough to explain.

Clifford Goldstein writes from Silver Spring, Maryland.