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Tuesday, November 25, 2014

What is a miracle? Miracles convey a message about the God of the Bible

Hebrews 2:3-4 "how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? After it was at the first spoken through the Lord, it was confirmed to us by those who heard, 4 God also testifying with them, both by signs and wonders and byvarious miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit according to His own will."


Introduction & Review
We have spent the past three days discussing the reality and nature of the miraculous. We have aimed in this series to answer the question: what is a miracle? Thus far in our study we have proposed three parts of our overall answer to that question:

1. Miracles are irregular events
2. Miracles are directly done by God
3. Miracles include visible signs

Today's post continues our discussion with the goal of proposing a full definition and answer to this question regarding miracles. My prayer is that this discussion had aided readers in not only better understanding miracles, but also the place of miracles in the defense of the Christian faith and in seeing how awesome the God of the Bible really is. 

Miracles convey a message about the God of the Bible
Whether we are talking about Moses, the prophets, Jesus or the Apostles, the miraculous was manifested by God to convey a message. The messages that were typically heralded with their attending miracles were either ones of Divine judgment or salvation. We have seen that miracles can be defined as: irregular events directly done by God and including visible signs. However what are their chief purpose? Are miracles mainly for showing off? If a person has the gift of healing, can they at will go in and empty hospitals to gain notoriety for themselves or do things that would cause the world to lay at their feet? 

If such motivations or results occur, then we are not dealing with a God-sourced miracle, but rather either a fraud performing sleight-of-hand tricks or some type of demonic counterfeit. 

In Exodus 34:10 we see this beginning sentence: "Then God said, 'Behold, I am going to make a covenant....". Why is it that God did all the "workings", "signs" and "wonders" in and through the nation of Israel? To convey the fact that out of all the nations of the earth, Israel was His chosen people. When the Apostle Peter states in Acts 10:38 "You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him". We ask the question: what purpose were miracles wrought by Jesus? Answer: to make known His identity and person as God in human flesh. 

The 35 miraculous events surrounding Jesus Christ were designed to communicate as much as possible the truth of Who He was. Hebrews 2:3 says these words - "how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? After it was at the first spoken through the Lord, it was confirmed to us by those who heard." The Apostolic signs, workings and wonders were designed by God to validate and communicate to onlookers the authenticity of the message and messengers. 

Closing thoughts:
Today we have spent some time answering the question: What is a miracle? In our brief study of a few key passages we have discovered key headings that can aid in answering such a question:

1. Miracles are irregular events
2. Miracles are directly done by God
3. Miracles include visible signs
4. Miracles convey a message about the God of the Bible

With this four-fold description, we can offer the following answer to the question: "What is a miracle?" A miracle is an irregular event directly done by God that includes visible signs that aim to convey a message confirming God's power, message and messenger." Tomorrow we will consider a very important issue in this study: namely how to tell whether or not an alleged miracle is truely from God or a counterfeit.