How often do you see the miraculous? In many ways miracles are like parables in that they are designed to deepen the faith of those with faith and harden those without faith. Look no further than the resurrections of Jesus and Lazarus to understand this.
But many do not experience the miracles we read about in Scripture. There are only a few reasons why:
1. God can withhold miracles for HIS purposes. God has the right to this. And if He does, He has not abandoned us. Yet maybe you agree with Gideon (Judges 6:13):
"Where are all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, "Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?' But now the LORD has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian."
2. God can withhold miracles because of a lack of OUR faith. Like Matthew explained about Jesus' lack of miracles in Nazareth (Matthew 13:58):
"And He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief."
3. God IS giving miracles and we do not have the eyes to see them. We see miracles but do not perceive them - or we explain them away to science or coincidence. This is perplexing...as if God is saying, "You tell me you want the supernatural, I give it to you, and you explain it away to the natural!"
4. God IS giving miracles, we DO experience the miracles, YET our hearts remain hardened to God's purposes. Like what Moses told the Israelites (Deuteronomy 29:2-4):
And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, "You have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and all his servants and all his land; the great trials which your eyes have seen, those great signs and wonders. "Yet to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to know, nor eyes to see, nor ears to hear.
Unfortunately I simply cannot believe option 1. I have to believe much of the church falls into 2,3, or 4.
O Lord, increase our faith! Open our eyes! We want to enjoy the blessing of participating in Your works!
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Perhaps, the Lord is doing all that he always has, Hebrews 13:8, yet we do not live by or walk by faith very well anymore. We come to understand that God can do this or that, but why would he do it? Our lack of Childlike faith leads to our inability to have eyes to see or ears to hear what the Lord is doing. Like you said maybe we do not percieve it or maybe we (the church) are starting to call right wrong and when miracles happen they are in places or around people (cultures) that make it hard for us proud people to want to see.
Does that make sense?
I am trying to say we are become faithless and calling it right or acceptable and people or cultures who walk by faith are wrong or wierd.
Miracles happen all the time. I think that we attribute the miraculous to natural events. This is true in medicine. We acknowledge the skill of the physician and sometimes acknowledge God but we now expect to recover from just about any medical condition.
We also use different terminology to describe miracles. We talk about "God working" when we are really saying we see a miracle. I think we saw a miracle in the lives of the High School kids who went to winter camp at Hume.
I also think that God does or does not do miracles as he wills. Should we expect a miracle to heal an infection when God provided (a miracle in my book) antibiotics that bring about healing from infection?
What should we be looking for if we intend to see a miracle? What level of supernatural? I define a miracle as something that breaks the natural way things work without any "natural" explanation. This leaves many things that are "miracles". Salvation is a miracle.
Those are my brief thoughts from a very western perspective. This subject could easily fil a book but this is only a blog so I'll stop here.
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