p. 3 | Miracles | AdventAI

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Feb 8, 1906

Miracles

The subject of the Sabbath-school lesson for February 17 is “Miracles.” It is a subject to which thoughtful study ought to be given at this time. Within recent years a concerted effort seems to have been made to confuse the minds of Christian believers concerning this whole question by advocating the modern notion that every revelation of the working of God’s power is a miracle. Those who are not willing to accept this philosophy have been represented as believing in “an absentee God” who had no direct connection with his universe, but left it to run itself. We are not compelled, however, to choose between these two alternatives. Neither one is in harmony with the truth.

All God’s works are wonderful. “Many, O Lord my God, are thy wonderful works which thou hast done.” “O that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!” But those revelations of his power which are designated in the Scriptures as “miracles” constitute a separate class of “wonderful works.” They were wrought and recorded for a special purpose. To attempt to break down this distinction is a long step toward that conception of God which, while it appears to bring him very near, in reality destroys any true idea of a personal God, banishes the God of the Bible from his rightful place upon the throne of the universe, and substitutes for him the god of modern philosophers—impersonal power.

As stating the truth concerning miracles in a clear manner, we commend to the attention of our readers the following extract from the writings of Archbishop Trench upon this subject. It is taken from his chapter on “The Miracles and Nature.” Written more than fifty years ago, it is free from the ideas of the “New Theology.” Dr. Trench says:—

The distinction indeed which is sometimes made, that in the miracle God is immediately working, and in other events is leaving it to the laws which he has established, to work, can not at all be admitted; for it has its root in a dead mechanical view of the universe which lies altogether remote from the truth. The clock-maker makes his clock and leaves it; the ship-builder builds and launches his ship, and others navigate it; but the world is no curious piece of mechanism which its Maker makes and then dismisses from his hands, only from time to time reviewing and repairing it; but as our Lord says, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;” he upholdeth “all things by the word of his power.” And to speak of “laws of God,” “laws of nature,” may become to us a language altogether deceptive, and hiding the deeper reality from our eyes. Laws of God exist only for us. It is a will of God for himself. That will indeed, being the will of highest wisdom and love, excludes all wilfulness—is a will upon which we can securely count; from the past expressions of it we can presume its future, and so we rightfully call it a law. But still from moment to moment it is a will; each law, as we term it, of nature is only that which we have learned concerning this will in that particular region of its activity. To say, then, that there is more of the will of God in a miracle than in any other work of his, is insufficient. Such an affirmation grows out of that lifeless scheme of the world, of which we should ever be seeking to rid ourselves, but which such a theory will only help to confirm and to uphold.

For while we deny the conclusion, that since all is wonder, therefore the miracle commonly so called is in no other way than the ordinary processes of nature the manifestation of the presence and power of God, we must not with this deny the truth which lies in this statement. All is wonder; to make a man is at least as great a marvel as to raise a man from the dead. The seed that multiplies in the furrow is as marvelous as the bread that multiplied in Christ’s hands. The miracle is not a greater manifestation of God’s power than those ordinary and ever-repeated processes; but it is a different manifestation. By those other God is speaking at all times and to all the world; they are a vast revelation of him. “The invisible things of him . . . are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” Yet from the very circumstance that nature is thus speaking unto all, that this speaking is diffused over all time, addressed unto all men, from the very vastness and universality of this language, it may miss its aim. It can not be said to stand in nearer relation to one

man than to another, to confirm one man’s word more than that of others, to address one man’s conscience more than that of every other man. However, it may sometimes have, it must often lack, a peculiar and personal significance. But in the miracle wrought in the sight of some certain men, and claiming their special attention, there is a speaking to them in particular. There is then a voice in nature which addresses itself directly to them, a singling of them out from the crowd. It is plain that God has now a peculiar word which they are to give heed to, a message to which he is bidding them to listen. . . .

But while the miracle is not thus nature, so neither is it against nature. That language, however commonly in use, is yet wholly unsatisfactory, which speaks of these wonderful works of God as violations of a natural law. Beyond nature, beyond and above the nature which we know, they are, but not contrary to it. Nor let it be said that this distinction is an idle one; so far from being so, Spinoza’s whole assault upon the miracles (not his objections, for they lie much deeper, but his assault), turns upon the advantage which he has known how to take of this faulty statement of the truth, and, that being stated rightly, it becomes at once beside the mark. The miracle is not thus unnatural, nor can it be; since the unnatural, the contrary to order, is of itself the ungodly, and can in no way, therefore, be affirmed of a divine work such as that with which we have to do. The very idea of the world, as more than one name which it bears testifies, is that of an order; that which comes in, then, to enable it to realize this idea which it has lost, will scarcely itself be a disorder. So far from this, the true miracle is a higher and a purer nature, coming down out of the world of untroubled harmonies into this world of ours, which so many discords have jarred and disturbed, and bringing this back again, though it be but for one prophetic moment, into harmony with that higher. The healing of the sick can in no way be termed against nature, seeing that the sickness which was healed was against the true nature of man—that it is sickness which is abnormal, and not health. The healing is the restoration of the primitive order. We should term the miracle not the infraction of a law, but behold in it the lower law neutralized, and for the time put out of working by a higher; and of this abundant analogous examples are evermore going forward before our eyes. . . .

The miracles, then, not being against nature, however they may be beside and beyond it, are in no respect slights cast upon its ordinary and every-day workings; but rather, when contemplated aright, are an honoring of these, in the witness which they render to the source from which these also originally proceed. For Christ, healing a sick man with his word, is in fact claiming in this to be the lord and author of all the healing powers which have ever exerted their beneficent influence on the bodies of men, and saying, “I will prove this fact, which you are ever losing sight of, that in me the fontal power which goes forth in a thousand gradual cures resides, by this time only speaking a word, and bringing back a man unto perfect health;”—not thus cutting off those other and more gradual healings from his person, but truly linking them to it. So again when he multiplies the bread, when he changes the water into wine, what does he but say, “It is I and no other who, by the sunshine and the shower, by the seed-time and the harvest, give food for the use of man; and you shall learn this, which you are always in danger of unthankfully forgetting, by witnessing for once or for twice, or if not actually witnessing, yet having it rehearsed in your ears forever, how the essences of things are mine, how the bread grows in my hands, how the water, not drawn up into the vine, nor slowly transmuted into the juices of the grape, nor from thence expressed in the vat, but simply at my bidding, changes into wine”? . . .

And we can quite perceive how all this should have been necessary. For if in one sense the orderly workings of nature reveal the glory of God, in another they hide that glory from our eyes; if they ought to make us continually to remember him, yet there is danger that they lead us to forget him, until this world around us shall prove, not a translucent medium, through which we look to him, but a thick, impenetrable veil, concealing him wholly from our sight. Were there no other purpose in the miracles than this, namely, to testify the liberty of God, and to affirm the will of God, which, however it habitually shows itself in nature, is yet more than and above nature, were it only to break a link in that chain of cause and effect, which else we should come to regard as itself God, as the iron chain of an inexorable necessity, binding heaven no less than earth, they would serve a great purpose, they would not have been wrought in vain.