MIRACLES by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 29, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 13.

MIRACLES.

By Editor

THE word "miracle" is defined to mean "an event in the natural world, but out of its established order, and possible only by the intervention and exertion of divine power; a supernatural event."—"Standard Dictionary." The word in the New Testament comes from two Greek words: dunamis, meaning miraculous power; and sēmeion, a sign, a wonder. We have also ergon, "works," and teras, "wonders," both having reference to true miracles.

Strong ("Systematic Theology," p. 61) declares that a miracle of the Bible, that is, a true miracle, is "an event palpable to the senses, produced for a religious purpose by the immediate agency of God; an event therefore which, tho not contravening any law of nature, the laws of nature if fully known, would not be competent to explain."

WE have little objection in a general way to the above definitions. They declare, as the Bible record clearly shows, that the miracles wrought by the servants of God were not a product of natural agencies, or a product of divine energy through natural law. They show a power or will above the ordinary operations of nature, transcending that law, and often reversing that law. Neither are they a matter of caprice, nor do they appear such to the observer. They always show the highest wisdom; they are wrought for the purpose of the greatest good.

NOW WE know what is said by the various classes of theologians and religionists. Some will have no miracles at all, but the ordinary working of nature's laws, not understood by us, perhaps, but nature's laws still. Others admit the miracles, but declare that God is in all the working of nature, and all are miracles. But looking upon it either way is contrary to the teaching of God's Word and the record of the miracles of His servants. In fact, it is tantamount to a denial of God's Word to characterize all the operations of nature a miracle differing in no sense from the miracles so called, or to say that all are merely the operations of God through nature.

GOD works in nature. Life from Him is operative in nature. But God works and His life operates through law. Life operating through one law transmutes the soil, the sun, the rain, the air into a sweet, luscious melon; by another law into a bitter olive. The law by which the life operates is in the seed, the vine, the tree. The olive tree will not produce the melon; the melon vine will not produce the olive.

LIFE from God operating through one law produces a colored man; through another law, a white man results. These laws may be perverted by men until race characteristics are merged or blended into an individual of different type. But the laws have both to do with men, tho of different capacity and color. But the law using life to produce the flower and the brute can not be perverted into the production of a race of man-vegetables, or man-brutes, which will persist forever.

Now ALL these transmutations may be to us marvelous, wonderful, divine; but they are not miraculous. They are in harmony with laws, which we may not wholly understand, but which we know to be uniform in operation and which we continually use to our own loss or gain. We plant potatoes, we know potatoes will be the product. We sow wheat, and barring foes and catastrophe, we know we shall reap wheat. We plant an apple tree, and we know that from it will come apples. We may know nothing of the wondrous processes by which all these results are wrought; we know that a divine Power spoke

the various laws, and Divine Providence constantly places at the disposal of these laws the great currents of life.

WE know more than this if we believe God's Word. We know that all of these laws, divinely given, have been perverted by sin to a greater or less extent. Degeneration marks the whole creation till death supervenes. Man can, through an understanding of these laws, prune, select, fertilize, feed, and in various ways improve, the stocks and breeds, the species and kinds, of animals and plants; but left to themselves, the tendency is ever downward to extinction and death.

WHAT God created He designed should persist forever. Man, under God the prince of this world, was to be the head and ruler forever of this earth. In his realm man was to progress forever. But man sinned. He placed athwart the channel of the working of God's life in his own being his own will and choice, and the law of God's life in man became "the law of sin and death." The mind, instead of ruling the flesh for God, became subject to a perverted flesh in which sin reigned, and therefore the mind became carnal; and "the carnal mind is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." And because of man the whole creation under him became subject to vanity, to sin, to sickness, to degeneration, to decay, to death. The perverted law, originally ordained to life, man finds to be unto death. Yet despite the degeneration and death, life works out wonderful things in the midst of death, things which in the end die also.

BUT God, in His infinite goodness to fallen man, for His own wise reasons, steps into this domain of sin, puts forth His own transcendent power, and lifts the operation of life above the perverted law of sin and death, into the higher realm of the law of righteousness and life. Creative power is exercised over life subject to perverted law. Its operation is a miracle. It is not in conformity to the natural laws which environ man and control a fallen creation. It is in harmony with the law of God's love and righteousness and life. It is a message from Him to His fallen creatures, that God has interposed to lift them to a new plane, a higher life because of a higher law, a new creation in Christ Jesus.

[The subject will be discussed further in the Miracles of Christ Jesus our Lord.]