The Purpose of Miracles

This is carrying on a series on miracles I started here with a study on how the word "miracles" is used and continued here, by thinking about the relationship between miracles and the laws of nature. The question I'd like to consider this time is the purpose of miracles.

In other words, this is an attempt to answer why God doesn't do more miracles to heal people, etc. (though I know plenty of people I trust who say they have seen miracles in the last few years)

What Miracles Don't Do

Perhaps surprisingly, what we've established over the course of these posts (read the comments too, and also this post that sprang out of a comment) is that miracles don't actually help people believe much. If people have decided not to believe in God, there is always another explanation they can think of for any miracle, whether it's the apparatus not working, whether it's alien technology, whatever. If someone doesn't want to believe, then a miracle isn't going to convince them. That's also true in the Bible - Pharaoh in Exodus is one classic example. God sends all kinds of plagues on Egypt, yet Pharaoh will not give in until in the end his army is destroyed in the Red Sea. The Israelites see the miracles too, and profit from them, yet over the following years they keep on failing to trust God.

So then, what's the point of miracles if they don't help people to believe?

The "Big" Miracles

There are a few miracles in the Bible that are referred to again and again, and it will actually help a lot if we think about them.

The miracles in Exodus are "big" - the plagues on Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the manna in the desert, ... They were all about God saving his people from slavery in Egypt so that they could worship him.

Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 4 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession
Exodus 19:3-5, NIV

The other really "big" miracle was the resurrection of Jesus. And once again, it's about God saving people so they could know him. In this case, Jesus rising from the dead meant that he beat death, so that people who trust in him can beat death too, so that we can know him. Just like God saved Israel from Egypt so they could know him and worship him, God saved us from sin and death so that we can know him and worship him.

The big miracles seem to be about God saving people so they can know him and worship him. So what about the small miracles?

The "Small" Miracles

Most of the other miracles in the Bible happen around a few key figures. Moses did quite a few, which showed people that God was going to use him to save his people. Elijah and Elisha did some, which showed that God was using them to warn his people to stay close to him. Jesus did lots, which again showed people that God was going to use him to save the people. And the apostles did some, which showed people they were announcing how they could know Jesus.

So if the "big" miracles are all about God saving people so they could know him, the small miracles seem to be about God pointing out to people that he's doing some saving. The point of miracles is that they point to God saving people in Jesus.

The Priority of Miracles

Here's the account of one of Jesus' miracles:

A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven."

Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, "Why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?"

Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, "Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . ." He said to the paralytic, "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, "We have never seen anything like this!"
Mark 2:1-12, NIV

Now, there's quite a lot going on there, but there are a few points which it's useful to think about here:

What was Jesus' priority for the paralytic? Well, the passage makes it look very much like Jesus thought that the forgiveness was important, and the miracle was only done to show that he could forgive people. Jesus seems to think it is more important that people should be forgiven and should be right with him (which means we can know him) than that we are physically healthy. That actually makes sense when you think about it. What matters more? Where we spend eternity or how easily we can move around for the next 50 years?

Why did Jesus heal the person then? To show that he could forgive sins - once again, it's to point to the fact that he really is the saviour. He can save people, he can forgive them.

It matters far more that we are forgiven than that we are well.

So what is God's priority for a paralytic today? Or for someone with an amputated limb? That they should be forgiven, get right with God and be able to know him, to praise and worship him. That's far more important than physical healing?

Miracles don't convince people, but they do point to Jesus who saves people.

Jerry Bridges - the Pursuit of Holiness

This is a good, short, basic book on holiness. I was given it at a convention I went to last year - I can see why they gave it out. Quite challenging, but little I hadn't heard lots of times before.

I'm still thinking through the huge implications of yesterday's post and quite a bit of stuff happening here.

I'd really appreciate your prayers (those of you who pray) for wisdom as to what I'm meant to be doing. I know it's right for me to be here, and for so long so much of what I've been doing has been building up to this, but I really need God's continued guidance for knowing what to do now I'm here.

Cross-Cultural Mission

One of the basic principles of Christian mission is described by Paul in his first letter to the church in Corinth:

Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
1 Corinthians 9:19-23, NIV

Basically, if we want to reach goths with the good news of Jesus (for example), the best way of doing that is to give up all the secondary cultural stuff and become a Christian who is also a goth.

Otherwise, if you've got a bunch of Christians who are all (as many are in the UK) white, university educated, middle class, non-smoking professionals, then outsiders are going to look in and say "That's a place for white university educated middle class non-smoking professionals, but I'm a black brickie who smokes and left school at 16, so I don't fit in." It shows people that they can fit in, it gets rid of most of the barriers, and lets them see Jesus better on their own terms. It doesn't demand that they have to change all their cultural stuff, that might well define who they are, if they are going to become a Christian.

I'm a Christian first and foremost. Yes, I'm white, middle class, university educated, non-smoking. But that should all be negotiable (except it's hard to change my DNA or the past). It doesn't define who I am, so I can change it if I love other people enough and really want them to know Jesus.

Now here's where the rubber hits the road. I know of no Christian churches which are doing this in trying to reach Muslims. I don't know Christian churches where the leaders grow beards, the women wear head coverings, they sit on the floor and put the Bible on a stand, where they only eat halal food. And we wonder why so few Muslims in the UK become Christians! Isn't it obvious! It's because we're not making the effort - because we are holding too tightly to our own culture to bother trying to reach them. I'm not saying we should become Muslims; I'm saying that where issues are negotiable (like hair styles, probably not like gender roles) then we should be willing to compromise to reach others.

What do we do instead? Benedictine techno-trance (no offence to those who really love that stuff), but the C of E seems to plug loads of money into alt.worship stuff because it is trendy even though it seems to bear no fruit and they don't know who it's meant to be reaching.

I know some great fresh expressions of church. I've talked about some on this blog - I've got friends involved with initiatives like the Plant and Eden. But they work precisely because they are losing classic white, middle class, etc culture and changing their culture to that of the people they are trying to reach. Where are the Christians willing to become like Muslims to win the Muslims?

Darfur

There was an interesting opinion piece in the Telegraph this morning about Darfur. Basically, as is well known, it seems that a group of muslims is killing a group of Christians, and has killed about 180,000 so far.

Yes, I think it is in a way surprising how little the West is doing there. Yes, on one level I think it is sad. Who do I think is winning? The Christians.

What we have there is a conflict between two cultures. On one hand, militant Muslims who are happy to kill for their faith. On the other, Christians who are willing to die for theirs. What is victory in that situation? For the Christian, victory is to stay faithful and to die. Those 180,000 are following the way of their Saviour, who submitted himself even to death.

At some times in the past, Christians have got it wrong and have fought back, even occasionally fought offensively. But it is clear that in doing so, they were not following Jesus.

What happens if the war in England becomes violent? What happens if those who refuse to convert to Islam are one day lined up and killed? Then I sincerely hope and pray that I will have the courage to join those 180,000 in conquering by enduring, even to the point of death.

In the (complex and hugely symbolic) book of Revelation, there is a final battle, which is between God's people and everyone else.

When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog — to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God's people, the city he loves.
Revelation 20:7-9a, NIV

God's people are hopelessly overwhelmed and outnumbered. But God's people do not fight back. What happens? The description of the battle is brief:

But fire came down from heaven and devoured them.
Revelation 20:9b, NIV

If any physical fighting for the faith needs to be done, leave it to God. The job of Christians is to stay faithful, to suffer and if needs be, to die.

Difficult question - would I have fought in WW2? Quite possibly. I think there's a difference between fighting to defend myself against attack for being a Christian and potentially laying down my life to defend my country, my family and others from evil.

Singing

One of the distinctive things Christians seem to do a lot is singing. Yesterday, I went to two churches with two very different approaches to singing.

Why Sing?

Because the Bible tells us to:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.
Colossians 3:16

Because singing expresses joy in a way that words without singing don't seem able to:

Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
Psalm 95:1, NIV

All the lands are at rest and at peace; they break into singing.
Isaiah 14:7, NIV

Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem!
Zephaniah 3:14, NIV

Because it is a good and pleasant thing to do:

Praise the LORD, for the LORD is good;
sing praise to his name, for that is pleasant.
Psalm 135:3, NIV

Praise the LORD.
How good it is to sing praises to our God,
how pleasant and fitting to praise him!
Psalm 147:1, NIV

So basically, the point of singing is largely to express gratitude and joy at our relationship with Jesus.

Now when I think about the way that singing has often been done in churches I've been to, I find that it doesn't seem aimed to do that at all. The "hymn sandwich" model (hymn then something else then hymn, then something else, etc) seems designed to express a bit of joy, then get on with something else, then express a bit more joy, as if it was somehow wrong to express lots and lots of joy and actually get excited about Jesus as we express our joy in him.

And don't even get me started about hymn singing in school - I'm still not sure what the point of that is. Why should people who don't have a relationship with Jesus be excited about it?

Now I think there are things we've still got to be careful of. We've got to be careful that we don't sing stuff that isn't true or that we don't believe, coz we don't want to be hypocrites any more than we already are; we should be careful that everything is done in an ordered way rather than chaotically.

However, I think it's important that if we're singing to express joy, then we should express joy in our singing - in the way that we sing, in what we sing, in the way that we put songs together. And the way that people work, it seems that it's somehow easier to express more joy by singing for 10 mins at once than it is for singing for two chunks of 5 mins with a 5 minute break in between to sit down in silence and listen to some boring notices.

Just a thought...

Does Science Work?

In a recent discussion, JL posted some interesting thoughts on the nature of knowledge in science. He's also done them as a post on his blog. I think there are some very interesting points here, that it's well thought through and well written, and while I agree with most of them, there are a few things that need a bit of clarification.

I give you this analogy: Before you walk into a building, you don't know how structurally safe it might be, and whether or not it might collapse on top of you. You might be 50% certain - either it will collapse, or it won't. You decide that your accumulated experience with buildings is a good guide, and enter the building. If you repeatedly return to the same building, and it doesn't collapse on top of you, your previous experience leads you to the conclusion that this building is structurally sound, and is unlikely to fall down while you are inside. You go further into the building each time you visit, increasing the risk of being trapped or hurt if it does start to collapse. You might be 80% sure, or 90%, or given long enough, 99.999999% sure. You can never be 100% sure, but you conclude that given the evidence and experience, the likelihood of this particular building collapsing with you inside is remote in the extreme.

I agree with the majority of what you say about science here (well, I would, I was a physics teacher until last month).

I think the analogy could be improved a little, however.

We don't have experience of anything else "like" science. We don't have a (naturalistic) understanding of why it works. We don't have any explanation of why or how electrons and photons should interact in the way they do in QED - we just observe that they do. In fact, that has to be true of any theory we see as fundamental.

So science is more like seeing a building with no visible means of support. We can't see a priori why it should stay up. We can't go away and test other things like it to see that they stay up, because there isn't anything else like it. We can't use our pre-existing understanding of engineering to say that it looks as if it should stay up, because we don't have any pre-existing understanding of the universe.

But yes, the reason most people believe that science will continue to work is that it has worked so far. That's not the reason I believe science continues to work - I believe it continues to work because God is reliable, and he continues to work it.

Actually, I think what you describe is a very good analogy for faith. Not in the post-existential sense of "a leap in the dark", but a process of putting your trust in something based on a growing understanding (which is how the Bible uses the word). So I observe that God is trustworthy and doesn't let me down, so I trust him a bit more, and so on.

Taking the analogy further, if the building has been carefully planned and thoroughly tested, well designed and constructed, it will survive all manner of adversity unscathed: fires, floods, earthquakes, strong winds. By the same token, small defects might be uncovered after such events, and these deserve much scrutiny and enquiry, and ultimately some resolution.

I agree. This is also largely the point I was making with miracles and people not believing - even the (hypothetical) absolute rationalist could say it was simply an example of some science or technology they had not yet fully understood. I'm pretty certain that miracles have happened. I have good reason to believe that they still happen.

When people don't believe, in my limited experience (others who read this blog have far more), it is usually either because they have not yet realised how trustworthy God is, how amazing Christ is and how wonderful it is to have a relationship with him, or it is because they have decided not to believe.

I very much doubt that it is possible to prove anything to someone who has decided not to believe, unless God first weakens that resolution. I think that's what is meant in the Bible by the phrase "a hard heart".

Taking Days Off

One thing I'm really grateful for is the whole idea of days off. Saturday, for example, is currently my day when I don't do any work. With that in mind, I intend this is to be my last blog entry on a Saturday for some time.

Father Christmas

A random not-especially-seasonal post today. I was in a coversation a few days ago where the topic came up and I realised I should write some more on it.

I was quite traumatised as a child over the whole Santa Claus thing. Here's how it happened.

My parents, in a well-meaning but ultimately misguided way, had told me that Father Christmas existed. They told me that he came down the chimney and put presents in my stocking. My stocking certainly went from being empty to being full of presents overnight, and many of the presents claimed to be from Father Christmas.

Having a fairly scientific mindset, I wanted to know how this worked. Specifically, I was bothered about the fact the chimney was bricked up and wasn't sure about the level of communication that seemed to take place between Father Christmas and my parents. So I stayed awake one year - I guess I was about 6 - and waited to see what would happen. As my parents were going to bed, I heard my mother come into the room, so I said hello. She seemed surprised, mumbled something about checking if I was asleep so Father Christmas could come, and went out. I figured I'd better pretend to be asleep the next time, and true to form, my mum filled my stocking with presents.

The next morning, I mentioned this to my parents, and they still tried to maintain that Santa existed, but came up with some much less plausible story, which I didn't believe. I know now that they meant well, but I also know that I lost a lot of respect for my parents that Christmas. I stopped regarding what they said as true just because they said it - I stopped trusting them. It felt as if they were lying to me, and thinking I was stupid to believe the lies.

Why do I say this? Because lies, however well-intentioned, damage relationships.

I think there are some situations where lying is ok - for example if I was hiding a load of Jews in Nazi Germany and the SS came looking. One thing that Daniel Hill has been pushing me on a fair bit lately in when I think it is ok to lie and when I think it isn't. I guess the key issues there are an understanding of the big picture, a knowledge of how others would respond to your statement, and issues of informed and humble consciences. If my parents had understood how lying about Santa would affect me, they wouldn't have done it.

The Power of Community

One of the more difficult decisions I made over the last year was where to train for the ordained ministry. The choice basically came down to two colleges. One of them had lots and lots of people like me, most of whom had pretty similar views to where I was coming from (not all of which views I entirely agreed with, of which more later I guess). Most of the teaching was done by lectures, also done by people with a similar background to me, where you were told stuff and expected to absorb and learn it.

The other college had lots of people, but many of them not like me, though most sharing a few basic assumptions (authority of Scripture, etc). Teaching was mostly done by being told to read a lot and write lots of essays, then being expected to be able to argue through the issues one on one with people who knew a lot about the field. A lot of the course was done by non-Christians in a secular university, but within the support of a Christian community.

I chose the latter, and I'm glad I did. If I learnt in a community with people with similar backgrounds and opinions, I'd either end up agreeing with them without having really engaged with the issues, or I'd end up disagreeing with them because I'm sometimes contrary like that. This way, I get to make my own mind up as to what the Bible teaches, while being exposed to a broader range of opinions, and there is much less likely to be compulsion to take (or oppose) a party line.

John Pollock - Shaftesbury the Reformer

This is a fairly short ( < 200 pages) biography of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. Reading it, I found it hard to understand how he didn't make the shortlist for "Greatest Britons", well, except that it was voted for by the general public, and there doesn't seem to be a large public awareness of Shaftesbury. To be honest, I didn't know what he did, except thinking that he had something to do with prison reform, which I have at times been quite ambivalent about.

In brief, Shaftesbury was a 19th century English nobleman, MP and social reformer. He was heavily involved with campaigning against and stopping the quasi-slave-labour culture of the 1800s (especially for children), providing education and apprenticeships for street children, helping to reform criminals, abolishing the burning of widows in Indian, and was involved in founding and/or leading a vast number of organisations including the Bible Society, the RSPCA, the NSPCC, the YMCA, ... One of the striking things is the way that his actions flowed out of his sincere trust in Jesus - he was for a while virtually the official spokesman for Christians in England and many of the organisations he was involved with were explicitly Christian. It has certainly been argued that without the reforms he introduced, England might well have fallen to revolution in the mid-1800s, as many other countries in Europe did.

This biography is certainly a good introduction to Shaftesbury, but doesn't really have space to get into detail about what was going on in his mind, as there is so much that he did.

One interesting question: How come the great pioneering social reformers in history have almost all been committed Christians? The only one I can think of offhand who wasn't was Gandhi, and even he claimed to have been hugely influenced by Jesus. Maybe it's my selective knowledge of history, but William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, ...