For some, the accounts of God’s miracles are a barrier to faith. In reality, they are bedrocks of true belief. The problem people run into is not a lack of faith but a lack of imagination. How could those stories be real?!?! To quote Jesus, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”-Matthew 19:26. Many an unbeliever has shipwrecked their potential faith on the immense scale of these three miracles. Their idea of God is too small!
People begin reading the Bible from the front, and immediately must absorb a God powerful enough to speak the world into existence in six days. They just can’t imagine how it could be done. Then they turn to Genesis chapters six and seven and are confronted with the idea of putting every land animal on one boat and a flood that covers mountains. If they make it through Genesis, along comes Exodus 14 and God divides the Red Sea and 1.8-million Israelites walk on dry ground to the other shore. “Who can believe it?” Well, I believe it because my God transcends time, place, and matter.
I think people are much more comfortable with small scale miracles. Jesus heals a blind man here, a lame man there and it doesn’t really challenge their idea of what is possible for God. Now, feeding 5,000 people and bringing Jesus back to life after three days, that takes a little more convincing, yet it is still within the realm of possibility. But creating the world in six days. “Come on now!”
Miracles only seem overwhelming to us. To God, they are simply a matter of thinking things into being. Our Lord created the universe by calling what is into existence from what was not (Hebrews 11:3). Once you have not only created stars but placed then in the sky just so (Amos 5:8), how hard is forming plants, fish, or even man? When Sarah laughed at the idea of having a child when she was 90-years-old, God asked a simple question, “Is anything too hard for the LORD?”-Genesis 18:14.
God is not limited by gravity, time, heat, or cold. He designed the entire universe, solar system, and even our atmosphere in such a way that earth would support life. He is not made of matter. He made matter. When you think of our heavenly Father like that, it makes creating the world out of water, flooding it with water, and then drying the water seem normal. In the same way, Jesus producing bread and fish to feed 5,000 people is only impressive, when you don’t think about the fact he created every grain of wheat on earth and every fish in the sea (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16).
The Bible declares the glory of God from beginning to end. But let’s look at two verses in particular: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”-James 1:17 and “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”-II Peter 3:8. Light does not shine on God. God is light. He needs no sun or stars to be able to say, “Let there be light,”-Genesis 1:3. To us, as earthbound people, it took 40-days and forty nights to flood the earth. To God, did it take a second? How long does it take to dry up a sea and let 1.8-million people stroll to the other side? To God it doesn’t matter.
Do not fail to believe in miracles because they are beyond your imagination. Imagine a God for whom they are not miracles.
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