December 20, 2014

This week we do something a little different. We thought that, in light of it being Christmas next week, instead of looking at the confused world we live in, we'd look at the world of miracles we live in.

What is a miracle? Webster's defines it as “An event or effectcontrary to the establishedconstitution and course of things, or (and this is probably the definition most people would agree with) a deviation from the knownlaws of nature; a supernaturalevent, or one transcending the ordinarylaws by which the universe is governed.”

A miracle can be something that doesn't fit into the natural laws as we know them but it is more than that. Some define miracles simply as extraordinary divine action. In order for that to happen though, there has to be more to this world than what we see physically, or can understand, even in the future. Obviously if someone from the past were to travel forward in time and see the technology we have today, they would consider it to be miraculous. But that's not what we're talking about. We want to look at things, that no matter what time in the past, present or future it were to happen, people would not be able to explain it based on nature's laws. And would say, That's a real miracle.

Can we really know if a miracle occurred unless we experienced it? A lot of times people will say “Oh that's just a coincidence. But I like Albert Einstein's definition of a coincidence. Einstein said that "Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous” So we have to trust a person's account of what happened to them just like we would want someone to trust our account when a miracle happens to us.

Author Erik Metaxas, whose written biographies of William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoffer, which they made a movie out of, and written scripts for Veggietales, has a new book out called Miracles and in that book he says that if a miracle happens in the woods and no ones around to see it, then it's not a miracle. His point being that miracles are signs that point us specifically to God and his existence.  As Albert Einstein also said

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