The Problem of Miracles

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John 2:1–11 ESV

1 On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2 Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. 3 When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 6 Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. 8 And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. 9 When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

Let me make a statement here at the very beginning that we will work out throughout our time together today… In order to disprove miracles… you must FIRST disprove God...

Let’s let this be the background of what we are talking about today. What do we do with the supernatural and unusual experiences in our lives that are held by rational credible people. Stories that seem to defy all logic. If only one of thsoe stories turns out tobe true, then what we believe about the reality of the world can fall apart if we hold to a trictly rational worldview rational world.

How can we as skeptics make the miracles make sense… and to be honest, miracles are just one of the reasons people don’t believe in Jesus, they cant believe them as true. Smithsonian Thomas Jefferson… bible without the miracles… this is what peoiple want today… and the same in Jesus lifetime… they wanted to wash it away… the devil… magical errors… today we say we live in the modern era, it can’t happen… and then we extend it to the Bible…

We believe that science has trampled the way for us to not believe in miracles

In the naturalist view, where there is no God… miracles are ruled out before they even get started.... they believe you just look at the evidence based on science....and if you are a naturalist it is not true… your view is first and foremost a philosophical view… you approach data and predetermine that the data must fit in with what you already believe about the world, and that is a dangerous way to approach data.

We must look at data with no preconceived notions about what is going on.

CS Lewis in his book on Miracles who was a lifelong skeptic said this, “If anything extraordinary seems to have happened we can always say that we may have been victims of an illusion if we hold a philosophy that excludes the supernatural this is what we will always say. If we have the assumption that miracles are impossible then no amount of historical evidence will make us believe. That isn’t fair to history because we decide before it has even begun and that isn’t the way we should approach anything...”

If miracles are possible but improbable then the right evidence can show us that it could occur. There is the contradiction to naturalism.

How do we come up with the idea that miracles cant happen… we believe that nature is the whole show…

and Who is to say that natural laws cant change… Alvin plantinga he talked about the idea that Newtons laws were for 2 centuries absolutely true.... every machine incorporated its ideas… he was vindicated so long… but then came Einsteins theory of relativity that refuted those laws and proved them to be wrong

In other words… laws arent immutable… it is our interpretation and best guess of what we think about those things happening around us… so laws are always being refuted and put down… qhich means we can’t hold to a natural worldview that could never change…because we can see clearly what we believe as true is always changing

Some people would say A miracle is a violation of nature…but here is the thing whenever someone believes in miracles.. they aren’t thinking when left alone that something miraculous will happen… they are saying that there is something outside the natural order that is causing that thing to happen and bring it forth miracles aren’t contradictions to science, they lie outside the realm of science…

THink of things like ethics and morality… they cant be tested in a scientific way but people don’t argue they don’t exist...

By definition miracles interrupt the very normal way we see the world and they need help for that to happen...

So the argument for miracles is an x factor that goes above and beyond nature. Nature cannot give us a miracle… We don’t believe that nature spit Jesus out of the grave… no God raised him from the dead… its not contradictory to the laws of nature… no God raised him up outside the laws of nature...

One scholar I read said “Only if the atheist has independent reasons to believe that God’s existence is implausible or his intervention in the world implausible, can he justify that the resurrection could be implausible. “

You have to say that God doesnt exist to say that miracles don’t exist.

THe mistake the skeptic makes with miracles is that nature is a closed system… they would say that miracles defy science… but they don’t.. naturalism as a philosphy is seen as outdated by a mechanistic portrait of an older day… and most think they are outdated… most people think that as the classic view of science

Today the more people dive into science the more legitimate miracles have become… one author says miracles are completely consistent with modern science… to give an example the old way of thinking gives no way for an event to be uncaused in any way, so the older science says there is nothing that can happen to make something un happen… or be reverse but the entire field of quantum theory is developed on uncaused events....

HE goes on to say IF we try to define a miracle with an event that is incompatible with nature then it seems water turning into wine or a dead man coming back to life are not miracles… because they are not incompatible with quantum mechanics… that is in today’s science the idea that this could happen isn’t too farfetched… it fits in with the narrative of what quantum mechanics say… and the more we learn about the universe we realize it is super complex and 200 years ago they didn’t know any of this stuff…

The more modern scientific mindset recognizes the limitations of science.. it shows us that laws are unverifiable… for example

IF one asserts that all swans are white how could it be verified.. by observing 10K 1 million.. it only takes one black swan to defy it… this is what happened when Europeans landed in Australia up until that point they believed all swans to be white it was an irrefutable fact… until our awareness of our prospective changed and a black swan was actually seen.

Similarly that an occurence is impossible because we have never seen or experienced it is a week argument… the thing having happened or not we have to decide if its possible or not and how improbable… we must investigate every miracle… out of the millions of claimed events in history, it would only take one of those events to be true to end teh entire naturalistic worldview...

FOr instance… Craig Keener on Miracles… doctors are going in and seeing that there are accuracies to claims about prayer actually changing what is going on..if even one of those is true… and if any of it is true then all of naturalism falls apart...

How many people have you met that have something that cant be explained by natural occurence? Ive seen people healed of incurable diseases… knowledge that can be confirmed… not eery day. but enough to make you take notice...

THe periodic table of the elements… thats unchanging right… no it is getting changed in light of quantum theory.... many people equate evidence with probability meaning the less probability the less it evident it is it could happen and that is a wrong argument… that is like arguing that a lottery winner didn’t win because the probability is so small 76mill to 1

Because the odds of getting dealt the perfect hand in bridge is so astronomical that it could never happen but we know that isnt true because it has happened…

IF that is true by the same reasoning we couldnt believe in teh big bang… in the end the skeptic fails to consider the occurence of rare events and says it can enver happen...

Im not saying this proves anything about God… the issue isnt whether an event is regular or rare… because rare doesnt mean never

ITs is wrong to say that something is a rare event and then say it is impossible for it to happen… we do not know enough about the laws of nature to know for sure whether or not it can happen

Lets talk about Jesus miracles… no other religion in the world that has as many miracles as the ones that Christianity says that Jesus performed… We say he had over 30 miracles in 30 years. But all the Bible is about 250 miracles… John says there are more than we ever recorded… but why only those 30? They are showing some restraint in the miracles… and they could have embellished...

31 seperate....3 groups… healing…exorcism.... nature miracles… he is basically doing miracles over consequences of sin, satan, and nature So the total miracle account breaks down into 6 exorcisms 17 healings… 6 raising from the dead… 8 nature miracles only 1 in all 4 the feeding of the 5000.. the fact that these happen outside of hte bible… Josephus said that he was a miracle worker… but what does that mean.... it points us in the right direction… and john tells us they are a sign that are pointing to something else....

signs that point to a reality

they point to a wonder and a mighty work… a great or divine power… the miracles were more than an attempt to better the world and not just the lives of those in the first century… one writer has said “The messiah was not going to save the world by miraculous bandaids interventions… a storm calmed here a crowd fed there… it was going to be saved by something much greater.” The miracles were not an end in themselves… they relayed messages about God and love and life and how Jesus was bringing about a new way… it was about a redemption of a broken world… they were actually restoring the world back to the way he wanted.....

Consider the man healed from blindness in john 9… why born that way… parents or him… and jesus heals him.... John 9:39

John 9:39 ESV

39 Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”

Some Pharisees said what are we blind too? And eh said, now that you claim you can see.. your guilt remains… The disciples as well as the readers of Johns gospel are looking back to find out why… and Jesus directs them forward and starts answering a different question…to what end… so the work of God can be made know in his lfe and the miracle here was to make a theological point not about the one mans blindness but everyones blindness.. your blindness, my blindness....to the spiritual questions.... his works are the physical evidence or what he was teaching through his life and ministry… the restoring of all things… and this is why john repeatedly uses the word signs.... to point to what is going on its the new creation breaking into the old..

Jesus miracles offer a hint about what God is going to do to heal our world....

Story of Cana… 6 stone water jars… the jewish rites of purification… and he is taking this religious ritual and making it into something new… this ritual is being changed and uprooted by Jesus and it is coming to an end and fulfilled by Jesus.... He is the new wine and the new temple… the scandal of the miracles is he is changing what is going on in the world and what religion was saying… it was a bomb to those people… these things would have been seen as extremely controversial to the audience of the book of John

Jesus wasn’t just healing and doing marvelous things… he was doing something that meant something bigger for the larger world...

So what does this mean for you and me/? It means transformation… this miracle and all of them are about transformation of OUR lives… he wanted to change normal life into something sweet and colorful....that doesn’t mean prosperous by the worlds definition… the real transformation of water into wine is about us at the end of the day… its about your anger problem… its about your guilt you live with that you cant shake… the addiction you can’t shake.... it promises to take the bland and make it something new… so that when the world tastes it like that wine it will never be satisfied with anything else...

Christianity is more than a set of teachings or philosophy of life… it is an offer of a relationship with Christ that will transform your life… my son who was dead is alive says the father in the prodigal story… is that your story… hopeless people that we were into something different so it changes the way we spend money, do our jobs… everything is changed when we put it into the hands of Jesus… these things used for purification are now better.... this later is better than the first… What we are talking about is sanctification… he changes what we used to take joy and value in into something different.... you may have not been exposed to conversations about miracles very often… healings… and other things… unbelievable… but then there are times when the miracles don’t happen

In our life the reality is every time we celebrate a miracle.... the backside is why not the other… and the crucial question is present in the story of water being turned into wine and it shows that we cant control God… we don’t get to tell him when he is going to heal or how he is going to do it… Mary to Jesus and he says woman its not my time.... and Jesus said take this cup of suffering from me… and he says no… in the midst of our suffering there are things we cannot see… and in the midst of it all he promises not one sparrow will fall without the will of God…and he says this in the midst of a time of persecution

Its not that we wont face trial and difficulty… its that we are safe when doing so… and its not that he will always say yes to our prayer he can say no… and we miss the fact that there were more miracles in Jesus ministry that he could have done as many as he wanted… why 36.... why so few… I think its because he knows something we know that we refuse to embrace… there are no quick answers… the answer is not always deliverance but discipleship… the porn addiction doesn't end over night… its a hard road to transformation… It is hard fought in the dark when no one is looking.... It is in the midst of our storm… and he says Dont despair because God is there...