Miracles and the Providence of God, from the book, "That You May Believe"

     Before we consider the specific miracles that John included in his gospel account, we want to be clear about what constitutes a miracle. The biggest issue we see with identifying miracles is confusing a miracle with the providential hand of God. In our culture today, we tend to throw around the term “miracle” rather freely. We will speak of minor events that are surprising to us as a miracle. Definitions are important and understanding the difference between a miracle and providence is important. We will start off by defining a miracle. A miracle is an act of God through which he suspends or changes the laws of nature to accomplish His will. There are two important elements in this definition: (1) God is the author of the miracle and (2) He suspends or changes specific laws of nature. This means that God, the One who created the laws of nature, can do whatever He wants with the laws of nature. We must not forget that God uses human instruments to do miracles, but God is still the One who is doing the miracle. This is important to note so that we do not attribute special power to certain figures in the Bible, like Peter and Paul, who performed miracles in the New Testament. It was God who was at work through them.

     Let’s look at an example of a miracle in Luke 17:11-19, when Jesus healed the ten lepers. Jesus told the ten lepers to show themselves to the priests and “…as they were going, they were cleansed” (vs. 14). The text is not clear how the lepers were cleansed, but clearly Jesus was the one who healed them. Jesus did not touch them, or give them some medicine, or even tell them to do something. Their leprosy completely went away as they were going to the priests. That was the point of Jesus sending them to the priests. The priest was the only person in their culture who could call a leper clean and allow them to enter back into the society. There is no natural explanation for the leprosy to immediately go away other than Jesus caused it to disappear. In other words, it was a miracle. God was the author of this miracle and physiological processes were reshaped to cause the lepers to be immediately healed. We know Jesus altered the processes because even with today’s medical treatments, leprosy can only be healed with a regimen of medicines over a six-to-twelve-month period, depending on the type of leprosy afflicting the patient.

     Let us now contrast miracles with the providence of God. As mentioned above, with a miracle, certain laws are temporarily changed or suspended to accomplish His will. With providence, God orchestrates events to accomplish His will. The laws of nature are not manipulated contrary to their established function, but God operates within the realm of the natural universe to accomplish His will.

     By far, we experience God’s providential hand at work much more often than God working through a miracle. Many times, however, we miss seeing God’s hand at work because we are not “tuned in” spiritually or we attribute the event to good fortune. In the case of miracles, many people miss God’s hand at work because of unbelief. They either explain away the miracle as not happening or attribute it to natural causes. This was the way it was in Jesus’ day and that is how it is today. (From That You May Believe, chapter 2, pages 29-31)