Miracles

Greetings All,

    This weeks thought comes from C. S. Lewis book "Miracles" (chapter 15).  I was reading it (re-reading it) last week in preparation for a sermon on Luke 9:1-9.  I know Lewis is sometimes hard to follow but this section on miracles is well worth your consideration.

I found myself saying "yes," and "this is true," and being thoroughly edified by it (though to get the full impact of what he writes you'll need to get the book and read the whole chapter (or book), part of which I've condensed for your convenience).  Enjoy! 

    

      "Christian miracles and their difference from mythological miracles lies in the fact that [Christian miracles] show invasion by a Power which is not alien.  They are what might be expected to happen when she is invaded, not simply by a god, but by the God of Nature: by a Power which is outside her jurisdiction not as a foreigner but as a sovereign.  They proclaim that He who has come in not merely a king, but the King, her King and ours.  It is this which, to my mind, puts the Christian miracles in a different class from most other miracles...

      It is not the duty of a Christian... to disprove all stories of the miraculous which fall outside the Christian records, nor of a Christian man to disbelieve them.  I am in no way committed to the assertion that God has never worked miracles through and for Pagans... But it would remain a quite isolated and anomalous fact...  

     Thus miracles are (in late documents, I believe) recorded of the Buddha. But what could be more absurd than that he who came to teach us that Nature is an illusion from which we must escape should occupy himself in producing effects on the Natural level -- that he who comes to wake us from a nightmare should add to the nightmare?  The more we respect his teaching the less we could accept his miracles.  But in Christianity, the more we understand what God it is who is said to be present and the purpose for which He is said to have appeared, the more credible the miracles become.  That is why we seldom find the Christian miracles denied except by those who have abandoned some part of the Christian doctrine.  The mind which asks for a non-miraculous Christianity is a mind in process of relapsing from Christianity into mere "religion."  

 

        Have a great week!  In the Bonds of Christian Fellowship,  Pastor Jeff

 

Dr. Jeffrey F. Evans

Christ Community Bible Church