In the first two posts in this series, I detailed some of the conflicts I found within the Bible itself related to a common sense conception of justice. In this post, I want to talk about my own life experience in relation to what the Bible says should be a believer's experience specifically related to miracles.
The Bible very clearly supports the existence of miracles as direct intervention of God in our lives. Jesus performs miracles in the New Testament and the prophets in the Old Testament also perform miracles. The miracles clearly go against natural order and are supposed to bring glory to God and demonstrate His power and/or love and mercy.
Jesus prophesied that his followers would perform miracles even greater than his miracles and he goes on to say that whatever his followers ask in his name will be done (John 14). There is no qualification or equivocation.
Typically, the formula for having a "yes" answer from God with regard to your prayers and requests goes like this.
1. You must have faith and believe that God will deliver
2. Your request must not conflict with any scriptural principles
3. Your request must fall within God's overall plan
If your request meets all of these qualifications, you should see God answer in the affirmative. When I reached my 30s, I realized that I had never witnessed anything I could honestly attribute to divine intervention, without some other plausible naturalistic alternative explanation. In other words, I have seen nothing in my 3 decades of firm belief in possibility and even likelihood that God would supernaturally intervene on my behalf. Was there some part of the puzzle I was missing? I never had any serious doubt of the existence of God nor of the truth of the Bible during that time. I believed it with my whole being. I was knowledgeable about scripture and was an adherent to orthodox protestant theology. Most of the requests for which I was expectantly awaiting God's intervention involved healing for family members or people from church, so I knew that according to the Bible, healing sick people was both within God's power and to ask God for that kind of intervention on behalf of others. Why then were my prayers and the prayers of my family and fellow believers consistently being denied? There is another caveat. Believers are supposed to have faith that God will act, but they are not supposed to pose their prayer as a test for God. For example, praying 'Dear God, if you do this, I'll believe you exist' violates this proscription. I don't believe I ever tried to set up that kind of condition because I was aware that it was forbidden and I was always fearful that if I tried to pose something like that in prayer, God would refuse my request because I broke the rule.
I heard various explanations proffered in explanation for the denial of those prayers; sometimes Gods says no or wait, God doesn't always say yes, and God knows what is best for everyone. But there are several instances that, when I reexamine what happened before, during, and after, nothing positive came about, there was no waiting for a yes reply from God because a person died, and the end result was no different than what one would expect with no prayer and no God.
One example was when my sister's second child, a little girl, was born with a serious heart problem. Our whole family prayed night and day. My sister's church, my parents' church, friends, neighbors, and people around the state and the country prayed, cried, and poured their hearts out, pleading that God save her baby. a small miracle from a god. It could have prevented years of anguish and heartache for my sister, and it would have been a significant testimony. I witnessed the same kind of vacuous result when two young men from the church youth group contracted HIV which developed into AIDS from blood transfusions due to their hemophilia, it was apparently outside God's will to save and heal them. People with cancer, car accidents, whatever came along, there was not a single miracle in all my three decades of praying and believing that God could and would intervene in the lives of the people around me. When my brother came out as an atheist, a family member with an eating disorder, church members with cancer; to all of these petitions, God apparently had other plans. While there were people at church who got better during an illness, there was nothing in all my years that I could honestly say 'that couldn't have happened by normal, natural means.'
While no single event caused me to question the idea that the god of the Bible was out there, willing to act on our behalf, as I considered the sum of the evidence, or lack thereof, I was left to conclude that if there was a god out there, he did not exhibit the characteristics that were attributed to the God I read about in the Bible.
It occurred to me that something may have changed from the time the New Testament was written, Perhaps, due to the fact that reason and science have developed so far, there would be no faith would be required if Christianity was the one true religion and the God of Christianity performed miracles with regularity on behalf of If anything, the Bible indicates that God will work miracles in order to bring glory to himself and draw people to him. Growing up, I was always made to believe that the preponderance of evidence favored Christianity. However, the more I examined my life experiences and the Bible, I realized my faith was quickly beginning to crumble.
Another explanation for the lack of miracles I embraced for a while was to ascribe a miracle status to everyday naturally occurring events; 'there is magic in the mundane'. I was influenced by Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton and his book Orthodoxy. In it, Chesterton argues that natural events like the sunrise could be seen as mechanical, but they could also be seen and understood as magical. That seems like a viable option, but there are huge problems with that solution.
1. If we ascribe supernatural explanations to ordinary occurrences, it's really no different than if there is not a God. I recently had a conversation on this subject with a believer, I'll call him Johnny, who was trying to persuade me that he had seen miracles. He told me about his work with homeless drug addicts. Johnny told me about a homeless man who was so weak from malnourishment and drug abuse, that he couldn't even walk. His toes were rotting away due to exposure and frostbite. Johnny told me that this man was healed by God after a few weeks of detox, food, shelter, and prayer. That the man's health began to return under those circumstances, was not miraculous and could just as easily have occurred without the prayer. It's not as if the man's toes grew back. He got healthier when he had a decent diet and wasn't on drugs. In the end, the man returned to drugs and died; not miraculous.
2. This waters down the biblical standard for a miracle. Jesus didn't have people flocking to him because sometimes people who were sick seemed to get better eventually. People with chronic illnesses were allegedly healed instantly and in front of crowds of people. Jesus was supposedly able to call people from the grave and restore sight to blind people. Those are not naturally occurring events. They are notable because they are extraordinary and beyond natural explanation. Jesus said we could expect to do those same things and more.
Not only have I never witnessed a genuine miracle, but I have never known anyone else who even claims to have witnessed anything similar to the supernatural miracles described in the Bible. This realization was one of the final nails in the coffin of my faith.
The Bible very clearly supports the existence of miracles as direct intervention of God in our lives. Jesus performs miracles in the New Testament and the prophets in the Old Testament also perform miracles. The miracles clearly go against natural order and are supposed to bring glory to God and demonstrate His power and/or love and mercy.
Jesus prophesied that his followers would perform miracles even greater than his miracles and he goes on to say that whatever his followers ask in his name will be done (John 14). There is no qualification or equivocation.
Typically, the formula for having a "yes" answer from God with regard to your prayers and requests goes like this.
1. You must have faith and believe that God will deliver
2. Your request must not conflict with any scriptural principles
3. Your request must fall within God's overall plan
If your request meets all of these qualifications, you should see God answer in the affirmative. When I reached my 30s, I realized that I had never witnessed anything I could honestly attribute to divine intervention, without some other plausible naturalistic alternative explanation. In other words, I have seen nothing in my 3 decades of firm belief in possibility and even likelihood that God would supernaturally intervene on my behalf. Was there some part of the puzzle I was missing? I never had any serious doubt of the existence of God nor of the truth of the Bible during that time. I believed it with my whole being. I was knowledgeable about scripture and was an adherent to orthodox protestant theology. Most of the requests for which I was expectantly awaiting God's intervention involved healing for family members or people from church, so I knew that according to the Bible, healing sick people was both within God's power and to ask God for that kind of intervention on behalf of others. Why then were my prayers and the prayers of my family and fellow believers consistently being denied? There is another caveat. Believers are supposed to have faith that God will act, but they are not supposed to pose their prayer as a test for God. For example, praying 'Dear God, if you do this, I'll believe you exist' violates this proscription. I don't believe I ever tried to set up that kind of condition because I was aware that it was forbidden and I was always fearful that if I tried to pose something like that in prayer, God would refuse my request because I broke the rule.
I heard various explanations proffered in explanation for the denial of those prayers; sometimes Gods says no or wait, God doesn't always say yes, and God knows what is best for everyone. But there are several instances that, when I reexamine what happened before, during, and after, nothing positive came about, there was no waiting for a yes reply from God because a person died, and the end result was no different than what one would expect with no prayer and no God.
One example was when my sister's second child, a little girl, was born with a serious heart problem. Our whole family prayed night and day. My sister's church, my parents' church, friends, neighbors, and people around the state and the country prayed, cried, and poured their hearts out, pleading that God save her baby. a small miracle from a god. It could have prevented years of anguish and heartache for my sister, and it would have been a significant testimony. I witnessed the same kind of vacuous result when two young men from the church youth group contracted HIV which developed into AIDS from blood transfusions due to their hemophilia, it was apparently outside God's will to save and heal them. People with cancer, car accidents, whatever came along, there was not a single miracle in all my three decades of praying and believing that God could and would intervene in the lives of the people around me. When my brother came out as an atheist, a family member with an eating disorder, church members with cancer; to all of these petitions, God apparently had other plans. While there were people at church who got better during an illness, there was nothing in all my years that I could honestly say 'that couldn't have happened by normal, natural means.'
While no single event caused me to question the idea that the god of the Bible was out there, willing to act on our behalf, as I considered the sum of the evidence, or lack thereof, I was left to conclude that if there was a god out there, he did not exhibit the characteristics that were attributed to the God I read about in the Bible.
It occurred to me that something may have changed from the time the New Testament was written, Perhaps, due to the fact that reason and science have developed so far, there would be no faith would be required if Christianity was the one true religion and the God of Christianity performed miracles with regularity on behalf of If anything, the Bible indicates that God will work miracles in order to bring glory to himself and draw people to him. Growing up, I was always made to believe that the preponderance of evidence favored Christianity. However, the more I examined my life experiences and the Bible, I realized my faith was quickly beginning to crumble.
Another explanation for the lack of miracles I embraced for a while was to ascribe a miracle status to everyday naturally occurring events; 'there is magic in the mundane'. I was influenced by Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton and his book Orthodoxy. In it, Chesterton argues that natural events like the sunrise could be seen as mechanical, but they could also be seen and understood as magical. That seems like a viable option, but there are huge problems with that solution.
1. If we ascribe supernatural explanations to ordinary occurrences, it's really no different than if there is not a God. I recently had a conversation on this subject with a believer, I'll call him Johnny, who was trying to persuade me that he had seen miracles. He told me about his work with homeless drug addicts. Johnny told me about a homeless man who was so weak from malnourishment and drug abuse, that he couldn't even walk. His toes were rotting away due to exposure and frostbite. Johnny told me that this man was healed by God after a few weeks of detox, food, shelter, and prayer. That the man's health began to return under those circumstances, was not miraculous and could just as easily have occurred without the prayer. It's not as if the man's toes grew back. He got healthier when he had a decent diet and wasn't on drugs. In the end, the man returned to drugs and died; not miraculous.
2. This waters down the biblical standard for a miracle. Jesus didn't have people flocking to him because sometimes people who were sick seemed to get better eventually. People with chronic illnesses were allegedly healed instantly and in front of crowds of people. Jesus was supposedly able to call people from the grave and restore sight to blind people. Those are not naturally occurring events. They are notable because they are extraordinary and beyond natural explanation. Jesus said we could expect to do those same things and more.
Not only have I never witnessed a genuine miracle, but I have never known anyone else who even claims to have witnessed anything similar to the supernatural miracles described in the Bible. This realization was one of the final nails in the coffin of my faith.
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