What is a miracle?

People have always been confused about miracles. Some people don't even believe in them, but those people are wrong.

You see, when God set things up, He made a bunch of rules about how things have to work. We know some of those rules, like the Law of Gravity, which makes everything fall to the ground, and the Law of Entropy, which means it's a lot easier to make a mess than it is to clean it up. Scientists know more of the Laws of Nature, but I don't know their names. So some people think that since even God has to obey the rules He made up, there can't be any miracles.

It turns out that some of the things we call miracles are really only part of God's design. The Miracle of Life, for instance. We call life a miracle because we don't understand it. And because so far, only God can do it. But because life obeys the laws of nature, it isn't a proper miracle.

Miracles are things that happen outside the known laws of nature. They look like they break the laws, in fact. And that's where the problem is. Would God break His own laws, even if He could break them? It doesn't seem very likely, does it?

Still, the Bible tells us Jesus did a lot of miracles, doesn't it? For example, he turned water into wine, and he walked on water, and he healed people's sicknesses without any medicine. And if miracles can't happen, like some people say, then why would the Bible say they did?

Well, God's time is not the same as our time. The Bible tells us so. When God does something in His kind of time, it might take a billion years in our kind of time or it might take only the teeniest little fraction of a second. When science discovers the laws of time, I bet they'll find out that speeding it up or slowing it down are part of those laws.

This means God can heal somebody's illness or injury in a fraction of the time it takes to wink your eye or snap your fingers in our time, but it might be a billion trillion winks of an eye in his time. Doctors give us medicines and do operatons and give us shots and stuff, but when it comes right down to putting bones back together or making broken or cut skin grow back together, only God can do that. It doesn't break any of the laws of nature that we know about, even if we don't understand how He did it, whether He does it real fast or real slow. Sometimes God heals people as quickly as you can snap your fingers, and sometimes He takes a little longer.

Remember the time when the doctor told Grandma she had cancer? She said, "Well, God will take care of that little business," and just marched out of the doctor's office as if she were angry. We were really scared for her, because she wouldn't talk to anybody at all for a whole week! And then she went back to the doctor at the end of that week and said "Okay, it's gone," and the doctors checked, and it really was gone. Weren't we all really surprised? Well, that was a time when God did a miracle. It was a miracle because all the doctors said Grandma was going to die - and instead, God healed her. He does that sometimes, if people get sick before they've finished their jobs here on earth!

But it is important to remember that sometimes people only think they're sick, so it's pretty easy for them, when somebody says "Be healed," for them to stop thinking they're sick and get well. People who don't believe in miracles say this is always the case, but we know better, because we've had our very own miracles, right?

Now, the Bible stories tell us about Jesus walking on the water and feeding five thousand people with only a little bit of food, and letting Peter find money in the mouth of a fish and things like that. This is the kind of miracle that seems to break the known laws of nature. And so, while God could do these things, it doesn't seem very likely that He would do them, does it? So why does the Bible tell us He did?

Well, the people who wrote the Gospels knew Jesus was God, because they knew all about how He came back to earth after being killed and buried. But other people didn't know that. Would we know it if somebody hadn't told us? So the Gospel writers had to try and convince everybody that Jesus was God, because that was their job and they had to do it before they could go to heaven. And when people kept on not believing them, the Gospel writers might have said something like,

"Look, if a Man could do this and that and the other thing, would that prove to you that He really is God?" And the people would have said,

"Yes, that would convince us, all right! Nobody could do those things except God."

Well, the Gospel writers thought about it very hard for a long time. They knew they hadn't seen Jesus do some of the things people wanted to hear about. But they also knew that Jesus could have done them if He had thought about it. He just had more important things to do. And they thought about it so hard and so long that they didn't even write their gospels until sixty years or more after Jesus died.

But what they finally decided was that since Jesus could do these things, and since if He had done these things, the people would be convinced that He really is God, then it was right and fair to say that He had done them. Because the important thing was that people understand who Jesus really was and is.

It's like when you say your Daddy can fix anything even though you know perfectly well that you've never seen your Daddy fix - well, a broken arm, for example. You don't really know for sure that he could do that, but are you lying to your friends when you say he can fix anything? No - because you have never broken anything yet that your Daddy can't fix.

So when somebody said to the Gospel writers, "Well, could Jesus walk on water?" the writers could say "Sure!". They may not have ever seen him do it, but since they knew He was God, they knew He could have done it if He wanted to.

This is just like when Kyle said, "Well, can your daddy fix a broken arm?" You said, "Sure, he can!", didn't you? Because even though you never saw him do it, you thought he could if he wanted to because you've never broken anything your daddy couldn't fix. And it just so happens that Daddy can help fix a broken arm - at least well enough to get it to a hospital where the doctors can put the bones back together. But Daddy can not fix the bones. Only God can do that.

Now, we see miracles happening all around us all the time, but most people are too busy or too worried to recognize them. We'll never be able to prove that miracles happen, though. You see, miracles are made of God's love, so they are sort of like our souls: even though they happen to everybody, they can't be found out by scientific experiment. And that's the only reason some people say there's no such thing as a miracle.