Friday, October 30, 2009

Miracles

I was reading CS Lewis last night from his book Miracles. Among many other things, he suggests that when we understand God correctly, we have a completely different concept of miracles and answered prayers. Basically, he says that, since God sees all "times" at once, it is not impossible for most answers to prayer to have been built into the fabric of this universe He created. If God knows that having rain or clear skies is vitally important, and that we have prayed for it, then He can have already (from our perspective) built that rain or clear skies into the weather pattern. Is it less of a miracle? Perhaps, from one perspective. But what it means is that, in order to answer our prayers, God need not intervene into the world, but just build it into the fabric. On the other hand, genuine miracles, in the sense of suspending the laws of nature, or inputting something from beyond the natural, is something that God does as well. But we have a tendency to only call it a work of God if it is a genuine miracle. If it turns out that it was going to rain after all, then God had nothing to do with it. And that is just plain not correct. After all, Jesus was "the lamb slain from the creation of the world." A little rain is pretty easy in comparison to redemption of an entire race. So keep on praying! God is listening even now and may be causing the entirety of creation to be a certain way even as we speak in order to answer that prayer!

Pastor Ken

1 comment:

Patrick said...

Awesome thoughts... :)