
Uninvented: Why Miracles in the Bible Read Real
When I wrote about miracles in Uninvented, I pointed out how rare they are in redemptive history, which might surprise those who have never read the Bible. The basic secular consensus is that the Bible is all myths and fairy tales, so secular people tend to think the Bible is full of miracle stories. Only, it’s not. It starts with the greatest miracle of all, God creating all things out of nothing, creation ex nihilo, by speaking all of it into existence. If you buy that, the rest of the miracles in the Bible are instantly plausible, and easily believable.
The first miracles we encounter surround Moses, the Exodus, and Israel entering the promised land in approximately 1400 BC. Then, after 500 or so years, the prophets Elijah and Elisha perform miracles, and it would be another 800 years until the miracles of Jesus and the Apostles. The Lord spoke to his people, kings and prophets, but we’re not told how that happened. Outright miracles are rare.
Nevertheless, most people being immersed in secularism from birth don’t see miracles, however rare, as the least bit plausible or believable. In time, they develop what I call a question begging anti-supernatural bias. Simply put, they assume materialism or naturalism (matter is all there is, or the “natural” world runs on its own), and thus miracles can’t happen. So, when they read the miracles in the Bible, they conclude they must have been made up, invented by the authors. Since 95% of people believe God exists, it isn’t difficult to get them to believe the miracles in the Bible can be or are real. At the least, they won’t dismiss them out of hand because the existence of God makes them possible.
The most important thing we can encourage a non-Christian to do is read the Bible while being aware of the inherent, and unquestioned, anti-supernatural bias that secularism has programed into their minds. That should be rather simple. If they believe in God, in whatever way they might conceive him, the possibility of miracles naturally flow from that. If they don’t, just having them posit God as a possibility is all they need. Then, they will be more open to see the verisimilitude in the text, the realness in the stories. At the least, they will have to conclude what they’re reading is not myths and fairy tales, and not even close.
As I’ve written here before, I started listening to Christian testimonies some years ago. Something I consistently heard was how simply reading the Bible completely changed their inaccurate conception of Christianity. I believe the Bible is literally the word of God because that’s what it claims to be (chapters 2 and 3 in the book are what make this plausible, the Christian concepts of revelation and inspiration), so what the Lord declares through the prophet Isaiah (55) is true:
10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
God’s word, and The Word, are the only things that can open a sinful human being’s heart and mind to saving trust in Christ. In philosophical terms, God is the primary cause, but as we see throughout Scripture, God uses sinful human beings to accomplish his purposes, or secondary causes, and that would be us! So, it is important to educate non-Christians on what the Bible claims for itself, which is divine revelation from God, and true history.
We should encourage our friends to start reading the stories of the One whom the entire Bible is about, Jesus of Nazareth. The gospels are incredibly powerful stories and have brought innumerable people to Christ over the last 2,000 years, including me. As a freshman in college, I was invited to a Bible study about “what the Bible says about who Jesus is.” That’s how I remember it being put to me, and it was the perfect question because that was something I wanted to know. The gospel we studied was John, a very good choice for any non-Christian to read, but any gospel will do, and Acts as well. I heard a testimony of an ex-atheist recently, and he said as he was reading Acts, he thought there is no way that it could be made up. Bingo!
One thing our non-Christian friends might not expect is how miracles are portrayed. They are never hyped or embellished, but are a simple part of the narrative, something you would expect from eyewitness testimony. Also, encourage them to notice the psychology of the people who encounter Jesus and his miracles. Everything he does is unexpected, which is why I argue he would be impossible to invent. In the book I call him the conundrum that is Jesus.
The Jesus in the gospels is a Messiah that would have been impossible for Jews to have made up because he was so unexpected. This includes not only his miracles but his teaching and personality. Jews never expected a miracle working Messiah, although the miracles confirmed he came from God. I love the way the gospels portray everyone who encounters Jesus. He just confuses the heck out of them.
The most impossible miracle for his disciples to have “made up” is the most important, the resurrection. There are many reasons for this I explore in Uninvented, but the impossibility of invention is from both sides of the ancient civilizational divide. Pagans wouldn’t make up a resurrection because their goal was to escape material reality. Jews wouldn’t either because resurrection was only something that happened at the end of time. You can see this in the interaction Martha has with Jesus when her brother Lazarus was still in the tomb (John 11). There are also significant psychological reason they would never have made it up, the most obvious was that Jesus was hung on a tree, and that meant he was under the curse of God. The Messiah? Impossible!
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