Faith Well Grounded

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. Albert Einstein

As Albert Einstein studied the universe, he found it more and more wondrous. This shouldn’t be surprising. Not even the staunchest of naturalists can look out into nature and be ambivalent about the wondrousness of what they find there. I guess a universe that could organize itself with such precision could be considered miraculous, since we don’t currently find a universe that tends to order, but instead tends to disorder. Come to think of it, the naturalist’s vision of the universe is infinitely more miraculous than the theist’s.

Thus I’m a bit conflicted about the above quote—most especially as a Christian theist. On the one hand, with God as the uncaused Cause of everything, then the cause of everything is outside of nature, and thus is miraculous by definition. Hebrews 11:3 states:

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

How wonderfully miraculous is the creation of something from nothing by word alone? But Christianity looks at things as a bit more complex than this. It’s a misnomer to say that “everything is a miracle”. God created an ordered creation—one created to function in a repeatable way. Although Christ is the power that upholds the Universe, it still works in a repeatable, ordered way. A miracle, strictly speaking, is the addition to or temporary cessation of that order. A miracle, by definition is a rare event of exceptional nature that defies natural explanation.

Now, why am I so conflicted by the thought of looking at everything as miraculous? Wouldn’t it actually be grand if everyone looked at everything as miraculous, in some hyper-natural compromise with our supernatural beliefs?

In a word: No.

This viewpoint would be a total misunderstanding of God’s intent, and would cheat humanity of its most prized and important possession—the revelation of our Creator about Himself to us, and by extension, the revelation of our need and His plan of redemption. He desires a relationship with us and has performed the work to have it. The “everything is a miracle” mindset will miss that. To understand why, we’ll have to understand what a miracle is and why God has historically performed them.

I’ll present that in my next blog post. I sincerely hope this will qualify as the proverbial “cliff-hanger”, and that you’ll tune in for the next post. For now, I’d like to leave you with that work of redemption mentioned above:

Romans 5:5 And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. 6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Praise God.

I pray that His unbound blessings are finding you daily.

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