SERIES: “ANSWERS TO SOME OF LIFE’S DIFFICULT QUESTIONS”
TEXT: JUDGES 6:11-13
TITLE: “ARE MIRACLES REALLY TRUE?”
INTRODUCTION: A. There’s an old story about a skeptic who continually challenged a local preacher.
The skeptic loved to try to paint the preacher as intellectually inferior because of his
faith. The preacher took the skeptic’s challenges with a lot of grace and restraint.
One morning, the preacher was eating breakfast at the corner diner when the
skeptic came in. Eyeing the preacher, the skeptic walked over to the table and began
to harangue this humble servant of the Lord concerning the validity of miracles. He
took great pains to ridicule the preacher concerning a belief in miracles and finally
taunted, “Give me one concrete example of a miracle. Just one concrete example.”
The preacher had taken enough abuse from the skeptic. The preacher stood,
politely wiped his mouth with his napkin, and kicked the skeptic as hard as he could in
the shin. The skeptic grabbed his leg, yelled some profanities, and sat down in a booth
– totally in shock at the preacher’s behavior.
The preacher sat down across from the skeptic and asked, “Did you feel that?” The
skeptic cursed again and declared in no uncertain terms that his throbbing leg had
certainly felt the kick. The preacher smiled and said, “If you hadn’t, well now, that
would have been a miracle.”
1. Have you ever struggled with the truth that God works miracles?
a. Maybe you’ve been in a situation where you asked God for something and
didn’t get what you wanted
b. Perhaps a loved one was suffering from a debilitating disease or life-threatening
illness
c. Or you had financial difficulties or another kind of need that had to be taken
care of in a big hurry
2. You’ve read about miracles in the Bible
3. You’ve heard other folks claim miraculous events in their lives
4. But you’re just not sure that even if God performed miracles at one time or another
that He still operates in the same way today.
B. I think we’ve become too loose with the term “miracle”
1. People find a parking spot in a crowded park lot and they praise God for a miracle
2. They find a lost wallet or lost keys and they praise God for a miracle
3. But sometimes they don’t find a parking spot in a crowded parking lot or find their
wallet or keys
--What happened to the miracle then?
4. Once there was a fellow who was quite overweight and decided to do something
about it. He changed his eating habits and began an exercise program. Everyone
where he worked complimented him on his efforts because they were working.
However, one morning he walked into work carrying a box of bakery donuts.
Everyone was shocked and so they asked why he had the donuts. He said, “You
guys know that I love donuts; especially donuts from Wally’s Bakery. As I drove
into work this morning, I thought those donuts. I prayed that if God wanted me to
have donuts this morning that there would be a parking spot open right in front of
the bakery’s doors. And guess what? The seventh time around the block, there
was a parking spot.”
C. I think that struggling with the validity of miracles is part of the human experience.
1. We go through struggles, trials, illnesses, and difficulties of all kinds and we say to
ourselves: “Are miracles really true? Does God still perform miracles today?”
2. Gideon was a leader of God’s people in the Old Testament.
a. When God came to Gideon to ask him to be a leader, Gideon was frightened and
he was skeptical that the job at hand could be done at all.
--The children of Israel were overpowered by and being oppressed by the
Midianites
b. Judges 6:11-13 (NLT) – “Now the Angel of the LORD came and sat under the
terebinth tree which was in Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite,
while his son Gideon threshed wheat in the winepress, in order to hide it from
the Midianites. And the Angel of the LORD appeared to him, and said to him,
‘The LORD is with you, you mighty man of valor!’ Gideon said to Him, ‘O my
lord, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where
are all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, Did not the LORD
bring us up from Egypt? But now the LORD has forsaken us and delivered us
into the hands of the Midianites.’”
c. Gideon had his doubts about the miracle stories he had heard about, too
1). He’d never seen anything as dramatic as the ten plagues on Egypt or the
opening of the Red Sea so that God’s people could escape slavery in Egypt
and receive the inheritance of the Promised Land
2). What he didn’t know at this particular point was that God was getting ready
to use him as the leader for a supernatural defeat of the Midianites.
D. We actually need to tackle two questions this morning
1. Hasn’t science removed a lot of the hocus-pocus concerning miracles?
2. Does God still perform miracles today?
I. THE HEAT OF THE MATTER
--How do you reconcile modern science and miracles?
A. First we need to consider what is true science
1. For something to be scientific it must be observable and repeatable.
a. Science is merely generalized observations about causes and effects.
b. Scientific laws do not dictate events nor do they necessarily explain them.
2. Miracles therefore are not scientific
--They don’t contradict science. They merely fall outside the scope of science
3. However, Science has become the god of our modern world.
--Physicist Max Planck: “Faith in miracles must yield ground, step by step, before the steady and firm
advance of the forces of science, and its total defeat is indubitably a mere matter of time.”
a. Let’s be honest: science has made our lives easier, more comfortable and more predictable.
1). We have medicines, vaccines, and medical procedures that heal our sick and broken bodies.
2). Doctors today have attained a status like the ancient high priests.
--Rather than connect the common man to God, the physician connects his patient to the power of
medicine.
b. We could say the same for technology.
--New gadgets are invented everyday that promise to make our lives better. A simple electronic
device like a TV remote control gives you the power to control your TV watching destiny..
c. The products of science enhance our quality of life.
1). It’s only natural that we’d begin to put our faith in it.
--After all, look what it’s done for us.
2). The miraculous is not within our frame of reference, therefore we tend to dismiss it.
B. Second, we need to have a good grasp of the definition of a miracle
1. Norman Geisler and Ron Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences, say: “A
miracle is a divine intervention into, or interruption of, the regular course of the world that produces a
purposeful but unusual event that would not have occurred otherwise.”
2. Christian scholar William Lane Craig defines it this way: “A miracle is an event which is not
producible by the natural causes that are operative at the time and place that the event occurs.”
3. In other words, if you held a glass jar above your head and dropped it onto a concrete sidewalk you’d
suppose it to fall at an expected velocity.
a. Within a second or two, depending upon how tall you are, natural causes should produce a broken
jar.
--That’s what normally happens.
b. A miracle would occur if all things stayed the same, but the jar did not fall at its expected velocity or
failed to shatter on the ground.
--If it took the glass jar a minute to fall you’d suspect something was up.
4. A miracle is an interruption of the natural work by divine intervention.
--Natural laws cannot explain what happened.
C. We also need to understand what the Bible teaches about miracles
--In actuality, the Bible records two important but different things
1. The first is that God works what we’re going to term: “ordinary wonders”
a. Sick people in the Bible got well without miracles
1). Bodies that mend themselves are one of God’s ordinary wonders
2). But when a man who has been blind from birth suddenly sees when Jesus just tells him to - the
Bible calls that miracle.
b. People in the Bible don’t call beautiful flowers miracles.
c. They don’t call finding a misplaced article a miracle.
--Those are ordinary gifts of an amazing God.
2. What the Bible calls “miracles” are things that are out of the ordinary.
--They call something a miracle when it’s not supposed to happen that way.
a. When Jesus walks on water, that’s a miracle.
b. When Jesus whispers and someone who is dead wakes up, that’s a miracle.
c. When Jesus passes out five little fish and two small loaves of bread and thousands eat and take
home leftovers, that’s a miracle.
3. In fact there is nothing the Bible calls a miracle that a scientist wouldn’t call a miracle today
if he saw it happen the way the Bible says it did.
a. These people weren’t just gullible and stupid.
--They knew bodies healed themselves.
b. But they knew something special was happening when a person who had never walked ran when
Jesus spoke.
c. They knew that storms died down, but it was different when Jesus said, “Peace, be still” and the
winds stopped.
II. THE HEART OF THE MATTER
A. Can intelligent people today seriously believe in the miracles of the Bible?
--Can a thinking person write off elves and fairies as fantasies and yet at the same time accept the idea of
manna from heaven, and the virgin birth, and walking on water, and resurrection from the dead?
1. Atheist Richard Dawkins: “The virgin birth, the resurrection of Lazarus, even the Old Testament
miracles are all freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of
unsophisticates and children.”
2. What is the most important thing for us to understand concerning miracles?
a. It’s simply this: Genuine faith in an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-present God logically leads
to at least the possibility of the miraculous.
b. Only a bias to disbelief dismisses the possibility of supernatural intervention.
3. If there is a God, then you pretty much have to figure that miracles are possible.
a. If God can create a universe, then healing a blind man is probably child’s play.
b. A creator God would probably find the implantation of a “Y” chromosome into the egg of a virgin
a simple thing to accomplish
4. If there is no God, then the whole idea of miracles is rather absurd.
--But if there is a God, then the idea that there cannot be miracles is rather absurd.
5. The real question is not whether miracles are possible.
--The crux of the matter is whether there is a God and whether or not Jesus was the Son of God who
could exercise the power of God
B. The existence of God clears up a whole lot of things that don’t make sense otherwise
-- I don’t have time this morning to lay out the complete case for the existence of God but it is powerful.
Please consider these things carefully
1. I think it makes more sense to believe in Intelligent Design as opposed to believing that this universe
simply sprang into existence out of nothing.
a. I don’t think it makes sense to believe that time, energy, and matter simply appeared from
nothing.
b. Everything around us is finite.
--Everything around us had a birthdate; a point of origin
c. And whatever caused all this to come into existence logically has to be uncaused, and timeless, and
immaterial.
d. Whoever gave this universe a birthday, logically, cannot be finite; He has to be entirely different
than anything we can know or understand.
--The universe doesn’t make sense without God.
e. There are scientists who try to calculate the odds of a universe so fine-tuned that it could support
life.
--They tell us that the precision is so utterly fantastic, so mathematically breathtaking, that it is
silly to think it’s all an accident.
2. I believe that you can argue the existence of God using the idea of a universal morality
a. The notion of universal moral values simply makes no sense without a God.
b. If God doesn’t exist, then there is simply no logical way to support the idea that there are
things that are right, and things that are wrong for all people, everywhere, all the time.
c. But deep inside we all know there are some things that are fundamentally right, and some
things that are fundamentally wrong.
--And that only makes sense, logically, if there is a God.
3. There are lots of other reasons to believe in the existence of God
a. There are so many people who have experienced His presence through the ages
b. The reality of Jesus’ resurrection which has never been disproved
--No one could ever present a dead body, Jesus’ closest followers all died proclaiming the truth of
the resurrection (conspiracies have a way of crumbling when confronted with the death penalty)
c. All point to the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving and merciful God
C. Is Jesus God?
1. Consider the miracles he performed
a. Jesus brought sight to the blind, He made lame people walk, He cured leprosy, He raised several
people from the dead.
b. He fed thousands with the equivalent of a single sack of groceries, he cast out demons, and twice he
filled fishing nets with almost more fish than they could pull into their boats.
2. Ultimate consideration must be given to His own bodily resurrection from the dead
a. The historical validity of Jesus’ resurrection is incontrovertible
b. The evidence of His resurrection is strong enough and qualitative enough to pass muster to be
entered as legal and best evidence in a legal trial
c. His followers have fearlessly preached the truth of His resurrection through torture, tribulation, and
execution
d. His resurrection is the clincher that He is God
3. By the way, no one during Jesus time ever denied his miracles.
a. They often questioned his authority, but his worst enemies never refuted the legitimacy of his
miracles.
b. You also need to understand that the New Testament was all written before Jesus’ generation died.
1). There was no time for myths or legends to develop.
2). If the miracles were untrue witnesses could have and would have easily disproved the accounts.
--Historically, everyone seems to agree that Jesus did some remarkable things.
CONCLUSION: A. Can a thinking man believe in miracles?
--Definitely. The tougher question is this: Why is it that we don’t see more of them?
1. I’m not talking about the kind of miracles you see performed by televangelists.
--Those things always seem to leave me a bit embarrassed.
2. I’m not talking about the ordinary wonders we experience because of an amazing God
3. I’m talking about incontrovertible, unambiguous, in-your-face miracles like the ones in
the Bible.
B. The more I study the Bible, the more I come to understand that I shouldn’t be surprised
that the kind of miracles I’d like to see aren’t common
1. They aren’t common occurrences in any era or period of time
--They were uncommon and special
2. I believe that they’re still uncommon and special
3. Why?
a. It’s not because we have less faith, or that God is any less powerful, or loving.
b. The fact is that throughout salvation history there are clusters of miracles.
1). Whenever God is unfolding a new chapter in the salvation story there are
clusters of miracles to confirm the truth of His messengers.
2). There were extraordinary miracles in the time of Abraham, and Moses as
God made his first covenants with man. There were miracles in the days of the
prophets as God was speaking hard words to his people through them. And the
greatest cluster of miracles came in the days of Jesus, and his apostles, as God
was making a new covenant
C. When I look back at the miracles of Jesus, I see that He didn’t want us to build our faith
necessarily around His miracles – with the exception of the resurrection
1. Faith is not to be self-centered
2. It would probably be easy to believe if He always healed us when we’re sick, if He
always surprised us with a check in the mail when our finances are strapped, or if He
always protected us when terrorists attacked
3. One of the problems is that too many people see God as a cosmic Santa Claus or a
genie in a lamp rather than the Righteous, Powerful, and Loving God that He is
4. In our false faith, we tend to look at God and miracles in a very unbiblical way:
a. We tend to see miracles as guarantees of safety but faith isn’t an insurance policy
for this life; only for life eternal
b. We tend to believe that if we can only muster enough faith, eventually God will
have to do what we want Him to do
--But we need to realize that God is wiser than we are and we should be grateful
that He doesn’t do everything our way
c. Sometimes we see miracles as magic and entertainment
--We should see them as signs of the Kingdom of God.
1). A kingdom in which the blind see, and the deaf hear, and the lame walk.
2). When Jesus fed the thousands, it was a sign that in His kingdom, no one will go
spiritually hungry
3). When He raised the dead, it was a sign that in His Kingdom, death is powerless
D. Don’t leave here today without understanding these important thoughts:
1. Jesus never met a disease He could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a
demon he could not crush.
2. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert.
--Jesus won’t force himself on a stubborn heart.
a. To receive His forgiveness and healing requires that we bend our knees to Him as
Lord and Savior
b. Until we stand in his presence on judgement day, He won’t force us to our
knees.
--But then it will be too late.
3. Jesus didn’t come to this earth primarily to heal our bodies, He came to heal our souls
a. Our souls are infinitely more important than their containers.
b. Too often we’re tormented because He won’t heal our bodies, and yet seldom are
we tormented with our own sin.
c. Jesus has a different set of priorities than we do.
--He focuses on what lasts forever. Do you?
