So today we are beginning a brand new series entitled Miracles Then and Now. Here's how I'd like for us to start. I want to start by asking you a question in a second. And I'm going to ask you to raise your hand, but don't raise your hand until I give you the cue because I just want to tease out the question a little bit to make sure everybody knows where we're going.
If you have ever, and wait until I cue, if you have ever asked God for or even if you're not even sure about God, if you've ever wished for or hoped for or felt like you needed a miracle, in about 15 seconds, I'm going to ask you to raise your hand, but I want to tease this out a little bit. I mean, going all the way back to high school because you're driving home and you're way after curfew and you're bargaining with God, "God, I need my parents to be asleep. I know they're not asleep, but if you could just make them pass out and go to sleep." Or maybe it was more serious than that, maybe in high school you were praying that God would get your parents back together, "Please bring my mama home, bring my dad home. Maybe just, God, please put my family back together."
Maybe you prayed for a miracle because you prayed that the diagnosis that you feared wouldn't be the diagnosis you're about to get, and everything just looked bleak, bleak, bleak. And the next day or the next week, you were going to find out and you're like, "God, please not that." Or maybe you prayed for a miracle, not for you, but for somebody you love, maybe a younger brother or younger sister, maybe a parent or a grandparent. So if at any point in your life, even if it was back when you were more of a believer than you are now, but you're like, "Yeah, back then," or maybe it could be current, if you've ever asked God for a miracle or just hoped for a miracle even if you weren't sure there was a miracle worker, would you be so bold as to raise your hand? Mine's up.
Yeah, look around. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? It's what we have in common. Here's something else we have in common, this is part of why we're doing this series, many of us, most of us didn't get the miracle we asked for. And in some cases, it was for the best. I mean, it is true that one of God's greatest gifts to us is unanswered prayer, because some time went by and it was like, "Oh yeah, God, glad that didn't work out. Thank you God for ignoring that. Yeah, this is better." But for most of us, it was devastating. It was devastating because you couldn't figure out, "God if You did this for them and You did that for them and You did things in the past," and you were raised with the Bible, "And God, You can do this. I'm not asking for You to part the seas, I just need this one little thing or she just needs this one little thing, or my dad needs this one thing or my older brother," whoever it was.
And not getting your miracle was devastating. In fact, it was devastating to your faith. Maybe you clawed your way back and eventually regained your bearings with faith, but perhaps you didn't. Perhaps your faith didn't survive and as a result, your disappointment with God in that season of life, you were in college or maybe as a few years ago or in that first marriage, your disappointment with God has left you navigating life without God. And maybe, kind of poking around a little bit, maybe religious people like me get on your nerves. because you know better than us, because you did it all right and you prayed it all right, and God didn't come through for you and you kind of consider people like me naive and you consider religious people naive. That makes perfect sense. If we'd had your experience, maybe that's where we would be as well. Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe you wouldn't use this word, so I'm not trying to read your mail, but maybe there's something in you that envies people that have faith because you used to have faith, you used to be a person of faith. And God didn't come through for you and you lost your faith and you miss it, you listen to the songs and it stirs something inside of you. And you remember when you'd go to bed at night and pray, and every once in a while you catch yourself praying and you're like, "What am I doing? I don't even believe in that stuff anymore."
But today, as we launch this series, I want to back up. This is going to be a bit of a lighter note message. In fact, it's going to be a bit academic. If it's your first time with us, just so you know, sometimes when I launch a series, there's not a lot of Scripture because I'm introducing a topic, and today's one of those. If you're like, "Oh my goodness, I didn't even have to open my Bible," show up next week, we will be back there.
I just want to introduce the topic. And it's such an important topic, I want to get us all on the same page. So I want to begin the series and the message today by answering a couple of basic questions as it relates to miracles. So when I say the word miracle, we're all thinking about the same thing. So I want to answer a couple of questions. One, I want to answer the question, what makes a miracle a miracle? And then we want to talk about what's the relationship between miracles and Christianity? Because Christians always believe in miracles and it's like, "Do you have to believe in miracles to be a Christian?" In fact, that's one of the questions I want to answer today is, do you have to believe in miracles to be a Christian? And do you have to believe all those miracle stories in the Bible in order to be a Christian? I mean, is that absolutely necessary?
And so, if you're not a Christian or you used to be or you're reconsidering faith or you're considering faith for the first time, I want to actually, it's kind of a strange place to start a series, I want to begin with this question. I want to answer this one now, do you have to believe in miracles to be a Christian? The answer is yes, but you only have to believe in two miracles to be a Christian. So I want to talk about those two. There's a reason for that, and that's going to become clear over the course of the next few minutes. The interesting thing about these two miracles that you have to believe in to be a Christian is most of you and most people in the world actually already believe in one of them.
And if you accept the second miracle that you have to believe to be a Christian, if you accept the second one, it opens the door to making the other miracles more acceptable. So hang with me for just a minute. Now, the reason I say you probably already believe in the first miracle has to do with our answer to the first question. And the first question I put up here was, what makes a miracle a miracle? I want to begin or continue by giving you a textbook definition for what is a miracle, again so when we say a miracle we all are talking about the same thing. This is very academic. You don't need to memorize this. This came from a professor I had almost 40 years ago in graduate school named Norman Geisler in his little book, Miracles and Modern Man. And here's how he defined... Miracles and Modern Thought. Excuse me, Miracles and Modern Thought.
Here's how he defines a miracle, "A miracle is a divine intervention," so God is behind a miracle, "divine intervention into or an interruption of the regular course of the world," like that could not have happened. I can't believe that happened. That would not have happened without divine intervention, "that produces a purposeful but unusual event that would not or could not have occurred otherwise."
So that's kind of the academic definition of a miracle. Here's a simple and admittedly simplistic definition of a miracle that I made up. This one's better, I'll just say that up front, but just to get us on the same page, here's what we're talking about, we're talking about a miracle. A miracle is the temporary, it's never permanent, suspension or reversal of the laws of nature. We'll just simplify it, that a miracle is the temporary, it's not permanent, it's sort of an interruption of the normal things, a suspension or the reversal of the laws of nature.
Now, regarding the laws of nature, here's specifically what we're talking about. We're talking about the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry. We're talking about what makes the world work or what makes the world predictable and observable. This is what makes science possible. A miracle is an aberration or temporary suspension or reversal of the laws of nature. Let me tell you something interesting about that, and you can check this out if you don't believe it, and you may not, did you know that Christians actually launched the modern science movement.
So these things work in tandem, and science explains to us how God did it. But a miracle is an interruption in the ways that God normally behaves, in the way that God designed things to happen. So for example, if a tree in front of your yard if you own a home, or if you're parked out in your apartment complex, then there's a tree, if a tree falls and misses your car by inches, I mean it is a big tree, it falls and you walk out there and your car's undamaged and you can't even get in the driver's side because that tree fell so close, if a tree falls and it is that close to your car, that's amazing but it's not a miracle. Because no natural law was violated. There was no suspension or interruption of natural laws rather, but the laws of nature.
And if you walked out and saw that, if you're a theist or a Christian, you would be like, "Thank God." I mean, you give God credit, right? But if you walk out and a tree is suspended in the midair, root ball and all over your car, and you get in your car and move your car and the tree comes crashing down where your car was, I want you to call me, okay? Because that is a verifiable miracle because it conflicted with or worked outside the laws of nature, okay? So that's the difference.
So the point is simply this, the formation of a baby in a womb, wondrous, wondrous. The fact that we are currently spinning through space in the Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold, just right, amazing. But those things aren't miraculous. They are explainable according to the way that the universe works, according to the laws of nature. Which leads me at last to the miracle that pretty much everybody believes in, whether you consider it a miracle or not. The reason this is important is, if you believe the miracle I'm about to describe, or if you believe what I'm about to describe and if I can convince you it is a miracle, then here's what it means for you, and for most of us this isn't a big deal, but this may be a huge first step for somebody, then if you believe what I'm about to describe as a miracle, then that means you believe in miracles. You at least believe miracles are possible. And that's a huge step. That's a huge step of faith, and maybe it's a huge step back to faith for you.
Because the most widely attested to miracle, the most widely attested to miracle is the birth of the universe. And here's why I say that's a miracle. The beginning of the universe constitutes a miracle because the birth of the universe, that singularity as Stephen Hawking, I think he's the one that came up with that idea, that singularity, we would call it that big bang, we're tempted to say that moment in time, but it wasn't even a moment in time because there wasn't any time and there weren't any moments. But that thing, that singularity where the universe came into being and all that energy just unfolded and continues to unravel and... not unravel, but continues to unfold, that happened outside of, and in fact in spite of, what we would consider the laws of nature. Because the laws of nature didn't exist.
In fact, the birth of the universe coincided with the birth of the laws of nature. So it is not an exaggeration. In fact, it's accurate to say that the beginning of the universe, because it happened outside the laws of nature, in conflict with the laws of nature, superseded the laws of nature, that the birth of the universe was actually a supra-natural, we don't have any other word for it, event. Supra means above and beyond. It was above and beyond nature as we know it, nature as we are confined to inside our universe.
It wasn't caused by nature because there was no nature or laws of nature to cause it. So the point being the birth of the universe was by definition a super or above natural event. Again, event doesn't describe it exactly, but it's the only word we have. It was a supranatural event. Now, don't rush your head. I'm not saying God did it, I'm going to get there in a second, I'm just saying it's almost undeniable that the birth of the universe, since it happened outside of nature, was outside the bounds and the laws of nature. So it was supra-natural. It was supra-natural. It was supernatural.
However, this is important, and if you're like, "I'm not so sure about that, you can talk about it over lunch or think about it later or look it up later," this is important however, everything that has a beginning has a cause. Everything that has a beginning has a cause. The universe and the laws of nature all had a beginning. Nobody even argues with that. The universe and the laws of nature had a beginning, which means the universe and the laws of had a cause, something caused that beginning. And of course, most people believe the cause of the universe and the cause of the laws of nature, most modern people believe that that was actually God. If you don't believe it's God, that's okay, but listen, this is what's so fascinating, if you don't acknowledge that God was the cause of the universe, which again is fine, you certainly wouldn't argue that the universe caused itself. Nobody acknowledges that. The best we can do is to say, "Something caused the universe," because everything that has a beginning has a cause and the universe had a beginning.
Because according to the laws of nature, something can't precede itself. So if it created itself, it preceded itself, that's a miracle. If something preceded itself and caused itself, that's a miracle too because that's outside of the bounds of the laws of nature and what we experience and how our world works.
So the point is, this isn't like a gotcha thing, I just want you to think. So either way, we all pretty much believe that miracles are possible because we believe at least one happened. And the nature of that miracle, the birth of the universe, required something above and beyond nature. It required something supra nature, supranatural, or we would just say supernatural, something above and beyond.
Now, Christians believe, okay, this is where we're coming back to this first miracle we've all got to embrace, Christians believe that the cause, of course, or the causer or the beginner, the one who began it all, began the universe of course, was God. God had no beginning, which means God didn't require a cause. He is the uncaused beginner. He's the beginner who had no beginning. So we don't have to say, "Well, who caused God?" and keep going backwards forever. You can't have an actual infinite backwards or we'd never get to this moment in time, which is a wonderful thought that you can think about later.
So the birth of the universe is the first of two miracles that you have to believe in in order to be a Christian. Christians believe that God created the universe. And everybody agrees the universe had a beginning. It's just a matter of who began it or what began it. And if you believe nothing caused something, that's a miracle. And if you believe, "We don't know, but whatever caused the universe was outside the laws of nature," that's a miracle too. So if a miracle is the way we define it or the way it's traditionally defined, almost everybody would agree, "Okay, if that's what a miracle is, something above and beyond nature that is an interruption or suspends the laws of nature, beginning of the universe was a miracle."
Now, one more thing about that. I did a series years ago, it's my favorite sermon series, it's called the Bible for Grown Ups. In that sermon, one of those messages I do a deep dive into this, so I just want to mention it real quick because this is so important. The point of the Genesis account of creation, since we're talking about the beginning, the point of the Genesis account of creation, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth," the point of the Genesis account of creation is not how God created the heavens and the earth, is not how He did it. The point of the Genesis account is that God created the heavens and the earth. God, Yahweh, the Jewish God, who is the Christian God, that Yahweh created the heavens and the earth, not the menagerie and not the pantheon of pagan gods that the pagans believe somehow put together the universe.
So when this was written, there was a Sumerian creation myth, there was an Egyptian creation myth, there was all these creation myths. And the Jews came along and said, "No, you have it wrong. It is not this gathering of gods whose bodies split apart to create the earth and the sea and all this stuff due to this intergalactic conflict between the gods." They're like, "That's not how it happened. There is one God. He is the uncaused causer. He's the beginner who had no beginning. He's the eternal God, and He in and of Himself created the heavens and earth." That's the point of the Genesis account, not how God did it.
So the point is that Christians take the Genesis account seriously because the point of the Genesis creation account is that God did it and He created from nothing, and that's a miracle. So anyway, that's the first miracle, that in the beginning the uncreated creator created everything.
Now, to introduce the second miracle, you have to believe in order to be a Christian. I want to go back to something else I learned from Dr. Norman Geisler almost, I hate to say it, 40 years ago. He taught us in class at a semester, the whole semester was built around what I'm about to share, he taught us what is commonly referred to as the classical apologetic method. The classical apologetic method is essentially, there's several versions of this, but the version he taught us, there's five statements that serve as the foundation of the entire Christian faith. And in these five statements, we bump into the second miracle that everybody has to believe in if you're going to follow Jesus.
Now, he spent an entire semester building these five statements. I'm going to do it in about eight minutes, okay? So we're going to go really fast, but again, I just want you to see the context for why this second miracle is so important, but more importantly, why you can believe it happened. So here they are, these five statements. I'm going to give you the first two together because they go together. Number one statement is God exists, which means miracles are possible. So we spent several weeks talking about all the arguments for the existence of God. And then we spent about a week talking about if God exists and God is outside time and space, and God created nature, that God then controls nature and consequently, He can intervene when He wants to, so therefore, miracles are possible.
The third statement is a hard right turn. This is so important, and this explains one of the things I've come back to over and over and over with you over the past several years. The third statement is this: the gospels are reliable accounts of actual events. The gospels are reliable accounts of actual events. Not every book in the Bible, that's not part of this, we'll get there in a minute, the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are reliable accounts of actual events. So we spent several weeks asking the question, why should we trust that what the gospel says is true? We weren't arguing for the inspiration of the gospels. We were just asking the question, are these four accounts of the life of Jesus reliable based on when they were written, who wrote them, and what they say about Jesus, and how they lined up with the current events in the first century?
So again, I'm not going to try to convince you that there are reliable accounts of actual events, but the point is, in terms of the Christian faith, it's built on that. Well, the reason that's important is that all four accounts of the life of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all attest to one very important event in the life of Jesus. And that is that Jesus rose from the dead. That is the second essential miracle you have to embrace in order to follow Jesus.
But if Jesus rose from the dead, this leads to the last one, Jesus is who he claimed to be, and what He said can be trusted. If Jesus rose from the dead, if Jesus explained His own death and resurrection and pulled it off, then what He said can be trusted and what He said about Himself can be taken seriously. the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of our faith. It's the event that launched the movement. The resurrection launched the movement, the church, and the church eventually assembled and published our Bibles. But if there was no resurrection, there's no Bible. If there's no resurrection, there's no Christianity. If there's no resurrection, there's no Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John because Jesus' life was not worth documenting.
He was just another wannabe Messiah that Rome crucified into the story. There were a bunch of those. What makes the story stand out, the reason we're Christians is because Jesus rose from the dead. It's why I constantly say to you, in fact, I think I'll say it now, if someone predicts their own death and resurrection and pulls it off, you should or we should lean into whatever that person says. This is your one-sentence apologetic or your one-sentence statement as to why you're a Christian. Why are you a Christian? Why do you believe that. I'm a simple man. If someone can predict their own death and resurrection and pull it off, I just lean into whatever that person says.
"Yeah, but what about all this... " I'm a simple man. I can't explain everything in the Bible. I don't understand the Book of Revelation necessarily. There's some things that I'm sure smart people can make sense of, but I'm a simple man. If somebody can predict their own death and resurrection and pull it off, we should lean into whatever that person says. That is the foundation of your faith. That is the anchor. It is the second miracle. And if you acknowledge that one, when we acknowledge that one, we are on our way.
But there's more. If Jesus is who He says He is, and if what Jesus taught and what Jesus said can be trusted, then what Jesus said about the law and the prophets can be trusted as well. Now, what's the law and the prophets. In the first century, they didn't refer to the Hebrew scripture as the Old Testament. There was nothing old about it. It was their Bible. The Hebrew scripture or the Jewish Scripture, the Hebrew Scripture, you can refer to it either way, they had their own words for that. So when Jesus was alive, when He referred to his Bible, the Bible of who we would call the Jews, they referred to it as the law and the prophets, or sometimes the law and the prophets and the Psalms, referring to what we would call the Old Testament.
So if what Jesus said can be relied upon, and if what Jesus said is true based on the fact that He rose from the dead and underscores who He claimed to be and underscores everything He said, then what Jesus said about what we would call the Old Testament, what Jesus said about the Old Testament can be trusted as well. So even though the Old Testament is at the front of our book, it's at the back of our apologetics, so we can update our list. What Jesus said about the Hebrew Scripture can be trusted as well.
Another little sidebar comment and I'll wrap this up. This is so important. The reason Christians take the Old Testament seriously is not because it got bound in a piece of leather or a piece of cardboard with the New Testament. The reason we take it seriously is because Jesus took it seriously. In fact, before Jesus, Gentiles had very little interest and almost no access to the Hebrew Scripture.
And then suddenly in the first century, this is one of the evidences for the spread of the church, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, suddenly in the first century, all these Gentiles, they just can't get enough of what the Jewish or the Hebrew Bible says. Why? Because of Jesus, because the Jewish scriptures, our Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament, prophesies that God is going to send a Messiah. And the Gentile believers were like, "Oh my gosh. God kept His promise to His people." God kept His promise to His people by sending a Messiah that came to bless the entire world, God's final king. So God exists, miracles are possible.
The gospels are alive. This is miracle number one, that God created heavens and the earth. So miracles are possible. The gospels are reliable accounts of actual events. If that's true, then Jesus rose from the dead because all four attest to it, so did Peter, Paul and James. If He rose from the dead, then what He said about the Hebrew Scriptures, anything He said anything about, what He said about you, what He said about your sin, what He said about your future, what He said about heaven, what He said about the eternal kingdom of God, all of that can be trusted. This is a big deal, and it all hinges on believing in two miracles.
So, summing up, the possibility and the reality of miracles is fundamental to Christianity. And to sum it up, let me just give you these two statements. The miracle of the universe or the birth of the universe, the miracle of the universe is the foundation of our faith in God. We believe that God is the uncaused causer, he's the eternal God, that He brought from nothing everything, including the laws of nature that allows us to have science, to make our world observable, to make things observable and repeatable. It's amazing. It's like God unleashed the human mind and said, "It's going to roll out into the future, just like the universe rolls out. I'm going to give you this gift of accumulated knowledge, accumulated knowledge that every generation's humans accumulate more and more knowledge and more and more insight and more and more opportunities to go. So that's how we did it. This is why when you come to faith in Jesus, this is why when you are overwhelmed at some point in your life with the reality of all this, that our only option, our only option, even when you don't get an answer to prayer, even when you don't get your miracle, our only option is to fall down on our knees and to pray with Jesus, our Father in heaven, great is Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth, on my earth, as it is in heaven.
And I'm dependent on You for my daily bread. I'm dependent on You to avoid temptation. Yours is the kingdom and the power. I mean, sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't, but goodness, the context of my life is You, the glory of God. And the second statement, the miracle of the resurrection is the foundation of our faith in Jesus. So if you're looking for, and I know you're not, but if you're looking for the irreducible minimum number of miracles you have to believe in order to be a Christian, if you're considering Christianity and like, "Do I have to believe a guy put everybody on a boat? Really?" you just start here. The foundation, the miracle of the universe, foundation of faith in God, miracle of the resurrection, foundation of our faith, and Jesus. But once you accept this miracle, you'll find many of those other miracles far more acceptable.
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