What to Make of Miracles?

In Matthew 8 we were confronted by a barrage of Jesus’ miracles:  the sick healed, the demon-possessed liberated, a raging storm stilled.  Chapter 9 will show us even more wonders, including a girl being raised from the dead (9:25).  Along the way we’ll read about Jesus walking on water (14:25), multiplying loaves and fish (14:13-21), and more.  In fact, from cover to cover Matthew’s account spotlights the miraculous—from a virginal conception (1:22-25) to the resurrection of Jesus (28:6-9).

What are we to make of this?  How can we, in our scientific age in which so many primitive superstitions have been dismissed, come to terms with Matthew’s accounts?  Many people today suppose that reality is limited to natural causes and effects, and therefore super­natural events cannot happen.  How do we reply to the skeptic who says the Bible’s miracle stories are like fairy tales?

Christians can and should have a great appreciation of science (consider how modern medicine has doubled the average human life expectancy in the last 200 years).  And many of the most reputable scientists in history have been Christians (e.g., Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Pascal, and Kelvin, to name just a few).

But science can’t explain everything.  Certain aspects of history, and questions of meaning, for instance, involve knowledge that extends beyond the limits of science.  Take the resurrection of Jesus, for example.  The Gospel writers and Christians down through the centuries have been saying that it was a true, historic event—that the God who created the universe and put in place all the laws of nature that we know (including laws that govern human life and health and aging, all of which points to the inevitability of death):  this God, this infinitely powerful and wise Creator God, is able to transcend the laws of nature that he created in the first place.  And so, it’s reasonable to infer that God could raise Jesus from the dead.  And yes, it was a miracle.