God of Creation

The miracles of God are miraculous precisely because they break through all that we know of the created world and somehow re-order something, somehow re-create something, somehow set straight something that was broken. No one can tell us how these things were done; no one but God knows. 

This is because God alone is God of Creation, and we are but mere men. 

When we let ourselves believe that the things that men do are God's miracles, we take every bit of the mystery out of it. As we saw yesterday, God no longer need be the God of Creation, but only the God of men, but it is worse even than that.

Because a man can tell you exactly how he did it. The man who designed the robotic legs that helped the paraplegic to walk again has filed a patent on them and included drawings and diagrams that show exactly how it was done. The single mother who pushes through despite all odds has journals and receipts and records of how it was that she got through the years. The scientist who one day develops the cure for cancer will know the chemical formula used to create it. These things are like a child playing with building blocks. He may make an incredible tower, but we would hardly say it is a miracle; he was given the blocks to begin with and can tell you precisely how he did it.

Contrast this with the miracles of God. No one knows how they were accomplished.

No one knows how water turns into wine just by being poured at the command of Jesus. No one knows how a little bit of spit and a little bit of mud, or even just a word, open the eyes of the blind. No one knows how telling a man to get up and walk does something for him that all his thoughts of walking have not done for himself. No one knows how a man stands in the center of the place of worship and stretches out his deformed hand, a hand that would not have stretched out at all just fifteen seconds before. No one knows how a bush burns, but does not burn up.

We cannot explain these things. We cannot take them into our labs and dissect them and discover them and tell you how they were done. We cannot do them ourselves. We just can't. They are beyond us. They are beyond our understanding. They are beyond our best science. 

It is as if the same child takes the same blocks and builds the same tower, and all of a sudden, window boxes with flowers appear. We can explain the tower, but we cannot explain the flowers; we had only given him blocks.

This is because God is the God of Creation. It is because everything lives or dies, grows or stagnates on His Word. 

It's the same thing we're looking at when we look at Creation. For as long as men have existed, they have been trying to explain the universe, but they cannot. They can tell you what it is made of, perhaps - atoms and quarks and a bunch of other scientificky things. They can tell you what bonds these small pieces together and holds them in place. They can expound upon the forces that act upon all of us and make certain things appear to work the way that they do. 

But they cannot tell you how this all happened. 

We are but children playing with blocks, wondering where the flowers have come from. 

That's why we cannot confuse the works of men with the works of God. It is why we must insist that miracles are not made by human hands, even under divine influence. God alone works miracles, for if they are not God's, then they are not truly miraculous. We could just as easily show you how they were done. 

That bothers some, I suppose, but it doesn't bother me. I love the idea of a God who works beyond what I can know, beyond what I can even imagine. I love a God who can take everything that I know about the world and make it, even just once, work differently. I love that millions, billions, trillions of jugs of water have been poured, but only those very few turned into wine. I love that a man who has thought a thousand times of walking need only be told once in order to actually do it. I love that of all of the countless loaves of bread that have ever been torn, only one fed more than five thousand. I love it. It reveals something about God that I could not know if He were not miraculous. 

He is, indeed, the God of Creation. 

Because of this, I can know that what He says is true: behold, He is making all things new.