Yesterday I posed the topic of whether miracles are
relevant. Here is some additional food for thought from Paul Little:
“You may have had positive or negative reactions to hearing
of Christ’s miracles. In our science-oriented society, there is a tendency to
try to explain everything by ‘natural’ causes. This tendency puts the emphasis
on how a miraculous event happened,
while the Bible is concerned with why
miraculous events happened. So we moderns ask questions which the biblical
authors would not have even considered.
Within the assertion that the God of the Bible exists, there
is a necessary corollary that this God indeed has the power to work miracles.
If, however, someone does not believe in the God of the Bible, the concept of
miracles becomes difficult, if not impossible, to entertain.” Paul Little
Yet, have you ever noticed that people who are “not
religious,” “don’t believe in the Bible or take it literally” or who claim to be
“spiritual without God” will also tell you unequivocally that they are going to
heaven after they die? On what basis do they make that miraculous claim, when
they have denied miracles as being literal in the Bible?
There are people who cannot believe Christ was born of a
virgin or rose from the dead, but believe they themselves are going to heaven
after they die. They would never believe Jonah could survive in a fish, but they
believe they are going to heaven after they die. They shut down and don’t want
to talk about faith—in fact are offended by faith in Jesus Christ—yet they say they
are going to heaven after they die. In any other area of life we would call
this line of thinking delusional. But people with this mindset make an exception in reasoning
when it comes to their own death and subsequent going-to-heaven.
People are often convinced of going to heaven after they die
(a supernatural event) while rejecting the supernatural in Scripture. Even
those who say, “Well, you can’t really know” when it comes to the Bible, claim
they “do really know” when it comes to their own trip to heaven! They have no foundation for their claim that they will go to heaven other than it is what they have
chosen to appropriate for themselves.
“For God so loved the world that he gave
his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have
eternal life.”
“Jesus answered, “I am the way and the
truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
“Now this is eternal life: that they know
you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
“Salvation is found in no one else, for
there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be
saved.”
“For the wages of sin is death, but the
gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus our Lord.”
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