So the accusation often comes up,”If your God is real, why doesn’t he do lots of showy miracles around? Why isn’t there a cross in the moon. Why don’t tongues of fire show up from time to time saying,”Jesus is LORD?” etc etc etc”. This question can come in different attitudes. It could be one of arrogance,”If you’re God is real, why doesn’t he work like I think he should?” or it could be one of childish ignorance,”This is how I expect a good God would work in order to let us know he is real.” In this short article, I should hope to explain why God doesn’t operate like this.
The first thing that should come to mind is the wise notion: God’s ways are above our ways. We cannot put God in a box and say for certain God needs to act in a certain way. We can know certain actions are evil and unjust, but it is not for us to say,”God should have stopped that from happening.” We can’t see how everything interconnects with everything else, but God can. What is known as Chaos theory for us, is something God understands completely. God knows how every particle interacts with other particles. God might act all the time in unseen ways to get things going the way he wants. You gotta think if God is pulling strings that if he did big showy miracles, much different consequences would happen. I believe God answers prayers, but doesn’t have showy miracles for every time he does this.
Isaiah 55:9 GNT As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways and thoughts above yours.
While God’s ways are above our ways, the Bible talks about the importance of the Messiah Jesus Christ. Jesus is the man who lets other men turn their lives around. Jesus can turn an evil man into a guy who strives to be a good man! But in the battle between good and evil, it sounds like some angels didn’t know which side to take: good or evil because they didn’t know how Jesus would change the world.
1 Peter 1:12 GNT God revealed to these prophets that their work was not for their own benefit, but for yours, as they spoke about those things which you have now heard from the messengers who announced the Good News by the power of the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. These are things which even the angels would like to understand.
If you look at reality without Jesus dying on the cross to bring forgiveness of sin to men, evil is something that should spread across mankind and conquer. Just look at the silver rule which the world loves so dearly: Do unto others as they do unto you. This rule makes sense if there are some good and some evil people on the Earth. The loving people would draw near to you, and the evil people would be taught a lesson in order that they might become good. But the problem is in the fact that we’re all evil by nature! Sin is in all of us. What would someone who abides to the silver rule do when everyone else is evil? He’d be evil to everyone else! Then the conclusion is that he should enslave men lest he be enslaved by them just as the Romans were doing when Jesus came on the scene…
So the angels would like to understand the Good News of Jesus’ saving power. They can’t see the future like God can. So the only way they can see Jesus in us is by watching us live across time and how Jesus changes people’s lives. This can’t happen all at once, which is why I think Heaven and Earth weren’t discarded the moment Jesus ascended into Heaven. There’s a bunch of Jesus’ story being told in everyone of our lives which unfold like a play to the angels above. Yes, we’re all players on a stage, where we’re trying to play the role of Jesus Christ and being good to all. Instead of becoming evil because all men are evil, we are to become as good as we can be.
So it might be clear to some of you already why showy miracles aren’t a common occurrence in the past 2000 years. If you throw a stone in a pond and want to observe its ripples on the water, do you throw handfuls of other stones in too. No, the other stones would cause so many ripples that you can’t observe the effects from the original stone. I believe showy miracles would just detract from the change in people’s lives and how their changed lives then in turn change other people’s lives. First you believe in Jesus Christ, then you act like Jesus Christ, then people seeing your love want to be like you who is Jesus inside you! This role model and preaching has successfully spread across the world!
How long does God want the world to go on for: we don’t know. As we learned in this article though, we can see why time does pass and the New Earth and New Heaven don’t start instantly. Scientists know the value of a sample size. The longer time goes on, the more sample size increases. And as we all know, a large sample size gives more credence to the validity of a scientific experiment. God already knew the results of his son Jesus Christ, and to God this is not an experiment. But to the angels in his presence and the angels fallen, they have much to learn from what Jesus Christ does in all of us. So why not showy miracles? God really doesn’t need to muddle the waters to show that the change in people’s hearts came from results of Jesus Christ, and not just interjections of God along the way.
God bless you,
Jim