Thursday, April 9, 2009

Too literal?

Do we have the wrong concept of miracles? Just as we are perhaps too literal when talking about the 7 days of creation because God's day is not the same as ours, should we also look at miracles symbolically and attribute anything good that happens as God's direct intervention and therefore a "miracle?" To me, this is just a form of superstition. Or are we "merely" watering everything down.

There are references in the Bible that say such things as "that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day (2 Pet 3:8), but the fact of the matter is in Genesis it says after each day of creation, "And there was evening and there was morning, one day..." It seems to me that God was going out of His way to tell us that the days of creation were 24 hour days. And look at Ex 20:9-11, "Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy." Should we then interpret this as God worked six indeterminate "days" (perhaps 1,000 years each) and then rested one indeterminate "day", therefore we should do the same?

And as I've said in a previous post, when we see miracles performed in the Bible they were proclaimed (Matt. 4:24; Mark 3:9, 10; 6:56) — they were not performed by stealth. There was no guessing or wondering if they were miracles or not; they were always straight-forward. And there were no doctors, drugs and gradually being healed; miracles were instantaneous — the dead immediately got up and walked, blind men from birth could suddenly see, and the sick were instantly healed, etc...

It scares me to see so many moving away from looking at the Bible in a literal and common sensical way, because once we decide to do that, who's to say what anything in Scripture means. Who's going to be given the final authority to decide?

No comments:

Post a Comment