[The cottage] had one room and a fireplace. The stranger nodded. “I like this well enough,” he said. “Come, Dunstan Thorn. I’ll rent it for you for the next three days.”
“What’ll you give me for it?”
“A golden sovereign, a silver sixpence, a copper penny, and a fresh shiny farthing,” said the man…
Dunstan hesitated. “If you’re here for the market, then it’s miracles and wonders you’ll be trading.”
The tall man nodded. “So, it would be miracles and wonders that you would be after, is it?” He looked around Dunstan’s one-room cottage again.
It began to rain then, a gentle pattering on the thatch above them.
“Oh, very well,” said the tall gentleman, a trifle testily, “a miracle, a wonder. Tomorrow, you shall attain your Heart’s Desire.”
– Stardust: Being a Romance within the Realm of Faerie, by Neil Gaiman
It’s easy to read the Bible as an uninterrupted stream of miracles and wonders. Speaking things into existence, flood, drought, confusing languages, giving language to a donkey, taking language from a man, giving birth in old age, conjuring frogs and gnats and flies and locusts, making the sun dark, making the sun stand still, making the sun move backwards, turning water to dry ground, turning water to wine, curing blindness with a word, curing blindness with spit and mud, raising the dead, raising an axe head, etc.
Reading the Bible this way raises a couple of challenges.
For the doubter: How can we trust the Bible, when the events that it describes seem so far removed from what we can observe of life and the world today?
For the believer (who may be the same person): If God used to go about working miracles and wonders all the time in the past, why doesn’t he do more to help us today?
Why, in other words, doesn’t life feel more like a fairy tale, like the faerie market that Dunstan and the gentleman visited, instead of… what it is?
Part of the answer is that the Bible doesn’t describe the miraculous wonderland that we may think it does. True, it describes a great many of God’s mighty works of power - but this narration is spread across two thousand years or more of history. The miracles that we read of are concentrated in three time periods: the Exodus, when God called a people for himself and delivered them from slavery (and foreshadowed his ultimate deliverance of his people from sin); the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, when widespread apostasy threatened God’s people’s continuing faithfulness; and the life of Jesus, which the kingdom of God came.
That leaves hundreds or thousands of years during which nothing much happened. And, by “nothing much happened,” I mean that people lived, loved, followed God, sang psalms, prayed, struggled, served, their lives written down to edify us and glorify God - just without fairy-tale wonders. Heroes of the faith such as Deborah, Ruth, David, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Esther went their entire lives with nothing overtly supernatural; merely some surprising successes and well-timed events, as God worked through the wonders of everyday life.
Even when miracles and wonders occur, there are shocking gaps.
We talk about Peter’s deliverance from prison by earthquake and angel (Acts 12:3-11), and we chuckle at how the congregation gathered to pray for his release was surprised that their prayer was actually granted (Acts 12:12-16) - but we skim over James, one of the inner circle of disciples alongside Peter, whose execution immediately preceded Peter’s imprisonment (Acts 12:1-2).
We talk about Jesus healing the paralytic by the pool of Siloam (Jn. 5:1-9) - but how many people did Jesus walk past at that pool to heal that paralytic?
When John the Baptist sent messengers to ask Jesus, Jesus replied by listing his miracles: “The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised” (Lk. 7:22). But conspicuously absent from Jesus’ list of miracles was freeing one captive (Lk. 4:18) - John, Jesus’ cousin, was executed and his head was served up on a platter.
It’s a far cry from Dunstan’s faerie market, with whatever wonders your heart desires, as long as you can meet the asking price.
And, even when miracles and wonders occur, they often don’t have the desired effect.
When people all over the Mediterranean world heard the gospel in their own language at Pentecost, some simply dismissed the miracle without even trying to understand it. (“They’re just drunk, that’s all!” (Acts 2:13 NLT)).
When God sent fire from heaven at Mount Carmel, Jezebel merely became more entrenched in her opposition to the Lord. This may seem surprising, but modern psychologists have confirmed and documented the backfire effect - presenting someone with evidence contrary to their beliefs often causes those beliefs to strengthen. Is it surprising that even the miraculous fails to overcome this twist of psychology?
When Paul healed a lame man in Lystra, the locals concluded that Barnabas was Zeus and Paul was Hermes (Acts 17:8-13). They followed the Greek deities and had a local myth of a prior visit by Zeus and Hermes in human form, which ended in judgment when the humans failed to recognize them. The Lystrans didn’t dig in in direct opposition like Jezebel, but instead of helping them know God, the miracles were reinterpreted to fit their preconceived ideas.
When Jesus fed the five thousand, the people tried to “seize him by force to make him king” (John 6:15). They had received the miracle, recognized it as from God, and even correctly interpreted it as showing that Jesus was the Prophet they were waiting for - and then made the exact opposite of the intended application, trying to make Jesus further their own nationalistic aims instead of making it their goal to follow him.
Mocking dismissal, backfire opposition, biased reinterpretation, or taking the miracles but missing the point. Even at their “best,” the miraculous isn’t the miraculous cure-all that we think it is. The Exodus, one of the three periods we mentioned when God’s miracles were most concentrated, shows this. Philip Yancey writes:
Suddenly anything a skeptic might have wished for happened… [God] let loose with the most bravura display of divine power the world has ever seen. Ten times he intervened on a scale so massive that not a single person in Egypt could doubt the existence of the God of the Hebrews. Billions of frogs, gnats, flies, hailstones, and locusts gave empirical proof of the Lord of all creation…
The response of the Israelites to such direct intervention offers an important insight into the limits of all power. Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love. The ten plagues in Exodus show the power of God over a pharaoh. But the ten major rebellions recorded in Numbers show the impotence of power to bring about what God desired most, the love and faithfulness of his people. No pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence could make them trust and follow him. (Disappointment with God, p. 70-71)
We think that we want miracles and wonders, but the people who experienced them most directly had all of the personal morality, faithful consistency, and relationship with God of a defiant two-year-old - or perhaps a convict - straying and pushing as far as possible and complying only when under the direct threat of the authority figure’s attention.
So, if they’re not to serve as fodder for a fairy tale or let us trade for our Heart’s Desire, what is the purpose of miracles and wonders?
The natural world - God’s creation, the universe around us, our own lives and relationships - is a wonder that points to God (Rom 1:19-20). We sometimes miss this, either because we’ve adopted a western secular mindset that dissects and disenchants the wonder away, or because like Dunstan we only have an eye out for the miraculous. As Terry Pratchett wrote,
Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time.
Added to the natural world, God’s miracles and wonders serve “the glory of God and the good of men… [as their] the primary or supreme ends… Therefore the miracle must be worthy the holiness, goodness, and justice of God, and conducive to the true good of men. Hence they are not performed by God to repair physical defects in His creation, nor are they intended to produce, nor do they produce, disorder or discord; do they contain any element which is wicked, ridiculous, useless, or unmeaning. Hence they are not on the same plane with mere wonders, tricks works of ingenuity, or magic” (Catholic Encyclopedia).
They confirm and serve as a sign for God’s word and God’s messengers - but these serve their purpose only when God’s Word and God’s message is heard. These miracles and wonders aren’t the point: the point is for us to hear from God.
They point to the glory of God. They show God’s goodness: that he is for us, that he works on our behalf, that pain and death will not have the final say, that evil will not last forever.
They’re the counterpart of prayer. “Prayer, as the connecting link of man to God, implies a constant interference of God in the life of man. Therefore in the Christian view of the world, miracles have a place and a meaning. They arise out of the personal relation between God and man” (Catholic Encyclopedia).
But remember their limitations:
Confirmations and miraculous signs can be rejected or twisted, as at Mount Carmel or Lystra. Those miracles and wonders aren’t the point; the point is for us to hear and understand God’s Word to us.
They can be an answer to prayer, but God in his goodness may give other answers. My grandfather’s prayer for my sister’s healing received no miracle - but, in his words, God gave him peace that passes understanding, even while his heart was breaking.
They point to the glory of God, but they’re only a preview or down payment. Because, in this fallen world, the miracles and wonders that we want are temporary, soon gone like fairy gifts as time and mortality take their toll. But God has promised our Heart’s Desire, a wondrous time when “the residence of God is among human beings. He will live among them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things have ceased to exist” (Rev. 21:3-4).