The miracles of Jesus - Classical Christian Literature by Athleo.net

IN THE GOSPEL HISTORY n
nature is a miracle in the same sense that we cannot
account for the origin of the simplest natural fact on
" natural" grounds. But nature is not a miracle in
the sense of the New Testament miracles. It is, at
least to the scientific vision, a sealed order ; its sum
total of energy remains ever the same ; there no
addition possible, no subtraction possible ; the whole
is a closed circle. This is the modern scientific
conception of nature, and it is here that the Christian
thinker parts company with the scientist, since the
latter leaves no room for a divine will in a personal,
active sense, and makes God a metaphysical abstraction,
an empty name. For this is the death of all
religion in the Christian sense.
But once you reach
the truth everywhere emphasised in the Bible that
God is a real, free, active Personality, that He is
continually acting on and through the works of His
hands, and that He manifests His power in ways
that can never be tabulated under the categories of
Natural Law — you come to a new conception of
everything. Nature is then open on the Godward
side to the influx of fresh energies when these
are required for any great purpose, as in the great
Providential movements of history, and in
the efflorescence
of the miraculous at the beginning of the
Christian era.
The scientist may be shocked because
there are so many religious thinkers who find it
possible to believe that Jesus on a particular occasion
turned certain water-pots into wine-jars ;
but that
need not disturb us if it brings us a nearer and warmer
sense of the beneficent power of God, who made both
wine and water, and is therefore able, if He has a
great spiritual purpose to serve, to turn the one into