I’m been thinking a
lot about this because Dionne and I have started reading John M. Frame’s Systematic Theology. When Frame discusses
miracles, he prefers not to call them an interruption of divine law or natural
process but “extraordinary manifestations of God’s lordship.” (p. 131)
It’s not that God
doesn't use means to achieve His ends, but that He is always, intimately,
involved in the oversight and support of His creation.
This seems a lot
closer to the way Scripture describes things. For example, here’s what the
Bible says (with my highlights) about the wind:
He caused the east wind to blow in the heavens, and by his power he led out the south wind (Psalm 78:26).
Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters; they saw the deeds of the LORD, his wondrous works in the deep. For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea. (Psalm 107:23-25)
According
to Psalm 135:6-7, the Lord works out His plan and pleasure in everything.
Heaven and earth, seas and
deeps, clouds, lightning and rain all do His bidding. The Psalmist describes
God as directly involved in all of these.
Whatever the LORD pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses.
Sure, it’s poetry.
But Jesus wasn't being poetic when He said, But I say
to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may
be like your Father in heaven, since he
causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:44-45)
God’s sovereignty is
active not just in the global broad strokes of His creation. He involves
Himself with little birds. He feeds
them: Look at
the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet
your heavenly Father feeds them. Are
you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6:26). And He presides over
their deaths: Aren't two sparrows sold for a penny?
Yet not
one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. (Matthew
10:29)
Even “random” events
are from Him: The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. (Proverbs 16:33)
What if God were far
more directly and intimately involved in everything than you and I ever
thought? What if God didn't just set up physical laws in the universe, but was actively directing their execution? To believe so is to
suddenly become aware of just how close our Lord really is to us.
We shouldn't dismiss
as symbolic or poetic or figurative verses like these:
For you are my deliverer; under your wings I rejoice. My soul pursues you; your right hand upholds me. (Psalm 63:7-8).
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. Your eyes saw me when I was an unborn fetus... All the days ordained for me were recorded in your scroll before one of them came into existence. (Psalm 139:13, 16)
And my God will supply all that you need according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:19)
It turns out God didn't set the world up a bazillion years ago like an immense domino trick, where He knocked the
first one over, and left the rest to topple by their
own momentum. When Paul says that Jesus created all things and that
in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16-17), he wasn't kidding.
