The greatest miracle of all is a change in your heart, followed by a change in your mind to obey your heart.
If exposing our false notions of what to fear is one edge of the sword of truth, then the other edge is false expectations of God’s mighty power over His creation. Correcting one requires correcting the other, because they both belong to the same horrific system of deception.
For all the Fright Night movies you’ve seen and absorbed, the ones attempting to depict the magic of fairies and the miracles of the Bible are equally sinister. It raises an expectation that God does things only in certain ways, and if you don’t see the mythical symptoms of sparklies and glowing, then it wasn’t a miracle.
Basic principle: Moral perception is a miracle gift of God. Everything He does is for His glory because that is also our best interest. Creation sings best and loudest about His glory, so life here can be no better than to join in that song. All God’s blessings are there. Most of them are utterly invisible without that moral perception. Every miracle of God comes packaged in plausible deniability.
Yes, even the drowning of Egyptian troops at the Exodus was something a secular mind could deny was much more than merely peculiar. Standard psychology recognizes two things at work here. One: If what you see is just too far outside what you can possibly believe, your mind will bury it. Maybe you’ll come up with all kinds of rationalizations, or you’ll simply refuse to process it and forget. Maybe you’ll just go nuts and never quite reconcile, living in two (or more) minds. Two: Recognizing God’s power demands that we walk through the Valley of Death and face that Flaming Sword of truth. That is, it requires we deny our very self concept. Not simply adjust it, but deny it on a level the intellect is not able to do.
Without the power of God, you cannot deny the reality you think you know. You can experience some shocking psychological conversions, but unless those are the cover for opening up your heart to rule, it won’t make you any different from other humans on this earth with dead hearts.
At question here is the concept of miracle, which is quite different between ours and the biblical culture. Our Western heritage demands linguistic precision and legalistic definition of terms. The ancient Hebrew heritage demands the opposite, that you use words merely as indicators of something beyond words. So if you reject God and the claims of His moral character in Creation, then it won’t matter what you experience directly in this world.
Few miracles in the Bible would get the attention of a secular mind. Most healing miracles in the New Testament would appear objectively fraudulent. There is serious doubt Jesus did much of anything with a dramatic flourish. Had you seen the Feeding of the Five Thousand, it would have simply seemed odd that the basket never came up empty. But if He fills your soul with the wonder of His power giving you communion with Creation, it doesn’t matter what your eyes see — everything looks like a bright sunny day. Had you seen Him still the storm on Galilee, it wouldn’t have been spooky, because the storms there die suddenly like that often. But if He stills the storms in your soul, you’ll never be the same.
