Our Western Civilization is loaded with so much intellectual trash, it’s a wonder anyone finds peace with God. Still, it’s there for those who seek His favor. Along with everything else that comes with His favor is a phenomenon in the Bible typically translated in English as “miracle.”
We have to get rid of a lot of false mythology about what a miracle is and how it works. On the one hand, we know miracles are part of following Christ. On the other hand, we see so few of them these days when seeking to follow Him. I can’t make them happen for you. And because their origin is in the Spirit Realm, I can’t actually explain how they happen and how you can claim them. All I can do is help you unlearn the lies so that your mind is open to the real thing.
1. Miracles are real. As long as you struggle with this, the door will remain closed. You must have faith and commitment enough to overwhelm your intellectual skepticism. It’s that old saw: You can hold your opinions (or let them go), but your convictions hold you. Opinion, thoughts and belief are a matter of your decisions. Your convictions existed before you were born, and rest somewhere in your soul awaiting your spiritual awareness for discovery. You must bend your intellect to bow before something bigger than you. If you aren’t held in the grip of faith such that you can embrace things you can’t understand, then there’s no way you can open that door.
2. Miracles are part of the Covenant. Which covenant? It’s the Covenant of Christ in His blood, the one that awakens in your soul as spiritual birth. When I write about the Radix Fidem covenant, that’s a subsidiary, a means of proclaiming our distinct community of faith. It is not the authoritative covenant to which all humanity is bound. The universal covenant for humanity is the Covenant of Christ (Law Covenants are subsidiary expressions of it). That covenant is something that escapes definition, yet it must be proclaimed. It’s beyond words, yet requires we use words that go along with our faith choices so that people can see it. If you aren’t pursuing that commitment to Christ as Your Lord, miracles will appear to you quite random, if they appear at all. In other words, you have to obey Biblical Law as the manifestation of your commitment to Christ.
3. Miracles are feudal. That is, miracles can only come via submission to that Lordship of Christ. This isn’t a doctrine or theology; it’s a moral truth, something fundamental to reality itself. Your authority to do miracles comes from your submission to the ultimate power of Creation itself. You can do them for yourself by exercising that authority in faith that it is real. You can do miracles for others when they place themselves under your authority, that authority granted to you by your covenant with Christ as a feudal servant of His.
4. Miracles are not automatic. You can’t simply claim a miracle as if it were a point of law. This is where we get that crazy “name it and claim it” nonsense; it comes from Christians thinking that divine truth works like US federal legislation. Divine justice is personal in nature; it is the feudal and covenantal “law” of the Lord you serve. It’s not “law” as legislation; it’s law as the divine will of some Person with whom you are involved. This is a totally different mindset that arose in ancient times in the Ancient Near East, and we have to absorb that, because it’s the context in which God revealed Himself.
5. Miracles are consistent with Creation. Miracles are not bending or breaking the rules. You get that perception because your heart does not rule over your mind. Miracles violate the perceptions of those who live by human logic and sensory data. Faith is above that; faith is something akin to a sixth sense that perceives moral reality as God designed it and revealed it. Faith is revelation in itself, revelation to you personally. It is your direct connection to the fabric of reality, wherein God designed everything consistently with His divine moral character. Miracles are optional, as noted in the previous point, but they are quite standard as part of the reality God made.
This is the point where I remind you that you must learn to see Creation or reality as a living person. All of the natural world that you experience is a living being — alive, sentient and willful. Jesus spoke to the storms and commanded other parts of nature to obey Him. That’s not just a metaphor; that’s reality. Learn to cultivate the friendship and alliance of the natural world. Learn that reality is variable like any real person would be with each of us. Get to know reality as a person.
6. Miracles ignore time. That’s because God is not bound by time. This is a tough one for Western brains. Sometimes it becomes necessary to explain this at length. The Spirit Realm doesn’t have “time” as we know it. But we belong in Eden; it’s what God designed for us and us for it. Time does exist in Eden, and when Christ returns He won’t abolish time. Time won’t end; the Curse of the Fall that holds us under time will be removed. Our perception of time will change. The natural world runs along in time, and our bodies are part of that. However, in our fallen condition, we are unable to perceive time the way God intended. A critical element in the Tree of Life is a radically different perception and relationship with time. In the Bible, it is portrayed as a question of ripeness, not something you should invest too heavily in measuring and trying to portion out.
Thus, miracles may happen immediately, or they may not. It all depends on what God thinks is appropriate for His glory. Your faith can tell you what He thinks, but that requires you learning how faith and convictions works.
7. Miracles are all about God’s glory. Now, His glory is much bigger than our witness, but our witness is part of His glory. Our witness is the totality of how we live in this fallen world by His grace. Thus, faith itself is a miracle, and faith to receive a miracle is supplied by the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Without that strong driving sense of faith to receive, there is no valid request. You can always ask when you don’t have to that strong leading, but the thing to pray for is an answer in your faith, a sense of what is necessary. And what is necessary depends on His grace. His glory is the whole point in living in the first place.
This is all a part of the communion with nature thing we proclaim. Nature is not fallen, but it is afflicted by the lack of our management due to the Fall. Perversion arises in the natural world because we aren’t on the job as we were in Eden. A critical element in that management mission was using miracles to shift things in the natural world to more closely match God’s glory. Knowing God’s glory and divine purpose in Eden meant sensing His divine moral character directly via the heart.
When any one of us is spiritually awakened, and then we also shift our sense of awareness into the heart instead of the intellect, then we gain that direct insight into what glory is and how to act accordingly. Living in Eden means having all of this worked out to the point it’s instinctive. That’s a very long way from where we are. It means having access to the Tree of Life, and that means we stop eating from the Forbidden Fruit. Our typical definition of the Forbidden Fruit is the human default choice of living by human capabilities and perceptions without faith, without a trust in God’s revelation. Getting from where we are to where we should be — stopping our consumption of the Forbidden Fruit — means passing through the Flaming Sword or Revelation. It means the fleshly self dies and the spiritual self takes over.
We can do that only part-way for as long as we are in the flesh. We can sample it, taste it, and that includes performing miracles. I cannot give you a HOWTO on performing miracles. You’ll have to learn that as part of your slow transformation while turning that Flaming Sword on your fleshly nature. And the perceived “completeness” of miracles is also subject to this. The degree to which God’s power changes things in your life may depend on you perceiving by faith just how far things should go.
The distance you have to travel between where you are today and where you could be is a matter of faith and practice, lots of prayer and contemplation, lots of communion with the unfallen natural world.
Chesterton was right when he said myth contains a lot more truth than we realize. Myth tells us what’s possible in creation, even if our minds could reject it as a plausibility. We have to be open to myths as possible if we want to see miraculous things as they are.