Witnessing miracles in person

I saw a miracle on Sunday. It’s always a surprise, but it made me wonder about how to share it.

I’ve had more than one critic insist these things can’t be happening, because no one caught them on video. So tell me who was going to catch this….

During a sermon on prayer, I talked about healing and what Jesus-followers should and should not expect. At the close of the talk, I prayed. Among the other things I said was a note of thanks: “Thanks for the guy who was healed of stomach pains last month.”

True story. I prayed for a guy who had had such digestion problems that he hadn’t eaten normally in months and was losing weight. A couple of weeks after we prayed, he was back to a normal diet.

So I just said thanks.

As I wonder about the phenomenology of listening to the Spirit, I remember that this particular thing occurred to me in the midst of prayer, and I decided to say it out loud rather than just letting it float through my mind.

But that was it.

After the sermon, two women came running up to me. One explained that she had been suffering from stomach pains, and when I said that prayer, she felt a sensation run through her body, and her stomach pains immediately went away. Her friend, who had been aware of her problems, was just as excited.

Ok now. Tell me how I was supposed to catch that on video?

But, good news, miracles have been recorded.

When Delia Knox got up

Take the case of Delia Knox. She was in a wheelchair for over 20 years. Then came a worship service where she prayed fervently for healing, and up she rose.

There are all kinds of problems for the skeptic.

One, that moment was caught on video. Go to YouTube and watch it yourself.

But furthermore, she was in a wheelchair for two decades after a car accident. She was known in her community with her disability. This wasn’t some rando in a crowd at a charismatic revival with no history.

Plus, think about what happens to the muscles in your legs after 22 years of non-use. You can’t just pop up.

But her story is public, and you can watch it yourself.

When Duane Miller piped up

Duane Miller was a Texas pastor serving at a church in Houston. After a long season of effective ministry, he contracted a virus that penetrated the myelin sheath of his vocal folds and damaged the nerve tissue beyond repair.

For pastors, that’s kind of your money-maker. He couldn’t preach anymore.

He saw over 200 doctors without improvement, and he had to resign from his position. He got a secular job that didn’t require him to speak.

Then an invitation came from a church to guest speak in a class that was held in the basement of a church. They figured that he sounded a bit like a wounded bullfrog, but they could give him a microphone and he could grumble his way through it.

He resisted the invitation. He was battling suicidal inclinations and didn’t have anything to say.

But he said yes.

While he was there, he began to speak – I mean, if you call it speaking – about healing. He said, “I still believe that God heals.”

And then, it came back. Right in the middle of this talk. His voice simply recovered as he talked about the God that healed. All of a sudden, after years, he was clear again.

Don’t believe me? Good news. Someone had decided at the last minute to record the talk. You can listen to it. Look it up. Listen to it a few times. See if you’re as stunned as he is.

Now go through all the possible objections you can. He wasn’t faking it. He literally lost his job over this. He wasn’t healed by medical treatment. Doctors had tried, failed, and given up. Miller had already resolved himself to the permanence of his condition.

What you’re going to have to do in order to maintain skepticism is what I call “materialism-of-the-gaps”.

Materialism-of-the-gaps

When looking at the nearly universal claims of spiritual experiences, gods, ghosts, miracles, and the supernatural, there are still a few hold-outs who really just don’t want it to be true. And the way they deal with it is materialism-of-the-gaps.

This involves the rejection of two things: abduction and Occam’s Razor.

Abduction is concluding the most logical explanation. It’s slightly different from deduction, which makes conclusions necessarily implied in the premises. It’s also slightly different from induction. Induction builds generalised conclusions from (usually) multiple sources of data. Abduction infers the best possible explanation for a (usually) surprising observation.

Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation is usually to be preferred, especially if it involves less speculation and guesswork than other options.

Materialism-of-the-gaps ignores these both, because it rules out the obvious possibility of the supernatural. It doesn’t matter that every culture in history has observed the supernatural in some form. Materialists don’t want anything to do with it. So they say there is no real explanation until a materialist explanation is found. They’re still looking for it, even when God is standing there and clearing his throat.

There is more.

Need more proof? Or do you just like hearing about miracles?

Look at the case of Barbara Snyder. She was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic with multiple sclerosis. Her doctors said she was going to die. Then a prayer went out through a radio broadcast, and she got up and walked away from it. There’s an abundant medical record to show that this is what happened.

Her collapsed lung was restored. Her clawlike hands opened up. She no longer needed a feeding tube or breathing tube. All of this happened in a single day, in a moment. It was the first time she had walked in seven years.

Why aren’t more on film?

This is because they’re almost always a surprise. As someone who prays for healing and has witnessed miracles, I can tell you that they’re always a surprise. And at some deep level, I feel a nervousness about treating God like an entertainer whose work I need to film. It’s not that I wouldn’t be glad to have it; I just wish I could get permission first to make sure I was in good stead.

But someone is going to catch them on film. It’s happened before, and it’s going to happen again. There are cases still in the pipeline that have yet to occur and be made public, but they’re going to keep coming in this age of video and the internet.

And skeptics, increasingly, are going to look silly. Because after all of those years that they pompously accused those of us who were being rational and empirical of “god-of-the-gaps”, they kind of have it coming.