If doubters do not believe God’s word revelation, then they will certainly reject His act revelation—namely, miracles. God’s miracles are revelatory testimony of who He is and what He has done to save a sinful people through Christ and the Holy Spirit. In the words of the writer to the Hebrews, “God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles” (Heb. 2:4). Our prayer must be that God would give us eyes to see and ears to hear so that we would receive God’s word and act revelation unto salvation—that we would stand in awe at His power to create and marvel at His miraculous power to save.
“A book forged in hell . . . by the devil himself” are the words that were used to describe Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. Critics characterized the book as godless. Why were the reactions to this book so hostile? Spinoza was a seventeenth-century philosopher who rejected the claims of Christianity. He believed that Christians had misunderstood the Scriptures because they had erroneously concluded that miracles had occurred in the biblical narratives. Spinoza offered a twofold argument for dismissing the Bible’s account of miraculous events and actions.
First, he claimed that the Bible was written in a style to excite and inspire human imagination, not to persuade the intellect. Second, a proper reading of Scripture requires peeling back the layers of phrases and metaphors. In other words, the Bible did not record miracles but reported events robed in hyperbole and exaggeration. The seeds of Spinoza’s doubts later blossomed in nineteenth-century liberal interpretations of the Scriptures. Some New Testament scholars claimed, for example, that Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand was no miracle. Rather, Jesus stood before an opening of a cave, which was concealed by His long, flowing robe. His disciples then fed loaves of bread through the sleeves of His robe. The feeding was no miracle but rather a sleight of hand—a well-intentioned ruse meant to inspire selflessness.
In his Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza argued that the will of God is synonymous with the laws of nature. On the other hand, a miracle is a violation of the law of nature. God’s will is unbreakable; therefore, miracles are impossible. Some philosophers, such as David Hume, simply dismissed miracles because of disbelief. Hume maintained that the testimony of Christ’s resurrection, for example, was likely false. Such testimony was therefore invalid for establishing the historicity of the resurrection. In the present, New Testament scholars such as Bart Ehrman make similar claims. Ehrman defines a miracle as improbable. Historians, however, can establish only what probably occurred in the past. Thus, a historian can never ascertain the historicity of a miracle. Regardless of the variations, the simple truth behind the rejections of miracles is unbelief—a rejection of God’s Word.
A second reaction to miracles is to relativize their significance. For all the claims of secularization and living in a disenchanted world, people are still as religious as ever.
