Providence Bible Church » chris ritter http://providencebiblechurch.org Reflecting Christ - Serving Others Fri, 18 May 2012 19:15:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= The Mystery of Miracles http://providencebiblechurch.org/chris-ritter/the-mystery-of-miracles/ http://providencebiblechurch.org/chris-ritter/the-mystery-of-miracles/#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:41:03 +0000 info http://providencebiblechurch.org/?p=99 One of my best friends for the past 12 years, Taylor Lawrence, could have died on Tuesday afternoon. He was riding his new motorcycle on HWY 193 away from Auburn/Newcastle area and fell off a 45 foot cliff. All things considered most people would say he “should” have died because of it. Yet by the grace of God he is alive, and not only that but the biggest physical wounds are only a dislocated shoulder, soreness, and a great deal of scratches due to the blackberry bush he slid into. It was a normal Tuesday afternoon until Taylor’s brother called me and told me about it – everything changed and I was in a bit of shock, realizing that I could have lost a great friend, others a great family member, and his wife could have lost a great husband. But he did not die even though quite a few people have died in recent years because of crashes on the very same highway.

Why do some people “live to tell the story” and so many others don’t? Why is the universe not even more predictable and reliable – for example, if someone falls from a certain height, or gets in an accident at a certain speed, the result will be death every time? With as much order as there is in the universe, the mystery of miracles astonishes me. In the end I believe there are only two options in regards to miracles and how we react to them: either Taylor is a lucky son of a gun who just happened to hit the right spot and live, or second Taylor was not meant to die on that day. I don’t believe there is a third option, I really don’t. Taylor’s time was not up, God had not decided it was time for him to come Home for eternity quite yet. But when that time comes he will go – and it may be far less dramatic than the crash he survived. For that matter, when “that time” comes for all of us, we will go, with no exceptions.

Miracles are a funny thing because they really don’t ever happen twice in the exact same way. Another guy could fall off the exact same cliff at the same speed, land on his head, and die at impact. When it comes to death and miracles, the question for me is not “why do some live and some die”, the real question is, “Who should decide who lives and dies?” If you and I live believing that people die “too soon” or believing people shouldn’t die when and how they do, we are making an amazingly arrogant claim about who should rule over life and death: human beings. We are essentially saying that God is not just, He doesn’t know what He is doing, and He should not allow anyone to die until we believe the time is right. But I am grateful, after much struggle, not to believe that any longer. I believe life and death are in the hands of God, and I believe God’s timing and reasoning are beyond our comprehension and perfect beyond compare.

So here I am, grateful that my friend is alive but pondering the mystery of it all. Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes 3:2 that there is “a time to give birth and a time to die” and the Bible says clearly that God is sovereign over it all. I rest and rejoice in the fact that I am not center of the universe, and that I have a day when I will die and see the Lord, and everyone else does as well. Until that day comes I will continue to be astonished at miracles, and I will continue to trust in God.

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