Miracles

,Miracles, I suppose, are really a rather controversial subject. Certainly numerous things have been written on them -- skeptics trying to explain away recorded Biblical miracles, spiritualist trying to prove the existence of various random miracles, and everything in between.

I was thinking about miracles today, mostly because of a vague memory of Israel. I remember riding past a village or something and our tour guide explaining that this particular people group believed that the messiah would be born suddenly of a man. Now that's an odd miracle. And I was thinking that such a miracle does not seem like something the God of the Bible would do. Which made me wonder: are there some miracles that really are in some sense impossible? I don't want to put limits on God's power, but on the other hand, His nature does limit what He can and cannot do (He can't sin, etc.) It rather seems to me that having the messiah born suddenly of a man would kind of go against God's nature. Let me explain my reasoning.

I am admittedly a geek, but because of my scientific background, I do think of God as the Great Scientist. Not only that, of course, but he did create the world and holds it together. There's nothing we've discovered in science that He did not first invent and create. He made rules and put limits on the world, which are good and save us from chaos. I think He follows His own rules. Even in miracles. I don't mean to make miracles sound less miraculous because they aren't. Even if we knew all the rules by which the universe operates (which we don't) there would be no way we could apply them to make these miracles happen ourselves.

Let's take the virgin birth, for example. Mary had all the parts necessary for life in her body. For God to tweak one of her eggs just a little to turn it into a sperm, for example, would be all that was required. I don't know that we could do that today, but we definitely could see how it theoretically could be done. From then on naturally processes would be followed. This is drastically different from what would be required in the messianic birth referred to before. To have a man give birth at all goes against nature. For it to be sudden would require basically an act of creation ex nihilo by God. I don't think that's how God works (in fact, I know that's not how He worked in the birth of the messiah). Thus, I would call it an "impossible" miracle.

I'd go on with a few other examples, but I need to go to bed. Let me know if y'all have any thoughts. :)