by Eric Metaxas
6
QUESTIONS ABOUT MIRACLES
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.
They kill us for their sport.
—KING LEAR
In the summer of 1967, while diving from a raft into the Chesapeake Bay, my friend Joni Eareckson Tada misjudged the depth of the water and fractured the levels between her fourth and fifth vertebrae, becoming an instant quadriplegic. She was seventeen. It’s one thing to consider this question abstractly, and another to think of it in a more personal way, as when it concerns someone we know, but in the more than forty-five years since the accident, Joni has been prayed for innumerable times, without any miraculous healing. Joni is herself a woman of profound faith. The question, then, is why hasn’t she been healed?
Asking that—and asking why God would allow such a thing to happen to an active and vivacious seventeen-year-old in the first place—is to ask the questions behind all questions. These are probably versions of the questions most people plan to ask God when they get to Heaven. We are made in God’s image and so we long for meaning. Therefore it is natural and normal and appropriate for us to want to know such things. What happened to Joni reminds us that there are questions to which we have no real answers—at least no simple answers. Someone might say that it was God’s way of bringing Joni to faith, which, in part, it seems to have been, but any sensitive person cannot help but wonder why God would need to do it that way. It doesn’t make much sense to us, does it? In any case, it is inescapably difficult to think about. But while we are pondering these larger questions, here’s something more.
In the moment that Joni’s vertebrae fractured, she found herself underwater, completely unable to move her arms or legs. She was unable to push herself up from the bottom and would have drowned in a minute or two. But just seconds after she dove in and was paralyzed, a crab bit her sister’s toe. Her sister had been on the raft a minute before but had already been on her way out of the water by the time Joni dove in. Her back was turned to Joni, and she wouldn’t have looked back as she made her way out of the water, but because the crab bit her toe and it hurt she turned around to warn Joni that the crabs were out and in a biting mood. When she turned around to tell this to Joni, she noticed Joni’s peroxide-blond hair waving underneath the water some distance away.
On a whim, Joni had the night before decided to bleach her hair peroxide blond, and had done so, driving to the drugstore, buying a bottle of hair bleach, and dyeing it that night. Joni told me that if she hadn’t done that the night before, her sister would never have seen her hair under the water at that distance. Joni’s hair was always what she describes as a “mousy” brown that would have been perfectly camouflaged by the water and the color of the bottom—until that day when it was suddenly a bright white blond. So it was because of that crab biting her sister’s toe at that moment and because she had decided to dye her hair peroxide blond the night before that her sister saw Joni in time to save her from drowning. As far as Joni is concerned, it was a genuine miracle that her sister saw her and saved her that day.
But of course we want to know what we are to make of a God who might be able to cause a crab to bite someone’s toe so someone’s life is saved, but who didn’t do something to prevent Joni from being paralyzed from the neck down in the first place. She’s been prayed for hundreds of times by well-meaning Christians who think their prayers will get her out of that wheelchair, but now it’s been forty-seven years and she is still paralyzed. Two years ago she survived a battle with breast cancer. What kind of a God are we talking about?
Joni says that for the first two years after that accident, she struggled terribly with depression. She simply didn’t want to continue living. She had been wonderfully athletic before, had ridden horses, hiked, played tennis. She would never be able to do any of these things again, and she knew it. Her will to live was nearly nonexistent, until one day about two years after the accident. It was then that she realized God might have a purpose for her. Indeed he did—as he does for all of us—and everything changed. She has been a bright light in the lives of innumerable people over the years. Joni is nonetheless unsparingly candid about how much she still dislikes being quadriplegic. She describes the routine she has to go through every morning when she wakes up: “bed bath,” toileting, exercising, getting dressed. She can do none of these things on her own. Each of them must be done by someone for her or with someone. It’s hard to imagine enduring that, day in and day out, for nearly fifty years. But she looks to God for strength and somehow gets that strength and continues to use it to encourage people struggling with disabilities. She is also an outspoken and effective activist and advocate on their behalf. Still, what exactly are we to make of this God who heals some and not others?*
WHY DO MIRACLES HAPPEN TO SOME PEOPLE AND NOT TO OTHERS?
We have seen in the previous chapters that our very existence is miraculous. But when we typically think of miracles, we think about the ones that happen on a personal level, where God intervenes in a way that amazes us. Sometimes it’s a miraculous healing. Other times it’s a miraculous provision, as when someone suddenly gets a check for the exact amount they needed. But if we accept the idea that miracles happen—or that they can happen and sometimes do happen—then we must ask why they happen to certain people at certain times and not at others. And most practically speaking, why do they happen to this person but not to that person? Why was so-and-so miraculously healed of cancer, while that other person was not healed, even when so many people were praying? Why is my friend Joni still a quadriplegic?
In chapter 15 I tell the remarkable September 11 story of how my friend Lolita Jackson audibly heard God’s voice directing her to safety just before the Twin Towers collapsed. But must we not wonder about her colleague who was with her and who perished? Must we not wonder about the fathers and mothers who died leaping from the flames to their deaths? How are we to make sense of that? We rejoice that one person was miraculously saved, but we can hardly forget about the others who weren’t. Can we face these difficult questions? If we don’t, what we think of as “the miraculous” becomes myopic and self-serving and unworthy of people claiming to care about truth.
How can we take the idea of miracles seriously if they seem to be so random, happening to this one and not to that one, happening here but not there? Is God merely capricious? In King Lear, Gloucester famously says: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. / They kill us for their sport.” That is the pagan view of “the gods,” who certainly don’t exist, and who, if they did exist, obviously would not love us mortals. From what we know of them, they treat us indifferently and often downright cruelly, just as a “wanton boy” would pull the wings off a fly. But that is not the God presented to us in the Bible. The God of the Bible, if he exists, is a God who claims to love us and who knows us infinitely more intimately than we know ourselves. Jesus says that his father has numbered the very hairs on our heads. If we are talking about the God of the Bible, we must talk of a God who has himself suffered and suffered horribly—and who has died for us. And he would do it again and again and again. We must talk of a God who has been wooing us as a lover woos his beloved, chasing after her and doing all he can to win her heart. Though he will suffer for her and die for her, he knows this does not guarantee that she will reciprocate his love. But he does what he does still, for such is the nature of love.
Who God is and what he is like has everything to do with the subject of miracles. If God were some cruel tyrant in the sky, we wouldn’t be surprised if he capriciously healed this one and let another die. But if God is who the Bible says he is, what should we make of him healing someone and letting someone else die? What do we make of him leading my friend Lolita to safety but letting others perish? How should we understand that?
Common sense suggests that any God who would heal one person and let another die an awful death doesn’t seem to be a God anyone would want to worship, even if he
really existed. That sort of God would seem loathsome, so wouldn’t we be justified in hating him, or at least in avoiding him, as many people do? Thinking about miracles forces us to think about the nature of the God behind those miracles.
Miracles seem to attest to the presence of a loving and compassionate God, one who wants to help us, who wants to speak to us and encourage us. But as soon as we think of when miracles do not happen, we think the opposite is true, that God is indifferent and unloving and doesn’t care if we are crushed and discouraged. So which is it?
If the latter is true, then it’s safe to say that God really doesn’t exist, because an indifferent and unloving God is hardly God in any real sense. And if he is sometimes loving and caring and at other times unloving and uncaring, in what sense is he any kind of God we could trust, with whom we would want to have a relationship?
It is at this point that most people shrug and walk away. It is sorely tempting to do so. If God is that complicated and confusing, it’s hard to take an interest in him. But to walk away now is tragic, precisely because it’s only by understanding this very thing that we can really get to the most important point of all. To walk away at this juncture is to be on the verge of what we seek—within reach of the breathtaking summit—but to lose our bearings and turn back, to miss out on taking those few last, difficult steps to something glorious.
So let’s think a bit further.
It’s only logical that if God always answered our prayers as we wanted him to, those answers to our prayers could hardly be considered miraculous. They would only be part of a predictable system that we could manipulate, if only we knew how. It really makes God not God, but a “God” or a god whom we are ultimately able to control through our efforts, whether via prayer or via our “moral” actions designed to elicit a favorable response. If that is the God in question, we who think of ourselves as his devotees are actually not worshiping him but rather a wished-for and prayed-for outcome, which is a fulfillment of our desires, whether noble or selfish. It follows that we are really quite indifferent to the God behind that outcome, if he is there at all. It is the outcome itself to which we are passionately devoted. So in this scenario, we are really treating God like a tool to be used, and we hardly acknowledge him any more than we thank the hammer or saw.
IS IT “TRUE FAITH” OR “DEAD RELIGION”?
If the goal of prayer is really to “get the results we want,” we have a strange, candy-machine idea of God. It is as though we need only to put something in and we get something back. It’s a kind of trade. With this sort of a “God,” there is no doubt that if I do x, then he must do y. In a way, he has no choice in the matter. If that’s true, why would there be any gratitude on the part of the one getting what he wants? Hasn’t he earned it by doing his part? If that’s true, he owes God nothing, because he did what was necessary and now he simply expects what is coming to him. In other words, perhaps I say a certain prayer a certain number of times and perhaps I forgo this pleasure for a certain period of time, and in return I get what I’m after. It’s a system that allows me to get what I want without the necessity of acknowledging God or having a relationship with God. Perhaps the thinking is that God is so rich it’s no big deal for him to give me what I want, so why should I be grateful? Perhaps I know I am only using God because I despise him and only want to do what I must to get what I want. It puts me and what I want at the center of things and again creates a God who is no God.
This approach is what I’ve previously called “Dead Religion,”* which is contrasted with what I have called “True Faith,” where the relationship with God is central, and the things we get from him are peripheral. We can think of it this way: If a child really loves her father and knows he really loves her, she trusts him. When he gives her what she wants, she is happy and grateful. But even when he doesn’t give her what she wants, she knows that he has a reason for not giving it to her, and not just any reason but a reason that has her ultimate welfare and concerns at heart. So although it might take some effort, in the end she cannot help but be grateful. If we have that kind of a God in mind, then even when we don’t get what we want or ask for, we can trust there is wisdom and real love toward us in not giving it to us.
There are many people who may talk about God and prayer and who outwardly look very religious, but they’re really just performing rites and deeds and prayers so they can get what they want. If they felt that those rites or deeds or prayers wouldn’t get them what they wanted, they would stop doing those things. So they are not really worshiping the God they claim to be worshiping. They are selfishly worshiping getting what they desire. For them, God is only a means to that end. If he doesn’t give them what they want, they cut him off. Any parent understands that we don’t want our children to treat us that way.
If we are talking about a loving God, we are talking about a God who asks us to trust him, whether we get what we ask for or don’t. But he will never force us to trust him. That is entirely up to us. We have free will and we can accept his love or reject it, or claim it doesn’t exist at all. We can trust him or distrust him as we like. But if he really and truly is the God of the Bible, who loves me with an unchanging and self-sacrificial love (agape), then I really and truly can trust him in all circumstances, which is tremendously freeing. In fact, I can go one step further than trusting him. To use a biblical phrase, I can rejoice in him.* But is only possible if we really do know that God has our best interests at heart at all times. Of course, we have to decide on our own whether we believe that. But if we come to see that that is true and do allow ourselves to believe it, we are precisely where he created us to be: in his loving hands.
IF WE THANK GOD FOR THE GOOD THINGS, WHY NOT BLAME HIM FOR THE BAD?
A good friend has often remarked that athletes publicly thanking God annoys him, because it follows logically that if they thank God for their successes they should also blame him for their failures, and why don’t they? This is a very good question. We have all witnessed this phenomenon. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with thanking God publicly in that way. In fact, I think it’s appropriate and right to do so, since it was God who gave us whatever we needed to accomplish what we accomplished. But to be fair to athletes who express their faith publicly, I have also heard a number of them say that even though they want to win, they are grateful to God no matter the outcome.
Therefore it actually does not follow that one should blame God for one’s failures if one is grateful to him for one’s successes. Rather, in a kind of Chestertonian inversion, it’s correct to say that we cannot truly thank him for the good things unless we also thank him for the bad things. That way seems madness, but actually it makes perfect sense. This is because if we trust the God we know from the Hebrew Bible—and not some indifferent Greco-Roman deity, for example—then we know that he means well toward us at all times and in every conceivable way, so it follows that we actually can trust him with everything, including our failures and our difficulties, as we have just said. So if he is actually the God who loves us beyond anything we can imagine, even the bad things can ultimately be a blessing. In fact, Gods wants us to know that, because our sufferings will be easier to bear if we know God is with us in the midst of them, leading us toward something ultimately redemptive and beautiful.
The author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” John Newton, who once was a slave ship captain, and who became a Christian preacher and an enemy of the slave trade, once said: “I have reason to praise [God] for my trials, for, most probably, I should have been ruined without them.” The author of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” This does not mean that Newton would have chosen to go through
his trials, or that Solzhenitsyn in any way enjoyed the terrible suffering of his imprisonment. But it means that in retrospect they can see that God used those difficulties to bless them in the long run.
Of course, no one wants to suffer. Let’s be clear about that. Let’s also be clear that that is normal and healthy. We shouldn’t want to suffer. But what we are talking about here is something else. It is understanding that as much as we wish to avoid suffering, there is more to life than merely avoiding suffering. In fact, good can come out of suffering. If we know this, it changes how we suffer. It gives it meaning. So what we desperately do want to avoid is not merely suffering but suffering without meaning.
If our suffering has a purpose, it is infinitely easier to bear than if our suffering has no purpose and no larger meaning. When a mother endures childbirth, she knows that it is leading to something life changing and glorious.
Viktor Frankl, who endured the death camps of the Third Reich, wrote about this in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. He said, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” Frankl observed this in his experiences in the Nazi camps. He also wrote that “[t]hose who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’”
