Did any of you see the episode of House that was on tonight? It interestingly ties into this whole discussion. (Spoiler Alert if you want to watch it!!)
A faith healer comes in very sick and House makes all kinds of jokes about God and the impossibilities of miracles. But while there, the boy-healer touches a woman with end-stage liver cancer and her tumor begins to shrink. She had been all depressed about her life, and now she has hope. Her doctor is upset because he does not believe in scientifically unexplained "miracles" and sets out to disprove it to "help her" back to the "reality" that she's a dead woman and stop all the madness of hope in something that won't happen. To make a long story short, they discover the boy-healer has herpes, scratched his sore before he touched her head, and she got infected with herpes. The herpes attacked the cancer, causing her tumor to shrink and gives her several more months to live. The funny thing is, her hope was not taken away. She felt like she had been given a gift and decided to live her life (and go to Florence) rather than sit around in deep depression. So of course they debated the validity of the "miracle" and kind of left it up to the audience to decide.
I think that a miracle can be defined as anything that changes your heart. You could get up from a wheelchair and walk again, but really the thing that you get more than that is hope/thanksgiving, etc. Jesus walking on water doesn't need to be a physical thing if it changed a heart. And that is also why God must exist: the spirit cannot be changed without a higher power doing it for you (I know I am oversimplifying a bit, but I wondered what the rest of you thought)
If I recall correctly, the words translated "miracle" are better translated "sign" or "power/ability", depending on the Greek word used. In the former case, a sign is something that communicates something to another. A sign oftentimes has no connection to the thing actually being communicated. For example the word "cat" is a sign for that furry animal that makes me sneeze. The letters c, a, and t have no connection with the actual animal. Likewise, a miracle communicates an abstract thing -- usually God's power and authority -- to human hearts -- just as you said. Which (a relative pronoun starting a sentence for jeltzz, if he's still reading) leads me to the other word for miracle. If humans do not have the power or ability to do something or to understand something, it is a miracle. This does not mean that humans will never have the ability or power to do or understand that thing. Nor does this mean that if a human can do that thing that he or she will do it in the same way as God might.
A faith healer comes in very sick and House makes all kinds of jokes about God and the impossibilities of miracles. But while there, the boy-healer touches a woman with end-stage liver cancer and her tumor begins to shrink. She had been all depressed about her life, and now she has hope. Her doctor is upset because he does not believe in scientifically unexplained "miracles" and sets out to disprove it to "help her" back to the "reality" that she's a dead woman and stop all the madness of hope in something that won't happen. To make a long story short, they discover the boy-healer has herpes, scratched his sore before he touched her head, and she got infected with herpes. The herpes attacked the cancer, causing her tumor to shrink and gives her several more months to live. The funny thing is, her hope was not taken away. She felt like she had been given a gift and decided to live her life (and go to Florence) rather than sit around in deep depression. So of course they debated the validity of the "miracle" and kind of left it up to the audience to decide.
I think that a miracle can be defined as anything that changes your heart. You could get up from a wheelchair and walk again, but really the thing that you get more than that is hope/thanksgiving, etc. Jesus walking on water doesn't need to be a physical thing if it changed a heart. And that is also why God must exist: the spirit cannot be changed without a higher power doing it for you (I know I am oversimplifying a bit, but I wondered what the rest of you thought)
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