Miracles involve God’s presence
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Editor,
Last week little Sailor Gutzler survived a plane crash. We have not yet learned how she escaped and arrived at the door of a house where she found urgently needed help. Public media has echoed the feelings and expressions of the general public, “It’s a miracle.”
This week, Barry Sadler, a Mullan, Idaho snowmobiler lost his way. After many hours in freezing temperatures, miraculously, friends rescued him. Some folks said that he survived because of his athleticism; the media showed pictures of his body building achievements. His wife was quoted as saying, “it was a miracle, God saved him.”
The dictionary says this about a miracle, “a supernatural event regarded as due to divine action” as well as, “an unexpected piece of luck.”
Think about this, during the night, when Jacob was escaping the anger of his brother Esau (Genesis 28), in his sleep he had a dream about a ladder or stairway leading to heaven, the Lord was standing at the top of the stairway and said to Jacob, (later, God changed Jacob’s name to Israel, Genesis 32:28) I’m giving you and your decedents the ground you are lying on (in other places in scripture “the ground” is described as Syria on the North, the Euphrates on the East, Egypt on the South and the Mediterranean Sea on the West), Jacob responds by declaring, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I wasn’t even aware of it.”
How about Jonah, if he had known that he could not escape God’s presence, he would not have paid the fare to take a boat ride to Tarshish. Jesus speaks about Jonah in Matthew 12:39-41.
Israel’s King David writes about God’s presence in Psalm 139:7, “I can never get away from your presence.”
The Apostle Paul said to the Athenians, (Acts 17:27-28) “(God) is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist,” NLT. “They will call him Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us’” Matthew 1:23b.
Harvey A. Town
Polson
