Re: Miracles & modern translation

At 12:11 AM 10/25/2005, mrb22667@kansas.net wrote:

>.... We probably all agree that God CAN do it regardless of where on the
>logarithmic scale the
>feat happens to reside. But the question is really: DOES God do it that
>way? .... --merv bitikofer

### Excerpts from link below:

".....It is certainly not that any miracle is any 'harder' for God to do
than any others, but rather that He normally avoids large-scale disruption
of His created order. He LIKES to preserve the predictability of the
natural world (cf. Jer 33.20: "Thus says the Lord, 'If you can break My
covenant for the day, and My covenant for the night, so that day and night
will not be at their appointed time, 21 then My covenant may also be broken
with David My servant that he shall not have a son to reign on his throne" ).

And we must note that God is more likely to avoid disrupting the motions of
the heavenly bodies, because He literally set them up to be guides to the
passage of time:
Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to
separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for
seasons, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the
expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth"; and it was so. 16 And
God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the
lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also. 17 And God placed
them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 and to
govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness;
and God saw that it was good. (Gen 1.14f)

He made the moon for the seasons; The sun knows the place of its setting.20
Thou dost appoint darkness and it becomes night, (Ps 104.19)

Thus says the Lord, Who gives the sun for light by day, And the fixed order
of the moon and the stars for light by night, Who stirs up the sea so that
its waves roar; The Lord of hosts is His name: 36 "If this fixed order
departs From before Me," declares the Lord, "Then the offspring of Israel
also shall cease From being a nation before Me forever." (Jer 31.35)
This intended-order would actually suggest that God would NOT make any vast
changes/exceptions to these patterns, which patterns the world depended on
for time-keeping. ...."

"....Now, I personally do not have the slightest problem with God stopping
anything in the universe at all-I consider natural 'law' to be absolutely
arbitrary [For example, gravitational attraction does not 'have to' exist
at all-it is not 'logically necessary' in nature.] So, for me, the issue is
one of exegesis-what does the text say happened?

So, on the basis of my exegesis of the passage-that the sun was 'silent'
for almost an entire day while the hailstorm wrecked havoc on the enemy-we
still have a relatively local miracle. The area in which the hailstorm and
darkness would have been observed would have been confined, and even other
native people experiencing this would have not been shocked by the
occurrence at all. Under this scenario, ... the combination of
locale-restriction and the natural appearance of the phenomena (i.e., hail
and dark skies) would have rendered this miracle unobserved and/or
unnoticed elsewhere. ..."

[end excerpts] For more detail click this link
<http://www.christian-thinktank.com/5felled.html> and scroll down to:
Miracle Two: The stopping of the sun by Joshua (Joshua 10.7-15)

~ Janice
Received on Wed Oct 26 09:35:07 2005