Today’s reading: Proverbs 1-2; Acts 12
There are a handful of miracles in the Bible that I really struggle with, and that ultimately force me to admit that I really have no concept of the absolute power and capacity of the Lord.
When an angel shows up to free Peter from prison, Peter thinks he is seeing a vision, and I completely get that. He was chained between two guards and the angel made the chains fall from his hands and had him get up and get dressed, all that somehow without disturbing the guards he was chained to or the sentries guarding the door. It’s reasonable to think the guards Peter was chained to were sleeping, and maybe the angel just made them sleep extra deeply through everything, but what about those stationed outside the door which they clearly walked out of? Or what about any other soldiers or sentries present in the building as they walk through the halls and out the front doors? Luke tells us specifically that they passed multiple guards. Or what about the gate of the city opening for them? Did none of the city’s guards notice the gate opening or closing?
I would honestly have a much easier time with this if God had just teleported Peter from his prison bench to a spot outside the city. I would be curious how it worked, but teleportation honestly seems so much simpler than what God did to rescue Peter. How did God handle the door opening and the walking past the sentries guarding it? Did He bend the light oddly so that, from their perspective, the door still looked to be shut? How did He stop them from hearing the sounds of Peter’s passing without blocking out the sounds of the night around them, or the quiets sounds of lamps burning nearby? Did He move Peter into some overlapping but non-physical dimension? But if He did that, why did the angel open the doors instead of just leading Peter to walk through them? And why could Peter see the guards but not the other way around?
The more I think about what had to be involved with this surface-simple miracle, the more overwhelming it gets. The fact that the Lord must have been controlling individual photons entering the guards’ eyes to stop them from seeing Peter, and must have been controlling the interactions to air molecules such that the sound of his passing was suppressed and his movement down the hallway created no discernible air currents, is just… unfathomable.
I certainly cannot deny that the God of the Bible has such power; He not only created a universe so vast I don’t have the ability to wrap my mind around it’s scale, but He actively sustains every atom of that vast universe moment by moment. When I struggle with a miracle like this, it’s not a struggle with doubt about it’s authenticity or with doubt that God could perform it, but it’s a struggle in how it forces me to deal with the realities of just how incredible our God is. When we talk about His power and abilities in abstract terms, it’s easy to accept in a very hand-wavy sort of way, but to accept a miracle like this as reality moves me out of a broad, hand-wavy, theoretical acceptance of God’s nature and to a place where I am forced to look at the unfathomable details and say, “Yes, despite the complexity I see in this, and despite the fact that the complexity I recognize is only a small portion of what is actually involved, I trust and agree that God can do it.”
Our God is so much more incredible, powerful, and capable than we could ever properly give Him credit for…
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