Supernatural acts of God

I have been really enjoying Miracles by C.S. Lewis. I thought I would share a few concepts about God from a chapter called "The propriety of Miracles". He answers the question that some of us may ask. Why would God need to do miracles, wouldn't He be able to plan out nature so that it would fulfil all His purposes without the need to apparently break His own laws of nature?

Lewis begins the chapter with:

"If the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God, opaque by the very fullness of His blinding actuality, then He might do things. He might work miracles. But would He? Many people of sincere piety feel that He would not. They think it unworthy of Him. It is petty and capricious tyrants who break their own laws: good and wise kings obey them. Only an incompetent workman will produce work which needs to be interfered with." 

He came up with a couple of potential answers to these questions that I found worthwhile thinking about.

1. Lewis suggested that God is like a poet or a painter when it comes to His ultimate plan. He follows basic rules known to everyone, rules that are consistent most of the time, ones that we can generally rely on. But what can surprise us is when the Poet or Painter is so skilful that He appears to break the rules of painting and poetry. The inexperienced may see a poem as half completed or a painting as incomplete, not because they are experts on art, but because they are not. It is the true artists who follow greater rules that are known to fewer of us. The true Artist is able to create a more beautiful and creative art work because of His knowledge and scope of what really is great art. Or I think about Jazz, it is music that appears to break rules but in fact follows a greater understanding of creative music. 

Hence if God does a miracle, it is not because He is incompetent but because He is competent. He is our lecturer, we are the students, in fact, are we the art? :)

2. The next concept that Lewis describes about story telling, is that a badly done story is where the plot is destroyed by unexpected or misplaced miracles. An example he gives is where a realistic story may be left at the end with a cliffhanger, only to finish with an unexpected miracle as an easy way out. The miracle that happened, destroyed the story because the miracle was not the theme of the story. How many movies have we watched where story writers do this! You are enjoying movie, wondering what could be happening, only to find it explained away by a seemingly random alien or ghost! 

However, as Lewis points out, a story where supernatural miracles are what the story is about, can then make a fantastic story.

Here I'll let Lewis describe how these ideas relate to God and His art.

"Now there is no doubt that a great deal of the modern objection to miracles is based on the suspicion that they are marvels of the wrong sort; that a story of a certain kind (Nature) is arbitrarily interfered with, to get the characters out of a difficulty, by events that do not really belong to that kind of story. Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control. The reader may set his mind at rest. If I thought miracles were like that, I should not believe in them. If they have occurred, they have occurred because they are the very thing this universal story is about. They are not exceptions (however rarely they occur) not irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns. Death and Resurrection are what the story is about; and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables. If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worth pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what the story was really about?—that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were the main plot? And is it certain you were right? It is easy to make mistakes in such matters....

To be sure, God might be expected to make a better story... But it is a very long story, with a complicated plot; and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers."

The cross of Christ is not a last resort, ditch effort to restore a story gone wrong, but the intended outcome hinted to us throughout scripture. God, the Author of life as we know it, plans the future in as much detail as He sees the past, and we are partakers in His ultimate story. What part will we play?  

Quotes retrieved from  http://www.dunedin.elim.org.nz/uploads/1/2/7/8/12786940/miracles-c_s_lewis.pdf