Herbert W. Armstrong defined exactly what a miracle is in The Plain Truth About Healing: “An event beyond the power of any known physical laws to produce; a supernatural occurrence produced by the power of God.”
Men don’t like this definition. They often feel the need to explain miracles away with purely physical explanations. When I was in sixth grade, for instance, a teacher explained that the parting of the Red Sea was accomplished with a tidal wave. At the end of this lengthy explanation that a natural phenomenon saved the Israelites by convenient timing, she added: “But who is to say that the God of the Hebrews didn’t send a tidal wave to save the Jewish people?”
I’ll tell you exactly who says it: God did in Exodus 14. The story of the parting of the Red Sea is specific—and it doesn’t describe a tidal wave. It describes an event that can only be explained through supernatural power that involved far more than a simple weather event.
In verse 17, we see that God first tells Moses what He expects from Him—that Moses would lift up his rod and stretch out his hand—and then what would happen. Read the account in Exodus 14, and you can see exactly how it unfolded. Here are a few aspects of this miracle:
1. The waters were divided into two walls, standing on both sides of them (verse 21).
2. The ground was totally dry (verse 22).
3. When the Egyptians went through, the ground was suddenly not so dry (verse 25-28).
4. Moses controlled the timing of the entire event by following God’s instructions.
Aside from ignoring the detailed scriptural account, notice that the “tidal wave” theory requires the theorists to completely ignore the pillar of fire! (verse 24-25). And that is exactly what the naysayers will do: try to explain away the presence of God in history’s greatest miracles. Everything about this event required the power of God.
Coming out of Egypt also represents another miracle you should recognize in a special way, something that takes place in every one of our lives. We know it is a miracle because it requires the power of God: “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:44).
I realize most of our readers were born into God’s Church. That includes me, and in many cases, includes even your parents. But at some point in your history, John 6:44 tells us God the Father drew someone out. Every second-generation Christian is in the Church because of the favor God gave someone who came before us. 1 Corinthians 7:14 tells us we are literally holy because of them.
The miracle God performed to draw your family to His Church is how you were brought out of Egypt by God. Everyone has their own story, and you should recognize it as both your personal family history and as a miracle from God, literally carried out by His power.
Those stories are the living fulfillment of being brought out of Egypt that we celebrated on the Night to Be Much Observed.
Miracles also regularly happen on a personal level in ways we might now often think about. A couple years ago, I spent hours gathering material on suffering—video and all—that I did not really use. Two years later, ac instructor Alex Harrison saw Information Technology department manager Stephen Coats in my office and asked him if he could locate an audio recording of a lecture from a secular recording and prepare it for online posting, something that would have taken a while to locate and then to encode. Even though I hadn’t used the material, I had already created the file. If Mr. Coats had not been in my office, I would never have known about the need. It turned out I had several other things Mr. Harrison needed for that section of his course, which saved him many hours.
A second example: I assigned a class to rewrite Ecclesiastes 9:11 in modern English. The next day, the sermonette was entirely about Ecclesiastes 9:11. God performs miracles at his college and Imperial Academy every day. These are things we simply cannot accomplish under our own power; they require God’s special, divine intervention.
I’d like you consider another type of miracle that you see regularly, one that will continue to unfold throughout your life as it has throughout mine. That is the miracle of fulfilled prophecy. One reason Christ said to watch and pray (Matthew 26:41) is because when we watch world events, we see the miracles of the living God unfold.
Having just witnessed President Trump’s return to power, prophesied for years now, you should recognize the faith-building quality that miracle has in your life. For those watching closely, events like what recently happened in Syria—it clearly moving from its ties with Iran to its prophetic place in the Psalm 83 alliance as described in the article “Syria and You” have the same faith-building quality.
For me, one such event happened on June 23, 2016, when the British people voted to leave the European Union. This was an event I had been told to expect since before I was a teenager.
I remember lying on the ground with a map of the world when I was still a preteen. We didn’t have a globe, and I was in the middle of an important project: reading The United States and Britain in Prophecy for the first time. I came across this passage: “Take a map of Europe. Lay a line due northwest of Jerusalem across the continent of Europe, until you come to the sea, and then to the islands in the sea! This line takes you directly to the British Isles!”
I went to my mom asking for a map, and she directed me to a world atlas. Even though I was never great with maps, any child can pull this off with ease—and I’ve never forgotten it. If you get out a map and draw a line northwest from Jerusalem, your line will smack right into the British Isles—and you probably won’t forget the experience either. It’s the literal movement of history and of many of our ancestry. The scriptures in Isaiah that reveal this movement have been available for thousands of years!
We’ve referred to The United States and Britain in Prophecy as Mr. Armstrong’s signature prophecy, which he talked about from the 1930s on. In 1956 he wrote, “Probably Germany will lead and dominate the coming United States of Europe, but Britain will be no part of it.”
He reiterated that through the remaining 30 years or his life. Because of the scriptures you can study in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, Herbert W. Armstrong told us before I was born Britain would leave the eu, and God’s people had been watching for this exact event ever since.
This is a fantastic reason to know the prophetic trends God’s prophets have identified. You can watch the news every day and see God’s Word in action. Seeing these things happen is one of the most powerful miracles we can witness. You can see the development of the company of nations in the British Empire. You can see the development of the United States as the single greatest superpower nation in world history.
In the Philadelphia Church of God, Mr. Flurry was prophesying about the king of the south, Islamic terrorism and the nation of Iran well before it was as apparent as it is today—a decade before the world trade center was destroyed on September 11, 2001. I watched the prophecies developing as I went through my teen years just as WCG members watched the development of the prophecies in The United States and Britain in Prophecy over their lifetimes. And the Laodiceans don’t know a thing about the king of the south—they haven’t received any new prophetic revelation from their leadership in 39 years. The miracle that God gives revelation through Mr. Gerald Flurry is the easiest way to prove the Philadelphia Church of God is God’s true Church.
One prophecy we are waiting to see fulfilled is about Jerusalem. A prophecy in Zechariah 14:2 that tells us half of this divided city will fall. I wonder if we recognize how much has already happened to make that possible. During the Ottoman empire, there were only a few thousand Jews in Jerusalem. Today there are well over half a million Jews in Jerusalem and almost 400,000 Arabs. Without the historic return of the Jewish people to their homeland and Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state in 1948, there would be no divided city for this prophecy to unfold exactly as scripture says it will.
One interesting example in found in 2 Kings, when a student with Elijah had his eyes opened by God to see the angelic armies surrounding them (verse 17). In order to recognize the miracles God performs, He has to make it possible for us to see them just as he did for that student. If you watch for them, you will see that your life is filled with miracles: healing, conversion, protection, prophetic fulfillment, answered prayer. All of these things strengthen our faith in the great miracle-working God who brought all of us out of Egypt.
Sidebar:
1. Only God can perform a miracle.
Read about the failure of the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18:20-40. They might have been superior in numbers, but only God could send fire from heaven.
2. Miracles are often an answer to prayer.
Elijah’s prayer in that account was short (verses 36-37)—it takes about 25 seconds to read it out loud slowly. But God’s answer was powerful and immediate.
3. God often performs miracles to further His Work.
You’ll notice as you read the Bible that most of the large, public display miracles were in direct support of God’s Work.
4. God performs miracles to protect us.
The Israelites passing through the Red Sea is an obvious example, but this applies to us individually and even as a Church. God promises specifically to protect His people from the Great Tribulation in a place of safety (Revelation 12:13-14)
5. God performs miracles when we do His will.
One promise we often rely on is in Psalms 37:5, Moffatt translation: “Leave all to him, rely on him, and he will see to it.”
6. Miracles strengthen our faith in God’s promises.