The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel According to St. MarkChadwick, G. A. (George Alexander)
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel According to St. Mark
Chadwick, G. A. (George Alexander)
Bible. Mark -- Commentaries
arrest its working, then indeed the sum of forces is disturbed, and the
complaints of science are justified. This may, or it may not, have been
the case in creative epochs, of which science knows no more than of the
beginning of life and of consciousness. But it has nothing to say against
the doctrine of the miracles of Jesus. For this doctrine assumes that God
is ever present in His universe; that by Him all things consist; that He
is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our
being, although men may be as unconscious of Him as of gravitation and
electricity. When these became known to man, the stability of law was
unaffected. And it is a wild assumption that if a supreme and vital force
exist, a living God, He cannot make His energies visible without affecting
the stability of law.
Now Christ Himself appeals expressly and repeatedly to this immanent
presence of God as the explanation of His “works.”
“My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” “The Father loveth the Son, and
showeth Him all things that Himself doeth.” “I, by the finger of God, cast
out devils.”
Thus a miracle, even in the Old Testament, is not an interruption of law
by God, but a manifestation of God who is within nature always; to common
events it is as the lightning to the cloud, a revelation of the
electricity which was already there. God was made known, when invoked by
His agents, in signs from heaven, in fire and tempest, in drought and
pestilence, a God who judgeth. These are the miracles of God interposing
for His people against their foes. But the miracles of Christ are those of
God carrying forward to the uttermost His presence in the world, God
manifest in the flesh. They are the works of Him in Whom dwelleth all the
fulness of the Godhead bodily.
And this explains what would otherwise be so perplexing, the essentially
different nature of His miracles from those of the Old Testament.
Infidelity pretends that those are the models on which myth or legend
formed the miracles of Jesus, but the plain answer is that they are built
on no model of the kind. The difference is so great as to be startling.
Tremendous convulsions and visitations of wrath are now unknown, because
God is now reconciling the world unto Himself, and exhibiting in miracles
the presence of Him Who is not far from every one of us, His presence in
love to redeem the common life of man, and to bless, by sharing it.
Therefore His gifts are homely, they deal with average life and its
necessities, bread and wine and fish are more to the purpose than that man
should eat angels’ food, the rescue of storm-tossed fishermen than the
engulfment of pursuing armies, the healing of prevalent disease than the
plaguing of Egypt or the destruction of Sennacherib.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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