This is part 1 of a series.

In no area is common sense less common than in religion.

When reading the Bible, everyone from the Pope to the sleepiest working man treats the words as if they are somehow unreal; magical, hard to be understood by the common man. And yet the Bible was meant to be understood by the foolish, meant to be learned by babes (1 Corinthians 1:17-29).

Matthew 11:25 (WEB) At that time, Jesus answered, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you hid these things from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to infants.”

So we shouldn’t treat the Bible as a book full of things beyond human experience; the lessons it has were not meant to require degrees to understand it, but rather it should be understood using the most basic of common sense that would have been available to any peasant farmer in Palestine.

Take Elijah calling fire down from heaven; when we picture this, as tens of millions have, we tend to arrive at an image like this painting.

But why? Have you ever seen tongues of fire falling from the sky? Is there anything in all of mankind’s experience that would explain this? No; this would be a new thing, something unprecedented.

But what if it wasn’t a new thing? Think for a moment; confine yourself, just for a second, to the real world. Pretend that Elijah calling fire down from heaven was something you’ve seen in your own lifetime. What might that be?

Try to read these words, as if you’d never heard them before; as a peasant in Galilee might have understood them; someone who never saw an artist’s impression, never saw a children’s movie about Elijah. When, in human experience, does fire fall from heaven?

Psalms 97:3-4 (WEB) A fire goes before him, and burns up his adversaries on every side. His lightning lights up the world. The earth sees, and trembles.

In a very literal sense, this tree is a victim of fire that fell from heaven! And this is how you WOULD have understood it, had you not already had the other preconception in your head! Because everyone knows that a major cause of forest fires is lightning which comes from heaven!

Now to be clear, I don’t mean that this wasn’t a miracle. Because calling lightning out of the sky on command, particularly a blue sky, is absolutely a miracle! It’s just not magical. It doesn’t require unknown dark forces; it just commands the real world to do your will.

RED SEA

Another great example is the parting of the Red Sea. We envision something like this picture at right, and this would indeed be a very impressive, miraculous event; and sure, God could totally have done this. The question is… did He? This would be an event utterly without precedent in our world. An event we can in no way relate to as a “real” thing.

More importantly, it simply isn’t what the Bible itself said:

Exodus 14:21 (WEB) Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and Yahweh caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

God was clear; a wind from the east divided the waters. God did not wave a magic wand and make the waters jump out of the way – but as cool as it looked in the Ten Commandments movie, that’s just not how God did it! And it didn’t happen instantly, as in the movies – it took all night!

It’s far less cinematic to picture a high wind blowing a tide back and revealing a dry sandbar; and yet, that’s simply what the Bible said.

It makes it no less of a miracle; for who made the wind to blow, and blow in the right direction at the right time; who knew that it blowing would create this dry land? So it was absolutely a miracle… but it wasn’t magical.

We like to picture the miracles in the Bible as Jim Carrey parting the red soup, or Harry Potter flying around a room on a broom. But the reality is, most of the miracles in the Bible are not magical at all… if you just use common sense.

JERICHO

You can’t believe the Bible, and not believe in miracles; but you can, and should, believe in miracles without resorting to magic! Certainly, God can do whatever He wants; certainly, He could make a broom fly. And yet, why wouldn’t He work within the laws of Nature He Himself created whenever possible?

For instance, when the walls of Jericho fell, that was absolutely a miracle; but was it magic? Did an angel swoop down with a mighty hammer and knock the walls over? Did God miraculously turn the stone walls into sand? Or did God do something even better… use the laws of resonance He had created?

The archeological evidence of Jericho shows that the walls fell out, not in; which is odd, because most cities that were captured were bashed in from the outside. Long story short, the walls of Jericho had been built long before the time of Israel, fallen into decay, and been badly rebuilt, with a poor quality wall built on top of a sloping base.

So when God commanded Joshua to make these journeys around Jericho, there were hundreds of thousands of people marching in step while making as much noise as possible, which literally caused stone to crumble – something we know for a fact happens, even today!

Soldiers today know that when crossing a bridge, you must break step so as not to reinforce the reverberations, which can – admittedly on rare occasions, but can – cause even stone to crumble. This is a scientific fact.

So the true miracle wasn’t God sending an angel to smite the walls; the miracle was that God didn’t have to break the walls down… the miracle was how God used science that Joshua couldn’t possibly have known to accomplish His will!

This is no less miraculous just because we know how it was done! It is simply less magical, more real, more relatable and therefore far more useful to us!

ECLIPSES

But this works for prophecy too. For example, Revelation 6:12 describes the sixth seal saying “The sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became as blood.” People are so wowed by the prophecy itself, that they forget to use common sense.

So think about it as a child would, searching for something in our own experience that prepares us for this terrifying event; when does the sun wear sackcloth? When does the sun, in other words, become dark? At an eclipse!

Now a slightly harder one; when does the moon turn to blood? We call these, even today, blood moons! Which usually come in pairs about 14 days apart! Because if the sun-earth-moon system is aligned properly for a total solar eclipse, it’s usually aligned properly for a total lunar eclipse as well!

So rather than imagine God divinely smiting the sun and moon, this tells us these events would occur near an eclipse of the sun and moon! REAL! Science! But still miraculous because God knew these things thousands of years ago!

Why do people overcomplicate these things, which were meant to be simple? Rather than seeking a magical explanation for the things in the Bible, confine yourself to reality and you’d be surprised at how much sense the Bible makes!

BLOODY SEAS

This allows us to look at things in the Bible with fresh eyes, things we thought were hidden behind mysticism but really, were just phrased with the best words possible for a pre-technological society. Take the seas becoming blood in Revelation 8:8, 16:3; that’s very strange, to be sure.

And yet… it’s not only known to happen, it’s quite common today. It’s just that we call it “red tide” or “algae bloom”. You can see how John, were he plopped down in front of the weather channel, would describe the seas turning to blood; what better term could he use?

Algae blooms consume a great deal of oxygen in the water and put off toxins besides, which kills many fish. Which is why, as a result of the sea turning to blood, “the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died” (Revelation 8:8).

So is it magical, in that God smites the sea with a magic wand like Harry Potter would, and it becomes actual blood? Or is it scientific, in that God foresaw that man would destroy the Earth, raise the temperatures of the seas, which would cause algal blooms to flourish like never before in the history of Earth? (Which is already happening, by the way!)

In Revelation we also see a vision of a mountain of fire falling to Earth; divine retribution, or asteroid impact? You see, it can be both! For God, knowing the orbits of the heavenly bodies, knew that at a certain date, an asteroid would cross Earth’s path; and if not, that a little nudge would be all it needed to do His will. This makes it a miracle! Just… not magic!

Again, when Ezekiel saw a vision of an angel scooping up coals off the heavenly altar of God, and casting them to Earth (Ezekiel 10:2) – the result being earthquakes and all manner of bad things – was this magic? Or simply an excellent way to describe a destructive meteorite shower in the end times… to a people who had no such word as “meteorite”?

We could do this all day, but I’ll just mention one more; John saw terrible visions of flying locusts with tails like scorpions, hair like women, iron breastplates, and which made a sound like horses galloping. Was he seeing a frightening monster… or was he watching a scene from Blackhawk Down?

A modern helicopter has the up-curled tail of a scorpion, blurry “hair like women”, and makes a sound recognizably like horses galloping. If God had placed you in front of a TV to watch Blackhawk Down 2,000 years ago could you have described it better to your ancient audience?

So why imagine a magical beast, when John was plainly just describing a helicopter without the use of any of the right words!

RATIONAL RELIGION

When you think about it, the Bible is one of the least “weird” holy books in the world. By that I mean, with a very few explainable exceptions, there is nothing in the Bible that can’t be fit into the observed experience of man.

The Babylonian religion explained the origin of the universe as Marduk killing his mother Tiamat, a dragon, and propping her mighty ribs up to form a tent out of the heavens.

The Hindu religion is full of elephant people and blue men and women with a thousand arms, with tales of cutting down a tree that turns out to be your father, and all sorts of odd stuff like that.

The Taoists believe that dragons watch over us and cats waving at you will bring them luck. In early Chinese myth, Yu the Engineer turned into a bear to dig a tunnel; his pregnant wife saw him, was ashamed, fled, and turned to stone. Yu, after turning back into a man, saw her and spoke to the stone and asked her to give him the baby; whereupon the stone opened up and the baby fell out.

Egyptians believed that Isis became a hawk in order to magically mate with her dead husband Osiris in order to give birth to Horus, who was Osiris reborn.

The apocryphal figure of Tobias was told by an angel to burn a fish’s liver and heart to chase away demons (Tobit 6). Jewish legend tells of Golem, a Frankenstein-like soulless zombie. The Quran teaches that the children of Israel were transformed to pigs and apes as a punishment for their disobedience. I could spend the rest of my life listing impossible, crazy, or just plain weird things that some religion or another teaches.

By comparison, the Bible is quite a down-to-earth book, when you think about it. The origin story is simple, and not contrary to science; God created the heavens and the Earth. He didn’t make it from the blood of a primordial beaver or something, He just did it.

Unlike almost every other origin story, God didn’t do something weird like kill His mother and make the trees out of her bones; He just did it. He didn’t pluck out an eye and turn it into Earth, or ask a friendly turtle to gather dirt to create the first dry land, or use the teeth of His enemies to make mountains; the kinds of things pretty much every other religion or faith or mythology in history has used to explain the world as we see it.

I’m quite certain He used scientific processes to do so, and – since His audience wouldn’t have understood anyway – He’s not very forthcoming on the physics involved. But it’s not weird, and to me that’s significant.

FANTASY

In all fairness there are some freaky things in the Bible – wheels within wheels come to mind, dragons with seven heads and 10 horns, lambs with 7 eyes, and so on. But in each case, the Bible was very clear these were allegorical visions or dreams which represent kingdoms or religions or historical events!

So just as we were not meant to take Orwell’s Animal Farm or Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or Baum’s Wizard of Oz as factual, but rather as allegories of historical events or contemporary cultural stereotypes, so we were not meant to take the weird visions of Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation, and elsewhere as literal history.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t see scientific processes behind, say, the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. We could almost do that with modern science today – it’s not much different from cloning.

Daniel in the lion’s den just required God to make the lions think he smelled funny, or some such. God could have simply made sure that Daniel ate garlic for lunch or whatever it is lions find gross, problem solved. A miracle yes! But not magic, just God manipulating the laws He created to accomplish the goals He has in mind.

Elijah making it not rain for 3 years was just a drought. Jesus calming the sea was just a lessening of barometric pressure or something. All these things and many others in the Bible were miracles, yes; because they happened on command! But not strange, magical events; the true miracle is not abnormal, it is just divine control over the normal.

UNUSUAL, NOT WEIRD

For most miraculous events there is a fairly easy way to visualize the miracle within the laws of nature – and usually, once you look for it, you’ll find it’s exactly what the Bible actually said, like the Red Sea parting by an east wind.

The Flood of Noah has a variety of more-or-less plausible explanations within the normal laws of nature; which one actually happened is debatable, but it’s not weird; it’s just unusual (and well attested by every ancient culture).

Balaam’s donkey speaking to him is a little unusual, to be sure, but maybe an angel spoke for him, or maybe God just gave the donkey the power of speech to make a point; after all, if He can make men know unknown languages, why not also animals in a pinch?

Daniel’s friends in the fiery furnace is certainly a miracle, but not a strange miracle. By that I mean that God making someone impervious to fire, temporarily, is not something we can’t easily imagine. The Babylonians clearly saw a Being made of fire in the flames with them (Daniel 3:25-27). Thus, a Being with a body like fire shielding them from fire is not at all hard to understand.

Likewise, we all know that there are savants in the world; usually people who are brain-damaged either by genetics or injury, who have unbelievable abilities. Some can do rapid math or recall every detail from memory; some play piano flawlessly, never having studied.

So since God made us, it’s not hard to believe that He can access these areas of our mind and “turn on” special abilities most of us haven’t developed. Which is what He must have done with Solomon and the builders of both Arks.

In crisis, many people are reported to have super strength; women saving their children by lifting a car, for instance; this is called “hysterical strength”. It’s certainly not hard for God to have given that to Samson or David when needed.

Similarly, children learn languages very quickly; how hard is it for God to make an adult “speak in tongues”, as children all do? Just flip a little switch in the mind, and if necessary download a bit of vocabulary to get them started, and boom – they speak in other languages.

A woman waking up pregnant without having been with a man is certainly unusual; but it is not weird. In fact virgin births are attested by science in many species of animals, even fairly high-order ones. So highly unusual, perhaps even unique among humans… but not weird.

WEIRD is when God takes the form of a white bull, rapes a woman, and she gives birth to Europa. Weird is giving birth to a fully grown daughter by having your head sliced open, or a different daughter being born by having your man-parts sliced off by a vengeful son. And that’s just Greek stories!

That’s the point I’m making here; God artificially inseminating a woman is nothing science doesn’t do today all the time, after all. Weird was when you try to get me to believe she gave birth to a Minotaur.

Likewise, when Jesus stretched out the withered arm, that’s definitely a miracle; but it’s not really different from a lizard regrowing a tail or a cut healing itself. Because healing is something we do normally… just not that fast or that much.

So Jesus just accessed the natural ability our body has to heal itself and turbocharged it through the power of the Father; this in no way lessens the miracle, but as He plainly said “thy faith has made you whole”. He did it with science – just such advanced science we can’t even pretend to understand it.

This makes the Bible itself real, and relatable; it makes it believable in a way that, say, the Avengers aren’t. Most importantly, it’s what actually happened. And obscuring that behind more exciting fantasies is only obscuring the truth of how God works. Because He works through common sense.

SUMMARY

I in no way want to lesson the impact of miracles, or the reality of them; on the contrary, I want to show just how REAL they are. We live in a real world, and we need to believe in miracles that work in real ways.

This is not to say that I can give a practical explanation for every miracle; there are many things I just don’t know, because I know about as much about the power of God as John knew about helicopters or Joshua knew about resonance!

So before you ask in the comments… no, I don’t know how Jonah survived three days in the fish; how 5 loaves can feed 5,000 people, or the scientific process of turning water into wine (I wish! God shouldn’t trust me with that one!).

But I can see a pattern in the many miracles we can explain, which gives me confidence that these other things can be explained within the laws of the universe without resorting to magic. This does not mean I dismiss the Bible as fairy tales and seek to discredit miracles as delusions or coincidences or wishful thinking.

On the contrary, I simply read the Bible for what it says and try to understand what really happened. Isn’t that what God wants? Why would our faith in magic be more flattering to Him than our faith in the laws He made… and in His ability to manipulate them at will?

But unlike most Christians, I don’t believe the Bible was written in a lawless vacuum where the laws of nature did not apply. God did, on occasion, bend the laws – such as by making the sun pause in the sky for Joshua. But the laws were never broken.

When I use a lever to move a boulder ten times my size, I am using a trick in the laws of nature to bend them. But I am not breaking the laws.

Likewise, when God used air to blow back the Red Sea, He didn’t break the law of gravity; He just used the law of pressure to temporarily overcome it.

When God used our faith to heal us, He didn’t break the laws of biology; He simply used His power to help our own bodies repair themselves!

So whether God’s power heals by supercharging the immune system, or by energizing our bone marrow to create extra T-cells, or by turning on a certain neuron to allow access to better memory, it’s still working within the laws of the machine He built!

If He uses a force stronger than gravity to toss a mountain into the ocean, or uses wind to overcome water, lightning to start fires, or global warming to bring algal plagues, He is still working within the laws of the universe He built!

I LIKE things like that. Things that make sense. I LIKE real answers that require minimal intervention from God to accomplish His will.

If you like things like that too, enroll to our bible course! You won’t be disappointed!

Continue to Part 2: Goal Of Life