The Morning Commute

Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures, and you don’t know the power of God.   Mark 12:24

The Sadducees rejected the Resurrection because they didn’t know the Scriptures or the power of God. Many people today would say they believe in God, but they would never expect the god they believe in to do anything—you might say that their gods are along for the ride.

There is more than one way to commute into Chicago. You can drive a car, or you can take the train. Thousands of people travel by both means every day, and it’s the same boring routine. You can ride the train down the tracks, stopping at all the same stations, or you can drive the car down the expressway, passing all the familiar landmarks. The whole thing is predictable.

This is how God has ordered the world—he holds the planets on regular courses, causes the sun to rise at predictable times, and makes things grow in consistent patterns. Science observes these patterns, which are just like the morning commute.

But there’s one important difference between the train and the car: if you’re a passenger on the train and one morning you decide to follow a different route, you can’t because you’re only a passenger. But if you’re in the car and decide you want to take another route, you’re free to do so because you’re the driver.

Here’s the question: Is God like a passenger on the train, or is he like the driver of a car? Is God imprisoned in a closed system in the universe in which he has no alternative but to follow the tracks of natural law? Or is God, despite the regularity of his actions, free to do something entirely different if he so chooses?

The Sadducees said, “God rides the train.” Jesus said, “God drives the car.” We can be thankful that God chooses to drive predictably, but if he should choose to do something completely different, he is absolutely free to do so. Once you know the God of the Bible, miracles don’t seem so strange.

For further reading, see Isaiah 43