Ask Pastor Mike Live

Focal Point Ministries: All right, let’s look at Brooklyn. Brooklyn’s back. Love your questions, Brooklyn. Let’s see: “Can you understand why a person may not believe everything in the Bible? Like a snake or a donkey that spoke in Hebrew.” I don't know if the snake was speaking in Hebrew because that was before the Tower of Babel. Who knows exactly what they were speaking? Although rabbis like to think they were speaking Hebrew in the garden, that creates some problems for the Tower of Babel. Whatever language, they were communicating through this animal: an angel through the donkey and a demon through the snake—which was not a snake when that was taking place. This was an animal that was turned into a snake after that.

I believe it is true, and here is the thing about reality: the reality we have is a miracle itself. Life itself, the fact that you and I are sitting here having a conversation through the miracle of the internet and technology. I want you to think about the reality that we are all sitting here looking at things and experiencing things as sentient beings on this planet. All of these things had to get here somehow. If you’re a typical skeptic saying, “I can’t believe all this. I don’t believe in God. I don't see Him; He should just speak to me if He’s out there,” as Psalm 19 says, everything is screaming from creation.

The greatness of God and the glory of God is being declared every day, every morning, every evening, and every night. This statement is, in essence, that there’s something rather than nothing, which is the great philosophical starting point of any good thinking. Epistemology in general: what are we doing sitting here trying to figure out who we are? Like Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Let's just start with that. I'm a thinking being. I must exist. Now, I'm sitting here in a world that I'm computing in my brain, all the things I'm seeing. Where did this come from?

The answer from the world at every university in our country—except for those that still rely on biblical revelation to inform their worldview—they’re going to say it just happened. It just exploded. It happened in an explosion billions of years ago that operated by a set of physical rules that no longer exist, and they’ve been replaced with rules that now make sense and can be relied on in physics. That’s how we got here.

The reality of saying there is a personal God who has existed eternally—as the philosophers used to say, the unmoved mover who put everything into motion and the uncaused cause that is the cause for everything, the initial cause of everything—and this thinking, sentient, eternal being has spoken things into existence and put them into reality because of His power as Creator, I would expect at some point if He ever wanted to communicate to us, He’s going to have to break some rules to get our attention.

That is what the miracles in the Bible are all about. They’re not on every page. The Bible is not filled with miracles. If you look through the Bible, physically counting every time you see the suspension of natural law—I'm not talking about timing or the providential timing of God, those can be called God acts and I call them "God things"—but when does He break natural law? He only does that less than a hundred times in the Scriptures if you count all of creation week as one. Beyond that, we’re dealing with a couple of statements about Jesus going to a village and healing people where it doesn’t tell us how many.

There are less than a hundred reports of God breaking natural law, so He’s not doing it all the time. What’s important to remember is He’s doing it in three primary clusters. If you scatterplot these, you’ll find most of them to be during the time of Christ and the Apostles. The second most was during the time of the prophets, Elijah and Elisha, starting the school of the prophets who spoke for the Lord. Then there was the time of Moses and Joshua. That is where 90% of all the miracles of the Bible that are recorded are in those three clusters, which produce for us the Law, the Prophets, and the New Testament in writing.

What comes out of these miraculous signs, as Hebrews chapter 2 says, is that they are affirming God’s speaking. When God speaks, the supernatural interacts with what we are used to, and that is the rules of nature going on as they always do—rules which we need to explain how they got here. That particular reality reminds us that God is going to have to somehow prove that this isn't just our intuition trying to imagine what God is like. God is going to have to speak. As Francis Schaeffer liked to put it, if there is a God and He has spoken, the way that He has spoken is going to have to somehow be verified.

The verification is these suspensions of natural law. We call them miracles, or miracles of the first order. I call them GT1s—God-thing-ones. God breaks natural law and basically says, "Shazam, I'm here. I'm able to speak now and give you information that’s going to be eternally true." That picture of those things is remarkable. When He allows the tempter in the garden to actually speak to brand new creatures—this is the first time God creates something that has a physical world with human beings that now have this hardware, this brain processing information.

The spirits don't need any of that; they're sentient beings without that, as they have intellect, emotion, and will. Here we are now, physically sentient beings, and we have little bones rattling around in our ears. Somehow there has to be some kind of physical communication, and so God allows Satan to manifest himself through some host animal. Just like we have in the New Testament, these demons using human beings as hosts to speak through them. In one case, a donkey, Balaam’s donkey. God allows this angel to come into this donkey to speak and to make a really clear point. This is God; this isn't just your servant saying you really shouldn't be going here with Balak to curse the Israelites.

Instead, God gives him a miracle, and this particular prophet who then goes on to record prophecies about the coming of Christ—this is a millennium before it ever happened—this is an act of God saying, "This is true." God’s not breaking natural law with the shysters on TV trying to tell you if you send them enough money they’ll give you your miracle. God has done miracles and they verify revelation, and it's few and far between over the biblical history that’s recorded for us. It doesn’t happen every day; it doesn’t happen all the time.

If there is a God who can create something out of nothing, even the most ardent atheistic skeptics are going to have to say something happened here to get trees in the garden and a beautiful wife that I married and kids that I hold and cherish in my arms. There’s going to have to be something instead of the cold vacuum of interplanetary space where there’s nothing. Even before space, space itself, if you think about the Big Bang, didn’t exist. There was nothing, this infinitesimally small nothing, and all of a sudden it became something.

Given enough time, that something becomes my beautiful baby or my beautiful wife. All of that is a creation of something out of nothing. If there is a God who creates something out of nothing, He is able to speak to His creation and He’s going to do that by getting their attention through the supernatural. A lot of skeptics think every page is like a fable; every page has a miracle. It doesn't. What we have in Scripture mostly is God saying, "Here’s what I’m thinking, here’s what you should do, here’s my word for you to follow, here’s the way for you to recognize your sin and how to get it fixed."

It’s not a book about the spectacular. There are more miracles in Harry Potter than you’ll ever find in the pages of Scripture. It may be hard to believe, but you’re believing something about reality here—that it all came from this infinitesimally small reduction of nothing that becomes something because it has to be something. In the old days of uniformitarianism, we used to think it had just always been here, but understanding the laws of physics says it can't always be here. I believe that the God who created the laws of nature can also suspend those laws of nature to make a point very clearly that He’s speaking to us.

Jesus spoke to us and said we’re sinners and we need salvation. For the skeptic, he also has a conscience that he’s working against, and I’m going to work with him by sharing the Scripture with him that is affirmed by miraculous gifts and miraculous events. There are very few of them, less than a hundred, but they are given to us in Scripture. That leaves us with a book that’s a roadmap to my conscience and a roadmap to my destiny, and I’d better figure this out before it’s too late.