“Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me?" Jeremiah 32:27 ESV
Do you believe in miracles? If one considers world history, religion, and the human condition that there are no atheists in foxholes, I don’t see how someone could deny that miracles have ever occurred. A pure secular, humanistic, or atheistic worldview does not believe in any sort of deity or higher power. Because of this, they must deny that any Creator can intervene in the affairs of humanity. To the atheist and even the strict deist everything that could be taken as a supernatural phenomenon can be explained naturally through luck, chance, science, or really anything — anything except God that is. Yet, this perspective is simply shortsighted as it extols humanism and science as the final arbiter of reality.
But the complex mingling of hope and disappointment of believing in a God who does intervene in human affairs, as Christianity affirms, is that He doesn’t always. Even those saint-like people we revere like certain pastors or popes can’t command God to perform miracles. That’s what makes them miraculous; they don’t take place often, or nearly ever (at least as we see or interpret them).
On a more personal level, if you do believe that God can work miracles, you put yourself in an uncomfortable predicament. On one hand, you’re comforted by the hope that God is aware and capable to intervene, while on the other, you run the risk of being disappointed when your request goes unanswered. If you have ever had a friend or family member with terminal cancer, I am assuming you have at one time in your life prayed for a supernatural healing. How I would love to say that He answers anytime a faithful Christian begs God to perform a miracle for the benefit of others, especially when death is imminent. But, experience is painfully clear — He rarely does.
This raises a question: Is faith in Christ believing that God can perform a specific miracle, or is it believing that God will perform a specific miracle? The former is the good acknowledgment that God has the ability to intercede while the latter is the danger of presuming that He will.
I'm sure these types of questions were considered by Russian religious dissent, Alexander Ogorodnikov. Born in 1950, Alexander converted to the Russian Orthodox faith in 1974. Soon after this, as a graduate student, Alexander was expelled for wanting to make a film about religious life. Seen as problematic in his atheistic and communist country, he was placed in jail for the criminally insane, and given antipsychotics. Apparently, his sincere religious convictions were seen as a mental disorder. Although Alexander was released due to public protest, it wasn’t long after that he was sent to Perm 36, a Soviet gulag near the Siberian border, in 1978. The labor colony for those deemed “especially dangerous state criminals” would become his home for the next ten years.
When he arrived at the gulag, Ogorodnikov was thrown into a cell with 40 other prison-hardened men, all half-naked and tattooed. As he entered, he addressed them saying, “Peace be with you!” Thinking he was a Christian, the other men asked that Alexander prove he was a follower of Jesus and that God cared for their miserable situation.
“We are the scum of the earth,” one man said. “We don’t even have cigarettes. If your God will give us cigarettes, we’ll all believe in Him.” Seeing this as an opportunity to share God’s love more than a threat to defend it, Ogorodnikov gathered the men together, had them stand, and led them in simple prayer. While he believed that God loved these men and could even grant their request for cigarettes as a sign of His mercy, I assume Alexander didn’t how God would respond.
While leading the men in a rather long, fifteen-minute prayer, Alexander felt the presence of God and believed the men felt something too. He then asked them to sit down, almost as if they didn’t want the prayer to end. And it was at that very moment, as the men took their seats, guards from outside opened the cell door and tossed a pack of cigarettes onto the cold floor. It was then that Alexander was assured in the presence of forty now reverential witnesses that his imprisonment was not a mere punishment for professing Christ in a Communist Country but a gift to serve the higher purposes of God.
The Lord spoke through the prophet Jeremiah, “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me?” While we know there isn’t, may we have the bold faith of Alexander Ogorodnikov to marry the hope of believing in a God who intervenes in our affairs when we ask, to the possible disappointment of not knowing that He will. Regardless, God works miracles and we should know that and live lives that reflect it.
But what do you think?
Micah Coate, President and Host of Salvation and Stuff
See Alexander Ogorodnikov / Rod Dreher's, Live Not By Lies, p. 160.
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