Hey God, how about a miracle?

Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “What shall be the sign that the Lord will heal me?” (2 Kings 20:8)

King Hezekiah was seriously sick when the prophet Isaiah came to tell him to set his house in order because he would soon die. Hezekiah was heartbroken and cried to God for more time. God sent Isaiah back to Hezekiah to tell him, “OK, God has seen your tears and will give you another 15 years.” Hezekiah said, “How can I be sure that God will do this? How about a miraculous sign from God, please.”

God humours Hezekiah and tells Isaiah to give him a choice of miracles. “Ask him,” says God, “Whether he would like to have the sun’s shadow move forward ten steps on the dial of Ahaz or retreat 10 steps.”

“Well,” says Hezekiah, “It’s normal for the shadow to lengthen 10 intervals; rather let the shadow retreat 10 intervals” (vs. 10). Isaiah prays to the Lord, who then brings the sun’s shadow back ten intervals on the dial.

And we tend to agree with Hezekiah. What kind of a sign would it be for the sun’s shadow to simply proceed as it always does? Why in the world would God offer Hezekiah a choice between the ordinary movement of the sun, and an extraordinary retrograde movement instead? We’d choose for the latter sign as well, wouldn’t we?

I’m not sure, of course, but I think that God would have been pleased had Hezekiah chosen to see the sun’s usual course across the sky as a daily miracle in itself. But that’s just ordinary isn’t it?

‘Ordinary’ creation?

Your heart beats about 70 times per minute, which is 4,200 times per hour, and 100,800 times per day, and 36,288,000 times per year. In your lifetime your heart will beat about 2.5 billion times. During that time, it will have pumped the equivalent of about 206 million liters of blood throughout your body.

A human egg cell is about .12 mm in diameter. That’s about the same size as the period at the end of this sentence. A human sperm cell is about 10,000 times smaller than an egg cell. During fertilization, these two cells get together and start growing to eventually form a human baby that has about 26 billion cells at birth. (By the way, it would take you about 34 years to count to a billion at one count per second.)

I could go on and on with countless other examples of the miraculous splendors of creation, but you get my point. Creation itself is an astounding miracle. The fact that there is something rather than nothing is miraculous. Without God’s moment by moment sustaining care of creation it would disappear into nothingness. And the greatest miracle is that God so loved creation that she gave her only son to save it (including us) for eternity. Praise God for the (ordinary?) miracle of Creation!