The horrors of this world
conflict with the concept of a God of power and love.
If God could intervene in this world, why did we have concentration camps?
Or the invasion of Ukraine, ... or the wars of Yemen, ... or 9/11, ... or Aids
or two-headed babies,... or slavery, ... plagues, ... starvation ?
We can only conclude that God is not "Love", as we understand it,
for surely a God who is Love, or even Good, could not stand aside from the slaughter of innocents
- if it could be prevented.
So how should we imagine our view of God?
Can we see any virtue in following a God who does not hold to our highest moral standards?
Can we see any virtue in following a God who demanded the genocide of Canaan in Scripture?
Can we not see that having both virtue and power is not possible for a God which
allowed the trenches of 1914, the starvation in Yemen, the rape of Ukraine?

If we are to see virtue in the God of the Old Testament,
we need to unpack the tales of heroes and heavenly voices to find the reality of divinity.
Maybe there is more truth in the words of the prophet Micah than in the myths of Moses!
Similarly we need to unpack the tales of divine intervention in the New Testament.

Yet I believe in a God of love - something that drives Creation towards a better solution.
There is evidence for this all around us as we look at the comfort and peace of our lives
and compare them to the ways of our fore-fathers and to past history.
We can see it in the moral compass by which most people live.
We can see in the evolution of Creation.

The reality of evil may then make us conclude that God does not intervene in the ways of this world,
but that the inbuilt bias of creation, the growth of God's Kingdom, is slowly unravelling around us.
As Jesus said, the Kingdom of God (his intention) grows like a mustard seed, not an explosion.
The Evolution of Creation towards its completion has taken time and will take more.
If God is Spirit, see John 4:23-24, then the influence of God can only be spiritual,
and practical intervention is only achieved through the hands of an intermediary.

Yet there seems to be undeniable evidence of a relationship between prayer and result,
even though prayer is an activity with the highest failure rate of any human endeavour.
Miracles do seem to happen - and some churches are based upon them.

The stories of miracles in the Bible follow a pattern.
Moses and Joshua both split bodies of water. Moses also fed the people.
400 years later came the miracles of Elijah and Elisha.
Both of them split bodies of water. Both expanded the food supply.
But they went further: Elijah raised the dead as did Elisha, who also healed a leper.
There was then a further gap of 800 years in reported miracles, before the time of Jesus.
Was God asleep, or does this represent a change in religious thought?

Miracles reappear in the stories of Jesus and his disciples.
They have continued to be reported intermittently ever since in certain places.
However miracles are not linked to the life of Jesus in Paul's writings.
They might seem to be an afterthought!

Bishop Spong sees the form of the miracles of Jesus as following that of the Elijah/Elisha stories.
These are affirmations of the nature of the ministry of Jesus following the model of the great prophets.

Another view of such supernatural events is that they are signs of literary intent;
signs that we should not take this story or event at its face value. There is more to it!
The healings of Jesus can also be seen as indicating conversions to the cause,
as reports of the campaign to replace the Roman Empire by the Kingdom of God,
for which its leader was eventually crucified, but which lived on despite his death.

If our more personal and current experiences may undermine this analysis,
should we then accept the supernatural, witches and wizards, saints and devils,
and all the magical concepts of childhood, or try to find a more practical solution?

In the past miracles were reported in places where modern knowledge might have provided another solution,
and, even today, we can see that a spiritual spin is often put, by some, on what are routine events.
Perhaps practical explanations will become obvious in the future for what we see today as miraculous.
This is how the evolution of knowledge is unwinding and past mysteries are exposed and explained.
Maybe the miracles of our today are the commonplace of tomorrow!