Of God and miracles

FAITH

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
MAN is mesmerised by miracles.
He attributes their existence to the work of other worldly powers and tells and retells each miracle occurrence until the actual miracle event disappears in the thick over coats of embellishments.
In matters of faith, we cast our glance in one direction, to the Bible, for our daily miracle dose. We alight upon one account of a miracle event in the good book and preach it in ever varying aspects to beyond its own veracity.
But do you not see the miracles dancing all about us, nay more, that are a part of us each second?
There is a miracle happening every second if we had but eyes to see.
The single sperm cell that penetrates the egg membrane of the female ovary, carrying with it the genetic code of a human person passed down over millennia and ensuring the sustenance of the species for generations to come is a greater miracle than the parting of the Red Sea by Moses. That particular miracle from the Book of Exodus we shall return to later in this discussion.
How does the mango or the cherry tree know when it is the season to blossom and to bear fruit or the migratory birds and other animals know when it is time to perform their own particular annual exodus?
The simple act of eating, of tasting, of having the food separated into its constituent parts in the digestive system, of circulating the beneficial elements in the food throughout the body and of removing the solid and fluid residue in right orderly fashion are miraculous feats occurring every second of our existence.
The other simple act of taking in oxygen, of having it transported from the lungs to the heart and from thence to all parts of the body through the bloodstream and of the blood returning exhaust in the form of carbon dioxide to the lungs to be expelled in the thoughtless yet life sustaining act of breathing is a miracle worthier than any that comes to us from the Bible.
Think about the symbiotic coexistence of plant and animal, of one depending on the other’s wasted breath for life and all the other interdependent operations of both.
Is it not a miracle that the human brain can operate with the cold efficiency of a super computer but is then capable of exuding warmth in love, making judgement based on emotion and other cognitive traits that computers of the far future will find difficult to outperform?
A computer can help perform surgery on the human brain more surely today than human hands might but its “brain” was hard-wired by human hands like no computer can put the grey organic matter of the human brain together. And that is a miracle.
The operations of the neural, nervous, skeletal and other systems of living things all operating in sublime symphony and harmony to surpass the greatest works by any human master of music and other art forms speaks of an author of such wonders.

God in everyday miracles
Look for God if you must, in the miracles of today, not in ancient texts. Look at all the natural systems of the world which operate in flawless symphonies as well.
All rivers flow to the sea but fail to drown the land because the sun takes up the water and stores it in clouds and disperses it over the land and ocean using the wind and later waters the land with rain which gives life to plant and animal. Rain, heavier than air, how is it contained in the vapor of clouds with no sink to contain it?
If these are not miracles than what are they?
How does the earth revolve around the sun in pristine order, spinning on its own axis so as to create day and night and the seasons which taken together sustain all life? How do all planets, their moons and accompanying space debris hurtle through space at mind boggling speeds without any known form of locomotion or guidance system and more especially, doing so without colliding into other planetary or star systems?
Those are mind boggling miracles.
I raise this non-exhaustive list here because of the insane and lazy habits we have adopted to refer to miracles only as those that come to us from the Bible and forget the miracles occurring every instant of our lives.
God has become a multi-billion Kina business with Bible waving preachers repeating the same verses that we have read from grade school with ever increasing variety of interpretations.
We seek an ancient, arcane God who was more obvious in the everyday lives of ancient peoples but who seems absent today from our lives. The God we believe in has never seen a computer and did not fly in aircraft. It would not know how to operate them.
God is most obvious in the lives of ancients because Its precepts guided savage man’s every action, who attributed every inexplicable thing to the miraculous works of a divine higher being.
Some of those miracles such as flying chariots are commonplace aircraft to us today and we can make flames today that do not burn bushes.
As knowledge advanced and man could explain a lot of happenings as natural phenomena, God receded.

Red Sea crossing
Let us return to the Red Sea crossing by Moses and the people of Israel around the 16th Century before Christ and examine it closely. No historical evidence exists today of that crossing except the accounts related in the Bible. It is hard to pinpoint on the map the exact physical point at which the crossing occurred.
The exodus account appears to have been written down many generations after the actual event so much can be attributed to word-of-mouth embellishments across the years.
In my mind, to the people of Israel at the time, the miracle was not the “parting” of the Red Sea to allow crossing on dry land – the miracle that we see in our minds today – but the “crossing” of the Red Sea that enabled the children of Israel to escape the clutches of the armies of the pharaoh of Egypt – the miracle experienced by the people of Israel at the time.
It is of no immediate concern to us what really transpired and since we scan the Bible for any wisps of miracles to attribute to God, we take the Exodus account literally.
For the people of Israel, it was their immediate safety and accomplishing that was their miracle.
A more plausible story would be this: Israel flees on foot early one fine Sunday morning after the Passover meal the previous night.
The departure is staggered. Women and children first.
The old and infirm stay behind, willing sacrifices of a nation to provide a ruse that nothing is amiss for a little while to gain much needed time.
Those fit to travel fast or on horseback and those willing to fight would have stayed back in plain sight again to give the impression all was well and then to harry and harass the Egyptian army once it was in pursuit.
They come from a vast region, not one city or area as the Exodus story might imply. The ability to organise such a flight by an entire nation without mobile telephones would have taken months and keeping it secret would itself count as a miracle. Tens of thousands who might not have heard of the departure will now be Egyptians if they were not all slaughtered at the time.
So I would imagine a staggered departure with the date chosen that would give the fleeing nation its greatest advantage. A certain festive day allowed by Pharaoh’s decree for the enslaved nation (Israel) to celebrate holidays or religious festivals would be the best time for flight.
The ruse gives Israel a day to two days’ head start before the pharaoh is alerted but so Israel is, at most three days March ahead of the enemy.
When the Egyptian army with its gleaming chariots give pursuit a cloud of dust spurned up by an army on the march hangs permanently over the army from a distance and the glint of chariots and helmets, breast plates and spears look like lightning flashes in the sand cloud.
Such a sight would wilt the heart of a servile nation but its intelligent politician leader spins a quite different tale.
Moses tells the people: “See, your lord and saviour Yahweh God of Israel is doing battle for you already. Look, look at him hanging above the armies of Egypt as a cloud confusing them in the dark. Look at his lightning bolts. Yahweh fights to gain us time. Let us not tarry. Let us hurry.”
Emboldened and with this epic battle scene etched forever in their minds, Israel marches on, for however long it is not known.
By and by they arrive at the body of water we know as the Red Sea where by prior arrangement Moses has reed rafts waiting. Israel mounts and is safely across the water before the Egyptian army arrives. Egypt’s army with heavy armour, horses and chariots are bogged down in the marshy area around the water and cannot continue their pursuit because unlike Mosses they never prepared any rafts. End of story.
Jewish parents relating this tale to their children must embellish it for dramatic effect especially when it comes to instilling obedience and reverence for Yahweh God.
“Yaweh parted the Red Sea for us to cross to safety,” is a figure of speech that emphasises God’s hand in the “crossing to safety” rather than the literal “parting the Red Sea” meaning in the statement.
I do not knock one of the most wonderful stories out of the Bible for knock’s sake or to be a smart-aleck.
An ancient story such as the crossing of the Red Sea must be taken with a grain of salt. There can be very many different explanations. The emphasis should be on the sum of the exodus event which is the escape of a servile nation, God’s own chosen people, from the clutches of a mighty pharaoh and his army. If God’s hand is involved it is there and it shall be found.

Generation who did not answer to the whip
To the cunning eye of an astute prince and politician such as Mosses was, escape was one thing, settling a nation weakened by servitude among hostile people was another. Israel, at the time of the Red Sea crossing, was psychologically a wasted, servile nation.
To settle in the promised but already settled land as a new spirited nation Mosses had to ensure all those who answered to the whip had to die out and a new generation raised who bent under no yoke, who answered no command that degraded their humanity.
Those 40 years of wandering in the desert were not punishment. They were years of necessary preparation when Israel was reminded of the Lord God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The nation was given spiritual, moral and community rules and obligations. That is when the Ten Commandments and the contents of the Book of Deuteronomy were laid down.
Remember that Moses was trained as a prince for leadership roles in one of the most powerful nations on earth at the time so he would have been able to write and to lead. That is why many of the books of that era are attributed to him.
He saw, with the eye of a prince, that an army had to be grown where formerly there were beaten down slaves. When Israel crossed the Jordan and took Jericho, nobody would have guessed that here was a people who had been enslaved.
So there is a very clear and very political reason to the wandering in the desert for 40 years. Moses kept them wandering until those who have suffered the degradation of obedience to the whip died off and there arose an entire new generation who did not.
Even if manna did descend from the clouds and Mosses got water out of a rock, there really is no need to wander so far down history lane to find miracles and collect them as fabled memorabilia.
Miracles happen every second of our lives in our own time as I mentioned at the start of this discourse. These wondrous actions which are explained perfectly by science suggest an author for them, a God force or energy that controls all.
If we are so obsessed with God, let’s find It in the miracles of today, in the everyday workings of our own lives.
Even God must be tiring of those who everyday meditate upon the Bible and find a thousand different interpretations for every line contained therein and expanding on every Bible miracle as if we were devoid of them today.