Water Into Wine: This Beginning of Miracles.... - Part 2

[Guest guest]

Water Into Wine: " This Beginning of Miracles.... " - Part 2

 

Why and when God permits

His emissaries to work

miracles

 

(p.216) Miracles attract curiosity seekers; the love of God draws highly

developed souls. The Lord has already arrayed before man a bounty of wonders to

behold: What could be more miraculous than the evident presence in every speck

of creation of a Divine Intelligence? How the mighty tree emerges from a tiny

seed. How countless worlds roll in infinite space, held in a purposeful cosmic

dance by the precise adjustment of universal forces. (p.217) How the marvelously

complex human body is created from a single microscopic cell, is endowed with

self-conscious intelligence, and is sustained, healed, and enlivened by

invisible power. In every atom of this astounding universe, God is ceaselessly

working miracles; yet obtuse man takes them for granted. [1]

 

The all-knowing, ever-understanding Lord silently goes on regulating His vast

family of the cosmos without compelling any recognition from man by an overt

show of His power and excellence. Having hidden Himself humbly behind the

universal veils of forms and forces, He nevertheless intimates His presence in

myriad ways, and calls souls through inner whispers of His love. No miracle

demonstrates more surely the presence of God than attunement with even one touch

of His loving omnipresence. God's highest gift to man is free will--freedom to

choose Him and His wisdom or the lures of 'maya's' satanic delusion. As the

Cosmic Lover of all souls, the Lord's one desire is that perchance man might use

his free will to cast away the mercurial inducements of Satan and embrace the

consummate fulfillment of Divine Love.

 

If God revealed Himself as the Eminent Creator or spoke to the world as

Indisputable Authority, human beings would in that instant lose their free

choice; they could not refrain from rushing to His manifest glory. If He

displayed His omnipotence in grandiose miracles, the awestricken masses would be

attracted to God compulsively by these phenomena instead of choosing Him by

their soul's spontaneous love. So even through the instrumentality of His saints

God does not draw souls to Himself by using spiritual power that abrogates free

choice.

 

The 'maya'-vitiated intellect of man seems nevertheless constrained to prefer

some definite demonstrable proof of God's existence before turning to Him--in

blind effrontery challenging his Creator again and again to prove Himself

through " signs and wonders. " But if man does not take a hint from the evidence

that every so-called natural manifestation is itself a miracle expressing God's

immanence, he is unlikely to get any other signs that he can better appreciate.

It is easy to believe when the senses are presented with comprehensible

spiritual phenomena; no efforts to bring out the faith latent in the soul are

then necessary. Jesus expressed this in his words to Thomas: " Because thou hast

seen me, thou hast believed: Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have

believed. "

 

One who truly desires God has no inclination toward powers and miracles. It is

the Lord's nature to reveal Himself silently and subtly--only rarely

openly--unto devotees who crave naught else more than the Creator. At the proper

time, before people who have the possibility of spiritual awakening, He permits

His saints to exhibit the extraordinary; but never to satisfy idle curiosity.

Though Jesus had a unique role as a world savior that began in a dark,

unenlightened age requiring open demonstration of God's power to make a

permanent impression in the annals of time, he nevertheless often refused to

offer spectacular signs and miracles to prove his divinity and God's presence.

[2] (p.219) Jesus worked his miracles of healing, raising the dead, walking on

the sea, for the sake of true believers, strictly under divine guidance and

permission. He always emphasized that he was doing the will of God who sent him,

awaiting first his Father's command.

 

The Second Coming of Christ (The Resurrection of the Christ Within

You) Volume 1, Discourse 11, pg. 216-219

Paramahansa Yogananda

Printed in the United States of America 1434-J881

ISBN-13:978-0-87612-557-1

ISBN-10:0-87612-557-7

 

Notes:

 

[1] " The rise of science served to extend the range of nature's marvels, so that

today we have discovered order in the deepest recesses of the atom and among the

grandest collection of galaxies, " writes Paul Davies, Ph.D., well-known author

and professor of mathematical physics, in 'Evidence of Purpose: Scientists

Discover the Creator' (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1994).

 

Systems theorist Ervin Laszlo reports in 'The Whispering Pond: A Personal Guide

to the Emerging Vision of Science' (Boston: Element Books, 1999): " The

fine-tuning of the physical universe to the parameters of life constitutes a

series of coincidences--if that is what they are....in which even the slightest

departure from the given values would spell the end of life, or, more exactly,

create conditions under which life could never have evolved in the first place.

If the neutron did not outweigh the proton in the nucleus of the atoms, the

active lifetime of the Sun and other stars would be reduced to a few hundred

years; if the electric charge of electrons and protons did not balance

precisely, all configurations of matter would be unstable and the universe would

consist of nothing more than radiation and a relatively uniform mixture of

gases....If the strong force that binds the particles of a nucleus were merely a

fraction 'weaker' than it is, deuteron could not exist and stars such as the Sun

could not shine. And if that force were slightly 'stronger' than it is, the Sun

and other active stars would inflate and perhaps explode....The values of the

four universal forces [electromagnetism, gravity, and the nuclear strong and

weak forces] were precisely such that life could evolve in the cosmos. "

 

Notes Professor Davies: " Quite a list of 'lucky accidents' and 'coincidences'

has been compiled....For a recent review see 'Cosmic Coincidences' by John

Gribbin and Martin Rees (New York: Bantam, 1989). " Davies estimates that if--as

some scientists maintain--there were no inherent guiding intelligence and cosmic

evolution were governed only by chance operation of strictly mechanical laws,

" the time required to achieve the level of order we now meet in the universe

purely by random processes is of the order of at least 10 to the power of 10 to

the power of 80 years " --inconceivably longer than the current age of the

universe. Citing these calculations, Laszlo wryly observes: " Serendipity of this

magnitude strains credibility, " and concludes: " Must we then face the

possibility that the universe we witness is the result of purposeful design by

an omnipotent master builder? " ('Publisher's Note')

 

[2] See, for example, John 2:18-22. Jesus declined to demonstrate his powers

when challenged by onlookers after evicting the money changers from the temple,

discussed in Discourse 12.