The Possible Processes of Miracles that Happen on Earth!

My wife is a regular watcher of Christian TV programs and channels. As the time for watching the TV programs is limited, she has now prioritized one such TV show in Malayalam language that is beamed in the morning on all weekdays on Surya TV.

That one is the Blessing Today TV program of Brother Antony Damien and his wife Sister Kshama Damien. 

Thousands of people go to attend the live programs that they organize at different locations. The programs routinely have bible preaching sessions, prayer sessions and miracle sessions that are told as divine interventions of  Jesus Christ whom Christians regard as the Son of God.

But Blessing today is not the only such program. There are several other such programs, some of which also get sponsored in some TV channels. And such programs are not limited to Christians alone, either.

God's answer, to prayer requests in some miraculous manner, is one of the key feature of these programs. Apparently, prayers of people like Brother Damien are heard and answered by God without any doubts. People are overwhelmed by such miracles and more and more people get flocked to such gospel preaching and prayer events.

Sometimes I too watch these programs on TV. My wife knows me as a person having a different view regarding my understanding and approach towards spirituality, God and religion.

So she asked me once: Do these miracles happen in reality? Do our prayers get answered in miraculous ways as they are projecting? 

My answer to that question is both an yes and a no. Yes, God's acts sometimes appear as miracles to people. But it is not God who is always responsible for the miracles. Miracles in human life happen due to many reasons. To make that clear, I have to explain things with some background information that I know now as the truth. Truth that may not be so palatable to people for various reasons!

The first universal truth about God is this: God is Almighty and God is Love. 

All living beings on all worlds are children of God because God has been the source of Creative Power to every one, all the time. God is also the source of all universal and natural laws. God's power is limitless and if at all it has any limits it is by His own will.  

But God is not a respecter of persons that He keeps answering to all individuals for all things requested just as a call center employee! That means, God works for some universal cause rather than giving some personal attention to some individual's personal requests. In that process, perhaps some individuals seem to benefit occasionally. But that also does not mean that God is not aware of the individuals or their problems. God knows each and every individual personally! 

God is the first cause, the center of every thing and the universal father of all and  his divine love and blessings are equal to all beings regardless of their religion, understanding or status. God is for one and all regardless of what people understand about Him. 

That means, the God of the Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and all other such religions are one and the same. God has personality, but has no form as we humans understand. People may know God , pray and worship Him  the way they understand Him with their limited knowledge.

No humans ever has seen God. The existence of God has been revealed to humans by various subordinate agencies of God from time to time ever since human beings got evolved on earth. It is difficult for humans and even some of the super human immortal beings to comprehend God. 

Human mind therefore adopts the technique of anthropomorphism (visualizing and equating God as similar to humans with super human powers) to understand God. Though this is an innocent and simple outcome of the human limitation, it might lead to much conceptual problems and gross errors in human understanding about God. Human tendency to worship historical heroes, saints and various natural or human made objects is due to this. 

There exist millions of invisible beings who all have an origin and are all normally immortals with unique personality and intelligence much higher than humans and several of those orders of beings are present on earth performing various responsibilities for and on behalf of God. From times of eternity God has also distributed many of his powers and prerogatives to many of His immediate divine associates who originated either directly or indirectly from Him . The divine beings who are directly formed from God the first source, for all practical purposes are same as God Himself because they are all perfect and think alike.

There exist billions of planets which are inhabited by human like beings in the whole of the present universe. But we have little knowledge about them due to our human limitations.

As far as earth is concerned, the lower order immortal and invisible beings present, keep functioning for God. These beings while much superior to humans, are much inferior to higher order divine beings and may likely to adopt thoughts and acts that are not in alignment with the will of God, just as it happens among human beings.

Doing acts done willfully against the will of God is evil and sin, whether it is committed by humans or the immortal invisible beings. Sin and evil cause the individual to depart from God's grace which ultimately causes a permanent curtailment of life and personality for both humans and the invisible immortals. For humans it may happen too earlier. For the immortals, it may happen after a long time. 

Unfortunately, earth is one such planet among the billions where a large number of immortals who are assigned to function for God have willfully decided to act against the will of God and spoil His universe plans. But there are also a minor group of immortals who are still working according to the universal plans of God present on earth. The willful disobedience of the majority of immortals under the command of one of their senior members actually caused earth to become a world cut off from the direct universal circuits of God. This has been the situation for almost two million years now and in reality earth is a quarantined world.

The quarantine effect caused humans the ability to see the immortal beings present around them. It has also caused the humans to limit their capacities with regard to knowledge, memory and life span. It also curtailed their ability to know about other worlds and systems of universe administration directly. It also caused careless humans to commit errors, sins and evil just as their invisible supervisors who are present around them.

The rebellious invisible personalities present on earth know about their ultimate fate. They know that some time later they all would lose their graceful, immortal status for ever. But they are determined to doom the humans too along with them. As they are doomed by moving away from God, they want the humans of earth too to share their fate. 

Human beings of earth for the past thousands of years are living in a hostile situation and environment as they are living in a world where the God-appointed service providers have become rebellious and gone against God. There is a background to how all these happened. I am not going to that now. The laws of God are universal. Those who willfully go against the will of God and his universal laws perish sooner or later, whether they belong to the order of the immortals or the humans.

But God is ever compassionate and loving. He knows the situation of earth. He had installed alternate arrangements to provide enough guidance to the humans that they escape the perils at some point of time.

One of the arrangement is a unique power of God that is vested directly with all human beings. It is a fragment of God Himself which resides as an invisible personality within each and every human being. That is the god or divine power within humans. This unique divine power is very feeble in all normal beings but is capable of transacting independently with the individual and the invisible immortals beings present outside. The presence of this God fraction functioning within the hardware of human brain is capable of certain communications with God too.  Ordinarily, human beings are not conscious of the presence of this god power in them. But this is the power that gives guidance to humans regarding the Godly attributes of love, beauty, good, compassion and the consciousness about God Himself. 

For those rare human beings who have transcended their human egos and mind levels might become conducive agents that they would be in a position to learn the interactions of the divine power that resides in them more clearly than others. Such individuals might possess some such mind powers to foresee and foretell events that might be viewed as some super human ability. Such persons are valuable to God and therefore they might even have a few invisible servants of God around them to act as invisible protectors. The self mind of such individuals would be in a position to discern some interaction that take place between the god-power that resides within them and the external invisible servants of God.  

A person who lives synchronized with the God power within becomes a candidate for advancement of life and immortality even after material death. 

In all normal worlds, the lower order immortal beings are visible (at least some orders) to the human like beings of those worlds and the former give assistance to the evolving humans of those worlds to develop to higher levels of progress by giving them necessary guidance and knowledge from time to time. They help the humans of the living planets to live a material life peacefully and fruitfully in accordance with the plans of God.

But on earth, the majority of these human supervisors joined hands to form an independent world that is not according to the universal laws and became cut off from the direct communication links of the rest of the universe. These rebels are now determined that the majority humans too are doomed like them. They now adopt all techniques possible to make humans deviate from God and perish.

Humans have their own will and personality which are also provided by the universal laws of God. Since human will is originally intended as free and independent, God or any of his agencies will not tamper with that free will of humans at any time. The god power that lives in humans only gives feeble advice to humans who are willing to listen those. Humans who are too self conscious and egoistic are therefore likely to miss the guidance of the God power that is within them. 

It may also be remembered that there are also a group of the invisible immortals present on earth who still work for the universe administration of God. They are the ones who did not go against God to join with their fellows who rebelled.

So, there exist a larger group of invisible personalities who are rebellious to God now on earth. There is also a smaller group of invisible personalities who are working for the universe administration of earth and working hard to restore earth back to the universe system. 

God is capable of restoring order quickly without resorting to a longer duration plan. But God, for His wisdom would not do that. Perhaps, God would not like to break his own universal laws for restoration of order in a planet like earth! God could also destroy all rebels in a moment. But He is handicapped and limited by His own love and compassion to his creatures.

Now coming to the question of miracles that I mentioned in the beginning of this article. Why and how miracles happen in the lives of human beings?

As I have mentioned, our earth has been in existence cut off from the universal communication lines for thousands of years because the majority of immortal beings responsible for maintaining earth under the universal administration of God wanted to be independent of their own. Thus they caused a few worlds to fall in to an erroneous administration functioning not according to the will of God. 

They wanted the humans to be manipulated the way they liked in their independent worlds. They wanted the humans to regard them as gods and worship them instead of the universal law that stipulated all living beings to worship only the Universal Father God. 

But a smaller group among them realized the error and did not agree to follow the majority. They remained to be loyal to God's will as they all used to be earlier. 

The larger group wanted humans to deviate from God, while the smaller group tried to guide humans to live according to the will of God. The rebellion caused both groups on earth becoming invisible to humans as the power system that enabled them to be visible to the eyes of humans got adversely affected.

Human generations that came later lived on earth under confusion. They have been under the whims of a larger group of invisible and super human beings who tried all tricks to confuse humans about God and make them not to understand the truths. While the smaller group has been trying to help humans to alleviate  their difficulties that happened due to the rebellion.

The larger group mixed some truths with more untruths cleverly so that differentiating truth from untruth becomes difficult for humans.

Human difficulties and problems such as diseases, genetic disorders, poverty, racial conflicts, religious conflicts, political conflicts, apparent triumph of evil over good, etc began to rise on earth, all due to the acts of the larger group and also due to the people who fall easy prey to the clever ways of this group. Earth problems  also got enhanced due to people who have a liking and inclination to shift to evil willfully.

Even good people who are too willing to follow the directions of the god-power that is within them began to face problems of human life due to the acts of evil men and the unseen evil forces that are present on earth.

The unseen agencies of God, however have been tirelessly working to reduce the problems of mankind by various techniques including some true revelations regarding God and some insights in to the root causes of human problems.

If humans do not use their intelligence and wisdom, they become gullible preys to the clever tricks played by the invisible super mortals and deviate from realizing God's will. They are likely to find falsehoods and half truths as truths. Under such circumstances, it becomes too difficult for humans to discern truth from untruths.

God or more correctly the agencies of God ( the divine beings and the several orders of invisible immortal servants of God) come to the help of praying humans when they are indeed in such helplessness. At times they create such circumstances in such a way that other humans are of help to them. But when it is very very essential, they may also use their divine powers to help humans that might appear to humans as miracles.

They may also act in some miraculous manner if such miracles are going to initiate a thought process in some humans that eventually prepare them to become good people who are willing to discard evil and follow good.

But unfortunately, the disloyal super humans may also use this as an opportunity to sway people away from God by using some miracles which cause men and women to be greedy for money and power. They often find success. 

With this much background I would like the readers to read this article too: Miracles-do they happen?

I am not sure how much you could understand.

I am also not sure whether the message I wanted to convey made any impact in your mind!

If yes, please feel encouraged to ask me your doubts using the comments facility.

The Wedding at Cana-the Story from the Urantia Book

By noon on Wednesday almost a thousand guests had arrived in Cana, more than four times the number invited to the wedding feast. It was a Jewish custom to celebrate weddings on Wednesday, and the invitations had been sent abroad for the wedding one month previously. In the forenoon and early afternoon it appeared more like a public reception for Jesus than a wedding. Everybody wanted to greet this near-famous Galilean, and he was most cordial to all, young and old, Jews and gentile. And everybody rejoiced when Jesus consented to lead the preliminary wedding procession.

Jesus was now thoroughly self-conscious regarding his human existence, his divine pre-existence, and the status of his combined, or fused, human and divine natures. With perfect poise he could at one moment enact the human role or immediately assume the personality prerogatives of the divine nature.

As the day slowly passed on, Jesus became increasingly conscious that the people were expecting him to perform some wonder; more especially he recognized that his family and his six disciple-apostles were looking for him appropriately to announce his forthcoming kingdom by some startling and supernatural manifestation.

Early in the afternoon Mary (earthly mother of Jesus) summoned James (Jesus’ earthly brother), and together they made bold to approach Jesus to inquire if he would admit them to his confidence to the extent of informing them at what hour and at what point in connection with the wedding ceremonies he had planned to manifest himself as the ‘supernatural one.’

 No sooner had they spoken of these matters to Jesus than they saw they had aroused his characteristic dislike. He said only this much:

“If you love me, then be willing to be with me while I wait upon the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

But the eloquence of his rebuke lay in the expression of his face.

This move of his mother was a great disappointment to the human Jesus, and he was much sobered by his reaction to her suggestive proposal that he permit himself to indulge in some outward demonstration of his divinity.

That was one of the very things he had decided not to do when so recently isolated in the hills.

For several hours Mary was much depressed.

She said to James:

“I cannot understand him; what can it all mean? Is there no end to his strange conduct?”

James and Jude tried to comfort their mother, while Jesus withdrew for an hour’s solitude.

But he returned to the gathering and was once more lighthearted and joyous.

The wedding proceeded with a hush of expectancy, but the entire ceremony was finished and not a move, not a word, from the honored guest. Then it was whispered about that the carpenter and boat-builder, announced by John as “the Deliverer,” would show his hand during the evening festivities, perhaps at the wedding supper.

But all expectance of such a demonstration was effectually removed from the minds of his six disciple-apostles when he called them together just before the wedding supper and, in great earnestness, said:

“Think not that I have come to this place to work some wonder for the gratification of the curious or for the conviction of those who doubt. Rather are we here to wait upon the will of our Father who is in heaven.”

But when Mary and the others saw him in consultation with his associates, they were fully persuaded in their own minds that something extraordinary was about to happen. And they all sat down to enjoy the wedding supper and the evening of festive good fellowship.

The father of the bridegroom had provided plenty of wine for all the guests bidden to the marriage feast, but how was he to know that the marriage of his son was to become an event so closely associated with the expected manifestation of Jesus as the Messianic deliverer? He was delighted to have the honor of numbering the celebrated Galilean among his guests, but before the wedding supper was over, the servants brought him the disconcerting news that the wine was running short.

By the time the formal supper had ended and the guests were strolling about in the garden, the mother of the bridegroom confided to Mary that the supply of wine was exhausted.

And Mary confidently said:

“Have no worry—I will speak to my son. He will help us.”

And thus did she presume to speak, notwithstanding the rebuke of but a few hours before.

Throughout a period of many years, Mary had always turned to Jesus for help in every crisis of their home life at Nazareth so that it was only natural for her to think of him at this time. But this ambitious mother had still other motives for appealing to her eldest son on this occasion.

As Jesus was standing alone in a corner of the garden, his mother approached him, saying,

“My son, they have no wine.”

And Jesus answered,

“My good woman, what have I to do with that?”

Said Mary, “But I believe your hour has come; cannot you help us?”

Jesus replied: “Again I declare that I have not come to do things in this wise. Why do you trouble me again with these matters?”

And then, breaking down in tears, Mary entreated him,

“But, my son, I promised them that you would help us; won’t you please do something for me?”

And then spoke Jesus:

“Woman, what have you to do with making such promises? See that you do it not again. We must in all things wait upon the will of the Father in heaven.”

Mary the mother of Jesus was crushed; she was stunned!

As she stood there before him motionless, with the tears streaming down her face, the human heart of Jesus was overcome with compassion for the woman who had borne him in the flesh; and bending forward, he laid his hand tenderly upon her head, saying:

“Now, now, Mother Mary, grieve not over my apparently hard sayings, for have I not many times told you that I have come only to do the will of my heavenly Father? Most gladly would I do what you ask of me if it were a part of the Father’s will—”

And Jesus stopped short, he hesitated.

Mary seemed to sense that something was happening. Leaping up, she threw her arms around Jesus’ neck, kissed him, and rushed off to the servants’ quarters, saying,

 “Whatever my son says, that do.”

But Jesus said nothing. He now realized that he had already said—or rather desirefully thought—too much.

Mary was dancing with glee. She did not know how the wine would be produced, but she confidently believed that she had finally persuaded her first-born son to assert his authority, to dare to step forth and claim his position and exhibit his Messianic power.

And, because of the presence and association of certain universe powers and personalities, of which all those present were wholly ignorant, she was not to be disappointed.

The wine Mary desired and which Jesus, the God-man, humanly and sympathetically wished for, was forthcoming.

Near at hand, stood six water-pots of stone, filled with water, holding about twenty gallons apiece.

This water was intended for subsequent use in the final purification ceremonies of the wedding celebration. The commotion of the servants about these huge stone vessels, under the busy direction of his mother, attracted Jesus’ attention, and going over, he observed that they were drawing wine out of them by the pitcher.

It was gradually dawning upon Jesus what had happened.

Of all persons present at the marriage feast of Cana, Jesus was the most surprised.

Others had expected him to work a wonder, but that was just what he had purposed not to do.

And then the Son of Man recalled the admonition of his Personalized Thought Adjuster in the hills. He recounted how the Adjuster had warned him about the inability of any power or personality to deprive him of the creator prerogative of independence of time.

On this occasion power transformers, midwayers, and all other required personalities were assembled near the water and other necessary elements, and in the face of the expressed wish of the Universe Creator Sovereign, there was no escaping the instantaneous appearance of wine.

And this occurrence was made doubly certain since the Personalized Adjuster had signified that the execution of the Son’s desire was in no way a contravention of the Father’s will.

But this was in no sense a miracle.

No law of nature was modified, abrogated, or even transcended.

Nothing happened but the abrogation of time in association with the celestial assembly of the chemical elements requisite for the elaboration of the wine.

At Cana on this occasion the agents of the Creator made wine just as they do by the ordinary natural processes except that they did it independently of time and with the intervention of superhuman agencies in the matter of the space assembly of the necessary chemical ingredients.

Furthermore it was evident that the enactment of this so-called miracle was not contrary to the will of the Paradise Father, else it would not have transpired, since Jesus had already subjected himself in all things to the Father’s will.

When the servants drew this new wine and carried it to the best man, the “ruler of the feast,” and when he had tasted it, he called to the bridegroom, saying:

“It is the custom to set out first the good wine and, when the guests have well drunk, to bring forth the inferior fruit of the vine; but you have kept the best of the wine until the last of the feast.”

Mary and the disciples of Jesus were greatly rejoiced at the supposed miracle which they thought Jesus had intentionally performed, but Jesus withdrew to a sheltered nook of the garden and engaged in serious thought for a few brief moments.

He finally decided that the episode was beyond his personal control under the circumstances and, not being adverse to his Father’s will, was inevitable.

When he returned to the people, they regarded him with awe; they all believed in him as the Messiah.

But Jesus was sorely perplexed, knowing that they believed in him only because of the unusual occurrence which they had just inadvertently beheld.

Again Jesus retired for a season to the housetop that he might think it all over.

[This story with much details as retold in Paper-137 of the Urantia Book has made me think deeper into the meanings of all these. Reading this has been very refreshing to my mind. For reading the Urantia Book visit my website.]