There are many incidents in scripture which we are able to see as miraculous. At the same time one wonders whether the people contemporary with the events would discern that God was active. It is obvious that the unbeliever would not see God’s hand in such events, but to what extent were the children of God conscious of the hand of God?
We think of Babel and the confounding of the tongues. The people of that time could not have discerned the divine influence at work as their accent changed and pronunciation altered. Maybe different individuals sensed different meanings in a word of command. This is not hard to understand. For example, today the word “let” means exactly the reverse of its meaning when the King James version of the Bible was written. It was the arrival of the dictionary that stabilized our language, and the people of Babel had no dictionary. Today, the problems of the world are magnified by the difficulties of language. Only the believer knows that the hand of God was directly involved in the circumstances that led to the multitude of tongues of the present day world.
Did Israel see a miracle in the collapse of the walls of Jericho? We think they would have done so, as most certainly their leaders did. But what of the people of Jericho? They felt an earthquake, but it is unlikely that they (except for Rahab) related it to the Israelite trumpeters. Charles Marston, in his commentary on the excavations at Jericho remarked on the obviously poor quality of the foundations of the walls of Jericho. He rather facetiously stated that they were so poor, that he wondered whether the phrase “Jerry-built” originally meant ‘Jericho-built”. Was God active when those same walls were built? Did He control the building because of His foreknowledge of the destiny of Jericho?
In passing, Marston also noted that the part of the wall adjacent to the gate had been more strongly secured. And so the inn-keeper, Rahab, Whose premises would have been placed at the entrance to the ancient city, lived in the safest part of the city. Bro. Roberts wrote the book “The Visible hand of God” and the book “The ways of Providence”. As we read the scripture we often find difficulty in seeing where “providence” ends and “miracle” begins. We are inclined to think that miracles do not occur today. Maybe the only truly miraculous part of the destruction of Jericho was in the timing of the earthquake that threw down its walls. And it is at least possible that, when the time comes to look back in history to the day in which we live, we will realise that God’s miraculous timing of events is as apparent as it is to us in the records of Genesis.
Reflections on the Potter and the Clay