In the exodus, one mighty act followed another. The story goes like this: Combine the most powerful king in the known world, slaves who stood no chance of successful insurrection because all they knew was slavery, and oppression that was getting worse. You now have the perfect ingredients for God’s decisive act of deliverance. It was the event on which God staked his reputation until it was superseded by an even more cosmic deliverance through Jesus Christ.
Here is what we learn: God prefers the impossible. Although he often cares for our needs before we know we have them, his mighty acts are showcased best against the backdrop of insurmountable odds. Anything less would detract from his greatness. In this case, all Moses did was stretch out his hand – his empty hand – and watch a mighty deliverance.
–Ed Welch
Recommended books by Ed Welch:
[Miracles] lead not simply to cognitive belief, but to worship, to awe and wonder. Jesus’s miracles in particular were never magic tricks, designed only to impress and coerce. You never see him say something like: “See that tree over there? Watch me make it burst into flames!” He used miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and raise the dead. Why? We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power.