It’s easy to joke about divine intervention: “I won’t pass this test without divine intervention.” “Nothing but divine intervention can stop me from binging all five seasons.” “Hey God! I could really use some divine intervention right about now.”
But what exactly is divine intervention? Lifelong Christians grow up hearing the phrase and knowing it has something to do with miracles and plagues and fire falling from the sky.
However, few of them can actually define it; when asked, they usually list one or more of the examples I mentioned and leave it at that.
Dictionary.com is equally unhelpful in this endeavor; it defines the phrase as “the interference of a deity in human life, popularly extended to any miraculous-seeming turn of events.” Since the Internet let me down, I asked my brother, Chandler — a religion major with plans for seminary — for a definition more specific to Christians.
“I don’t like divine intervention at all,” he said. “The term comes with a self-focused bent where people see it as God going against His plan because we prayed hard enough. But that’s not it at all.”
When I asked him what it actually is, he said divine intervention is God doing something He was going to do all along and calling us to participate in it. “When we pray for a miracle, we pray because God guided our circumstances in a way that made us want to,” he explained. But since God let us pray, we get to be part of the plan He laid out before the universe ever existed.
With that approach to divine intervention in mind, what are we supposed to do when we see it in the Bible or in life?
There are three types of divine intervention based on this view: Big showy miracles, ordinary displays of God’s mercy, and one act of love so powerful it gave us the reason for our faith.
