Where my wife and I are staying, we have waited at one spot four different times for someone to pick us up and every time there on the top of a short brick wall sat a tiny toy figure.  Three different days and four rides the same toy person was there.  I guessed it was a Star Wars figure.  Looking more closely, it seemed a young woman in a Star Wars-like outfit.  In what I know of the Star Wars story, it was probably a jedi and maybe the one the story calls “the last jedi.”

If you don’t know the Star Wars story, because you’ve seen none of it, good for you, but let me explain.  In a fictional cosmos, the jedi are warriors with supernatural power, who fight for what is called the light side of the force as opposed to the dark side.  This fiction hearkens to God on the light side and Satan on the dark side.  According to the fiction, the force connotes to something like a pantheistic view of God in which he is not a person, but some kind of mystical power.  The fiction speaks of an existence of God, albeit a false one.  This supernaturalism is crucial to the explanation of everything that happens in Star Wars fiction.

In the Star Wars story, only a few characters possess supernatural power to use either for evil or for good.  Those without that power find themselves often in need of the abilities or gifts of those special individuals.  Over aeons of time, certain ones through the story uniquely, even more greatly tap into the light side or the dark side of this supernatural force.  These individuals come along once in a very long time with very special significance and they are usually prophesied.  The needy natural ones place their hope in the coming of those to deliver them.

Fictional prophet-like characters predict the coming of the few supernatural characters, very often just one, with very special power.  These prophets receive revelations from the same supernatural power, which is apparently God, and they know what will happen in the future.  The spread of these prophesies over a fictional cosmos results in its people looking for the coming of these superior, supernatural figures, which will change the course of history.

I write all this to say that in general people who know the Star Wars story accept eras of supernatural intervention in their fictional cosmos.  It makes sense to them.  They agree both with the existence of supernatural power that works through men and that once in a great while this same supernatural power raises up a prophesied person who can use the power.  In other words, they accept eras of miracles.   They recognize the continuity of a natural world accompanied by rare times, moments, periods, or ages of supernatural intervention.

In a fictional Star Wars world, the divine always works to maintain and sustain, but also intervenes in a unique way.  An unprecedented person comes along, who is not normal.  He is far from normal and no one has been seen like him in ages.  The maintaining and sustaining are continuity.  They are normative.  The rare one, however, is not.  This is discontinuity.

Scripture gives (see especially 2 Peter) as a major reason for apostasy, a departure from the faith and the truth, the scarcity of evidence of divine intervention.  God gives every good thing.  He always intervenes in a providential manner, His good graces seen everywhere and at all times.  God also though intervenes at times in unique ways.  Men say because of the sparsity of the latter, they can’t receive the Lord.  He must show Himself more to their liking.  I call these showings, crown performances.  If God doesn’t bring them a crown performance, they have their excuse for not believing.

God has intervened in a special, unique, and miraculous way throughout history.  However, this kind of dealing is far less frequent.  The word “miracle” is most often the same Greek word translated “sign.”  Something isn’t a sign if it is the same as anything else that occurs on an everyday basis.

Through scripture, you can see eras of miracles.  They mark extraordinary times and people, and these occasions, which are very rare through history, make a unique point, one that stands out very much.  Certain names are associated in the Bible with these eras, including Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Jesus, and the Apostles.

One figure stands out above all of those functioning with supernatural power in an era of miracles:  the Lord Jesus Christ.  If these operations were normal occurrences, they would not stand out, and neither would Jesus.  Jesus must stand out and He does stand out.  He will show Himself in even greater glory when He comes the second time and in fulfillment of further prophecy.  He is the greatest figure in all of world history.