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"Everything was black as far as you could see. We looked out from the top of that hill and it was totally black, except for what was around Mr. Davies' house." -Sheri Munson

Today's secular scientists maintain a skepticism of miracles. They tend to discount the miracles of the Bible out of hand because of an anti-supernaturalistic bias, a bias that rejects the possibility that a mighty God intervenes in human lives in obvious, tangible ways. Yet miracles did not only occur in the Bible, but they continue to take place today.

In order to do their jobs, scientists have to depend on the natural world – these four dimensions (three dimensions plus Time) that we can directly experience with our five senses. Scientists are dependent on experimentation that can be repeated over and over and still give the same results. Science is an excellent tool for learning about this world around us, and scientists have freed the world from much superstition by finding the natural causes of things previously attributed to the gods, things like sickness and lightning. However, just because science depends on the "natural" world doesn't mean the natural world is all there is. It just means that science is limited in what it can explain through experimentation. And yet, physicists have already provided evidence that there are many dimensions beyond the four we're familiar with.

What's more, things happen on this planet every day that defy naturalistic explanations. God still does miracles all the time. For the next several weeks we will tell about modern miracles in the lives of people close to our ministry. In every case we have verified the miracles through two or more reliable witnesses.

The Iron Canyon Fire and Mr. Davies:
It rained a lot in the desert north of Los Angeles during the spring of 1958, and the grass grew tall over the normally brown mountains. That fall, the hot Santa Ana winds came through and dried up that tall grass, priming the area for trouble.  Southern California is known for its dangerous wildfires. 

Doug Austin was 15-years-old in 1958, and he describes the fierce fire that swept through the desert from Saugus to Palmdale that fall. "We called it the Iron Canyon Fire because it started in Iron Canyon when lightning struck. My dad and I were driving down the road alongside it, and that fire was going just as fast as we were in my dad's truck."

Up on a lonely hilltop in that area lived an old black man known as Mr. Davies. "We'd take pies up to him on Thanksgiving. He was a nice old guy," Austin recounts.

Sheri Munson was just 9-years-old, but she also remembers Mr. Davies. "We would ride our horses up there to his house. His house was made out of nothing but cardboard and tin and pieces of wood that he'd found around. He had a few chickens and that was it. We'd ride up and sit on our horses and he would tell us stories about Jesus. "

That year when the Iron Canyon Fire raged through, Munson remembers being very worried about Mr. Davies. As soon as the burned land cooled enough for their horses to pick through the hot spots, Munson rode her horse out to see if Mr. Davies had escaped. She hoped that the old man had been able to get out before the fire destroyed his little patchwork house. It turned out that he had not been able to get out of the way of the fire after all.

"We came up the hill on our horses," Munson tells, "and all of a sudden, when we got to the top, we were in tall grass up to our horse's shoulders. There was Mr. Davies' house in the center of it all with his little chickens out there. We could see a long ways from that hilltop and it was black all around, as far as you could see.

"We said, ‘What happened, Mr. Davies!  What did you do?' He said, ‘I saw the fire coming,' and he went out there and pointed, and he said, ‘and I went out and got on my knees and prayed, and asked God to spare me, and I saw the fire split and it went around me on both sides and it came back together over there.'

"If you were to take half a football field and make it round, that's how big it was. Everything except what was around his house was burned black, " Munson said. 

"There was no reason, no reason his house should have been standing." Austin commented, giving the same description of the blackened mountainous desert. "Mr. Davies was a religious man," he finished.

Munson said, "It was fifty years ago, but I can still remember sitting on my horse with the grass clear up to his shoulders, talking to Mr. Davies. And the thing of it was, it just seemed so normal." She paused. "Mr. Davies was pretty excited."

God still does great things in this world. Science may have a hard time finding the true explanation, but just because science is limited, God is not. We see Him working constantly in the lives of His creation to show His great love and mercy and to demonstrate His power and glory in this world.

The inscriptions attached to some of the Psalms have puzzled scholars for centuries, and yet the key may have been in the Biblical text all along.

There are 34 psalms without inscriptions. There are 52 psalms with simple titles such as "A Psalm of David," "A Psalm of Asaph," etc. There are 14 psalms explaining their historical connection, such as "A Psalm of David when he fled from Absalom, his Son," etc. There are 39 psalms that include a special word inscription, presumably a musical annotation or instruction. There are four psalms designated for a special purpose, such as the Sabbath day, etc. And there are 15 psalms specifically designated "Songs of Degrees."

-Psalms without inscriptions - 34
-Psalms with simple inscriptions - 52
-Psalms with historical inscriptions - 14
-Psalms with inscriptions denoting purpose - 04
-Psalms entitled "Songs of Degrees" - 15
-Psalms with special word inscriptions (39, less 8 included in the 14 above) - 31 

Total: 150 

The antiquity of these inscriptions is well recognized. They were already in existence when the Septuagint translation was made in the 3rd century B.C., and since the translators let them stand untranslated it seems that their significance had been obscured even back then.

The Puzzle:
It is an admitted fact that the key to these inscriptions has been lost for over 2,200 years. Bishop Jebb, who issued a monumental work on the Psalms in 1846 regretted that "so great are the difficulties attending this enquiry, that in many instances little more than conjectures can be offered." The late Dr. E. W. Bullinger said: "No subject of Biblical Study has appeared to be more incapable of solution." That great Hebraist, Franz Delitzsch, said of these so-called psalm "titles": "The Septuagint found them already in existence, and did not understand them... The key to their comprehension must have been lost very early."

A Solution Discovered?:
In the ancient Hebrew manuscripts there were no breaks or spaces separating the psalms as there are in a modern Bible. The only mark of division between them is the number in the margin. The inscriptions, therefore, have always been assumed to be the titles of the psalms following them; however, they could just as well be footnotes to the psalms preceding them. Are there any clues to Hebrew practice within the Biblical text itself?

In the third chapter of Habakkuk we find a psalm with both a superscription and a subscription that is illuminating:

-A Superscription: "A Prayer of Habakkuk the prophet, upon Shigionoth" (Hab 3:1);
-The Prayer or Psalm itself (3:2-19a);
-The Subscription: "To the chief Musician upon Neginoth" (Hab 3:19b).

We find the same arrangement in Hezekiah's Psalm of Praise and Thanksgiving for his recovery from sickness, recorded in Isaiah 38:

- The Superscription: "The writing of Hezekiah, king of Judah, when he had been sick and was recovered of his sickness" (Isaiah 38:9);
- The Psalm itself (Isaiah 38:10-20a);
- The Subscription: "Therefore we will sing my songs to the stringed instruments, all the days of our life, in the house of YHWH" (Isaiah 38:20b).

These two examples give us a key to the ancient stylistic practice regarding the inscriptions. It seems apparent that the precedent superscription was a title, and the closing subscription an amplifying instruction regarding its performance.

As an outcome of the Babylonian exile, detailed knowledge of the original Temple worship became obscured, and by the middle of the 3rd century B.C., when the Septuagint translation was made from Hebrew into Greek, there was nothing to tell the translators whether the inscriptions between the psalms belonged to what went before or what came after. Our English Bible continued their presumption that the inscriptions always related to what followed.

An Example:
Psalm 9 has the superscription: "To the chief Musician upon Muthlabben, A Psalm of David." What does this mean? Muthmeans death; and ben would seem to mean son, but that seems obscure to say the least. Let us also recognize that this first part appears to be a subscription to Psalm 8 rather than a superscription to Psalm 9.

Furthermore, it could be beyn, written without the long vowel (the omission of the vowel sign being frequent in Hebrew): thus, muth-labbeyn, which means "death to the one coming between." This is how the inscription reads in the ancient Jewish Targum: "To praise, relating to the death of the man who went out between the two camps." This appears to be a reference to Goliath, who is actually called the "man between the two hosts (1 Samuel 17:4, 23)." Our English version misses this and has the translation as "a champion."

Read Psalm 8 again now in the light of this as a subscript and see in it, the celebration of David's great victory over Goliath.

[These comments have been excerpted from Learn the Bible in 24 Hours by Chuck Missler.]