I don’t know. I can’t know. Neither can anyone else.
In Bible times and in ours, God performed very few miracles. This is evident if we compare how many miracles it reports with how many centuries it covers. The miracles in the Bible are not evenly distributed. Most of them are clustered around major events in its overall narrative.
We should wish for fewer miracles rather than more. Questions about divine fairness inevitably surface when miracles benefit some but not others. Miracles also tempt those who believe they have experienced them to make themselves the center of attention. Not for nothing did Jesus often instruct those for whom he had performed a miracle to tell no one. Miracles do not encourage us to do the hard work of discovering how the universe and everything in it works.
We should not think of miracles as contradictions of the laws of nature but as applications of them that we do not understand. People who lived for centuries in Hawai’i before people of European descent arrived knew that it is impossible to walk on water. People who lived at the same time in Alaska knew that this is possible. When it is cold enough, it is possible not only to walk on water but to travel on heavy sleds and so forth on it.
There are at least two reasons why we should not think of miracles as contradictions of the laws of nature even though many people do. The first is that this misunderstands the proper meaning of “laws of nature.” They are not prescriptions of what must and must not happen. They are descriptions of things that actually do and do not occur. If something happens that contradicts one of our laws of nature, we need to change it so that it includes such possible events. If we do not know how to do this, we should wait until we do.
Another reason is theological. If we think that God created the true laws of nature, saying that God contradicts them is saying that God acts in self-contradictory ways. This is something we should be hesitant to do.
The most straightforward account of why Donald Trump was not killed is that he had just turned his head in a way that caused the bullet to fly past by him except for grazing his ear but if he hadn’t turned his head the bullet would have crashed into the side of his skull and killed him.
But this proves nothing because we could say that Donald Trump’s Guardian Angel caused him to turn his head at exactly the right moment (or second). This could start us on an infinite regress of accounts of where and when God might have intervened.
If we agree for the sake of the discussion that God protected Donald Trump, what follows? We should all be thankful that the sniper didn’t kill him no matter what our political orientations are. But we should not take this be a sign that God wants him to be the next president of the United States. God might have had some other reason for sparing his life.
Maybe God wanted to spare the nation the turmoil that would have followed his assassination. Maybe God wanted him to live long enough to be found guilty or innocent of the many crimes he is accused of committing. Maybe God believed that his family would suffer too severely if he were killed.
Maybe! Maybe! Maybe! We do not know and we cannot know.
We do know that one of the basic and best principles of sound theology is that we should not make unusual experiences the basis of our decisions. We should focus on the usual things, the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. We should concentrate upon the way God usually acts and not upon the ways God sometimes does.
God works almost always as a persuasive influence rather than a coercive power. In every moment of every life, God fosters as much health and healing as is possible in every set of circumstances. How much of these we actually realize depends upon how discerning we are and how willing we are to act in harmony with what God is fosters
Albeit in a different context, Jesus said, “Let those who have eyes see, let those who have ears hear.”
Because it is possible to have serious reservations about both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, we should perhaps make our decisions according to each party’s platform more so than on its candidate. Some say that we should not vote at all. I am not yet persuaded that this is the best option.
Horrific events like the one Donald Trump experienced often cause people to pause, consider where their lives have been going and change directions. This is a very real possibility for Donald Trump. He will do much good if he humbly accepts the failure of his would-be killer as an opportunity to stop dividing the nation with falsehoods and start uniting it with truths. He will do much harm if he annoints himself with his good fortune as an indisputable sign that God endorses him and all that he is doing.
We are in serious danger of deifying Trump like almost all nations did to their rulers until the Enlightenment. It is one of the sources of the continuing and slowly improving “American Experiment” as this is expressed in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States. This is a young and fragile project. We should not take its longevity for granted.
Of all people, Christians should be among those who are most defending it and nurturing its moral development. Unfortunately, in recent years some leading Christians have been among the Enlightemment's severest critics. Yet, they are among those whom such thinking has most blessed. Also, they rarely propose better alternatives. Although tearing down what we have in the interests of something we cannot even envision might be fun, it isn’t responsible.