Living Stones – Friday, December 8, 2017
Marvelous thing
John 9:30
The man answered and said to them, “Why, is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where He is from; yet He has opened my eyes!
So, a man who was blind from birth received his sight and the first thing he had to do was to fight with people who he was seeing for the first time.
Miracles bend, sometimes suspend, the laws of nature. While our sickness may be scientifically and medically explained by our treatment specialist, God has the capacity to work outside of the science. The deterioration of the organ may be real, the diagnosis accurate, and the prognosis grim, but God can reach into the human body to repair or restore that which was written off.
It is very interesting how science and technology change our need, desire, or expectation of a miraculous intervention. Blindness and lesser forms of visual impairment are pretty commonplace in the population. Today vision care is pretty commonplace too. There was a time when if someone started to develop problems with their vision they would come for prayer. Today they just go to an eye-care centre. Even those who previously found the cost prohibitive can now purchase vision-care services and solutions like spectacles paying with small instalments from a variety of small, medium, and large-scale providers.
As a result of these developments, there is less prayer for problems with vision and more use of spectacles, I have been wearing spectacles for more than 40 years. These days, we hardly take vision problems to church. However, there are new sicknesses and diseases to take to church. Nowadays, we have a prevalence of new and little-understood diseases and a plethora of cancers of the everything.
There is still a need for miracles, particularly in matters of health and wellness, but the science and medical technologies blind us and cause us to depend more on medicine and less on God. We certainly do believe that science is valuable because the laws of God have established an order that could be studied and understood. We also believe that medicine is a result of understanding and abilities that God had made available that the sick might be nursed back to wellness. The science and medicine should not, however, be allowed to undermine our faith in God for a miracle.
Sovereign God can do whatever He pleases, whenever He pleases but has often chosen to operate in an atmosphere of faith. In that passage in James 5 where we are encouraged to call for the elders of the church to pray for us when we are sick, James emphasises that faith is critical, “And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” James 5:15.
We even see this in the ministry of Jesus. Mark records the following, “Now He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He marveled because of their unbelief. Then He went about the villages in a circuit, teaching.” Mark 6:5-6.
Jesus did no mighty works because there was unbelief in the place. Compare that with Luke 5:17 when He was in a different place, “Now it happened on a certain day, as He was teaching, that there were Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting by, who had come out of every town of Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was present to heal them.”
Despite the presence of the Pharisees, there was an atmosphere of faith among the people. So intense it was, with so many people pressing in for a miracle, that the friends of the paralytic had to lower him from the ceiling. The first reaction of Jesus was a response to their faith.
This man whom Jesus encountered and healed of blindness by the peculiar method of applying spit and mud to his eyes, and then sending him off to a pool some distance away down a flight of stairs to wash, was ready to put his faith in Him. However, the religious leaders had long lost their faith in God’s power and desire to intervene in the situations of men’s lives. They had little or no expectation of the miraculous and so they found every way to disbelieve that which had clearly taken place in this man’s life.
When we stop expecting God’s intervention, or when we become so accepting of the circumstances or our lives and the prognosis from doctors, we can become like those religious leaders. They were so blind to God’s miraculous power that even a miracle of sight couldn’t bring them any closer to seeing God.
It’s put this way in Isaiah 53:1, Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? Ron Kenoly had us sing it this way, Whose report Will you believe / We shall believe The report of the Lord / His report says I am healed / His report says I am filled / His report says I am free / His report says victory
Let’s keep believing God for miracles. God still does marvellous things.
Think on these things:
- Do you truly believe that God still heals today?
- Have you experienced personally or witnessed God’s healing or miraculous power?
- Are you or someone you know in need of a miraculous intervention because of a bad diagnosis or prognosis?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today for the miracle we need from God for our self or for someone else.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex