Miracles and Faith

Years ago, my 12 year old daughter bird sat her friend's parakeet, Kiki, for a week.  This bird perched on her shoulder while she did her homework and loved to be handled.  Kiki went home on a Sunday morning, and my daughter immediately began her plea for her own bird.  With a dog, cat, and a water frog, I was not convinced we needed another pet.   Later on that same day, we had friends over for a backyard bar-b-que.  And guess what flew into one of the trees....a parakeet!  I immediately thought three things:

1.  What are the odds of a domesticated parakeet flying into our yard?  And then what are the odds of this happening on the same day the one and only visiting parakeet went home? (At that point we had lived in the house 16 years)?

2.  I needed to get my prayer list to my daughter ASAP!

3.  This had to be divine intervention (aka "a miracle"), and God does have a sense of humor.  There was a bird - escapee or kicked out - who needed a home.  There was a girl within flying distance who so wanted a parakeet.  There was a mom who would see God's hand in this mutually beneficial connection, and make an immediate investment in a bird cage.

Cleveland the parakeet was with us for about three years before he died of apparent natural causes.  He was never as friendly as Kiki, preferring his cage to shoulder time.  But boy could he sing!

God is omnipresent - everywhere all the time. He works both supernaturally via miracles, and through the natural abilities of His creation, including both believing and non-believing people. 

Do we need miracles to have faith?  Jesus performed 37 Gospel recorded miracles, yet most of His contemporaries still did not believe in Him.  Do God's miracles go unnoticed in our busy world?  Or do we deny them, attributing a beautiful, perfect, unexpected result to anything but God?  At best, today Jesus' following might get a bump after a miracle, only to decline when the next bad thing happens. 

In both the Old and the New Testament, we see a downward spike in miracles as God's story is told.

The Hebrews saw a lot of miracles over several months before they left Egypt - the 10 plagues and the parting of the Red Sea.  And while wandering the desert for 39+ years, they always had fresh manna in the morning, water, shoes and clothes that never wore out, not to mention the flame of God they followed around.

God's miracles steadily declined once they entered into the promised land.  In their first battle of Jericho there were lots of miracles, culminating in the walls around the city tumbling down for easy defeat.  But God wanted the Israelites to put forth human effort in conquering and inhabiting the land, relying on God for protection and guidance.  When they followed God's commands and were obedient, times were good.  When they didn't proceed as instructed, including worshiping pagan gods, no assistance, or miracles, were provided to bail them out and they found themselves tossed out of the land in exile.

Still in the Old Testament 440 years after the Israelites entered the promised land but well before the exile, obedient and faithful David defeated Goliath using only a small sling shot and a handful of rocks.  His provided armor did not fit, but with David's faith in God and God's protection, the giant was miraculously defeated. 

Roughly 1000 years after King David, Jesus (in human form) also often used earthly materials to accomplish God's will.  His first miracle involved turning earthly water into exceptionally good wine.  John 2:7-10  Jesus said to them (the servants), "Fill the waterpots with water."  So they filled them up to the brim.  And He said to them, "Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter." And they took it to him.  Now when the headwaiter tasted the water which had become wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the headwater called the groom, and said to him, "every man serves the good wine first, and when the guests are drunk then he serves the poorer wine; but you have kept the good wine until now."  Earthly materials were used again later in John when Jesus healed a man who had been blind since birth.  Johns 9:6-7  He (Jesus) spit on the ground, and made mud from the saliva, and applied the mud to his (blind man's) eyes, and said to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam".  So he left and washed, and came back seeing.  

Like the Old Testament, the number of miracles decreased in the New Testament as the years passed.  Only Jesus' 12 apostles (minus Judas plus Matthias) and convert Paul had miraculous healing abilities similar to what we saw with Jesus.  They healed the sick and the lame, and Peter and Paul even brought life back to the dead.  Filled with the Holy Spirit, they were given miraculous healing powers not for their glory, but to spread the good news of Jesus.  But the leaders of the churches they started did not have the same healing powers.  Faith in Jesus is what brought salvation, and that is what the churches shared.

God promises blessings from obedience.  These blessings may seem miraculous (a homeless parakeet finding my daughter), or mundane (my ability to afford a $40 bird cage for the aforementioned parakeet).  We should count on this obedience/blessing correlation since God promised it.  Deuteronomy 28:1-2 (Moses speaking) "Now it shall be, if you diligently obey the Lord your God, being careful to do all His commandments which I am commanding you today, that the Lord your God will put you high above all the nations of the earth.  And all these blessings will come to you and reach you if you obey the Lord your God."  

We are to follow God, not demanding nor counting on miracles.  Faith that is dependent on proof via a new miracle is not a fully developed faith since it relies on additional proof of love/blessing.  God's greatest miracle is beautifully explained in John 3:16  (Jesus talking) "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.  We do not need more miracles.  To receive the ultimate blessing, we just need to believe in the miracle of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

Faith = Trust + Obedience > Fear

When I talk to people about faith I often hear things like:  If there is a God, how come He does not make His presence unmistakably known?   Or if God would just show me a miracle that only He could do, then I would believe. 

The Israelites had God in their presence in the cloud by day/fire by night leading the tabernacle. They also witnessed first hand several miracles: parting of the Red Sea, mana from heaven, even an overwhelming amount of falling quail. And they still had fears, doubts and obedience issues.  They did not consider themselves soldiers ready for battle for land promised to some relative hundreds of years ago (Abram).   They were farmers who had been slaves only a year before.  Their fear was real and overwhelming, and their faith in God as their promised protector sometimes wavered.

By Numbers 10, 613 rules from God had been made clear, the tabernacle had been built, the priests had been ordained, the trumpets had been made and the people of Israel were ready to move from Sinai, where they had been for almost a year after their dramatic exit from Egypt, towards the land promised to Abraham 430 years before.

Following the cloud/fire of the Lord, the Israelites traveled three days of an expected 11 day journey.  As is human tendency, eyes were taken off the Lord and the complaining began.  Perhaps this complaining was masking the real concerns settling in – doubt and fear over what awaited them. Numbers 11:1  Now the people became like those who complain of adversity in the ears of the Lord; and the Lord heard them and His anger was kindled, and the fire of the Lord burned among them and consumed some at the outskirts of the camp.  Were those on the outskirts non-Israelites who had made the journey out of Egypt, not exactly pagans, but not convinced of the wisdom of the God of Abraham?  But we should not let the Israelites off the hook since nowhere in the biblical text do we see anticipation or excitement on anyone’s part about being a week away from the land of milk and honey.

Now in the wilderness of Paran, the Israelites complained about the mana, the lack of meat, and life being so much better as slaves in Egypt.  Numbers 11:4-6 Now the rabble who were among them had greedy cravings; and the sons of Israel also wept again and said, “Who will give us meat to eat?  We remember the fish which we used to eat for free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melon, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our appetite is gone.  There is nothing at all to look at except this manna!”

Even faithful stand-outs Miriam and Aaron joined the negative chorus, complaining about brother Moses marrying a Cushite (non-Israelite). Perhaps they did take issue with Moses marrying outside the faith, but they also seemed to have a problem with his prophet elevation over themselves.  Number 12:1 and they said, “Is it a fact that the Lord has spoken only through Moses?  Has He not spoken through us as well?”

Ask anyone in the camp and probably many would say “yes, we are ready for the Promise Land”, but God knew their hearts and He knew this generation was never going to appreciate, let alone succeed, in the land promised to their ancestors.  Battles would need to be fought and total trust in the Lord was imperative.  This group was not the right group for that.  The people were swamped with quail meat and a plague, and Mariam, who spoke out against Moses first, was cursed temporarily with leprosy.

Cue the 12 spies.

God knew where this was all going, and it was time for the people to learn their self chosen fate that their negative attitudes foretold.   Numbers 13:1-3 Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Send out men for yourself to spy out the land of Canaan, which I am going to give the sons of Israel; you shall send a man from each of their fathers’ tribes, every one a leader among them.”  So Moses sent them from the wilderness of Paran at the command of the Lord, all of them men who were heads of the sons of Israel.

The Lord sent them, knowing that 10 out of 12 would support a bad report.  Numbers 13:32-33 So they brought a bad report of the land which they had spied out to the sons of Israel, saying, “The land through which we have gone to spy out is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are people of great stature.  We also saw the Nephilim there and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.”  The reconnaissance mission was God’s order, but the recommendation not to proceed was all spy.  God did not tell this undeserving nation to not enter Canaan, this undeserving nation made that decision themselves.

Knowing what we know now, we can "Monday morning quarter" back the Israelites. How could they ignore the presence and miracles of God?  But those wandering in the wilderness did not have widespread written language, the entire Old Testament or the upcoming New Testament to make "trusting and obeying the Lord" decisions.  We have His Word and have seen prophecy fulfilled and promises kept.  And yet we doubt.

From the beginning, trusting and doing what God says have been faith strengtheners.  If He says "Its time to go to the land of Canaan." It's time!  And the enemy walls will come a tumbling down! (Joshua leading the Israelites into Jericho, a lesson to dissect another time).  

I cannot provide one example in my life where I bounced an idea off biblical text, made the decision supported by the text, and later thought it was a bad decision.  On the complete other hand, I can give you countless examples of bad decisions that went against biblical text.  Keep reading the bible, keep studying, keep praying.  It makes trusting and obeying possible.

 

 

 

 

Jesus Plants, Humans Harvest

John 12:23-24  But Jesus answered them by saying, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.  Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."  If we want to be more like Jesus, we too must choose to die to our worldly ways.  This may sound hard, boring, and perhaps painful.  But when we are glorifying God, the Holy Spirit gives us new life and power and we are happier and more complete than ever!  We long for God and heaven more than the goodies of this world.  How do we get to this point?  Invite that Holy Spirit in - He will show you.

The story in Acts 5:40-42 blows my mind! They (the Pharisees) followed his advice (Gamaliel, who put forth the theory that the Jesus believers might be just a fad and would disperse once His followers started dying); and after calling the apostles in, they (the Pharisees) flogged them and ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and then released them.  So they (the apostles) went on their way from the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for His name.  And every day, in the temple, and from house to house, they did not stop teaching and preaching the good news of Jesus as the Christ.  Well that flogging backfired!  Jesus' apostles seemed to gain self-relevance and felt honored when flogged just like their Messiah Jesus had been.  When people see believers persevere and thrive in times of suffering they know something special is going on.  And that something special is belief and confidence in Savior Jesus Christ.

Jesus "plants" by changing hearts and putting those changed hearts in the paths of others.  Jesus used an outcast Samarian woman who came to the well during the off period to avoid stares and gossip as she was unmarried and living with a man, who was not one of her previous five husbands.  But Jesus saw her and gave her grace.  And this woman, who no one, not even herself, could see any value in, began the harvest process.  People listened to her, invited Jesus into their homes, and believed He was the Savior of the world. John 4: 39-41  Now from that city many of the Samaritans believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, "He told me all the things that I have done," So when the Samaritans came to Jesus, they were asking Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days.  Many more believed because of His word; and they were saying to the woman, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe,  for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One truly is the Savior of the world."  

More Jesus seeds were harvested in Samaria five years later despite more persecution.  Acts 8: 1-8  Now Saul (before his miraculous conversion and name change to Paul) approved of putting Stephen to death.  And on that day a great persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except for the apostles.  Some devout men buried Stephen, and mourned loudly for him.  But Saul began ravaging the church, entering house after house; and he would drag away men and women and put them in prison.  Therefore, those who had been scattered went through places, preaching the word.  Philip (a deacon, not the apostle)  went down to the city of Samaria and began proclaiming the Christ to them.  The crowds were paying attention with one mind to what was being said by Philip, as they heard and saw the signs which he was performing.  For in the case of many who had unclean spirits, they were coming out of them shouting with a loud voice; and many who had been paralyzed or limped on crutches were healed.  So there was much rejoicing in the city.  Believers fled Jerusalem because of the danger, but they did not stop sharing the Word when they arrived in their new destinations.  Samaria remembered Jesus' visit and the woman at the well's conversion (the seeds), and were ready to receive the Holy Spirit and be healed by Philip (the harvest).

We may sometimes plant, we may sometimes water, and we may sometimes harvest.  God sees the big picture and knows where and when to send us to do his work to make disciples of Jesus.

Did Jacob know of the Bro Betrayal?

Joseph's 10 jealous older brothers sold him into slavery.  The big question....did dad Jacob ever know?  

The brothers were obviously concerned that Jacob knew and expressed this to Joseph, who had all the power over them as Pharoah's number one guy, after Jacob died.  Genesis 50:15-21  When Joseph's brothers had seen that their father was dead they said "What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong which we did to him!"  So they sent instructions to Joseph, saying "Your father commanded us before he died, saying, "This is what you shall say to Joseph:  "Please forgive, I beg you, the offense of your brothers and their sin for they did you wrong."  And now, please forgive the offense of the servants of the God of your father." And Joseph wept when they spoke to him.  Then his brothers also came and fell down before him and said, "Behold, we are your servants." But Joseph said to them, "Do not be afraid, for I am in God's place?  As for you, you meant evil against me but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to keep many people alive.  So therefore, do not be afraid; I will provide for you and your little ones." So he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.

Arguments for Jacob knowing his 10 sons orchestrated Joseph's demise:

1.  Jacob had been lead to believe that Joseph had been killed by wild animals and obviously this was a lie.  Genesis 37:31-34  So they (the 10 brothers) took Joseph's tunic and slaughtered a male goat, and dipped the tunic in the blood; and they sent the multicolored tunic and brought it to their father and said, "We found this; please examine it to see whether it is your son's tunic or not."  Then he examined it and said "It is my son's tunic  A vicious animal has devoured him; Joseph has surely been torn to pieces!" So Jacob tore his clothes and put on a sackcloth undergarment over his waist and mourned for his son many days.

2.  Jacob remembered the dream Joseph shared.  Genesis 37:9-11 Then he had yet another dream, and informed his brothers of it, and said "Behold I have had yet another dream: and behold the sun and the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me."  He also told it to his father as well as to his brothers; and his father rebuked him and said to him, "What is this dream that you have had?  Am I and your mother and your brothers actually going to come to bow down to the ground before you?"  And his brothers were jealous of him but his father kept the matter in mind. Did Jacob realize the jealous brothers had done what they could to prevent the fulfillment of this dream, and got rid of the dreamer?

3.  Jacob also remembered what God had told his grandfather Abraham.  Genesis 15:13 Then God said to Abram, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years.  Was this 400 years to be spent in Goshen Egypt, where his whole family ended up after Joseph saved them from famine?  Did Jacob realize that Joseph's elevation to Pharoah's number one guy could only have happened if he left the family, even if by awful means?  This all correlated with the dream fulfillment in Genesis 37.

Arguments for Jacob NOT knowing his 10 sons orchestrated Joseph demise:

1.  When Jacob was telling each son what would happen to them in the days to come, first son Reuben got an earful.  Genesis 49:3-4  Reuben, you are my firstborn, my might and the beginning of my strength preeminent in dignity and preeminent in power.  Uncontrollable as water you shall not have preeminence, because you went up to your father's bed; then you defiled it - he went up to my couch.    In Genesis 35:22, we learn that Reuben slept with his father's concubine Bilhah who was also mother of two of this brothers - ick! And it came about, while Israel (Jacob) was living in that land, that Reuben went and slept with his father's concubine, Bilhah, and Israel heard about it.  If Jacob had known that Reuben thwarted the plan to kill Joseph and planned on rescuing him, would he have forgiven the Bilhah offense?  Genesis 37:21-22 But Reuben heard this and rescued him (Joseph) out of their hands by saying, "Let's not take his life."  Then Reuben said to them, "Shed no blood  Throw him into this pit that is in the wilderness but do not lay a hand on him" - so that later he might rescue him out of their hands to return him to his father.

2.  Throughout Jacob prophesizing what would happen to each son in Genesis 49, he mentioned several times how his son's had failed him.  Along with Reuben's affair, Simeon and Levi were chastised for avenging their sister's, Dinah's, rape by killing the men of Shechem.  Genesis 49:5  Simeon and Levi are brothers; their words are implements of violence. Genesis 49:6  For in their anger they killed men, and in their self-will they lamed oxen.   Jacob called out adultery and violence against enemies, yet he never mentioned anything about the treatment of his favorite son Joseph, which makes one wonder if he knew about it.  

3.  It seems like Joseph recognized in Genesis 50 that everything that happened was part of God's plan and worked out well.  Throwing his brother's under the bus would have been questioning God's plan.  Did Joseph have this conversation with his father, Jacob, and did Jacob agree?

We do not know definitely if Jacob knew of the brother betrayal because God did not deem it necessary for us to know.  Our take away should be that God is in charge, suffering can be used to glorify God, and God has a lot of  plans that we can not even fathom.