In Bible class today, we were reading about the story of Jairus’ daughter who died and Jesus brought back to life. (Mark 5:21-43) At the end of this story I had the students write a quote, not from scripture, but a deduction from this story and then we would have to prove from Scripture whether this quote was true or not.
The quote was this – “A person who does not believe in Jesus nor has trust in Jesus will never see a miracle in their lifetime.” Is this possible? Does this hold true? Would we break fellowship over a statement like this if one believed this to be true and another did not? Well certainly I would not hold to this quote like I would scripture nor would I say this was an absolute truth, but then I have to wrestle with how this could be possible?
So the students took some time to consider this and one student raised his hand and said, “I think I got it – a person who does not believe in Jesus nor has trust in Jesus will never see what we see as a miracle.” And we said, you may be onto something.
Well we can be certain of this. Anyone who does believe in Jesus and has their trust in Him sees miracles and the first miracle they witnessed was their own conversion. We knew at one point in time that we were hopeless, helpless, and hell bound to a Christ-less eternity. We understood that we were dead in our trespasses and sin. That apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, we would live on to die one day in our sin and never see His glorious face. We knew that without Him there was no hope, no help and only eternal damnation. But in the darkest time of our lives, we cried out in faith to our Lord Jesus and He rescued us from our hopeless, helpless and hell bound life. He changed us and we have never been the same since. Every day we witness Him in us and our life is different.
Now when that happened, the world of rejecters of Jesus would say, “Well you maybe got ‘religion’ in you, or maybe you just became a good person, or maybe you just grew up.” But they would never see it as a miracle, even though they are looking at it.
Take my cancer – I had it, but now I don’t. We witnessed miracle after miracle (and still seeing His mighty hand at work) but a rejecter of Jesus could attempt to chalk it all up to chance. They could point to any thing and everything as just “mankind and mother-nature doing their thing in harmony.” They could even say, “You got lucky” and never once acknowledge the Savior’s hand in all of this.
They have been placed outside the house and the Savior is not letting them see what they would already reject as a miracle. When Jairus daughter walked out of the house finally and people on the street saw her, one of few things would have been said – “There goes that girl who we thought was dead but was only asleep.” Or –“There goes that girl who was faking it all the time.” Or – “There goes that girl who had a lucky break in this life and though she was sick and even died, somehow she is still walking.” Or – “There goes that girl who was dead, but now is alive because Jesus brought her back to life, it was miracle!”
What do you say when you see someone who has changed, when someone who was sick but now well, when the sun comes up and then goes down, when you take you next breath… do you see the miracle?
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