DESPERATE PEOPLE DO DESPERATE THINGS (PART VII)

“Miracles Happen for a Reason”

By Akin Ojumu

Contrary to what you might have been taught to believe, supernatural occurrences are not normative. Only on rare occasions does God interfere in or disrupt the natural order of the universe. At those moments in the course of human history when God decides to exercise His sovereign authority over nature, He does it for a specific reason in order to accomplish an express purpose.

As much as we would have loved it to be otherwise, the miraculous events of the apostolic era of the early Church were unique and not something that continued in perpetuity. Prevalent in the Church today, however, is the fierce aversion to the objective reality that the signs and wonders and miracles of that era are over. Because there are people today who are driven to replicate the phenomenal occurrences of the apostolic era, they end up perpetrating all kinds of fake miracles, and they invent all manners of lying wonders.

In the recorded Biblical history of God’s dealing with humanity, we can actually determine the number of times and epochs when there were widespread occurrences of miraculous phenomena. These points in human history where the Bible recorded a proliferation of miracles are limited to only three time periods, namely:

1) Mosaic Era of Moses and Joshua

2) Prophetic Era of Elijah and Elisha

3) New Testament Apostolic Era of Christ and His Apostles.

Appearance of miracles in the Bible was clustered around these three eras. After the era of Moses and Joshua, there were no major or consistent miraculous events recorded in the Bible until the time of Elijah. After Elisha, you don’t hear that miracles occurred consistently again in the Old Testament. It wasn’t until the appearance of Jesus in Matthew that the world, once again, became a blaze of miracles. Thereafter, by AD 100, following the death of the last of Jesus's Apostles, miracles once again waned.

When you add them all up, each of these periods of spectacular phenomena lasted less than one hundred years. Now, we know that God is sovereign, and He is capable of interjecting Himself into the human stream supernaturally anytime He wants. We are not trying to limit Him. What we are simply saying is that God has chosen to limit Himself, to a great degree, to those three periods of time. (Source: Pastor John MacArthur).

During these three time periods, miracles occurred for four main reasons. God caused the miracles to happen in order to, (1) introduce a new era of revelation, (2) call attention to the revelation, (3) authenticate the revelation, and, (4) validate the messenger of the new revelation.

The purpose of the miracle in the Bible is not to prove the existence of God, but it is to prove the legitimacy and the validity of an agent of revelation – of someone whom God has commissioned to speak His word. The purpose of the miracle is to verify the messenger of the word of God (Source: Ligonier Ministries).

In the New Testament era of miracles, Jesus performed signs and wonders to proclaim the advent of the Kingdom of God, to call people’s attention to the Gospel of the Kingdom, to validate the Gospel of the Kingdom, and to demonstrate that He is the King. To understand Jesus’s miracles, you must view them through this lens.

And it’s also in this light that we must understand the encounter with the woman with the issue of blood on the road to Jairus’s house.

We read that immediately after this poor woman touched the hem of Jesus’s garment, her flow of blood dried up, and she felt the infirmity leave her body. And the Lord Jesus, sensing that creative power had gone out of Him, He stopped the crowd in its tracks, turned around, and with His piercing eyes scanning the crowd, He asked:

Luke 8:45

“Who touched me?”

Like we noted last time, Jesus didn’t ask this question as though He didn’t already know who touched Him. Firstly, He asked the question to bring the woman out of her obscurity into the open in order to commend her to the people and affirm her to the crowd who had rejected her for twelve years. She was brought from the shadows into the open so she would know that in addition to being healed physically, she has also been spiritually healed as well. She understood this when she heard the Lord told her to go in peace.

Mark 5:34

“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Now, the second reason Jesus asked the question, “Who touched my garments?” was to strengthen the faith of Jairus in Jesus’s ability to heal his daughter.

As the story unfolds, we learn that immediately after the woman was healed of her infirmity, messengers came from Jairus’s house to inform him that his daughter had already died and therefore no need for Jesus to come to his house any longer.

Mark 5:35

“While He was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?”

Before the messengers arrived to deliver the devastating news, the Lord Jesus knew that Jairus daughter had already died. In order to prepare Jairus for the news he was about to hear and to bolster his faith, the Lord Jesus orchestrated the miraculous event of the woman with the issue of blood to receive her healing. He wanted to demonstrate His power to Jairus and also for him to hear the woman’s testimony. By hearing the woman’s testimony of her healing from an infirmity of twelve years, the Jairus’s faith would be fortified. Seeing Jesus deliver this woman was meant to help Jairus not to lose faith because of the news he was about to be told that his twelve-year-old daughter had already died.

When you understand the story behind this story, it’ll blow your mind. This story poignantly and powerful illustrates the love and mercy of God. What we have in this divinely orchestrated event is a demonstration of the sovereignty of the Almighty God. Unlike the pagan gods, the LORD is not aloof and distant. He loves us, cares for us, and He rejoices over us with gladness.

Zephaniah 3:17

“The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.”