And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” [Matthew 26:27-28 (ESV)]
When Jesus forgave the unnamed woman’s sins, he caused quite a stir among the Pharisees and religious leaders who were His fellow dinner guests. People can forgive an offense against them, but they can’t forgive an offense against someone else or God! While I can forgive your $10 debt to me, I have neither the right nor the power to say you don’t have to pay the $150,000 you also owe the Bank of America, Sallie Mae, Capital One and Chase for your mortgage, college loan, car financing, and credit card purchases. A person can’t do that but God can! Because only God has the authority to forgive people’s sins, implied in Jesus’ forgiveness of the woman’s sins, is a claim that He is God.
This wasn’t the only time Jesus shocked the Pharisees by forgiving sins. On another occasion, a paralyzed man’s friends brought him to Jesus for healing. When Jesus told the man, “Your sins are forgiven,” the religious leaders accused Him of blasphemy. The Hebrew Scripture made it clear that only God has the prerogative to pronounce forgiveness. The book of Leviticus laid out an elaborate temple system of offerings for intentional and unintentional sins, with different animals offered for different kinds of sins. Every year, there was a special Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, with its elaborate forgiveness ritual in which the nation’s sins were paid for with the sacrifice of a goat and the people’s forgiven sins were laid on another goat (the scapegoat) and sent into the wilderness. To the Pharisees, Jesus daring to pronounce forgiveness without being a high priest or making a sacrifice was a blasphemous claim to divinity. His actions would have been blasphemous had He not been God. As both the Great High Priest and the final sin sacrifice, however, Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law.
Knowing their concerns, Jesus addressed the religious leaders and asked whether it was easier to pronounce forgiveness or heal. He then told the man to pick up his mat and go home! As the man arose and started walking, the crowd was astonished. By healing the man, Jesus confirmed His authority to forgive. The physical healing was as much for the religious leaders as for the paralytic. Although the man’s forgiveness couldn’t be proven or disproven, his healing was obvious to all and there was only one being who could both forgive sins and heal broken bodies—God!
Jesus’ healings were observable acts that identified Him as the Messiah and yet the very people who should have recognized Him seemed to deliberately turn a blind eye and deaf ear. When Jesus healed the paralyzed man, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, or a voice to the mute, He was fulfilling Isaiah’s Messianic prophecy of salvation made some 700 years earlier.
Two disciples, Philip and Andrew, are mentioned in John’s account of the day Jesus fed over 5,000 with a boy’s lunch. When Jesus asked Philip where they could find food enough for all of the people, the right answer would have been, “Lord, you have the power to feed them all.” Instead, Philip, who may have been the first century equivalent of an accountant before following Jesus, immediately did a feasibility study and figured the massive expense. Ignoring the solution standing in front of him, he only saw impossibility.
After hearing people say, “It’s a miracle!” regarding the speedy development of the COVID-19 vaccines, I began to wonder what constitutes a miracle. In his book Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem defines a miracle as “a less common kind of God’s activity in which he arouses people’s awe and wonder and bears witness to himself.” I’m not a theologian but his definition seems to qualify a miraculous event by its infrequency and awesomeness rather than its nature. By his definition, last month’s “great” conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn might qualify. It certainly was awesome and, since that hasn’t happened at night for nearly 800 years, it certainly qualifies as uncommon. It was, however, predictable and the two planets will be even closer together the night of December 25, 2874. I prefer Pastor Taylor Krug’s definition: “A miracle is a particular event that occurs within the natural world that cannot be sufficiently explained with a perfect science and an exhaustive understanding of the cosmos.”
Yesterday, I mentioned Dr. Frank Crane’s comments about the wonders of everyday life. After saying, “The miracle of miracles is life,” Crane adds, “The most amazing, baffling, mysterious thing in all the universe is a seed.” While cutting into an orange this morning, I looked at the seeds hidden in the juicy fruit and recalled his words. Think how a single orange seed can grow into an orange tree that produces countless flowers that almost miraculously transform into oranges that will then produce even more seeds. The amazing power and potential held in the core of one small seed is there because it was designed by God.
In one of his four-minute essays, Dr. Frank Crane posited that that the Seven Wonders of the World weren’t the most wonderful things in the world; the wonders of everyday life were! I have to agree. The seven wonders are man-made and, of the original seven, only the great pyramid in Giza remains. On the other hand, the night sky has been there since God created it when time began. Within our galaxy there are some 300 billion stars. The Milky Way, however, is just one of some 2 trillion galaxies (making for a total stellar population of roughly 70 billion trillion.) Since that’s just in the observable universe, there probably are plenty more that haven’t yet been detected. That those trillions of stars are orbiting around an ever expanding universe boggles the mind! Nothing made by man even comes close.
He came as a baby! God Himself humbly came into the world as a helpless infant. Our nativity scenes and Christmas cards portray a serene Mary holding her peacefully sleeping child but babies are anything but calm and peaceful. They are messy and incredibly noisy little creatures who, when not sleeping, are crying, eating, drooling, peeing, or pooping (often all at the same time). That was God sleeping in the feed trough and nursing at Mary’s breast but He didn’t have a gold halo around his head. Looking the same as every other newborn, he was doing and feeling the same things every human baby feels. On the eighth day of His life, He was circumcised just like every other little Jewish boy and I’m sure He cried in pain! That crying baby was God!
Devotions of the Heart 