Amazing Coincidences

 Hello All,

As we are heading into the Easter Run Up, I had an interesting thought put to me the other day.  Maybe you've heard it too.

It was the night before His Crucifixion. Jesus and His disciples were in the Garden of Gethsemane. You'll remember the fracas when soldiers, led by Judas, showed up to arrest Him. With the “Kiss of Death” by Judas, things got crazy.  

Peter, entrenched in moment, whipped out his sword and removed the ear of one of the perpetrators.  Scripture puts it this way: 

“And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear. And Jesus answered and said, ‘Suffer ye thus far’. And he touched his ear, and healed him.”

I’m trying to imagine this as a stage play. How would I choreograph it? Right there in all the confusion, Jesus stopped what He was doing and healed the servant.

And I’m thinking to myself, why didn't that MIRACLE stop everything in its tracks? Wouldn't the soldiers have been impressed?  Wouldn’t they have been thinking, "Who is this guy?"

Whenever I bring the topic up, we’re always left with the conclusion that, “You had to have been there.” It WAS dark, after all; maybe in the confusion, no one except for a disciple or two really noticed and fully understood the miracle of the moment. 

But that doesn’t erase the fact that just about everyone knew about Jesus and the amazing miracles He was doing in those days. I can’t help but believe that this was yet another demonstration of Who He was and what He was about. People knew that; for that very reason, many of the crowds following Him were looking for just such a demonstration. Jesus performed a lot of miracles and there were always many, many people who believed by just witnessing what He'd done.  In fact, somewhere He even complains that people seem to want a miracle in order to believe.  

So then I’m thinking, is it possible that some people simply WON'T believe, in spite of what they see? I’ve seen the truth of that idea more times than I care to remember.

I remember a student back in Japan. He so wanted to become a Christian, talked to Tony often about spiritual things and studied the Bible more than most. 

One day he came into our group and said, quite happily, "This weekend, I went camping and it was very rainy. The forecast called for rain all weekend.   I set up my tent as best I could in all the mud and said to God, "If it's clear in the morning, I'll believe in you!"

"Oh, and what happened?" asked Tony, daring to hope.  

"Oh, the next morning I woke to birdsong and a beautiful clear sunrise!"

"That’s wonderful! Tony replied with real joy. Isn't it great that God answered your prayer!"

"Yup", he said, "it was really an amazing coincidence!"

Think about that rich young ruler in Matthew 19:16-30.  He just couldn't/wouldn't hear the Good News, even when it was given by Jesus Himself.  I think often of that young man in Japan. He occasionally shows up on Facebook, but to my knowledge he went away and never understood God's good grace.   

So sad when people choose to not see the obvious.  An ear put back and healed?  What a coincidence. 

Do you keep a list of “Amazing Miracles” that you keep next to “Amazing Coincidences”? What constitutes one from the other? Keep that in mind over the next few days, will you? What would it take to slide something from “List A” to “List B”? 

We’re at the threshold of Palm Sunday. Keep in mind that the King is Coming.  



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let It Go

 Hello Again,   I usually don’t like to quote from Facebook, much less recommend it, but today I’m going to do both.   I posted the following on my own FB site and was surprised at the comments that came back. It seems the message here really hits the nail on the head. What do you think? "A Harvard Study of 724 couples Who Made It Past 30 Years Revealed Something Surprising: “It wasn’t love, s*x, or kids that kept them together. It was the ability to tolerate the same things in each other – over and over again. The couples who divorced thought, “This habit drives me crazy, but I can fix it.’ The ones who stayed? ‘This is who they are. They’re not changing.’ Long marriages rarely resolve every conflict. That’s a myth.  Couples who lasted 30+ years didn’t dig into every hurt feeling. They learned to let go. Not suppress – release. ‘You forgot again,’ ‘You said the wrong thing again’ – short-term couples turn that into a fight. Long-term couples let it slide. ...
Read more

Good News and Salt Licks

 G’day Fellow Travellers, I think many of you might be on Facebook and so noticed the picture I took out the back of our house the other day… seven of the most majestic English-originated Red Deer you ever saw.   It’s a bit of a mystery how they got there, since they are not native to Australia and DEFINITELY not welcome among the country’s flora and fauna. It’s believed they were introduced some time back by a wealthy entrepreneur with plans to start up a new industry. Nobody is saying for sure, but the only thing that can be said is that the deer love it here! I know that the many of you living in Texas and those parts look at deer and think either “menace” or “venison” and perhaps both in the same sentence.  Fortunately for these folks here, although they’re listed as ‘feral’, as they are, everyone treats them like family pets.  Yes, they eat our flowers, but according to the layout of the floodplain we live on, they really can’t get into the traffic, so we a...
Read more

Those Pesky Chimeras

 So some people collect stamps; I like to collect words. No one’s ever accused me of being ‘smart’ but sometimes I like to be a “smart aleck” and throw out a word in casual conversation that not many of my cohorts will immediately understand. It’s fun to watch their reactions, like, “Oh! You mean THAT fogdog!” or else, “I think I knew that …” Today’s word is “Chimera”. If you already know what that means, there went my fun for today. You can skip ahead to the application. “Chimera” is a noun that describes something wished for but is either illusory or impossible to achieve. Lately I’ve been painfully aware of two chimeras in my life. One comes to mind when I’m looking back; the other when I’m looking ahead.   Not that I’m counting, but I believe I’ve spent about 80% of my adult life on a diet, on that never-ending search for the perfect body. Now time is teaming up with my best intentions, bringing me one more step toward accepting this as the chimera it is. I’m bracing ...
Read more