Miracles

There were many, many people who died while Jesus walked this earth, and mostly he didn’t intervene. But by healing that woman in that town, he spoke a clear message about what God was doing among them.

There have been certain periods in history when God was moving in special ways and he did many more miracles to let people see he was moving.

This year’s confirmation class started out with making a timeline of Bible history. And when we do that project, it always sticks out that there are big gaps in the Bible record where we aren’t told of anything God did. There was a gap of several centuries when the Israelites were in Egypt and they multiplied, but nothing miraculous happened and they must have wondered whether God had forgotten them.

Then the moment for the Exodus came and ‘wham’ there was miracle, after miracle.

When they were in the desert, where there was no food, God provided miraculous food for them, called manna. But the day the crossed the Jordan River into country where they could find food for themselves, that miracle stopped.

There is another gap of 400 years between the Old Testament and the New Testament. God hadn’t forgotten about them, but he was waiting for the timing to be right. And when the day came, then there were many miracles to help people see that God really was doing something among them, hopefully to help them listen and pay attention.

God does more miracles in those times when he is doing special things on the cutting edge of where people need to hear the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Kathy and I saw that many times.

In 1973 we were in Kabul, Afghanistan, one of the most spiritually needy countries in the world. The Kabul mayor had a campaign to demolish the only Protestant church in town. One of the missionaries wrote him a respectful letter warning him that he was opposing God, and that if he demolished God’s house, he would be punished for it. On the day the demolition of the church was completed, there was a military coup and that mayor was in jail.

Military coups happen from time to time. But do you think the timing was an accident? I don’t think so.

Two years earlier, before we arrived, Kabul was in the midst of a three-year drought. They had no rain for three years. The group that we worked with had several of the European and American travelers who came through make commitments to Jesus Christ, and they needed to be baptized. So, they went up to a reservoir on the edge of the Kabul valley for a baptism service. And right as the baptism service finished, it started to rain, for the first time in 3 years, and a rainbow appeared. One missionary said it might have been the first public baptism in Afghanistan in a thousand years.

And rain comes and goes and we know that rainbows are caused when direct sun light passes through raindrops just right. That’s not a miracle. But the timing tells me that God had tears of joy in his eyes and wanted us to know what this meant to him. And so he did something very special, a sign.