{"id":4952,"date":"2014-01-22T00:05:15","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T08:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=4952"},"modified":"2014-01-21T23:15:30","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T07:15:30","slug":"miracles-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2014\/01\/22\/miracles-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Miracles"},"content":{"rendered":"

As he finished saying this, a local official appeared, bowed politely, and said, \u201cMy daughter has just now died. If you come and touch her, she will live.\u201d Jesus got up and went with him, his disciples following along.<\/p>\n

\tJust then a woman who had hemorrhaged for twelve years slipped in from behind and lightly touched his robe. She was thinking to herself, \u201cIf I can just put a finger on his robe, I\u2019ll get well.\u201d Jesus turned\u2014caught her at it. Then he reassured her: \u201cCourage, daughter. You took a risk of faith, and now you\u2019re well.\u201d The woman was well from then on.<\/p>\n

\tBy now they had arrived at the house of the town official, and pushed their way through the gossips looking for a story and the neighbors bringing in casseroles. Jesus was abrupt: \u201cClear out! This girl isn\u2019t dead. She\u2019s sleeping.\u201d They told him he didn\u2019t know what he was talking about. But when Jesus had gotten rid of the crowd, he went in, took the girl\u2019s hand, and pulled her to her feet\u2014alive. The news was soon out, and traveled throughout the region. (Matthew 9:18-26)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\tJesus made it all look so easy. When Jesus healed someone, there were no explosions, no sparkles in the air, no waving of wands or muttering of spells. He didn\u2019t flap his hands about. When the woman who had suffered a hemorrhage for twelve years needed healing, she was the one doing all the physical effort by attempting to sneak up and touch him. Just her belief and her touch was enough for her to become well. When the local official\u2019s daughter was dead, all Jesus did was walk up to where she was lying. Then he grabbed her hand and helped her get out of the bed. She was simply alive.<\/p>\n

\tThe miraculous became mundane in Jesus. It was no more spectacular, seemingly no more out of the ordinary, than the work he had done as a carpenter. In fact, it was usually less time consuming and less labor intensive. Jesus, like any carpenter, could take some wood and with a bit of diligent effort, turn it into a table or a chair. With the sick or the dead, Jesus transformed them even more easily.<\/p>\n

\tThe miraculous is God\u2019s normal. In fact, if resurrections were as common as sunrises, we\u2019d stop paying attention to them. Which says, perhaps, that we might want to pay more attention to sunrises. God performs miracles all the time. But most of them we\u2019ve learned to take for granted.<\/p>\n

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As he finished saying this, a local official appeared, bowed politely, and said, \u201cMy daughter has just now died. If you come and touch her, she will live.\u201d Jesus got up and went with him, his disciples following along. Just … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[18,17,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4952"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4954,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952\/revisions\/4954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}