The Miracles of Jesus

As the youth studied the Gospel of John on Sunday nights at Youth Group, one thing that kept coming up was the miracles Jesus performed. When we studied Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the 5,000 and his claim that He is the Bread of Life, we noted that miracles did display Jesus sovereignty and Lordship, but they weren’t primarily naked displays of power. More specifically, they show what He came to use His power for. They tell us His mission and how we can be a part of it. They tell us that He came to deal with sin and the effects of sin, namely suffering. Every single one of Jesus’ miracles comes against some type of suffering, which means that God isn’t content with the way the world is anymore than you or I are. Jesus feeds the hungry, heals the sick, opens the eyes of the blind, fixes the legs of the crippled, resurrects the dead, and even calms storms. Every miracle is an assault on injustice, disease, decay, and death.

When John the Baptist is unsure if Jesus is really the Messiah, Jesus sends this message back to him, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.” (Luke 7:22) He comes to deal with suffering; the blind see. He comes to deal with uncleanness; the lepers are cleansed. He comes to deal with injustice; the poor have the Gospel preached to them.

If we just think of miracles as proofs of Jesus’ power, then we’re only going to think of them as an interruption to the way things usually work. However, if we see miracles as signs of the Kingdom, we see that Jesus isn’t temporarily interrupting the natural order of things, but temporarily restoring the natural order of things.

Jesus comes and shows us that this isn’t how things are supposed to be. When He feeds the hungry, He’s reminding us that God designed a world without children with swollen bellies. When He raises the Centurion’s son and Lazarus, He’s reminding us that God created a world where brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands, and wives don’t die and leave unbearable heartache. He’s not just pointing back to the Garden of Eden, but forward to the new creation.