John 11

John 11:47-48

CHRIST AND John 11:47-48. THE twentieth century has come upon a strange thing in theology, namely, an attempt to admit the Deity of Jesus Christ, and yet to deny His miracle working. Infidelity has taken on the guise of Christianity in name, while denying the power thereof. From the first it has been the business of the foes of Christ to break down every evidence of the supernatural associated with His life and labor, His death and resurrection. They understand perfectly that if this can be accomplished they will have carried the citadel of our holy religion. As another has remarked, “To this end they have employed every possible means. The whole mighty host is massed and hurled against this mighty fortress of our faith, and every possible weapon of wit and wisdom, ignorance and learning, science and philosophy, sophistry and fallacy, is forged for this combined assault.

Here is the Marathon, the Thermopylae and the Waterloo of the ages!”It is essential, therefore, for Christian teachers to meet these men on the field of their own choosing. If we can defeat them there, and set them to rout, the battle is finished and Faith has won her victory.In answer to the question, “Did Christ Work Actual Miracles?” permit three statements.THE MIRACLE DEFINED Arthur Pierson never said a truer thing than when he remarked, “Definitions lie at the basis of all discussions, for they define or limit the ground which argument is to cover; they set bounds within which we both keep ourselves and hold our opponents. This is of as much consequence in debate as it would be in a contest between athletes to settle the rules of honorable championship.”What is a miracle? Two or three sentences may answer this question.It is the occurrence of the supernatural. The late Dr. George Lorimer said, “The Gospels have taught that miracles are astonishing and expressive effects of which the Divine energy is the direct and all-sufficient cause.” It matters little whether one calls them “miracles”, “signs”, “wonders” or “powers”; they involve the conceded presence and power of God. Ordinarily water does not turn instantly to wine.

If it did so at the word of Jesus, that must be regarded as a miracle. Ordinarily leprosy does not yield even to medical treatment. If it take its departure from the body at the word of a man, it is a miracle. Ordinarily, a man buried four days in a hot climate falls into decay. If at the end of that time he be revived by a word and walk forth among the living again, it is a mighty miracle. The natural does not account for it.

The very claim that these events have occurred in the world is a declaration of the supernatural.The supernatural is a sign of God’s power. The very wonder of it suggests the presence of God. When the bush burned and was not consumed, Moses was not surprised that God should speak to him out of it. When“great multitudes came unto Him having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus’ feet; and He healed them: “Insomuch that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see; and they glorified the God of Israel” (Matthew 15:30-31). not one of them questioned that this meant the intervention of Divine power.There is a story told of an Eastern king who had denied to one of his counsellors the wonderful works of God. “Show me a sign,” said the king, “and I will believe.” “Here are four acorns,” said the counsellor. “Will your majesty plant them in the ground and then stoop down for a minute and look into this clear pool of water?” The king did so. “Now”, said the other, “look up.” The king looked up and saw four large oak trees where he had planted the acorns. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed.“This is indeed the work of God.” “How long were you looking into the water?” asked the counsellor. “Only a second,” said the king. “Eighty years have passed as a second”, said the other. The king looked at his garments. They were threadbare. He looked at his reflection in the water; he had become an old man. “There is no miracle here, then,” he said angrily. “Yes”, said the other. “It is God’s work, whether He do it in eighty years or in one second.”True, but it is not a miracle. If it took eighty years it is God’s usual work, hence known as the operation of natural law. If it be done in one second it is God’s unusual work, hence admitted to be a miracle.Such supernatural events are not opposed to natural law.

Hume and his confederates begged this whole question by denying the miracle as something necessarily opposed to natural law, and then reasoned that if God were the Author of natural law He would not fight against Himself by setting it aside. When an engineer has his engine in order, water in the boiler, steam up, the throttle open, and he urges her ahead, according to the natural law of the machine, it would continue to move forward, following the rails.

It is arranged primarily for the purpose of such motion, and if left to itself would never reverse it. But when he reverses the engine, is that a break in natural law? Nay, verily, it is the intervention of a power higher than the mechanics controlling the same. The one thing that men must finally admit is this, that God still sits at the throttle valve of the universe. It is a mighty piece of machinery, I grant you, but as easily under the control of His hand as is the engine responsive to the touch of its master.To borrow an illustration from another: My watch tends to move forward and the hands, of themselves, take one direction only. But when I discover it is an hour too fast I move the hands backward.

Though I interrupt the usual movement I violate no law. The watchmaker designed that very thing when it was originally constructed.

Admit the first sentence in Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”, and a miracle is easily possible, or else God made something so great that it escaped the control of its Creator.I doubt if there is a single miracle recorded in the New Testament that is not according to natural law. Take the changing of water into wine. The instantaneous process is supernatural; given a grape seed and a season, and you call the process natural. That is exactly what it does—changes water into wine. Why then should our God be charged with having opposed natural law when He did it instantly, instead of requiring a few weeks for its accomplishment? Health is according to natural law.

When then the wheels of natural law are reversed and a man is sick, who can object if God turn them again to their wonted track and urge the human life ahead? Life is according to natural law.

All nature works together for its origin and maintenance. Death is the reversal of the engine of nature. Who then can object when God again sets in forward motion that which has been momentarily arrested?Dr. P. S. Henson once called attention to the electric wire and the electric current flowing through the same. You would not think there was anything in it, it flows so quietly. But make a break in the wire and cover the end with charcoal and you have kindled an arc light, and then you see there was something there all the while.

The power of God so uniformly flows that men by and by come to believe that there is no power there at all. Let Him make a break in that line of action, and He kindles a light to ages that are dark, and makes manifest His presence and power—a power unsuspected. No wonder Paul wrote to the Corinthians,“The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). A fiction writer has truly said, “Science is compelled to admit a miracle or else confess itself face to face with the inexplicable. It cannot account for life if it deny the miracle. Spontaneous generation is an exploded bubble. It cannot account for the evolution of the mineral into the animal, and the animal into the man, except it admit a miracle.” The missing links are a multitude, and the endeavors of Huxley, Darwin and Harrison to produce them were signal failures. Moses has given us the only ground of the miracle—God! By Him he accounted for the rod turned to a serpent, the plagues falling upon Egypt, and the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night.THE MIRACLE Admit that miracles are not necessarily antagonistic to natural law and we must go a step further in answer to our question, “Did Christ Work Actual Miracles?”In response, two or three things: Miracles are claimed for Christ. The four Gospels make that claim repeatedly. They declare water was turned into wine at His word; they report the healing of the nobleman’s son; they recite the miraculous draft of fishes; they assert the quieting of the tempest; they rehearse the dispossession of the demoniac; they describe the raising of Janus’ daughter; they depict the opening of the eyes of the blind man; the healing of the palsied; the cleansing of the leper; the feeding of the five thousand; the granting of hearing to the deaf and speech to the dumb; the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Above all, each one of them insists that Christ, after three days, rose from the grave. Do you remember what the author of “Quo Vadis” says concerning miracles? By that book we are taken to the earlier century; taught to breathe its atmosphere and live in its surroundings.

Vinicius is returning to health, and recalls the events since the night at Ostrianium, when his jealousy toward the Christ and His religion had burned because Lygia was devoted to both. The author says, “The whole series of thoughts which had come to his head from that time the more astonished him at the superhuman power of that religion which changed the souls of men to their foundations.

He understood that in it there was something uncommon, something which had not been on earth before, and he felt that could it embrace the whole world; could it ingraft on the world its love and charity, an epoch would come recalling that in which, not Jupiter, but Saturn had ruled. He did not dare either to doubt the supernatural origin of Christ, or His resurrection, or the other miracles. The eye witnesses who spoke of them were too trustworthy and despised falsehood too much to let him suppose that they were telling things that had not happened.”Aye, that is the argument that must forever appeal to thinking men. Was John a liar when he reported what he had seen? If so, he was both a fool as well as a knave, for nothing short of a fool would first tell a lie and then die in its defense. Were Peter and Paul falsifiers?

If so, when else in history did falsehood make men of such matchless character and render them so noble as martyrs? Men sometimes go to court and testify to falsehoods, and when they find that they must suffer for the same, they are only too glad if the world will let them off with the admission that they were in error.

These men gladly died in defense of their faith in the supernatural. Paul meets it, not alone with calmness, but with apparent content, if not delight: “I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: “Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day” (2 Timothy 4:6-8). Beloved, such men were neither duped nor deceiving.Miracles are also affirmed by Christ. He said, “All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth”. “I will, be thou clean”. “If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out”? “I go, that I may awake him out of sleep”. “I lay down My life, and I take it up again”, etc.There was not a point in which His miracles were not contested. There was not a possible weakness in them that was not searched out. When men hate you sufficiently to hunt you to your very death, be certain of this, that they will let no faking pass without exposure. On the Eastside in Minneapolis some folks were performing striking feats in the atmosphere of heavy shadows, arrayed in scanty clothing, suggestive at one and the same time of the spook and of another world. But when a crowd from St.

Paul, jumping upon the stage, made a grab, they found real flesh and blood, and the whole deception was exposed to light, to laughter, to derision, to scorn. But where is the man who has shown that the wine made at Cana of Galilee was only water into which some chemical had been secretly dropped, turning its color? Where is the man who has shown that the blind who professed to receive their sight at Christ’s touch were only faking vision? Where is the man who has demonstrated that the deaf, whose ears Christ opened, were still unable to hear? Where is the man who has proven to the world that Lazarus had only swooned and consequently was buried before his time, or that Jesus only fainted and after three days revived? When Paulus attempted such an explanation even infidels laughed.Faith in miracles is the foundation of the Church.This fact was conceded from the very first.

Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, boldly declared,“If Christ be not risen” (and this was the most marvelous of all His miracles) “then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. * * We are of all men most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:14; 1 Corinthians 15:19). Robert Buchanan, known to have no special leaning to orthodoxy, said, “We may follow Mr. Matthew Arnold in his pitiful feats of literary Jesuitry; put all the miraculous business aside in order to throw one last straw of hope to the sinking Church of England. We may potter and quibble about ‘poetry’ and ‘essential’ religion as much or as little as we please; but with the loss of the supernatural pretension perishes the whole fabric of organized Christianity.” A church cannot be safely raised on the foundation of merely human speech or human conduct. Its very weakness will destroy the foundation eventually, and the walls will fall. That is why the Apostle wrote, “Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, even Christ”. God, in order to certify that His Son was more than a man, did these signs and wonders at His hands, and so marvelous were they that a member of the Sanhedrin, a ruler of the Jews, predisposed, as every one of them was against this Man, was compelled to approach Him by saying,“Rabbi, we know that Thou art a Teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that Thou doest, except God be with him” (John 3:2). “Thine arm, O Lord, in days of old Was strong to heal and save; It triumphed o’er disease and death, O’er darkness and the grave; To Thee they went, the blind, the dumb, The palsied and the lame, The leper with his tainted life, The sick with fevered frame. And lo! Thy touch brought life and health; Gave speech and strength and sight; And youth renewed and frenzy calmed Owned Thee, the Lord of light.” That is the foundation of the Church. Depose the miracle and you remove the foundation of the Church and extinguish the light of the world. You may as well “try to demolish Gibraltar with popguns and putty” as to attack this citadel of our faith—the supernatural. The one thing of the centuries so surely attested that no man will be able to successfully dispute it is the power of God manifested in Christ in miracle working.THE ’ PURPOSE That purpose was at least threefold. It evidenced the Deity of Jesus. You will remember that when He performed the miracle of the barley loaves and fishes, the men who saw the miracle that Jesus did, said, “This is of a truth that Prophet that should come into the world” (John 6:14). It was a natural reasoning. Jesus Himself appealed to the Jews,“If I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not. “But if I do, though ye believe not Me, believe the works; that ye may know and believe that the Father is in Me, and I in Him” (John 10:37-38). To John the Baptist’s question,“Art Thou He that should come? * * Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them” (Matthew 11:4; Matthew 11:3). You remember how in Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses, with fond anticipation, returned to his home in Ithaca, but his family did not recognize him; even his wife denied her husband, so changed was he after his absence of twenty years in the hardships and long privations of war. He cast in his mind what to do, and finally called for his bow, so stout that none but himself had ever been able to draw it. Though age had weakened him, to his own surprise, he found it bent to his masterful touch until the bowstring reached his ear. At the sight the wife threw herself into his fond embrace, saying, “I know now that you are my own dear husband Ulysses.”And, beloved, the one thing that makes us certain that Jesus of Nazareth was the very Son of God, is this, that when He walked the earth He was Master of His own creation, and it never failed to bend to His touch or become obedient to His will. The miracle attests that creation’s Master had come.It also expressed the sympathy of Jesus. It is the custom of all those who call the modern miracle into question to emphasize the fact that miracles attested the Deity of Jesus and added authority or weight to His words; but the most of them are silent touching the fact that miracles were ever wrought because the sight of suffering or distress so appealed to the Son of God that He could no more withhold His beneficent power than He could restrain Himself from tender pity.

The glory of Jesus Christ consisted not alone in exhibitions of His Deity, but was equally manifested in the ebullitions of His humanity. At the grave of Lazarus He wept.

No man need be surprised, therefore, when He cried to His friend, fallen under the fierce assault of the last enemy, “Come forth!” He who will may believe that that miracle was meant only to attest the Divinity of Jesus, or add weight to His spoken words; but I am compelled to think that it was the cry of His humane heart calling back to His arms His bosom friend, and causing the hearts of those beautiful sisters—Mary and Martha—to lose their sorrow and leap for joy.Victor Hugo makes Jean Valjean as watchful as the hunted ever are against possible detection on the part of his adversary; but when a driver’s wagon is mired this same man crawls beneath it, and by his Herculean strength releases its wheels, and in the very process publishes his own name. Did Jean Valjean lift that wagon to exhibit his power? Never! but because his tender heart could not “pass by on the other side”, seeing the distress of the stalled man.The Samaritan who ministered to the man on the way to Jericho, binding up his wounds, carrying him to an inn, paying his bills, providing against the future—did he do that that Samaria might have a good name, or that anybody might believe in him? Nay, verily, but because in his breast there beat the heart of a brother. And, if I know the Christ at all, He healed sick men, opened the eyes of the blind, and raised the dead, primarily because His heart was as humane as His character was Divine; His Spirit as compassionate as His Word was potent. Is it not written,“And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and He healed their sick” (Matthew 14:14)? No wonder John wrote,“The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). And that glory was never better manifested than in the miracles that Jesus wrought for the help, health and happiness of men. It is while studying this side of His character we realize that our High Priest can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and are encouraged to“come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help m time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). It attested the saving power of Jesus. To do that was to manifest forth His glory. “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost”; to grant “remission of sins”. They called His Name Jesus because He was to save His people from their sins. When He said to the paralytic, “Thy sins be forgiven thee”, they charged Him with blasphemy, saying, “Who can forgive sins but God”?“And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts? “For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? “But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith He to the sick of the palsy) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. And he arose, and departed to his house” (Matthew 9:4-7). The Father which sent Him therein bore witness to Him, “confirming the Word with signs following” and proving the power to forgive sins by the fact that He could restore bodies. It is no wonder the sentence follows, “And His disciples believed on Him”. God meant that men should be convinced through the senses; that they should accept what they had seen and heard.When John comes to write his first Epistle, he lays claim to attention on the part of his readers by reason of the fact that he was speaking of the things which he had seen with his eyes, and heard with his ears, and handled of the Word of Life. And if the miracle were potent for penitence and furnished the very basis of belief two thousand years ago, who doubts that the revival of the Word’s plain teaching concerning it, and the practice of claiming its promises, would compel men to cry out again as did Peter, “We are unclean”, and to seek His favor who is alike able to say, “Arise, take up thy bed and walk”, or “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee”? Have we forgotten the remark which the many who resorted to Him beyond Jordan made,“John did no miracle, but all things that John spake of this Man were true, and many believed on Him there” (John 10:41-42)? Have we forgotten the result when He raised to life the widow’s son and delivered him to his mother? “There came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, That a great Prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited His people”.He is the One in whom I invite you to put your trust. No sick man ever came to Him but went his way whole. No sinner ever sought Him in penitence and submission but was pardoned and saved. No soul now seeks Him in vain. In very truth, beloved, He seeks you this night for “the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost”. And to-night you may have the privilege if you will put yourself within the power of His touch.I read long ago a report of how King Christian, of Denmark, then eighty-five years of age, but still agile, stood at the corner of the street waiting for an electric car to go by.

Suddenly two little girls, one four years of age and the other five, started to run across the track. A car was bearing down upon them, but they knew it not. Onlookers screamed with terror, so certain did it seem that the little ones were to be crushed beneath the wheels. Just at that moment the old man leaped forward and grasped them by the arms and drew them to a place of safety. A few minutes and the little girls were proudly telling that they had been saved from death by the King.Oh, men and women imperiled infinitely more by the power of sin bearing down upon you, cry to Him for help to-night and through all the ages of eternity you will be telling in Heaven how you were saved with an everlasting salvation, and that by the King of kings, even Christ!