5
And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few
sick folk, and healed them.
It
is important to note that when something should not be done or if it would not
be appropriate to do it God has it written in a way that implies He was unable
to do it. So, for the lazy Bible student this can be very confusing but it
indicates a plan, forethought, and a way that God has in mind how things are to
be done. See the following verses, as John Gill pointed out;
Genesis
19:22 Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do any thing till thou be come
thither. Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar.
Jeremiah
44:22 So that the LORD could no longer bear, because of the evil of your
doings, and because of the abominations which ye have committed; therefore is
your land a desolation, and an astonishment, and a curse, without an
inhabitant, as at this day.
God’s
response is already figured out. He’s not reacting to events. He knows events
beforehand and knows how He will see His will be done.
In
the following verse it is not to be imagined that Joseph’s brothers were
physically prevented from speaking peaceably to him but that their response to
their father’s favoritism influenced their behavior.
Genesis
37:4 And when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his
brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him.
See
here a parallel verse to Mark 6:5;
Matthew
13:58 And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.
There
are times, though, when Jesus worked when the people’s faith wasn’t an issue.
This is reported to prove a point to us. We complain that God isn’t doing
enough for us and we don’t examine our unbelief. It is one thing to receive a
negative response to our prayers because God’s will is on a different tack. It
is another entirely not to receive a positive response to our prayers to God
because we really don’t believe. Many Christians have more faith in their faith
than they do in God. We often hear about the power of prayer when what is
really only relevant is the power of the one to whom we pray.
Mark
9: 23 Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to
him that believeth. 24 And straightway the father of the child cried out, and
said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.
Always
praying in His will, according to the Bible, keeping the idea of eternity in
our hearts;
1
John 5:14 ¶ And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any
thing according to his will, he heareth us: 15 And if we know that he hear us,
whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.
I
think we can safely assume that a new Mercedes convertible if you can only
afford a Nissan Centra or that your 95 year old body will start working like a
20 year old’s is not part of God’s plan. Sometimes unbelief is based on pure
selfishness and unreasonable expectations. In that case God can’t help because
it would go against His eternal purpose, His will for your life, or death,
whatever the case may be. Does what you want line up with what God wants for
you?
6
And he marvelled because of their unbelief. And he went round about the
villages, teaching.
Unbelief
limits God by His own rules. If you refuse to believe He will not honor
unbelief.
Psalm
78:40 ¶ How oft did they provoke him in the wilderness, and grieve him in the
desert! 41 Yea, they turned back and tempted God, and limited the Holy One of
Israel.
Mark
5:36 As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, he saith unto the ruler
of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe.
I
would imagine that God does marvel at mankind’s unbelief. There are an infinite
number of reasons to see His hand in all of creation. It is a mathematical
impossibility that life could have happened by chance on earth which even
unbeliever Francis Crick, one of the co-founders of the DNA helix admits in his
book “Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature”. He explains that life could not have
originated on earth by random chance and believes the cop-out like militant
atheist Richard Dawkins that life was “seeded” here from somewhere else in a
process called Panspermia, perhaps with a seed of life carried on the “solar
winds”.
However,
paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee, in their book “Rare
Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe” point out that life
probably couldn’t have randomly occurred anywhere but earth because of
conditions so unique here. So, there you go. It couldn’t happen here without
God and it probably couldn’t happen anywhere else so what are we left with?
Can
you just see God marveling at unbelief?
Andrew
Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause point out in “Why God Won’t Go Away:
Brain Science and the Biology of Belief” that a belief in God seems to be
“hard-wired” into the human consciousness. They then go on to guess why that
would be from an evolutionary, atheistic perspective.
Duh.
Underscoring
the doctrine found in the first three chapters of Genesis without meaning to do
so, William R. Clark in his “Sex and the Origins of Death” tries vainly to
understand why there is death as he admits that death is not by necessity a
part of the definition of biological life. Can you picture God marveling at
Clark’s unbelief when God explained why the very foreign idea of death came
into the world in the first three chapters of Genesis?
What’s
it going to take for these people to see the truth found in the Bible? Perhaps
the “White Throne Judgment” and a lake of unquenchable fire?
Skeptics
and scoffers, there is no point in arguing with me. I have these books. I’ve
read them. I know what they say. Save it for someone who is impressed with your
pseudo-intellectual view of the meaningless of life and the randomness of
existence. I’m not buying what you’re selling. It’s just sad that children in
public school and young people in college have to have their senses assaulted
with this non-scientific nonsense paid for by government confiscatory taxation.
It’s not amazing that teenagers kill themselves or go on killing rampages or
suffer depression and mental illness. It’s amazing that more of them don’t with
this garbage crammed into their heads, that they are nothing but mere, random
accidents of nature, events in space-time with no more meaning or purpose than
a rock.
God
is marveling at mankind’s unbelief. So am I.
No comments:
Post a Comment