John 4:43-54
Jesus Miraculously Heals an Official’s Son
43 After the two days he left for Galilee. 44 (Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country.) 45 When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, for they also had been there.
46 Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. 47 When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.
48 “Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”
49 The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”
50 “Go,” Jesus replied, “your son will live.”
The man took Jesus at his word and departed. 51 While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living. 52 When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “Yesterday, at one in the afternoon, the fever left him.”
53 Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he and his whole household believed.
54 This was the second sign Jesus performed after coming from Judea to Galilee.
This weekend I watched the Miracles of Lourdes on Sixty Minutes...The Lady of Lourdes, a title for Mother Mary, is a most popular place for believers...On February 11, 1858 a young French peasant girl named Bernadette was gathering firewood with her sister and Mary appeared to her...The lady asked her to go back to the Grotto and revealed herself as the Immaculate Conception...Due to Bernadette's lack of education she later learned that this woman was Mary who had an Immaculate Conception and is the Mother of Jesus...
I was inspired by Jesus and our Father for this place in France...People travel all over the world to go there and be inspired and grow their faith and be healed by Mother Mary...Jesus' Mother, a virgin, had this Child of all Child's named Jesus, the Son of God...
God does miracles in some odd and strange places, and Lourdes seems to be one of them...As Peter Kreeft once said, it seems that God doesn't want to do a lot of miracles or maybe doesn't want to do miracles, but does them ever so often...At anytime our Father could heal the entire world of illness, but chooses not to...Just as Jesus could have healed everyone in Israel when He walked the earth, but did not...As in Lourdes everyone is not healed but there have been seventy very well documented unexplained miracles in Lourdes, France...
Maybe it is too much for our minds to believe that God and Jesus can perform miracles...Maybe our thoughts are not in the right mindset and earthly things get in our way to believe a miracle can happen...But seventy documented miracles are in Lourdes...And Lourdes has a medical and formal process they go through for years before claiming a miracle a miracle...Miracles show us there is another World and earth and the universe is not the whole show...There are things that are Spiritual, that are Divine...There are things that are sacred and holy - and they are where miracles come from...
The rules of nature can be broken and were when Creation happened by God...So God or His Son at anytime can break nature's law and change it and that is what we call a miracle...C. S. Lewis wrote this about miracles..."If Naturalism is true, then we do know in advance that miracles are impossible: nothing can come into Nature from the outside because there is nothing outside to come in, Nature being everything.”...This is simply a case of begging the question (assuming what one wants to prove)...If naturalism is the “whole show,” then everything, even our reasoning process, can be explained from within the whole system of nature...But then it is difficult to see how our knowledge can be anything other than the result of natural processes...So why should we assume that naturalism is true?...After all, we have good reasons to believe that our experience of reasoning, moral oughtness, and beauty point to transcendent realities."...