The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it.” Then he left them, got back into the boat and crossed to the other side. [Mark 8: 11 - 13 NIV]
'He sighed deeply.' This short phrase captures the frustration in the heart of the Saviour as he encounters the intransigence of these Pharisees. They are bitterly opposed to everything about Jesus of Nazareth. I loved the human touch in this incident. Jesus often demonstrated that he had supernatural powers and that he possessed deity. He is God in a human body. But this deep sigh reminds me that he is fully human as well as being divine.
Why was Jesus so distressed by this apparently innocent request? They are saying if you want us to believe that you are who you claim to be, we want a dramatic sign. The Pharisees were into the supernatural. We want something really dramatic and spectacular.
This was a trick because they did not for one minute believe that Jesus was the Messiah. So they did not expect him to produce a sign. They were probably looking for a shooting star to appear in the heavens or a comet to hurtle across the sky. However, Jesus made it clear that they would not get the sort of 'sign' they were demanding. In Matthew's Gospel, he adds that there will be an exception - and he refers to his resurrection and compares his rising from the dead after 3 days to the story of Jonah who was in the belly of the great fish for three days before being spewed out alive.
The Pharisees were not influenced by the resurrection. This was greater evidence of who Jesus was than any shooting star or comet. They were determined to reject him. It strikes me that they had ample evidence that Jesus is the Son of God but they chose to ignore this. John's Gospel contains 7 signs which was the name John gave to the miracles. Even though the last of these was the dramatic miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, they remained unconvinced and unimpressed.
There is a danger that we are insisting on the spectacular. Sometimes God does miracles and uses dramatic interventions in human affairs. At other times he speaks in a still small voice. We should not allow any insistence on the spectacular or the dramatic, to present a barrier to us coming to know Jesus as Saviour and Lord. My conversion to faith was remarkably unspectacular but it was real. Satan will use any excuse to blind his followers - and this expectation of a dramatic sign is another red herring from the devil. God shone a bright light from heaven to shake the Jew (Saul of Tarsus) who was persecuting Christians and cause him to see Jesus as the Messiah. God also caused an earthquake to waken the jailer in Philippi from his unbelief. But he spoke to Timothy quietly through two women who played a huge role in his life - his mother and his grandmother. This was probably a very low key affair - no dramatic event such as an earthquake or a blinding light brighter than the midday sun. But this was how God chose to speak to Timothy.
To bring this blog to a close, I want to look at a passage from the Old Testament detailing the story of the prophet Elijah when he was in a poor spiritual state. He was fleeing from a woman - Queen Jezebel who was determined to kill him and Elijah is feeling desperate and he has forgotten that he is serving Yahweh, the powerful God of Israel. He tells God that he has been 'very zealous for the Lord God Almighty and details the low spiritual condition of the nation of Israel. "I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too."
So God intervenes. He starts off dramatically with a powerful wind which tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks. "But the Lord was not in this wind." Then there is an earthquake but the Lord was not in the earthquake. There follows a fire, but again the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire there came a gentle whisper. And Elijah recognised that this was God speaking to him and so he pulled his cloak over his face and went and stood at the mouth of the cave. And God speaks to Elijah in this very still small voice. (1 Kings 19: 9b - 14)
God was speaking to the Jews through Jesus in a small voice and the Pharisees were not listening. They were looking for the hurricane or the earthquake or the fire. Maybe Jesus is speaking to you today and you have not realised that He is speaking because you are looking for something much more dramatic. We need to be ready to hear God speaking to us. He is maybe speaking to you through a verse of a hymn or something a Christian friend has said to you. He is maybe speaking to you through events in your life. God still speaks in 2022. The problem is that we are not listening.
[Photo by Clarisse Meyer on Unsplash.]
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