After Christ teachings, that He must die at the hands of wicked men, and be raised from the dead, came the miracle of the healing of the lunatic son, another glorious work performed by Christ, when His disciples had failed to cast out the devil from that poor man. The scene opens when Jesus arrives and catches the rulers questioning His disciples, because they could not heal the poor young man. Jesus didn't like to see these hypocrites questioning His disciples, because He knew why they were doing it – to mock them for believing on Jesus as Messiah, and to ridicule their impotence to heal this poor man. But Jesus comes and saves the day! He cast out the demon, and rebuked them all for their unbelief. This is a running theme throughout history: mocking the Lord's people in times of distress. A particular example is Nebuchadnezzar's mocking the three Hebrew young men, who refused to bow down and worship his giant idol which he had erected. So too the martyrs of Jesus have been persecuted, mocked, and put to death, even unto this day. Sometimes the Lord rescues them, and sometimes they are cruelly slain. Christ Himself was mocked at Calvary, as He had been telling His people for some time before. It was foretold by David in Psalm 22, what he had learned from the Spirit of Christ. The entire Psalm describes the humiliation of Christ on the cross, and His rescue by God, and exaltation when it was over. Christ had foretold His mocking and shame: "I am a reproach of men, and despised by the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn. They shoot out the lip, they shake their head, saying, He trusted in God that he would deliver him: let him deliver him now!"

The transfiguration of Christ, and the healing of the lunatic son, are well known miracles of Christ. Yet it is little noted that the context of these two miracles is Christ's rejected teaching, that He must die and rise again. Just before the transfiguration, Christ begins to tell His disciples that He must be treated with contempt by His Own people and by the Romans, and then taken out and killed, and then raised again the third day. Peter and the rest of the disciples didn't like that teaching at all. Peter rebuked Christ, and denounced the pending death of Jesus. Peter and the disciples longed for Christ to set up His kingdom and destroy the wicked Romans. The return of a physical kingdom then was one of the things that men embraced, but not God. Think of it: the means of our salvation and everlasting joy were rejected by the disciples of Christ, the very ones who followed Him and believed in Him! But God desired the sacrifice of Jesus, in fact, He brought it to pass, by the hands of wicked men who hated Messiah. Christ Himself, as our High Priest, offered Himself up as God's Lamb to take away the sin of His people. Within a week of their rejecting Christ's teaching, Peter, James, and John were present to observe the transfiguration of Christ on the mountain. They saw Moses & Elijah, two important patriarchs of Israel, conversing with Jesus about His ascension to glory. But God spoke to them all out of the cloud: This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased! Hear ye Him! This was a word of rebuke to the disciples for objecting to Christ's sacrifice on the cross! No matter what the disciples thought, the only Person Whose thoughts matter is Almighty God!

Consider the greatest tragedy of all – the murder of the Lord Jesus. In John 12, just before Christ went to the cross, He declared the distress of His soul at the prospect. Should He pray His Father to save Him from this hour? But for the cause of making a sacrifice He came to this hour! Jesus described why He must die: like a kernel of wheat, unless it falls to the ground and dies, it brings forth no fruit. Christ must die, so that life could multiply unto all His loved ones! Christ here expresses His personal anguish at the prospect of the coming dreadful hour, when He will be punished for our sins laid upon Him. Yet, He knows that it must be done, and that His whole life was an intentional pursuit of this very dark hour. Finally, the Lord Jesus intimates that His death will be by crucifixion, so that all sorts of the world's people might learn the Gospel and be saved. And so, the greatest tragedy is this: that the only perfect man ever, must be murdered by the state, by the will of God, and by Christ's Own will, so that He might be sacrificed as God's pure Lamb, to cleanse and perfect His people from every stain of their sin. Our Lord Jesus suffered both physically and spiritually, with the thorns, the vicious floggings, the humiliation, the mocking, the shame. But the wrath for our sins was also laid upon Him on the cross by God, and He was punished in our place and treated as guilty for us. Christ is the only unguilty, innocent man ever seen in this world! That glorious outcome of the tragedy for us was also foretold by Christ on that horrible night: You now have sorrow, but I will see you again, & your heart shall rejoice, & your joy no man taketh from you!

Even the tragedy of death, God turns to joy, when God's glory is shown to us! When Lazarus was sick, the Lord Jesus tells His disciples that it is all so that Christ the Son of God might be glorified! Christ teaches us that, what is to lost men pointless and unredeemable is, to those who trust in Christ, meant to manifest the glory of Christ to us! Christ deliberately tarries until Lazarus has died, because God had ordained Lazarus to die from his illness. Jesus knew all that, and He intended things to develop as they did, so that we might see His glory in the conquering of death for His loved ones. We ought to take great comfort when death comes to us or our loved ones, knowing that each discrete step along the way was planned by God, to accomplish His good purposes for us, and to reveal His glory to us! Martha told the Savior, "Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother Lazarus had not died!" But God's will and purpose was to demonstrate in Lazarus' death what Christ next tells Martha: "I am the resurrection and the life. He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live! Whoever believes in me shall never die." Can we believe that? Do we believe it? We must trust in Jesus in every discrete step of the way in tragedy, and not question, why didn't God do this instead of that? If Christ had followed Martha's wishes, and healed Lazarus before he died, we would be less sure of His power over death! Thus, tragedies train us to trust in God, and God uses our tragedies to train others to trust in God.

Christ discussed incidents where a tower collapsed and killed many people, and where the tyrant that ruled over them murdered them and used their blood to pollute their sacrifices. Christ warned us not to assume that victims of tragedy are necessarily greater sinners. Israel, and indeed most people today, assume that God blesses the righteous, and so the greater the tragedy, the greater the sin must be. This was the false view for which Job's friends were rebuked. They falsely insisted that God would not have allowed the tragedies experienced by Job, unless Job had committed some secret iniquity against the Lord. Some tragedies, the Lord Jesus instructed us, are warnings of judgment to come for unrepentant sinners. Judgment is sure to fall against the wicked. Rather than speculate about why tragedy falls on other people, we are to realize our own wickedness is sure to be punished one day. Christ assures us that something bad will happen because of our sin, and we ought to seek repentance and forgiveness from the Lamb Who was slain for our crimes. But His disciples couldn't grasp the truth of this, and when they came upon a man born blind, they assumed that either he or his parents had committed some grave sin. But Jesus set them right: sin in that case had nothing to do with it, but tragedy befell the poor man so that the works of God might be seen in him. Indeed, shortly thereafter, Christ performed the great miracle of giving sight to that poor man who was born blind! Nothing like that had ever been seen before! This was a great work given to Christ by His Father, to testify to His bona fides, that Jesus has all the power of God, because He is God!

According to God's Word, God works ALL THINGS after the council of His Will! God has a reason and purpose for every tragedy, but that doesn't mean that we know the why of it all at this time. This month, our nation's support for Israeli Zionism has blown up in our face. Even those who are enthusiastic supporters of Zionist violence and terrorism, couldn't withstand the outrage over Israeli attacks on Christian Palestinians and American citizens. Violent Zionist settlers have been burning fields and houses, assaulting and murdering Palestinians, blocking food aid vehicles from feeding starving people in Gaza, and trying to drive them away, so that the Israelis can seize their homes and fields for themselves. And so in the last month, settlers beat and murdered an American citizen visiting his family in Palestine, yet another church in Gaza was shelled, killing three people, and the historic Christian town of Taybeh, or Ephraim as it is called in the Gospel of John, has been under a sustained attack by settlers, burning homes and cars and fields, and destroying olive trees. The Christian leaders of the town have issued a plea to the world for help against these settler attacks. While at first it looked like US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who has supported the settler terrorism, would ignore the Christian plea for help, it quickly turned out that there are American citizens living in Taybeh who are under assault by the settlers. So yesterday, Huckabee toured the town of Taybeh, and denounced the settler violence as "acts of terror." All of this violence and oppression against believers is, of course, ordained by God for His Own purposes and for the good of His saints.

The horrible flash floods in Texas have claimed almost 300 lives missing or dead. There was no warning, and the shallow rivers in the region are quickly filled to overflowing, roaring down stream and carrying trees and buildings and vehicles with it, as well as animal and human victims. Some will say, that God didn't want this to happen. He was standing by and watching, and couldn't do anything to stop the flooding. But the Bible refutes such nonsense! God works ALL THINGS after the council of His Will! God has a reason and purpose for these floods, but that doesn't mean that we know the why of it all at this time. The Bible teaches that God not only made the weather system and processes, but that God controls them also. Many texts bear this truth out. God sends the rain, the floods, the heat of the sun, earthquakes, storms, the wind, eclipses, droughts, and a host of other meteorological events. In these texts, God takes personal responsibility for bringing all these things to pass. Sometimes God sends these things for judgment and wrath against ungodliness. The global flood that destroyed almost all mankind is but one such incident, where God took personal responsibility for bringing it about. God carries out these things, rarely directly, but overwhelmingly by His providence. God is the ultimate cause of all things that exist or take place! The Psalmist proclaims that the wind, the floods, the lightnings, the fire, the hail, they all fulfill God's word! In the book of Job, both Elihu and God Himself give God the credit as the meticulous cause of whirlwinds, cold, rainstorms, etc., and of them all obeying God's commands.

When Jesus spoke with His friend Martha after the death of her brother Lazarus, she inquired tentatively whether Jesus might ask His Father for Lazarus' life to be restored. Jesus quickly corrected her: I AM the resurrection and the life! Christ is not just powerful enough to raise His people from the grave. He is, rather, resurrection and life itself! His identity itself is resurrection and life. By His almighty power, as God Himself, He raises up all His people who trust in Him. This is because all of life was created by the Son of God. Jesus pushes further: whoever believes on Him, though he were dead, yet shall he live. Whoever lives and believes in Him shall never die. Even in death, His trusting loved ones merely rest in sleep, a rest from which one day, Jesus will awaken us, and we shall never die forever! Everlasting life is here again promised by Jesus. How can God be just and justify sinners? How can the promised judgment for sin be reversed, legally and morally, so that God's promise of wrath is fulfilled against us? In John 10, Jesus described the only method: He should lay down His life for His people, His sheep, whom God had given to Him for safekeeping! But there is an additional duty imposed upon Christ, not only to lay down His life to save His sheep, but also to take up His life again in resurrection. Only in that way can Christ fully and completely save His lost loved ones, by dying in their place, and rising again in vindication and glory to lose none of them, that none of them ever could be snatched away from His saving, strong arms.

In Ephesians 3, Paul describes the mystery of the Gospel, only then revealed in full. That God would save Gentiles as well as Jews, and unite them all together in Christ's church, was a veiled truth until after the Resurrection. But all of this was the eternal purpose, proposed in Christ Jesus as Lord. So by faith in Christ, we all have boldness, and access in confidence to our God. That faith was itself given to us by God through the Holy Ghost. By Christ's blood shed and presented in the holiest place in glory, and being cleansed by that blood, by faith we lay hold upon that boldness and confidence in Christ. Paul insists that those believers faint not because of his own persecutions. Indeed, being bold in Christ in the face of those persecutions is our glory. Paul next prays for them, as members of the family of God in Christ, that according to His riches in glory, they would be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man. Paul seeks that Christ might dwell in our hearts by faith, and we ourselves rooted and grounded in the love of Christ, so that we might be able to comprehend, with all the saints, the infinite greatness of the love of Christ. Oh, how we need to grasp the truth of Christ dwelling in our hearts, and believe it is so! It is the unity of the Lord's people by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, which knits us together with Christ, and the Father, and with each other, that we may all be one in Christ! Oh, that we would know the love of Christ, which naturally cannot be known, but by His Spirit in us, and that we would be filled with the fullness of God Himself! In a real sense, the saints are all "taken over" by the Spirit of Christ in us.

In Philippians 1, Paul describes how his persecution advances the Gospel! In his bondage, he displays the Gospel message even in the palace, and its spread is thereby furthered. Notice that this is the opposite of what false teachers preach. The Gospel is not preached by violence by believers, but rather by violence AGAINST believers! Further, Paul's boldness induces boldness in other Gospel preachers! Paul exclaimed that "many waxing confident by my bonds, are much more bold to speak the word without fear." Some people even preached the Gospel to hurt Paul, but he rejoiced in that also. Paul rejoiced in every way that Christ was preached. Rather than shutting down the Gospel message by jailing Paul, instead the Gospel message exploded. Paul expected to be released from his bonds, due to the saints' prayers for him, and the further supply of the Holy Ghost. Paul had an earnest expectation, that he wouldn't be ashamed of anything, but rather that in all boldness, as usual, but now more so, Christ would be magnified in Paul's body, whether in life, or in death. Paul knew he would not be ashamed in his suffering for his faithfulness to Christ and Gospel preaching. It would not, and could never be, in vain. The Gospel preaching could never fail to work God's will in the hearts of the hearers. In Paul's body, Christ would be magnified, whether in Paul's release, or in his death at the hands of his persecutors. Either way, Paul would be delivered from the wrath of wicked men. This makes Paul's dilemma greater, because he wins either way, in life, or in dying. Paul realizes that should he die, he would be instantly with Christ, and what joy that would be!