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Chosen no: R-5103 a, from: 1912 Year. |
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"He Doeth All Things Well"
--OCTOBER
27.--MARK 7:31-8:10.--
"He hath done all things well: He maketh both
the
deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak."-- MARK 7: 37.
IN PREVIOUS STUDIES we have noted the fact that
Jesus invariably, in connection with His miracles, impressed the healed ones in
particular, and all the witnesses in general, with the fact that the healing
power was Divine, thus to establish faith in God. Today's lesson gives a
special illustration along this line. A person was brought to the Savior to
heal who was deaf and who had an impediment in his speech. They besought Him
that He would lay hands on him.
From this it seems evident that most of the
miracles were performed by the laying on of hands, although the record also is
that some were healed by touching Jesus or touching His garments. In the latter
case it is evident that the healed person exercised faith, otherwise he would
not have touched the garment in hope of healing. In another case we read that
Jesus could not do many mighty works at a certain place on account of their
unbelief. Hence, willingly or unwillingly, the power of healing was associated
with the exercise of faith; it was either on the part of the sick, or for him
by his friends.
The instance under consideration is peculiar.
(1) Because Jesus took the man away from the multitude and healed him
privately; and (2) it is peculiar as to the means used. He put His fingers into
the man's ears, as though to start some life current through them; then He spat
and touched the man's tongue. We cannot suppose that the Master's power was
limited to these means, when on other occasions He exercised other means. It seems
preferable to understand that these methods were used in order to attract the
man's attention and assist him in the exercise of faith.
As the man could not hear, nothing said to him
could explain the situation; he could see the spitting, he could feel the
touch, he understood what was going on, and incidentally the healing of his
person. These matters meant the submission of his mind, or the exercise of a
degree of faith. Additionally, after having given those lessons, and while the
man still looked at Him, Jesus looked up to Heaven, and thus the patient had a
third lesson on the subject, namely, that the power for his cure was expected
from God. Jesus sighed, and said, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be
opened," and immediately the man's ears were opened and the difficulty
of his speech was gone.
The statement that Jesus sighed is worthy of
note; we can only surmise that it indicated His deep sympathy with the man
before Him and with the groaning creation in general. We remember another
occasion on which it was said that Jesus "groaned in spirit." That
was when He stood by the tomb of His friend Lazarus, and saw Mary weeping and
the Jews weeping with her; "He groaned in spirit and was troubled,"
and wept also. The general lesson seems to be that He was
TOUCHED WITH
A FEELING OF MAN'S INFIRMITIES,
as had been prophesied. The fact is, He was
perfect-- He did not have an imperfect body with aches and pains and blemishes,
such as other men have, but this did not make Him cold and unsympathetic,
rather the reverse. His perfect mind would make all His sensibilities more
active than ours; His sympathy would be stronger, His sense of pain keener. We,
as a fallen race, have become so accustomed to many of our surroundings that
they are commonplace and we are inclined to consider them natural--forgetting
that the natural order of man would [R5104 :
page 295] be the perfect order, and that the blemished state is the
unnatural.
In yet another way may we suppose our Master was
touched with a feeling of our infirmities, namely, by reason of His losing
vitality on the occasion of each miracle. Is not this the meaning of the
Scripture which declares that "He poured out His soul unto death"? Daily,
hourly, His vitality was being exhausted in the healing, blessing, comforting
and instructing of those with whom He was in contact. We have a very clear
expression on this very subject, in the case of the poor woman who had an issue
of blood for years, and who quietly and unostentatiously touched the hem of His
garment, saying within herself, "If I may but touch His garment, I shall
be healed." She was healed instantly, and Jesus turned Himself about and
asked, "Who touched Me?" for He perceived that virtue, vitality, had
gone out of Him.
This thought, that the Master was not merely
using a Divine power as an Agent of God, but that He was using up His physical
power for man's relief, should properly bring our hearts into very close touch
and sympathy with Him, and give us that much clearer view of [R5104 : page 296] the Savior's love, and that
much better foundation for confidence in Him in respect to all our affairs.
In the miracle under consideration in this
lesson, our Lord's sigh may also have been, as with us, an evidence of physical
weakness--the result of His bestowing of His vitality and energy in the cure of
the patient. We are not to think of the death of Jesus, therefore, as having
been entirely accomplished at Calvary. Rather
are we to understand that it began at His consecration, at thirty years of age,
at Jordan, and that it
continued day after day, and year after year, and merely culminated and was
finished at Calvary.
The day before His crucifixion our Lord
intimated this. Speaking of His consecration unto death, He said, "My soul
is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; I have a baptism to be baptized with,
and how am I straitened until it be accomplished!" It was accomplished
fully the following day, on Calvary, when He
cried, "It is finished!" His baptism into death was accomplished.
"HE
DOETH ALL THINGS WELL"
It is following the account of this miracle that
we read that the multitude declared the words of our text. We are not, however,
to understand that merely this one healing was the basis of their comment, for
the account of these same instances by St. Matthew
(15:29-31) tells of great multitudes gathered, having with them many
lame, blind, dumb and maimed and many others, and they cast them down at His
feet, and He healed them, insomuch that the multitudes wondered when they saw
the dumb speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk and the blind to see,
and they glorified the God of Israel.
"MANIFESTED
FORTH HIS GLORY"
Let us never lose sight of the great central
thought connected with our Lord's miracles. His mission was not to heal the
sick and to cast out devils, but to "give His life a ransom for all, to be
testified in due time." The secondary feature of His work was the calling
of the "Israelites indeed" to be His footstep followers, who would be
received of the Father and begotten of the Holy Spirit, at and after Pentecost.
The miracles and cures performed were merely incidentals and not His real work.
They were incidental in the sense that they were illustrations on a small scale
of the great work which His Kingdom will accomplish during the thousand years
of His reign. Then "all the blind eyes shall be opened and all the deaf ears
shall be unstopped."
It would have been a still greater and grander
work for Jesus to have expounded the Divine Plan, and to have opened the eyes
of the understanding of the people, and their deaf ears; but this work could
not be accomplished to any extent until after He had ascended up on high, and
had appropriated the merit of His sacrifice to the justification of believers.
Hence it was that Jesus said to His disciples, "Greater works than these
shall ye do, because I go to My Father."
And so it is today that the followers of Jesus
are permitted to do greater things than He did, greater than any of those
miracles, because it is surely a greater miracle to open the mental eyes than
to open the physical; to unstop the mental ears is more wonderful than to open
the physical ears; to cause the dumb to sing praises to God in the spirit of
their minds is still greater work than the giving of natural speech. It is not
that we can do greater works than Jesus of ourselves, nor that we could do as
great, for without Him we could do nothing. As it was Jesus who did the cures
accomplished by His Apostles when He sent them forth to heal the sick and to
cast out devils, so it is Jesus now who is doing these greater things through
His consecrated people.
ANOTHER
MULTITUDE MIRACULOUSLY FED
The account in the conclusion of this lesson, of
the feeding of four thousand people with seven loaves, and the taking up of
seven hampers of fragments, was another manifestation of Jesus' power, or as He
would express it, of the Divine power in Him. When the five thousand were fed,
five loaves and two fishes were used, and they were gotten from a small boy. In
this case the disciples themselves had seven loaves, and gave their all for the
feeding of the multitude, and all had sufficient; and the fragments, according
to the Master's direction, were again collected.
It is worthy of note that in both cases the
Master displayed frugality and encouraged economy on the part of His followers.
No doubt it would have been just as easy for Him to have created more delicate
viands and in great variety. The loaves used then were the same as are used in Palestine today by the
natives; they are about the size of our large buns and are made of the entire
wheat, ground. Many of the strong natives of Egypt
and Palestine
seem to live almost exclusively on this bread, about two such small loaves
constituting a meal. Quite possibly some of us would find ourselves equally
healthy and strong on similarly plain food. It is for us to exercise faith in
God and to partake of our daily bread with grateful hearts; there will be a
blessing in it, however plain.
W.T. R-5103a : page 295 - 1912r