My brother’s son is a medical doctor. While at medical school, a professor told the prospective doctors that science still technically cannot explain how the healing of patients takes place after they got medical treatments. The only thing they do know is that their prescribed medical treatments create the conditions that are conducive for healing to take place, but how the healing process actually happens, scientists actually don’t know – science cannot explain that process in detail. It remains a mystery. Is this not the miracle Jesus (God) at work in conjunction with the medical scientist? Healings from medical treatments, therefore, are also miracles! Maybe we should define science differently? Currently healing, which cannot be explained, is viewed as science and is therefore excluded from the miracle healing powers of Jesus. Should we ask Lee Strobel to investigate? Whatever the outcome, Jesus is not an intellectual object needed to be proved. It is an heart, relationship issue. I take it in faith.

Yet in the Gospel of John, written several decades later, Jesus’ ministry is largely set in Jerusalem, Jesus is very open about his divinity, never or rarely refers to the “Kingdom of God”, never speaks in parables but in long discourses, and the time period from his baptism to his death spans three years. In the Synoptics, Jesus seems to cast out (exorcise) demons in practically every town he passes through, yet not one exorcism is mentioned in the Gospel of John. Not one.

And conservative Christians want us to accept the historical reliability of these ancient texts???

Get serious.

Yes, and as I like to say, “Pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed.” Your family has been “blessed” with both.
Philip

Hebrews 11:6 says, ““And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” I believe this verse wholeheartedly but I must trust God’s definition of “reward” instead of my own. In my daughter’s case, reward involved a miraculous physical healing. In my case, God’s reward results in learning to depend on God in my weakness; equally miraculous if you knew me well.

Thank you for your post!

That’s it. And they only did it three times. So the act of raising someone from the dead would have been seen as a very, very big deal. It was not like healing someone of a disease or casting out demons. Lots of people, it seems, could do those miracles. Nope, raising someone from the dead was the big kahuna of all miracles! Is there any instance in the Bible of a false prophet or a prophet of another god raising the dead?

In the Gospel of John chapter 11, we are told that Lazarus had been dead for four days. His body was decomposing to the point that he stunk. Lazarus death and burial were very public events. His tomb was a known location. Many Jews had come to mourn with Mary and Martha and some of them were wondering why the great miracle worker, Jesus, had not come and healed his friend Lazarus; essentially blaming Jesus for letting Lazarus die.

Let’s step back and look at the facts asserted in this passage: Only two OT prophets had raised people from the dead, and these two prophets were considered probably the two greatest Jewish prophets of all time: Elijah and Elisha. If this story is true, the supernatural powers of Jesus were on par with the supernatural powers of the greatest Jewish prophets of all time! If this event really did occur, it should have shocked the Jewish people to their very core—a new Elijah was among them! This event must have been the most shocking event to have occurred in the lives of every living Jewish man and woman on the planet. The news of this event would have spread to every Jewish community across the globe.

And yet…Paul, a devout and highly educated Jew, says not one word about it. Not one. Not in his epistles; not in the Book of Acts. Think about that. What would be the most powerful sign to the Jews living in Asia Minor and Greece—the very people to whom Paul was preaching and attempting to convert—to support the claim that Jesus of Nazareth himself had been raised from the dead? Answer: The very public, very well documented raising from the dead of Lazarus of Bethany by Jesus!

But nope. No mention of this great miracle by Paul. (A review of Paul’s epistles indicates that Paul seems to have known very little if anything about the historical Jesus. Read here.)

And there is one more very, very odd thing about the Raising-of-Lazarus-from-the-Dead Miracle: the author of the Gospel of John, the very last gospel to be written, is the only gospel author to mention this amazing miracle! The authors of Mark, Matthew, and Luke say NOTHING about the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Nothing…

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We know much about the mechanics of the world (hard sciences and life sciences offer much insight into things which remained a mystery since the dawn of human history), yet we still can not explain precisely how ANYTHING actually is. In short, it’s because what we see is the creation of God. God who told reluctant Moses to refer to Him simply as I AM.

But that may not be much comfort to people who endure hardship and loss, for whom each day is a struggle and the testament of faith is by the very act of living and hoping for that which is yet unseen.

For all of us who know of the scorn that comes from a world that is satisfied only with the here and now, and the sorrow of loss, Paul’s words of encouragement to the Hebrews is the best summary of what we can expect as Christians:

Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning;[a] they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.

These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect. – Hebrews 11: 35-40

May we be given the grace of God and the blessing of patience. Wait on God, because He does not forget those who love Him.