A day in the Life

 Moving into Mark 5, we have the opportunity to narrow in on just a couple of stories from Jesus' life that stand out. This is one of the features we see with the accounts of Jesus' life. They aren't autobiographies. They don't contain a lot of rich details that you might get if you were to read a modern day autobiography. In fact, that they only cover about three years generally is somewhat remarkable. Modern day biographies look at significant events in the life of the person begin portrayed, and really seem to dive into them. But to do this, they take pages and pages to describe everything.

So when we come to the accounts of Jesus' life, the details may seem somewhat lacking. But that is where we remember the reason behind these accounts. They are not to give blow by blow accounts of everything Jesus did. In fact, when John wrote his account, he makes a note that if he were to describe everything that Jesus did, it would fill several books. John wrote so that people would read and believe in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and would therefore have life in his name. And that really gets to the point of the stories.

So when you read Mark 5, and you see the account of the demon possessed man, as well as the two women Jesus heals, it's great to see how remarkable these miracles are. We often will want to see God do something similar in our lives. We read the miracles of the Bible and wonder why God doesn't do these things more often. After all, wouldn't people believe if they saw something unexplained? Yet, the biblical account also reveals a bit about what people believe after they see a miracle.

Many of Jesus' miracles were explained away with things like, He has a demon. Shoot, in the case of raising Lazarus, the leaders even tried to put Lazarus back to death because they didn't want to believe the miracle. The people coming out of Egypt saw God's mighty hand at work, and about a month later, doubted that God would take care of them. In all of these instances, we see that the miracles actually created more of an obstacle to faith than serving as a faith-building event.

Jesus would even say that his resurrection would be something that would not be believed. And yet, through the Spirit's work, there are those who hear the stories and believe that God can do such things, and did such things. These stories of miracles aren't to inspire us to greater faith so that God can do miracles around us. Rather, it's to inspire us to believe Jesus to be who he says he is. And then, by that believing, we have life.

May you be led to a greater belief that Jesus is the one who gives you life as you read today!