Passage
I would like to dedicate this late post to Daylight Savings Time, which is evil and robbed me of an hour of sleep last night.
Long passage tonight! (I did not do a good job of evenly distributing these.) To be fair, though, this is all one story. Man asks Jesus to save his daughter. Jesus comes. Woman is saved along the way. Girl is dead. Jesus saves girl.
And from the girl's perspective, she did drown. I continue to think about faith and trust. The girl suffered; she died, she was sick, and God could have prevented all of that. Jesus did save her, but he was delayed along the way because He chose to save another woman. And part of me wants to take a rather trite approach to this, and say that God isn't saving you because there is a bigger plan and be patient, but that isn't really the case. Yes, disease happens, but God is still in charge of that. God could have delayed her death until after Jesus arrived, to cut off some of the pain.
Well, I suppose it depends on how sick she was. Maybe her death was easier, at least for a little while, than suffering from whatever sickness she had. But again, Jesus could have prevented her from having that illness, couldn't he? There is still that underlying question. Jesus was able to heal the woman and the girl, but he delayed saving the girl because of the woman. If I believe in an all-mighty God--and I do, because faith isn't really my issue--then I have to accept that Jesus could have been (or God, in this case, could have handled) both at the same time. Jesus was physically limited by time, but God isn't. I can't look at my "storms" and think that God is delayed because He is dealing with someone else. That doesn't follow the idea of an all-mighty God.
So why wait? Why couldn't both have been done? One might be to test Jairus, I suppose; I don't like the idea of testing parents by hurting their kids, but it isn't like that wasn't a precedent before (see: Abraham and Isaac, that one war general's daughter in Judges). Would Jairus still have faith when things were lost? That's not fair to the daughter, but maybe sometimes you are tested, and sometimes you are the instruments of the test. (And things weren't fair to Isaac or that general's daughter either, particularly her.) Or maybe Jesus wanted to show off to the crowd. Maybe lots of other things.
I can be upset about the girl and for the girl. I can be upset about me. But I guess it might be selfish, to assume that one is being hurt only for their sake. I once heard that if we knew everything God knew, we would decide to do what He is doing. Now, I'm maybe a little more selfish than God, so I don't really like that little saying, but I am blinded by myself. I don't think it's fair. But neither is salvation, I suppose.
C'est la vie.
No comments:
Post a Comment