Hello again!
This is what God gave me today in His word:
And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there. In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once. When the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, “How did the fig tree wither at once?” (Matthew 21:17-20)
`Sometimes we’re like the disciples: blind to the miracles going on in front of us. The disciples no doubt heard Jesus curse the fruit tree, and they obviously saw it wither. You’d think they’d be able to draw a connection, right? The people in Heaven probably ask the same questions of us, when we don’t bother to look at the cause of the miracle, but instead admire the miracle itself.
Have you ever found a five dollar bill lying on the ground somewhere, and thought how lucky you were that you found it before anyone else? Well Christians have a word for that: providence. There is no such thing as good or bad luck, those are just figments of our imagination that we humans created in an attempt to dumb down God’s supreme providence into something we can more easily understand. We tend to do the same thing with miracles; dumb them down into “luck”. For example, a car crash that everyone would think to be fatal, but which leaves everyone involved alive, might be seen as luck, rather than God’s hand at work.
Likewise, we see the disciples attempting to understand why the fig tree withered as quickly as it did. You can almost see their minds taking into account rain fall, irrigation, the current temperature, and trying to fathom a reasonable explanation. Yet there is no reasonable explanation for some things, aside from God’s providence.
When Jesus was dying for everyone’s sins, people may well have thought it was simply “bad luck” that this poor man had been caught. Yet even then, even when He turned His face away from His own Son, and allowed Him to die for all of our sins, He was working out everything for our good and His glory.–We need to stop focusing so much on “good luck”, and start praising the one, God almighty, whose hand of direction, guidance, and protection is on us even now.
You are Loved!
Joshua Cleveland
