Healing From Proof Sickness

Jesus said to him, "Go; your son lives." The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started off. (John 4:50)

John is writing this book to show us what real, saving, vibrant belief looks like. Every page of this book is filled with illustrations, comments, warnings and revelations about both the right kind of belief and the counterfeit belief that fails to connect with the heart of God.

This story introduces a man who started out with the weakly sort of belief but when exposed by the words of Jesus quickly dropped it in favor of real belief that saved his own son. If I want to do the same I need to follow the example of this man and see what he did that I could emulate.

Evidently he was hoping that there would be something to prop up his faith before he would invest more trust Jesus. He wanted Jesus to come to his house first; maybe that was the first sign he wanted to see. Maybe that would be the first step to prove to him that Jesus cared enough to even want to help him. Interestingly the gospels are filled with stories where Jesus easily complied with other people's requests to come to their homes to heal someone, so why did Jesus take a completely different approach with this man? Why was it so important to Him that this man trust Him without Him showing up at the son's bedside to heal him personally?

It has to go back to issues of the heart. The only reasonable explanation why Jesus seemed to treat one person so different than the next in a similar situation is that Jesus was far more concerned with eliciting trust and faith from their heart than He was in performing a miracle for them. The difference had more to do with where a person was in relation to their belief in Him more than the practical logistics of whether He could get to their house or not. And think about this for a moment: every single person that Jesus healed or even raised from the dead during His earthly ministry just turned around and died later on anyway. All of the physical healing and resurrecting He did for people all ended in death eventually, so what was the point of it all?

Jesus did not come to earth primarily to exhibit some miracles to impress us into believing that He has more power than we have. Satan also has more physical power than any of us have and he is eager to exploit that with supernatural signs whenever it furthers his plans to deceive us. It is far too easy to assume, without sufficient skepticism, that if miracles are involved then credibility must automatically follow. This is a very dangerous trap that millions of people have fallen into or even grown up within already. When God works miracles the true purpose for them may often be very different than the assumptions that we may have about them.

Generally people tend to view miracles, healings, supernatural manifestations and the like as proofs that are very beneficial for soliciting the faith of unbelievers. It is true that God has used miracles all throughout history as one of the means of helping people on their journey toward a saving relationship with Him. But most of the time we put far too much faith in miracles themselves than we do in the heart of the Father from which some of these miracles come. In essence, we are often secretly more interested in benefiting from a good miracle in our lives much more than in deepening our relationship and dependence and submission to the authority of the God behind the miracle.

Satan often uses miracles as a means of inducing deeper deception in the hearts of millions who are more eager to experience the excitement of the supernatural in their lives than they are in humbly submitting to a total dependence on God and willing obedience to His laws. Sadly most of our pleas for miracles in our lives are based primarily on selfish desires to relieve discomfort but with not much interest in surrendering control over our own future or direction. We are afraid to give up our mistaken ideas about God that discolor our perceptions of how He feels about us, but we still want to benefit from the power that we know He has to fix our problems. So we look for ways to manipulate Him into doing things for us without being willing to trust His heart and allow Him full access to our own.

But God is not in the helping business but is totally dedicated to the saving business. And salvation is far more concerned with the healing of our souls and our relationships than it is with the repair of our bodies that are destined for the grave anyway. That is not to say that God has no interest in our physical conditions – He is very concerned about that. But that is not the most important part of our lives despite how we feel to the contrary. The real problem is that we seldom see where our real problem is – if that makes sense. God wants to use things that happen in the external realm of our lives to convey far more important messages of love and grace and truth to the vastly more vital part of our makeup – our hearts, our souls and our attitude and relationship with Him.

One reason God is interested in our externals, our bodies, our mundane lives is because these things have so much affect on how we view Him. He has to relate to us indirectly many times through the only things we are paying attention to in order to draw our attention in another direction that we are not presently even aware of at the moment. That is one reason why Jesus dealt differently with different people in similar situations, because each of those people needed different methods or responses according to what was going on under the surface in their own hearts.

This man evidently needed this stern confrontation by Jesus to expose to his own awareness the weakness of his faith and the deceptions that were smothering his spirit and preventing him from trusting the heart of Jesus to care about his son. Jesus was directly addressing the far more vital issues that were preventing this man from stepping into a saving relationship with Him and He wanted to nudge this man's heart to wake up and smell the roses instead of focusing on the negatives. Jesus could heal a body in a heartbeat without any problem; but drawing a person into a healthy state of belief and simple trust was a far greater challenge. But this latter goal was the focus of every interaction that Jesus had with people all throughout His life.

In this case His challenge to the man that exposed this disbelieving mindset was effective and the man instantly realized that what he thought was faith was actually doubt disguised as belief. As soon as he realized how fake his faith had been he dropped it like a hot potato and immediately embraced the kind of faith that Jesus was seeking to inspire in his heart. Jesus was challenging this man to trust God's heart more than what God could do for him externally and the man responded in brokenness and confession of his weak faith. He may not have expressed it clearly in his words, but in his mind he realized that he had come with preconditions attached to his willingness to trust Jesus and these very conditions were deadly when it came to exercising saving faith.

When this man choose to trust Jesus fully instead of wanting things to happen his own way, Jesus still pressed him to see how he would respond. Instead of accommodating the man's request to come to his house, which was actually part of the preconditions that would have undermined his new faith, Jesus told the man that the miracle was already in place. It as now up to the man as to whether he was willing to trust the heart of Jesus as well as believe in His identity enough to act on his new faith, or whether he would falter and sink back into his former mindset and insist on something more tangible before he would fully believe.

Fortunately this man chose to believe in Jesus and discarded his unbelief by seizing on the words of Jesus and investing all of his confidence in the words alone without asking for any evidence whatsoever. Jesus had just warned him of the dangers of wanting to see signs and wonders before being willing to believe and this man took those warnings to heart. He turned away from his unbelief and invested all his hope and trust in the words and heart of Jesus. As a result the text says that he then demonstrated his faith by starting off toward home.

These simple words have far more significance than appears at first glance. These words speak volumes about the kind of new belief that this man was now choosing to exercise. Jesus had just refused to go home with him per his request, but instead challenged the man to trust His heart and His word. The man took the challenge and acted on it in accordance with his faith, so much so that he did not even hurry home in anguish and fear and haste as he had come the other direction. As a result his own heart was filled with an indescribable peace and was suddenly filled with love and joy and feelings he had never enjoyed before. The presence of Jesus actually was going home with him as he had requested even though Jesus had not complied with his demands externally. And this inner presence was far more effective in accomplishing the work that God wanted to do in his life than Jesus' physical presence might have been.

The rest of the story is almost an anticlimax from this point on. It is almost like the writer simply needs to fill in the footnotes so that it can be confirmed that his man made the right choice in acting on the word of Jesus. For this story is much more than just about the healing of a boy. This story is about the healing of the heart of a royal official from the oppression of unbelief that plagues nearly all of us each day. It is the story of the capture of a man's heart and a miracle of transforming grace in the mind and life of a person who had been trapped in a sickness even worse than his son was experiencing. Jesus was more interested in healing this man's heart, and the healing of his son was only a step in the process of accomplishing that.

All of Jesus' miracles were really more focused on capturing people's hearts than they were to demonstrate that He had supernatural power. Displaying the ability to work miracles can be used for good or for evil. We, just like this man so long ago, are far too vulnerable to the allure of signs and wonders and miracles to hang our faith on. But that kind of faith is easily manipulated by the enemy who can easily exploit those desires to built our faith on forces and ideas that are actually very subtle counterfeits of the truth. The Bible is clear that both good and evil forces are quite capable of working miracles and the basis of signs and wonders is a dangerous foundation to bank our lives on.

A number of mature Christians have observed that they have noticed how many times new believers often seem to have more miracles happen in their lives than people who have lived in close relationship to God for many years. It almost sounds strange to some and even suspicious, but it also may tell us something important about how God relates to His children. Some people can be influenced to make a move toward trust in God through the means of signs and wonders and miracles and come to trust God with their lives and begin to grow in spiritual maturity. But it seems to be analogous to the 'miracles' that happen to a baby in the provisions of their parents before they are old enough to know what is going on.

The sudden appearance of a bottle or a breast to feed a baby is almost miraculous. They have no idea of how all of this takes place and they have to learn to trust the hearts of those who care for them so diligently. But as they get older they are expected to interact more and more with those who care for them and to take on greater responsibility of their own care with less and less direct input from their caregivers.

Does this indicate that their loving parents now love them less when they are not providing everything they need at the drop of a hat? Not at all. It means that the 'miracles' are needed in the beginning to provide for their needs in ways that they latter will be expected to do for themselves as they gain experience, physical capacities and especially increased maturity. But the love they will experience will actually deepen much more as they come to know the hearts of their parents more intimately and learn to appreciate them from new perspectives.

So it is with our relationship to God. He does not want us to remain spiritual infants all of our lives in total dependence on miraculous intervention to provide for us and keep our spiritual trust alive. It is no less loving of Him to insist that we act on our growing faith at times that forces us to stretch out of our comfort zones as it was for Him to provide for us eagerly at other times through miraculous means. As we grow in grace, in maturity and our knowledge of His heart, He wants us to mature in our relationship with Him and learn to synchronize with His ways and learn to interact with Him at levels of higher maturity.

The real goal of every loving parent is to have their children grow up to become independent in healthy ways while still remaining in close relationship to their parents and deepening their affections and appreciation for them. The ultimate joy is for parents to have their grown children be their closest friends while at the same time living in close relationship to others as they start up their own families and raise their own children into healthy maturity. This is the model that God is seeking to experience with all of His children – to grow them into the fullness of Jesus so they can act like adults and not need to depend on the external presence of miracles and signs to prop up their faith.

That is not to say that God will not continue to provide miracles or signs in the life of mature Christians. But it is the heart relationship that is most important to Him and the greatest miracle is the transformation of the life as the love and presence of Jesus works itself out from the heart that is resting in His peace deep inside. It is the kind of heart that will choose to act on the word of Jesus without needing to have proofs of His love as a prerequisite for belief.