Today, I am reading and commenting on John 4-5.

I am currently in the middle of taking a course designed to empower the entire body of the Christian Church to missions.  So, when I read what Jesus said to His disciples after speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well, it really struck me.  After saying the phrase which I used as my title today, Jesus told His disciples that He had sent them to reap, to harvest, a crop for eternal life.  Further, He tells them that He sent them to harvest the crops that another had sown.  I see this as explaining why we see the Apostles and other disciples primarily preaching the Gospel to Jews and Samaritans at the beginning of the Book of Acts, and only see a major outreach to the Gentiles after Paul’s conversion.  Jesus sent His disciples first to harvest souls for eternal life from among the Jews and Samaritans, whom others (Himself, John the Baptist, and unnamed others) had sown the good news about the kingdom of God.

The other thing which I see fortuitously is when Jesus is speaking to the royal official whose son was sick.  When the official begs Jesus to come and heal his son, Jesus replies, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe.”  The official’s reply is essentially, “I just want my son to live.”  Jesus then heals the boy and sends the official on his way.  Note that the boy was not present and the official did not learn until he was on his way home that his son was healed.  The reason this struck me is that I have been watching videos of Christian apologists debating Muslims and one of the things which come up is that the Koran says that Mohammed did not perform miracles because previous prophets had performed signs yet people did not believe them.  Here Jesus pointed out that people refused to believe without more signs, even though He had already performed signs for them.  Yet, He healed the official’s son.  Further, at the beginning of this section of the Book of John, John told us that Jesus had already said about the area this takes place in that a prophet was without honor in his own country (which this was).  Jesus continued to perform miracles despite the overall lack of faith. 

Which leads me to a final point, which I consider related: one thing which I have struggled with is why we do not see more miracles in the modern Church.  One point I made is that maybe we do see them and fail to recognize them, or, perhaps, they are not well publicized.  Shortly after I formulated that thought and began praying that God would open my eyes to see His power miraculously displayed, while watching videos of Christian apologists, I heard Wes Huff tell the story about how he recovered from an autoimmune induced paralysis in a way which his (non-believing) doctors called miraculous (If you want more information I am sure an internet search based on those search terms will yield a video where he describes that).  Then, over this past weekend, I was watching another Christian apologist who mentioned two people who had clearly documented recoveries from disabilities in ways which modern medical science cannot explain.  Those two people were Bruce Van Natta and Marlene Klepees.  While I am confident that these will not convince those who are skeptical of the possibility of miracles, they are well enough documented to overcome my skepticism of most miracle stories (which comes from the number of charlatans who claim miraculous powers in order to profit).

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

I have created a Patreon page for those who would like to support me in writing these blog posts every day: https://patreon.com/AttilaSoldus