Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Good morning, dear ones.

Becki and I did another chaotic walk with two high-energy dogs. We’re kind of learning how to handle two dogs and two balls so as to minimize Dandy’s jealousies. He’s a real hard head. Hondo is a good 75 pounds and could probably rip Dandy to pieces if he wanted. But he is very accommodating and doesn’t challenge Dandy’s demand for alphaship. I think I can recognize some indications of human personalities in the mix.

Thano is pretty excited. Without pre-planning, he fell in love with a Honda car that my mechanic had offered to me. It’s not a big price tag, and since Thano had some ready-made financing in place via the Credit Union, we approved of the transaction. So we’ll do some things to get Thano’s truck fixed up, then sell it to apply to the Honda loan. This all happened in one day. The other day we pulled a deal that landed us a new dog in one day. Things can happen fast around here. It makes me wonder what will happen today.

May your own adventure of today be blessed.

Love, Dad/Ray.

Are miracles supposed to be normal? If they were, they would be “normacles”—they would not be miracles. As I process this passage before us, I’m seeing Jesus present what we can glean as a balance between the two—between the normal/natural and the miraculous/supernatural. While it is normal to do whatever we need to do to live well in this normal world, there are some dangers that flow from a preoccupation with the miraculous.

This passage begins with Jesus going up on a mountain with crowds of people following Him. It couldn’t have been much of a mountain for the people to be hauling so many sick and crippled folk up there. I climbed Mt. Rainier back in 1967—certainly no place for taking sick and crippled people. It’s stated that Jesus healed everyone brought to Him in this particular setting, but if Jesus’ ministry priority was all about miracles, He could have just as easily had that mountain thrown into the sea just to make the logistics easier. Or He could have chosen to modify His miracle performance strategy by simply affecting a mass adjustment of the metabolism settings in this crowd of individuals so that they wouldn’t need to eat—so they could just go jogging back home and not even get tired. Coming to think of it, I would prefer that miracle of having a body not requiring food for health and strength over a miracle of porking out at a miracle lunch.

I can’t be absolutely sure that I’m connecting all the dots exactly right, but it seems like there is a connection here to the warning Jesus gives to His disciples when He says, “Be careful…Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (16:6). Whereas those guys had just approached Jesus, “asking him to show them a sign from heaven” (16:1), they are shown to be giving unbalanced attention to miraculous stuff—without a HEART AFTER GOD. Ah—herein, I think, is the key to the equation—again. After all, Jesus reprimanded those guys saying, “A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a miraculous sign…” (16:4). And those guys sure had plenty of religion with a glaring void of love for God and those whom He loves. I take that to mean that being involved in religious or spiritual-sounding supernatural pursuits without a HEART AFTER GOD is very dangerous business insofar as pleasing God and eternity are concerned.