Glory in contrasts

"All were praising God for what had happened. For the man on whom this sign of healing was performed was more than forty years old" (Acts 4:21-22).

The buzz about town was that God had healed the lame guy who used to sit all day by the temple door-and he "was more than forty years old!" It would have been cool enough if he had been disabled for only a couple years, but he had never walked since birth!

Glory seems to have something to do with contrasts-the bleaker the presenting problem, the greater the glory. That's why the Lord does a lot of healings and savings and deliverances throughout history that are spectacular. It is not wrong to like-and to even request-spectacular things from God. He is the one who set up this miracle in Acts so that the lame man would not be healed until he was so long down that no one had hope for him.

Mark makes a point of including in his narrative the story of the woman with the bleeding issues, adding that she had been hemorrhaging "for twelve years." (He also cannot resist taking a knock at the revolving door of physicians who were not able to help her, further showcasing God's superiority.)

Jesus finds out his friend Lazarus is dying, and what does He do? He makes a point of not going to Bethany until the man is good and dead. (Martha is worried that there is a smell by the time Jesus arrives.) This is all to enhance the glory of God: it's too easy to heal a sick man; God wants to wow the neighborhood with the raising of a dead man.

For all these reasons and more, I think we need to pray for amazing and possibilities-bending things-not only the salvation of my kids, but their decisions to be missionaries in China. Why not? God has always had a flare for the spectacular.

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