Life of Christ #8 – What Happens When Faith Touches Jesus? | The Power of Christ

Well, again, I ask…I have so many questions. How did He know that she was going to live? In a minute, you’ll find out He calls it sleep, not death. What does that imply? What does God see death as? Did she live forever, or did she die again? So that brings up the matter of sleeping again. Was she really dead? Is she dead today? I don’t want to get into all of this, but it raises some pretty hairy theological questions, and I don’t have any answers. I have no idea.

Now I have another question for you. Why did only James, John, and Peter get to go in there and watch this healing? He made everybody else leave. It’s very possibly the atmosphere of faith. It was a faith mode going on around in there, and He needed it and nothing else in the room with Him. The little girl obviously is not going to have faith. Would you agree with that? Her faith won’t make her whole.

As far as the death aspects of this, there have been a lot of theological wars fought over this, and I personally feel like when there’s something that is not that theologically important, stay away from it. I have no power over death. I feel the same about the second coming: no matter what I believe, it will come the way it’s going to come. My theological views will not change it.

Well, when He gets to Jairus’ home, the traditional scene is there. Women are pounding on their breasts. People are screaming. There are professional wailers who are literally paid to wail. It’s quite a scene. There is Oriental emotionalism. Sometimes you catch this on television. Have you ever watched how the people in the East take death a lot more openly and outwardly than we do? We try to control ourselves a little until we get to the funeral, and we have a sad silence, but they don’t. Boy, they get down, and traditionally they work at dying. I mean, they work at the presence of death. This is what’s going on here. It is a horrible scene.

I don’t think the Lord is particularly pleased. He says, ” Off with you. Why make so much noise? Why cry? I love the Lord’s healthy attitude about death. He obviously knows something about death that the rest of us don’t know. He tells them to stop crying. It is here He says, ” She’s only sleeping.” Now they have suddenly stopped crying and wailing and beating their chests, and now they are scorning Him, so He picks James and John and Peter to go into the room with Him. He took the child’s father, the mother, and the three men with Him. I don’t know why He took the father. I ask myself, what is the mind of God that brings the mother and father in? I wish I knew the answer, and I don’t. Why does God want a mother and father present?

I don’t know about James, and I don’t know about John, but I’m immediately reminded of the wonder of having Peter present. Do you know what I have in mind? One day Peter almost completely reenacted this entire scene. It was almost exactly the same scene Simon Peter reenacted. He raises someone from the dead. If he had not been present in this particular bedroom scene, with someone already dead, I wonder if he would have had the courage to do what he did. It was audacious.

I’m sorry, but I’m back to a peripatetic ministry. This is on-the-job training for apostleship. God knew what He was doing and how He chose to train men to be His disciples. He brought them into a room and showed them how…and one of them did it. I have to believe there’s a reason why He brought James in there. I have to believe there’s a reason why He brought John in there, because James would be dead in a few years, and because John lived to be a very, very, very old man when all the rest of them were dead, and he alone was left alive.

That day those two men both looked death right in the face. Saw its power, and saw its power vanquished. I don’t know if I’m right, but in this scene I love the mind of God. To me, there’s a lot of compassion in having brought James and John and Peter into that room. Perhaps the Lord was already thinking about someone dying some years later, and perhaps He had in mind a man who would lose his head. Perhaps He had an old man in mind, someone who would wonder why he alone was left to live, when all the rest had gone to glory. And who would, if tradition tells us correctly, escaped death when some men were trying to kill him.

Well, the Lord says to her, “Talitha, koum,” and we’re told what it means. I say to you, child, maiden, arise. Now we get some theology. Brothers, what had left this girl? Her spirit. Maybe her soul was still in there. I don’t know. Her spirit came back into her. What then is the seat of your life? It’s your spirit. Praise the Lord. Her spirit was brought back into her. I assume that if it returned into her, then it also became very much alive, if not that hour, at some future day, either in Jerusalem or some years later when the disciples go out and preach the gospel to all the towns and villages, and they come back to Capernaum. I am certain the little girl was there to be saved, now a young woman.

I don’t have much more to say about this story. I haven’t taught you much about it, but I pointed out some things you may not have given much thought to. I’ll tell you this. The Lord is fighting a losing battle and trying to keep people from telling what He does.

I will sum up the last story very briefly because we are definitely picking up a pattern here. He walks out of this building in this dramatic scene, and lo and behold, first it’s some Pharisees and John the Baptist’s disciples, then it’s Jairus, then it’s a woman in a crowd. Then it’s the dead child in a bedroom: now it’s two blind men, and they’re calling out. They don’t even know which direction to call out. They hear the noise, and they know He’s somewhere around.

What do they call Him? Son of David. I’m here to tell you that those two guys were Jews. These are untutored men. There’s no master. There’s no rabbi. They don’t know much about the Bible. They are going right back to the rudiments. Son of David. But they are literally calling Him king. This is a high honor. Son of David. They’re getting right down to the nitty-gritty. They’re calling Him “the descendant of the king.”