Fear After Favor

The end of miracles should be that a certain fear of God comes upon people. That must be the end. That people praise God! Or that they view Him as marvelous and terrible!

Imagine you were an Egyptian when the plagues came upon them! I am certain by the first or second or third plague, you would have distinguished the God of Israel.

It is one thing when someone else testifies about God! Sometimes we may not fully comprehend the magnitude of the miracle. A lame person or cripple walking may catch your attention, but it may not make you cry.

You reading about the woman with the issue of blood getting healed may cause you to applaud God, but it will not make you shiver.

It will not make you shiver until the woman starts narrating her story; how perhaps twenty men rejected her hand in marriage; how her family disowned her; how she kept getting fired for her stench, and yet she needed every penny she could get to pay the physicians. Remember sanitary pads did not exist then!

The cripple will now provoke tears when he begins narrating how he needed to be carried to the toilet three times a day, and be helped. And if his helper wasn’t available, he’d end up defecating on himself where he lay.

You’d start crying when he tells you of how he had given up on marriage, and children, and dreams! When the depth of his suffering you descend, you will grow some extra reverence of God!

I remember getting an A for an exam I didn’t sit for. Many classmates had laughed at me and mocked me. But when God performed the miracle; I nearly collapsed on my knees on the university highway! For no human understanding could explain how that happened!

When I won the iPhone 16 two weeks ago, I trembled! I trembled the same way Peter did when Jesus asked him to cast his nets again even if he had toiled all night. The miracle was too good to be true. And I remember from that VHS Jesus movie, how compassionate eyes fell on Peter, but he feared Jesus; saying ‘Depart from me for I am a sinner…’

These miracles are God’s goodness! After we have received favor in His eyes, and the miracles pursue us, that goodness will cause us to repent! For his enemies, it will pile up as hot coals upon their heads, turning them to friends!

God, time to time has to do something terrible (and by this I mean not one that causes sorrow and despair, but reverence) that men — that we — may first drop every familiarity we may have developed of Him — that we may expect afresh again! That we may believe for bigger!

God is my friend; but what He did for me made me remember that He is the creator! That He is sovereign still! Miracles paint His color and character; so that we are confident and sure of Him and His omniscience as we walk in life! These miracles validate Him!

And if it is a personal experience! O what a marvelous testimony! It is a personal gospel! But we must carry it in continual remembrance! That when we come into the wilderness like Israel, after crossing the red sea, we do not yearn to return to our past (yearning for garlics), but be conscious that He who did the marvelous in the past, is with us in the present, and can do what He did in the past — now! And that He will be able to do it all again, and greater in the future!

These experiences must be like altars that we return to when life gets funny! And we must not look at them in essence! But look at whom they came from! But look at who made them possible even when they seemed impossible! He … is the prize! He … is the treasure! He … is to be feared!

Even after you have got it all! Even after you have reached the promised land and entered houses you did not build; He said you should not forget Him! Some miracles can become a reality for you, and yet remain inaccessible to others; so by His wisdom, He offers us humility and grace to extend this miraculous to everyone by love. Making His will on earth as it is in Heaven.

But even after making it on earth as it is in Heaven; He is still the treasure. The love! We find ourselves back in the garden! Having dominion over earth, but … but having communion with Him majorly, and partaking in His rest of the seventh day forever!

O may God do miracles and wonders in your life; that cause men to repent, that cause men to revere Him, that cause men to expect from Him, that cause men to stamp that He is God and there’s none apart from Him … that cause men — and yourself — not to get familiar with Him! And yet be so in love with Him at the same time!

Expect the miraculous!