The Miraculous Messiah – The First Five Miracles
Now as soon as they had come out of the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. But Simon’s wife’s mother lay sick with a fever, and they told Him about her at once. So He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and immediately the fever left her. And she served them. Mark 1:29-31
In Jesus’s fourth recorded miracle, He again demonstrated His love. Having seen some of Jesus’ earlier miracles, the apostles brought their problem to Jesus: Peter’s mother-in-law was sick.
Times of tribulation are sometimes when faith is strongest. Sickness is a result of man’s sin, but God allows those kinds of difficulties to remind us that our earthly life is a temporary sojourn toward either eternal life or eternal damnation. As the hymn writer Edward Mote wrote, “When every earthly prop gives way, He then is all my hope and stay” (The Lutheran Hymnal 370:3). Times of sickness and the loss of loved ones is not a time to doubt Jesus’ care; rather, it is a time to consider our desperate need for the healing that only He brings. “It is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick,” Christ says in Matthew 9:12.
Our Great Physician rebuked the fever of Peter’s mother-in-law and gently lifted her. Immediately restored to full health, she was able to show her love for her Savior in serving Him. Though spared grief that day, Peter experienced many trials throughout the rest of his life. We close with Peter’s encouragement to rejoice in our trials: “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:5-7).
When darkness veils His lovely face,
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In ev'ry high and stormy gale
My anchor holds within the veil.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand.
The Lutheran Hymnal 370:2