AP

Acts 14:8-12  In Lystra there sat a man who was lame.  He had been that way from birth and had never walked.  He listened to Paul as he was speaking.  Paul looked directly at him, saw that he had faith to be healed and called out, “Stand up on your feet!”  At that, the man jumped up and began to walk.  When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!”  Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker.

What a contrast we see here with the response of the Jewish leaders to Jesus’ earthly ministry!  The most blatant example of the latter is recorded in John 9.  It was fundamental to Jewish belief that only God could give sight to a man who was born blind.  Jesus’ miraculous healing of the man was therefore irrefutable evidence that Jesus was God – as it should have been to any honest observer!  The Jewish leaders had already convinced themselves that Jesus’ claim to be God was fraudulent blasphemy so when every effort to prove that the miracle didn’t really happen failed, they cast the healed man out of the Temple – ie out of their sight.

The culmination of their interaction with Jesus is interesting: “Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said: ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’  ‘Who is he, sir?’ the man asked. ‘Tell me so that I may believe in him.’  Jesus said: ‘You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.’  Then the man said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshipped him.  Jesus said, ‘For judgement I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.’  Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, ‘What? Are we blind too?  Jesus said: ‘If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.’” (John 9:35-41).

The crowd at Lystra in Acts 14 made the opposite mistake.  When they saw Paul and Barnabas had performed a miraculous healing on a man ‘lame from birth’ they concluded these Apostles were of divine origin, and Paul and Barnabas had to quickly disabuse them and point them to the true source of their power: the ‘Good News’ of Jesus, the Son of God (verses 14-18).

God’s ultimate, undeniable miracle was the Resurrection of Jesus, and Paul would later make give this solemn warning to a crowd gathered at the Areopagus in Athens: “For [God] has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.  He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:31)  How foolish it would be to persist in denying such evidence.  Jesus himself had made the plea: “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.” (John 14:11)

– Bruce Christian