Amazing Love: Mark 9:30-32
God is amazing in His love and understanding of our nature. He knows our strengths and our weakness. He knows we won’t always get it right and He continues to call us back to Him. He is the greatest constant source of love we will ever experience.
Jesus teaches His disciples that He will be handed over to mankind, be killed, and rise from the dead in three days. This isn’t the first time that He has taught them this. It’s a difficult message to hear; Jesus cycles back through it.
I wouldn’t have understood, either. I’m not sure taking two times through the material would make a difference. I get the dying part. People die every day, it’s a reality of the fallen world. It is the returning to life that would have caused me to stumble. That doesn’t happen every day. It so rarely happens that most of the people reading this post won’t have any experience with it. People stay dead.
To teach them, Jesus has gone into incognito mode. They are even passing through Galilee, which has been ready for harvest in the past. Jesus passes up the opportunity to teach receptive people to get some time with the disciples. Of course they listen.
The disciples are also human. Listening doesn’t equate to understanding. Think about it. How many times have you been told something won’t work and you still try it to make sure? Human beings learn best through experience. We are primarily hind-sight learners. Experience creates understanding.
We get life when we experience it. That’s why most of us must burn our hands once before we understand why touching a hot stove is a bad idea. That’s why most of us must have a failed relationship before we understand why there are so many sad songs about break-ups. We must experience life for it to make sense. No wonder the disciples don’t understand what Jesus is teaching. They’ve never experienced a resurrection.
They were too afraid to ask Jesus about it. This also makes sense. They’ve just failed to cast out a spirit because their relationship with the Father wasn’t where it needed to be. Having failed once in recent memory makes them shy about looking like they were failing again so soon afterwards.
Passages like this strike home. Because God’s ways can be hard to understand, it is easy to feel like we’ve failed when we learn only in hindsight. Yet, God knows this about us. That’s why He came and died and rose again. We are going to make mistakes, and the cross means we can make them and still have relationship with the Father. We can learn by experience, make our mistakes, and continue to try and live a life constantly aware of the presence of the Father. God is amazing in His love and understanding of our nature.
