JESUS CHRIST’S DEATH & RESURRECTION, LIFE AND DEATH BEING IN GOD’S CONTROL
How encouraging it is to hear powerful testimonies of our God working in the present time!‘About this time next year,’ Elisha said, ‘you will hold a son in your arms.’ ‘No, my lord!’ she objected. ‘Please, man of God, don’t mislead your servant!’ But the woman became pregnant, and the next year about that same time she gave birth to a son, just as Elisha had told her.
The child grew, and one day he went out to his father, who was with the reapers. He said to his father, ‘My head! My head!’ His father told a servant, ‘Carry him to his mother.’ After the servant had lifted him up and carried him to his mother, the boy sat on her lap until noon, and then he died. She went up and laid him on the bed of the man of God, then shut the door and went out. She called her husband and said, ‘Please send me one of the servants and a donkey so I can go to the man of God quickly and return.’… So she set out and came to the man of God at Mount Carmel. When he saw her in the distance, the man of God said to his servant Gehazi, ‘Look! There’s the Shunammite! Run to meet her and ask her, “Are you all right? Is your husband all right? Is your child all right?”’ ‘Everything is all right,’ she said. When she reached the man of God at the mountain, she took hold of his feet. Gehazi came over to push her away, but the man of God said, ‘Leave her alone! She is in bitter distress, but the LORD has hidden it from me and has not told me why.’ ‘Did I ask you for a son, my lord?’ she said. ‘Didn’t I tell you, “Don’t raise my hopes”?’ …
When Elisha reached the house, there was the boy lying dead on his couch. He went in, shut the door on the two of them and prayed to the LORD. Then he got on the bed and lay on the boy, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands. As he stretched himself out on him, the boy’s body grew warm. Elisha turned away and walked back and forth in the room and then got onto the bed and stretched out on him once more. The boy sneezed seven times and opened his eyes. Elisha summoned Gehazi and said, ‘Call the Shunammite.’ And he did. When she came, he said, ‘Take your son.’ She came in, fell at his feet and bowed to the ground. Then she took her son and went out. 2KINGS 4:16- 37.
Once again, we have come to the time of year when we recall the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His death, burial and resurrection are the only hope for all mortal human beings to live eternally in the kingdom of God. This Gospel is to be preached to all nations before Christ’s Second Coming according to God’s plan written in the Bible. We, as bible-believing Christians are expecting this to take place in the near future, in this present generation. Recently we have been seeing more of God’s miracles as well as warning signs through natural- and human-made- disasters such as the horrible Notre Dame fire in France on 15th April’19.
During His earthly ministry, Christ demonstrated three instances of raising someone from the dead. The first miraculous restoration to life was of a widow’s son, and it was performed at a town called Nain. This was near the town of Shunem that the prophet Elisha (who is regarded as a fore-shadow of Jesus Christ) had restored a Shunammite woman’s son to life around 850 years previously. As Christ’s deep compassion towards the mother brought about the restoration of life from death, so Elisha’s compassion towards a barren woman also worked out.
In the Bible (God-proclaimed Word), it is not a coincidence that similar happenings take place in the same or near places at different times. What happened to the Shunammite woman’s dead son and her strong faith in God who supernaturally gave her a son against all odds is very encouraging and is quoted at the beginning. In the face of unexpected despair and great calamity of her only son’s death, her dependence for the salvation of her son was in Elisha, through whom God had promised her a son. Elisha’s heart-felt intercession opened a way for the miraculous breakthrough.
There is a recent amazing story, in which such miraculous restoration to life has been witnessed not to be a gift limited to a special person. The following article about the film Breakthrough, which had its first showing on 18th April’19, depicts the unbelievable, miraculous story of John Smith, a 14-year-old boy who was prayed back to life by his Spirit-filled mother. The boy had fallen into a frozen lake and his body was recovered 15 minutes later. Doctors attempted to revive him for 45 minutes in vain and his mother was brought into the emergency room to say goodbye. The doctors, believing that the brain-dead boy was not going to live overnight, were preparing to give his heart to another kid.
The article elaborates on how the atmosphere changed in the room when signs of life suddenly returned to the boy as a testimony of the charge nurse: ‘When you walked into the room, there was something else that walked into the room with you. There was a presence there with you …When you prayed for him, there was something that moved up the table so hard and so forceful that it pushed me and the other two people there back away from John, almost to the point where I couldn't keep my finger on his pulse’. She also mentioned that even the temperature of the room changed.
The nurse’s testimony shows the fact that before the mother, Joyce came to the room, she had intently prayed over her son’s restoration to life with unshakable confidence in the Lord and as a consequence she had brought God’s life-giving power with her.
Joyce recalls her strong faith in Him:
We had prayed to God for 17 years that we could have a baby. I had three older children, and we lost two children …On my way to the hospital, I just started praying to God, "You gave him to me. You can't be taking him away from me …." And the Lord just started talking with me and said, "Don't worry about this. I've got this. I'll take care of this." …The power of life and death is in the tongue …I'm talking about reading God's Scriptures and knowing His promises and His truth through them …I learned we are created in God's image; He's omnipotent, so our words are potent …So when you start speaking the Scriptures, Satan stops hearing evil and starts hearing God's voice. He's under God's authority.
Her husband also puts it:
for probably eight months before this happened, God had been preparing Joyce …I think there is a difference between faith and belief. And I think her belief is what God had grown and what she'd been working on. Because the Bible says you either have faith or you don't. It's not something you can grow. But belief, and that's by studying God's promises, being in His Word. And I think these miracles are available to anyone who will really get in and run after it.
How encouraging it is to hear such powerful testimonies of our God working in the present time!