Walk By Faith, Not By Sight
“Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from Thee.” Matthew 12:38
As for the entire time that Jesus walked the earth, the religious leaders were again on His case attempting to trip Him up so that they could prove that He wasn’t God’s Son, the Messiah, but rather a counterfeit who was trying to scam folks into following Him and abandoning their leaders who were fearful of losing their power over the people. So often in religious arenas and particularly political ones, there is a power struggle to gain control over people for good or bad. This time the scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign to prove that He was who He said He was, and this sign had to be from heaven. In their demand for a sign, they were implying that Jesus’ miracles came from somewhere besides heaven. Previously, after He had healed a man who was possessed by a demon which made the man blind and unable to speak, they accused Jesus of working by the power of the devil.
In Matthew’s account, the religious leaders addressed Jesus as “Master”, which was their term for “teacher” or “Rabbi”. According to Unger’s Bible Dictionary, the term “rabbi” was a respectful name given to the Jewish teachers. By their use of the term “Master”, they were either pretending to give Him some respect, or they were being sarcastic. When they asked Jesus for a sign to prove He was from God, it indicated that they disregarded every miracle that He had already done. It’s as if they were saying that all He had done was not good enough to convince them of His true identity. Jesus could have done a thousand miracles before them, and they still would not have believed Him. That’s how hardened their hearts had become. It is no different today. Multitudes are ignoring the signs found in both the Old Testament and the New. They cannot discern the signs of the times in which we live. Jesus did rise from the dead, but people are still not persuaded to believe in the only hope for mankind, yet they still ask for signs. It makes news when someone thinks they have seen the face of Jesus in a pizza or on a tree trunk. People clamor for something tangible, something that they can physically see or touch, but having faith is believing when you can’t see or touch.
Jesus said that it was “an evil and adulterous generation” that “seeketh after a sign”. That certainly was not very flattering, but Jesus always called them like He saw them. In the Old Testament, God had made a covenant with Israel. When God called out Abraham, He promised to make him a father of a great nation with the intent that His people would worship and serve Almighty God and Him alone. However, history has shown us how many times that Israel had left the LORD and gone after other gods, committing spiritual adultery. Those who lived a sinful lifestyle were spiritually blind which caused them to miss the signs that were all around them. Knowing the hardness of their hearts, Jesus had decided not to do another miracle before them at this time. He did give them one sign, that of the prophet Jonah. You will recall that God sent Jonah to Nineveh to preach repentance to the folks there, but Jonah ran and was swallowed by a great fish. Jesus said to the religious leaders, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” I am certain that the religious leaders had no clue as what this sign meant. We know because we have the advantage of reading the transcript of these events after they occurred.
Luke 11:30 states that Jesus said, “For as Jonah was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation.” For all intents and purposes, a mortal man surviving within the digestive system of a whale could only be a miracle from God and a sign to the world that Jonah had a God-ordained mission. Jesus, too, had a God-ordained mission of which these religious leaders would play a part. Their rejection of Him would lead to His crucifixion and resurrection which would be the ultimate sign of His deity, yet it would be too late for them. The people of Nineveh repented at the eventual preaching of Jonah, a mortal man, yet many of the people of Jesus’ day refused to repent at the preaching by God’s Son and John the Baptist before Him. If the religious leaders really wanted a sign, all they had to do was to search the writings of their own prophets, but this, too, they stumbled over. Had they truly believed these Old Testament prophecies, their faith would have led them to recognize Jesus as God’s Son.
Paul wrote in II Corinthians 5:7 that “we walk by faith, not by sight.” The only way to truly know God is by faith. We can’t show anyone an actual picture of Him or play a recording of His voice. We can’t demand that He do some sort of sign to prove that He exists. That would make us as guilty of unbelief as those religious leaders. Those of us who are believers know that God lives in our hearts. My former pastor from my younger days used to say that if someone was living in the house with you then you would certainly be aware of it. The scribes and Pharisees were standing face to face with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and refused to believe in Him. Jesus said in John 20:29 when speaking to “doubting Thomas”, “because thou has seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”