he had imparted, but “for the loaves and the fishes.”  We almost instinctively say, in our meditations upon these things:  What a pity they could not discover in him something higher to believe in and love than the mere power and will to heal their bodily ills and minister to their bodily wants!  This strong faith in his power and readiness to minister in a miraculous way to their external, worldly enjoyments and comforts is what led them to try to take him by force and make him their king.  Having now given you his first object in working miracles, I turn to the second.

Here a great field for thought opens to our view, from which a volume could be written.  Every miracle the Lord wrought, just like every parable he spoke, has a double line of truth, an inner and an outer sense.  These are related to each other as the soul and body are related.  Jesus says:  “My words are spirit, and they are life.”  His miracles, when rightly understood, are the same.  “They are spirit and they are life.”  Their spirit and life enter us through the light they contain.  Let us look at one or two with a view to find what spirit and life we can:  One Sabbath day Jesus met a man in a Jewish house of worship, called a synagogue, whose right hand was WITHERED. Notice, the man’s hand was withered.  This means that it was dead, just as we mean that a plant is dead when it is withered, or so nearly dead that its life is almost gone.  This man’s hand must have been powerless.  He could not use it to do anything; and it was his right hand.  He could not move a joint of it.  It was simply powerless.

But notice particularly what Jesus commanded him to do.  He said to this very man:  “Stretch forth thy hand.”  Does not that look like an unreasonable command?  The man might have plausibly said:  “I cannot do this.  I have not been able to reach my hand to my mouth in the past year.  I can not do as you tell me.”  But instead of urging objections he instantly obeyed, for the words, “Stretch forth thy hand,” were not more than out of the Lord’s mouth when we read, “And he did so:  and his hand was restored whole as the other.”  Now I ask, Did this man have any part to act, or duty to perform in this miracle of healing?  I answer, He did; and without his obedient cooeperation his hand would have been left dangling powerless at his side.

Is there not a lesson here?  Let us try to gather crumbs of instruction from it.  If you take your Bible and concordance, and hunt up the places where the expression “right hand” is used, you will plainly see that “right hand,” when spoken of as the “right hand” of God, means power, the power of God.  As applying to man, it means the same, the power of man.  In this sense the right hand of every unconverted man and woman is withered under the blighting curse of sin.  But Jesus is present to heal.  He is ever ready to heal all who have need of healing now, just as truly as when he was visibly among men.