No Sign Will Be Given
I can’t possibly count the gospel sermons I’ve heard over the years and in one way or another most of them have referred to God’s eternal love, His infinite grace, and His immeasurable mercy. There’s a certain comfort in this, especially when we’re engaged in spiritual procrastination, putting off one of God’s invitations to draw near to Him.
But such comfort is based on a distortion of reality. Many verses provide balance to this idea that the God who is love has no boundaries, limits or restrictions. Humans will find that there is a limit when they try God’s patience, trying to manipulate Him as a condition for believing or obeying.
One such case appears in Mark 8, where we read that “The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, ‘Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it.’” (vv 11-12) The Pharisees, the hyper-religious of their day, desperately wanted to discredit Jesus because He saw right through them. So they hounded Him. They asked Him tricky questions. They posed awkward hypothetical situations. In these verses in Mark 8, they asked Him for a miracle to validate His authority.
Jesus was no stranger to trickery and He refused to cooperate. In one of those powerful declarations of truth, Jesus said “I tell you the truth, no sign will be given...” The people of Jesus’ day had ample opportunity to validate His claims by listening to what He said and watching what He did. He was not about to start performing for them so they could analyze and assess Him on their terms.
The desire to set down conditions which God has to fulfill in order for certain people to accept His existence and authority is still with us. Some people call for God to justify Himself, given certain difficult circumstances. Others demand material “proof” of His existence. Still others demand a specific intervention as a condition of believing. In effect all are saying, “Meet my conditions and I will believe in you.”
I tremble at the arrogance of such statements be they expressed or implied. What makes people think that God is in such desperate need of their... I don’t know what, that He would submit to them to win them? And, of course, people who test God in this way, really have no intention of responding positively to Him anyway. Knowing this, His solemn response is, “I tell you the truth, no sign will be given...”
In this declaration of truth, Jesus makes it clear that He is God. He will work on His own terms. He will reveal Himself as He chooses. He will not be manipulated by His creation. Personally, I find that very reassuring.
