There's an awful lot of antibiotics in our house these days. My five-year-old son finishes up his this week for his ear infection (which he got on the heels of strep throat). My 10-year-old daughter got a bad case of strep throat on Sunday and will be on them until the middle of next week. Me? Well, the doc put me on them yesterday for a sinus infection.Step throat made both my kids violently ill. They both vomited and moaned their way to the doctor. But after their doses of antibiotics, I watched in utter amazement how both of them started recovering within about eight to 10 hours. Color in their faces. Light in their eyes. They were completely different kids. Amazing.
I must admit, I couldn't help but think of it as almost magic. Even though I get that antibiotics work in a scientific way, I don't understand it. And "magic" is often used to describe something we don't understand. If I could transport back 500 years and treat people with antibiotics, they'd think I was magic. Such a dramatic recovery from such violent illness. Heh, chances are that they'd either try to make me their ruler or burn me at the stake.
And that started me thinking. I've always been intrigued by Dallas Willard's admonition that if we believe Jesus is Lord then we must also believe that he is "the best informed and most intelligent person of all, the smartest person who ever lived." He's "the ultimate scientist, craftsman, and artist." In this line of thought, Willard describes Jesus' miracles as a supreme mastery of physics and the natural world, observing:
At the literally mundane level, Jesus knew how to transform the molecular structure of water to make it wine. That knowledge also allowed him to take a few pieces of bread and some little fish and feed thousands of people. He could create matter from the energy he knew how to access from "the heavens," right where he was. . . .
He knew how to transform the tissues of the human body from sickness to health and from death to life. He knew how to suspend gravity, interrupt weather patterns, and eliminate unfruitful trees without saw or ax. He only needed a word. Surely he must be amused at what Nobel prizes are awarded for today. . . .
And one of the greatest testimonies to his intelligence is surely that he knew how to enter physical death, actually to die, and then live on beyond death. He seized death by the throat and defeated it. Forget cyronics!
. . . All these things show Jesus' cognitive and practical mastery of every phase of reality: physical, moral, and spiritual. He is Master only because he is Maestro. "Jesus is Lord" can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate before saying, "Jesus is smart."
He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived.
Antibiotics are crude and rudimentary compared to the mastery Jesus displayed. It's child play next to him. An mere echo of the Maestro. And that fills me with more wonder and awe than any magic I can dream of.
(Image: some of the meds in my house right now)