God’s Word for You
Mark 5:19-20 “No.”
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, October 2, 2022
19 But Jesus would not let him. Instead, he told him, “Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he had mercy on you.” 20 The man left and began to proclaim in the Decapolis everything Jesus had done for him. And everyone was amazed.
How sad, how frustrating, to be told “no.” We have several examples of God saying no to prayers in the Bible. Moses prayed that the Lord would call someone else instead of him as a prophet (Exodus 4:13), but God sent him and his brother to Pharaoh. David prayed for the life of the first child Bathsheba bore to him, spending days and nights lying on the ground, but after seven days, the child died (2 Samuel 12:16-18). The prophet Jonah, in a fit of disappointment and anger, prayed that God would kill him when the city of Nineveh repented and was spared, but the Lord refused and taught him a lesson instead (Jonah 4:1-11). And our Lord Jesus asked for the cup of his suffering to be taken from him (Mark 14:36), but the Father answered no. That last “no” was a blessing that still resonates in our lives and our spirits today and forever, for through that no, we have life, forgiveness, and the resurrection.
This no, that is, Jesus refusing to let this man become a disciple, was an example of another kind of answer to our prayers. God generally answers prayer in one of four ways:
1, Yes. Sometimes God simply grants what we ask, like the Syro-Phoenician woman asking Jesus to heal her daughter (Mark 7:30), or like the Lord answering the prayers of my wife and me in the early days of our marriage with the gift of children—the first one born just a little more than nine months after our wedding day.
2, No. Sometimes, as with Jesus asking for the cup to be taken away, the Father answers “no.” His plan is for us not to have the thing we ask for.
3, Later. Sometimes the Lord delays his response for a while for reasons known only to him, but which become a blessing to the one praying. Luther says about this, “When we pray we have the advantage [of the promise] that what we ask will be granted although not according to our wish. God does well that he doesn’t give us everything as we wish, for otherwise we’d want to have everything on our own terms.”
But here, the man cured of his demon wanted Jesus to let him be a disciple, but he is told no. This is an example, as we have said, of the doctrine of the divine call, and especially of the call seeking the man rather than the man seeking the call. But with regard to prayer, it is an example of God’s fourth answer:
4, You are not asking for enough. Sometimes God flings wide open the storehouses of his goodness and blessings and he gives us something very different from whatever we prayed about. He told Israel through Isaiah: “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes” (Isaiah 54:2). He was going to do more, far more, than he was asked.
A disciple? No, you will not be a disciple, Jesus says. Instead, you will be my only apostle in this pagan land of the Decapolis.
Then Jesus sent him back to his family as a preacher fully prepared to announce the grace of God. He had already known the black pit of sin, despair, hell, and possession by demons. Then he found out first-hand about what God’s grace accomplishes in the heart and life of the helpless. “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27). He knew Jesus’ name, he knew Jesus as the Savior, and he understood sin, grace, and the power of the gospel. He knew more first-hand than most of us preachers learn in thirty or forty years of experience after our eight or twelve years of schooling. Not long ago, the demons in him had known Jesus’ name, and they were terrified. But now he had learned Jesus’ divinity and grace, and he was overwhelmed with love and thankfulness.
It can be so sad, so frustrating, to be told “no.” But it can also be a surprising and amazing gift. And so we pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.