Your faith has made you well

"Your faith has made you well." Jesus says this time and again after healing someone but where did they get such faith? Was it not given to them by God's Holy Spirit? God used the miracle of healing to draw people to Jesus so that the world would know who God was and the extreme measures He would go to in order to have relationship them. Before Jesus came there were many things that kept people from God such as, rules and requirements from the Pharisees and religious teachers, sickness and disease, a life of bad decisions, and oppression from an enemy of God who was set on destroying the thing He loved most. People knew God was holy and because of that He separated Himself from them. Because of their knowledge of the Old Testament they knew about Israel wondering in the desert for forty years because of their inability to surrender to God's leading, they were taught to offer sacrifices for their sins and failures but a better way was coming. It was not through a great army marching into the camp of their oppressors and wiping them out but it would come through sacrifice, similar to the sacrifices they themselves have been offering for so many years. You see their history and even their present situation pointed to Jesus and what He was preparing to do! Even though it was all coming to this one point in time no one could see it because God had not revealed it to the people yet. Let's read Matthew 9:8. Jesus just forgave a paralyzed man of his sins and of course the teachers of religious law had a problem with that. Jesus knew their hearts, which only God can know but somehow they missed that and he asked them is it easier to say "Your sins are forgiven, or stand up and walk?" So Jesus told the man to stand up and go home, when he did it this is what happened. (Matthew 9:8 NLT) "Fear swept through the crowd as they saw this happen. And they praised God for sending a man with such great authority." Even after all of this God covered the eye of their hearts so that they would still believe this is a man that God had given great authority but not the Son of God. Soon a faith even greater would be required of them...