In the story of Jesus raising the son of the widow of Nain
from the dead, it is interesting to read the response of the people to this
miracle.
And there came a fear on all: and
they glorified God, saying, That a great prophet is risen up among us; and,
That God hath visited his people. (Luke 7:16)
For the longest time, I read that and particularly the last
line—“God hath visited his people”—would resonate with me because as a
Christian I know Jesus is the Son of God, and it was literally true that God had visited His people.
But I started to get the sense that the Jews didn’t attach
quite that meaning to it, otherwise many more of them would have worshipped Him
than actually did. So it had to have a different kind of meaning to them and evoke something we have
forgotten about or never knew.
So I turned to the footnotes. Exodus 3:16 cleared things up
right off, since it was about the children of Israel in bondage to the
Egyptians:
Go, and gather the elders of Israel
together, and say unto them, The Lord God of your
fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, appeared unto me, saying, I have surely visited you, and seen that which is done to you in Egypt: (emphasis
added)
It seems that expression “the Lord visited His people” was
used in a context when there is a miracle showing the Lord’s compassion in
delivering (or being about to deliver) His people from a situation from which
they can’t extract themselves.
In the context of the miracle of raising the widow’s son
from the dead, we have to remember there was no Social Security. The woman had
already lost her husband, the main provider of the family, and the burden of
providing had fallen on the son. Losing this son—her only son—meant she would
likely become very poor. Not only was he restoring her precious child, by
raising the widow’s son from the dead, Jesus saved her from a very difficult
life of poverty. He also saved the
son from death. I really like how it emphasizes this saving when the scriptures
say, “And he delivered him to his
mother.”
The Jews probably saw this deliverance of the son from death
and the deliverance of the widow from poverty and instantly took it as an
indication that God saw the afflictions of His people Israel and was about to
deliver them from the Romans like He’d delivered their fathers from the
Egyptians.
There are many other instances in the Old Testament of the
idea of God visiting His people in their afflictions with deliverance. There are also about five instances of
it in the Book of Mormon with the same kind of context.
I also ran across instances when prophets warned the people
that God would visit them in His anger because of their wickedness, so the
visits aren’t all happy.
Today let’s take some time to think about how the Lord has
helped us with our troubles so we can see that He visits us in our afflictions.
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