Daily Bible Reading 17th June 2026 // Luke 11-17
11 Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. 12 As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her. 13 And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14 Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” 15 And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16 Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” 17 And this report about him spread through the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country.
One accepts the miraculous in principle simply because, as we have already pointed out in these studies, miracle is what the whole business of the gospel is about, as may be seen from the following considerations: the two central assertions of the Christian gospel - the Incarnation and the Resurrection - are in essence miraculous. To say that God has broken in, in the mystery of the Word made flesh, is miracle. And to say that God (in Christ) has broken through in the Resurrection, is miracle. And if these are true, there can be no problem; for if these are true, they mean that the whole human situation, with all its woe and misery, is changed and revolutionised, and anything can happen. Furthermore - and as a corollary - to understand Who Jesus is, is to see that miracle is not only possible, but inevitable. For He is God the Lord; and because He is, any problem with any of the miracles is necessarily resolved. For God is a God Who raises the dead!
The validity of this miracle of a man being raised from the dead cannot, then, be in dispute. But what is our attitude to it and what is our reaction to be? Do we simply say, 'This is wonderful', and pass on to the next passage? Something more than that must be our reaction. For the question needs to be asked, 'What is this story saying to us? What is its message to us today, its significance in the context of the record of the gospel that Luke represents to us?' The heart of the story and its message and significance for us lies in the fact that in it we have an encounter between the Lord Jesus Christ and the grim, universal fact of death. To spell out what this means leads us to ask the question: what is death?, and that must be our next consideration.