Walking in the blessing of God requires your cooperation. You have to access it by faith. Receiving a miracle, on the other hand, is basically dependent on how desperate you are. If you don’t give up or quit and you’re still looking to God, you can have a supernatural intervention, but it’s going to be after a crisis. If you’re going to live from miracle to miracle, you’re going to live from crisis to crisis.
In contrast to a blessing, a miracle is only temporary; it’s never going to become your norm. God created natural and supernatural laws for you to live by. You get a miracle – a temporary intervention – God is going to eventually return everything back to the natural, spiritual laws.
This is what happens with some people when they get cancer or some other disease. In the natural, it’s a life or death situation, so they have a surge of faith, believe God, and get miraculously healed. But whatever it was that allowed the illness to come in – wrong thinking, unforgiveness, bitterness, or whatever (there are multiple things that can cause this) – isn’t dealt with. They leave the root intact and over time, the physical ailment comes back with a vengeance. So, their miracle will only be temporary. It won’t last because the root cause was never dealt with.
By far, the longest miracle recorded in the Bible is the miracle of the manna (Exodus 16). God’s people were in a crisis situation. They were in a desert, and there wasn’t any food to eat. God granted them this manna, and it was absolutely supernatural:
Man did eat angels’ food.
Psalm 78:25
It was miraculous! Through the years, certain people have tried to come up with some natural explanation for manna, like saying it was the secretion of a beetle. It wasn’t. The Israelites had to collect a certain amount manna every day. If they collected more and tried to leave some for the next day, it bred worms and stank. But on the sixth day, just like clockwork, they could gather twice as much as normal and it wouldn’t turn rotten. This enabled them to obey God’s command to rest on the seventh day. It was supernatural – not natural! God miraculously supplied their needs. But it was temporary and was only during those forty years in the wilderness.
And the children of Israel encamped in Gilgal, and kept the passover on the fourteenth day of the month at even in the plains of Jericho. And they did eat of the old corn of the land on the morrow after the passover, unleavened cakes, and parched corn in the selfsame day. And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any more; but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.
Joshua 5:10-12
There came an end to the manna. You can’t get manna today. You can pray for it, saying, “Well, they got it in the Bible. Bless God, I’m going to have some!” The children of Israel were in a specific crisis situation. You aren’t in that crisis situation, so you won’t get manna. It was temporary. It’s not going to happen for you. Manna was a miracle for the time, but its time has passed away.
Here’s another difference between a blessing and a miracle: a miracle is always just enough to get you by. It will never be an abundance. This was certainly the case with the manna. The Israelites griped about it to Moses, saying, “Our soul loatheth this light bread” (Numbers 21:5). They got sick and tired of manna – manna for breakfast, manna for lunch, manna for dinner. Manna met a need, but it wasn’t an abundance.
Contrast this with the Promised Land. There, they had all kinds of fruit and meat available to eat. Consider the sample the spies returned with – one cluster of grapes so big that they had to put it on a pole and carry it between two men (Numbers 13:23). That’s how abundant the land was! Their cluster of grapes was huge compared to a cluster of grapes today. Perhaps the grapes were as big as apples. Can you see the abundance there?
The blessing of God comes through natural things. It grows and takes time. You have to plant a seed and then weed and water it. This takes some effort, but the blessing is much more abundant than a miracle.
Andrew Wommack appears this Monday on LIFE TODAY. This is an excerpt from Living in God’s Best by Andrew Wommack. Copyright ©2017 by Andrew Wommack. Published by Harrison House Publishers. Used by permission.
