Are Signs Ok?

King Hezekiah was dying and he appealed to God to live through His illness. God listened to Hezekiah and gave him 15 more years of life. Further, He gave Hezekiah a supernatural sign that He heard his prayer by causing a shadow on the stairway to go back 10 steps. Note Hezekiah did not ask for the sign.

King Ahaz was told he would be delivered from the King of Aram. He was told to ask for a sign of this deliverance. He refused and the country was judged. Moses and Gideon asked for signs and they were given them. They were not chastised for their requests. God uses signs as signs of his covenant with the people, yet Jesus says an evil and adulterous nation craves a sign.

The word "sign" appears 90 times in the ESV Bible. As people, we crave for signs. Something visible that we can see or touch. We live in the seen world. Yet we are told to look at things that are unseen (2 Cor 4:17-18). So what are we to think of signs today?

If I think biblically about this issue, I seem to come down that God does not care for signs that test and validate him to an unbelieving faith. We might call those foxhole or ultimatum requests. I think that is what Jesus was referring to when He responds to the Pharisees in Matthew 12. But I do think that God will provide signs to a weak faith. I call these "fleece" prayers after Gideon in the Book of Judges. God knows that my faith can be pretty flimsy and that I simply cannot live 100% in trust of the unseen world and I really need to see Him every now and then in the seen world. So he says these prayers are ok. Further I have learned from the Bible that God will give these signs even when we don't ask for them.

I am so thankful that God knows how fragile I am and meets me halfway in the seen world. It might be something really tiny but very obvious that God is here with me in the seen world. Something that encourages me in my faith. There are many days where I just feel completely lost and abandoned. And seemingly in those days God appears in my seen world with a sign. However, I want to be careful that I don't cross that fine line to demanding a prayer to authenticate God. He is there whether I see Him or not.