There were wise men who travelled from afar and recognised the baby Jesus. There was a demoniac who was possessed by thousands of demons and he recognised Jesus. There were religious men who possessed thousands of scriptures and they failed to recognise Jesus. They didn’t want to believe in Jesus. It was not that they couldn’t believe, it was because they wouldn’t believe. They simply were not interested in truth and wanted to keep on doing what they had always done.
I know that was the case because of Lazarus. Here was the case of a person who had irrefutably died. He had been lying in a tomb for 4 days. When Jesus raised him from the dead, the religious leaders, rather than being convicted of Jesus as Messiah, wanted to not only kill Jesus but also Lazarus.
Raising people from the dead wasn’t something you see every day yet these religious people preferred to conceal all the evidence in order to preserve their pre-conceived beliefs and traditions.
Again when Jesus healed a man who had been unable to walk for 38 years on the Sabbath day, they weren’t impressed with Jesus as their Saviour, they simply wanted to pounce on Jesus for doing this miracle on a non-working day. How many crippled people had they ever seen healed, yet they wanted to focus on anything at all to detract from facing the obvious that Jesus really was the Son of God.
So many people in Jesus’ day, and in our day, reject Jesus because they simply do not want to believe. Jesus said about these people that they “look, but they don't really see. They hear, but they don't really listen or understand" (Matt. 13:13 NLT).
It’s hard to understand why people run away from a tender and intimate relationship with a God who loves them dearly but such is the power of beliefs that are held both in ignorance and rebellion. We can but tell people about Jesus and pray for them to come to the point that they will ask: “Sir, we want to see Jesus” (John 12:21).