Luke 7:16 – A tremendous sense of holy mystery swept over the crowd as they witnessed this miracle of resurrection. They shouted praises to God, saying, “God himself has visited us to bless his people! A great prophet has appeared among us!”

“God Himself has visited us to bless His people.” This is the unsaid cry in every man’s heart, his heart longs to know His maker, he is just not quite in touch with his real needs. The strange thing about the Lord is that He tends to be so unusual and quite unpredictable. He loves to show up at funerals and deathbeds or even tombs four days late, you would think His timing could be a little different. Apparently He has a flare for the dramatic, why just rush over and heal a sick person when you can wait a few days and raise someone from the dead? Like I said, he can be quite unpredictable in all that He does. Here is how the Pillar Commentary describes this visitation.

“A gust of awe and praise seized all who were present — the “all” being emphatic (hapantes) in a number of weighty Greek manuscripts. “A great prophet has appeared among us. God has come to help his people”. The Greek word for “come to help” (episkeptesthai) was the first and last word of Zechariah’s song in the infancy narrative. Its subject is God — not a distant and uninvolved God — but the God who visits, even intrudes into, his creation in grace in order to “redeem” and raise up a “horn of salvation” for his people “from heaven”. The exclamation of the people in v. 16 is a confession of faith that, in the raising of the boy in Nain, this prophet from Capernaum is the fulfillment of the longing of Israel for God’s eschatological intervention of salvation. Luke underscores the radical nature of the divine visitation in v. 17 when he says that “this word about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.”

Visitations from God can come in many different ways. He shows up in churches that have been quite dead themselves for quite a while or He may show up in remote regions that most people forgot existed. Yeah, He does what He wants and when He wants and His visitations change the world. It’s hard to forget the horse stable in Azusa Street or the frontier church in 1734 in Western Massachusetts or the teen age revival in Wales, of all places, in 1904. Visitations are what we long for, maybe there is an unscheduled one in your future that will change your whole world.