“Go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” – Matthew 17:27 (NIV)
If you were designing a way for Jesus to provide the temple tax for Himself and Peter, you would not design this way.
A hook. A line. A lake. A fish. A coin in the fish’s mouth. The provision was not a donation from a wealthy supporter. It was not a miraculous appearance of coins in a bag. It was instructions to go fishing, and to find the specific provision inside the specific mouth of the specific first fish caught. The precision of the provision, the right amount in the right place at the right time, is almost comic in its specificity. But it is also one of the clearest demonstrations in all of the Gospels that God does not only provide in broad, general terms. He provides in precise, exact, peculiar ways for the practical details of ordinary life.
The temple tax was two drachmas per person. Jesus specified a four-drachma coin: for my tax and yours. The coin covered both exactly. Not a surplus. Not a deficit. The exact amount, delivered through the most improbable method available, because apparently God found the improbability worth the specificity.
Think about the specific practical need in your life that is too small to feel like it qualifies for a significant miracle but too real to ignore. The bill that is precisely the amount that is not in the account. The resource that is needed in a particular denomination or form that has no obvious source. The practical problem that has a very specific shape that no general provision seems to fit. These are the fish-with-a-coin-in-the-mouth situations, and Jesus’s instruction to Peter is the answer: go fishing. Do the next ordinary thing. The provision will be in the mouth of the first fish you catch.
What I love about this particular miracle is what it reveals about the scope of God’s attention. He is not only the God of the burning bush and the parted sea and the raising of the dead. He is also the God of the temple tax, the mundane financial obligation, the practical administrative detail of an ordinary week. The same Jesus who wept at Lazarus’s tomb arranged for a fish to have a specific coin in its mouth on a specific day because two people needed to pay their taxes. Nothing in your life is too small for His attention.
Today, identify the specific practical need that feels too detailed and too ordinary to bring to God in prayer. Bring it anyway. In as much detail as the situation requires. He managed the coin and the fish and the exact drachma amount. He can manage yours.
Then go fishing. Do the next ordinary thing in the direction of provision. The coin is in the first fish.
Prayer
Father, I bring you the specific practical need that I have been too embarrassed to mention because it feels too small and too ordinary. Thank you that you arranged a coin in a fish’s mouth for a tax bill. You are the God of the mundane detail, the specific amount, the precise provision. I am going fishing today in faith. In Jesus’ name, amen.
