July 24, 2000
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Luke 5:16-26 Jesus Forgives and Heals a Paralytic
A Saving Faith in a Paralyzed Man
Luke 5:17-20
"It came about one day that He was teaching and there were some Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting there who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was present for Him to perform healing. And behold, some men were carrying on a bed, a man who was paralyzed and they were trying to bring him in and set him down in front of Him. And not finding any way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went upon the roof and let him down through the tiles with his stretcher, right in the center in front of Jesus. And seeing their faith He said, "Friend, your sins are forgiven you."
Forgiveness is the single most important and blessed benefit that God can provide. Forgiveness is the door to blessing in this life and to eternal life in heaven. You cannot preach the Christian gospel about forgiveness unless you understand sin and its consequences. To understand that all men are sinners, that all men are alienated from God, all humanity is headed toward eternal hell where they will forever be punished for their sins and then to understand that God by grace has devised a means by which He can forgive sinners all their sins so they can escape judgment and enter into eternal bliss in the glory of His heaven, that is the message of the gospel, that is the good news.
In the thirteenth chapter of Acts the Apostle Paul said, "Therefore let it be known to you, brethren," verse 38, "that through Him," that is through Christ, "forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you." Acts 10:38, that is a great verse and that's the essential element of the Christian message. We preach the forgiveness of sins. In Ephesians 1:7 are familiar words, "In Him," that is in Christ, "the beloved One, we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of His grace." And then chapter 4 verse 32, "Be ye kind one to another, tender hearted, forgiving each other just as God in Christ has also forgiven you," that's the great theme of the Christian message. If you want to know what is distinctive about Christianity, that is it. God will forgive all your sins which changes forever your relationship to Him. Instead of being your judge, He becomes your friend. In fact, He becomes your Father. Instead of sending you to hell in an act of just retribution, He takes you to heaven in an act of gracious blessing. And all because your sins have been forgiven. That is the message that Christ came to preach and to provide that forgiveness He had to die on the cross and take the judgment of God for sinners. Their judgment having been rendered on Christ, God could then forgive those who repent and come to Him.
Most people understand that that is the message of the New Testament. Perhaps they don't understand that that is also the message of the Old Testament. From Adam on we see God acting in a forgiving way toward sinners. That is the whole saga of redemption. At the very beginning when Adam had sinned and God has cursed him, immediately God sets about to kill an animal and to make garments and to cover Adam and Eve in an act that portrays sacrifice. By an animal sacrifice which provided a covering for Adam and Eve's shameful nakedness, God was giving a picture of the sacrifice of Messiah by whose death a covering would be provided for the shame of sinners. Always God has demonstrated a willingness to forgive sin.
In Exodus 34:6-7, this is how the Lord identifies Himself. "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth, who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin." Three synonyms were used by God when He said that to sum up the completeness of God's forgiveness. He is a compassionate God. He is a gracious God. He is slow to anger. He abounds in loving kindness, which is an Old Testament word for grace. And He forgives iniquity, transgression and sin. That's His desire, that's His nature. That is why from the very outset of the Fall, God set in motion a redemptive plan by which He could grant forgiveness, putting all the guilt of all who repent on Jesus Christ who died as the sacrifice, the substitute for sinners. Nehemiah 9:17 says, "You are a God of forgiveness, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness." And that echoes the words of Exodus 34. To show how extensive that forgiveness is, Psalm 103:12, "As far as the east is from the west, so far as He removed our transgressions from us."
Micah 18:7, "Who is a God like Thee, who pardons iniquity and passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His possession? He doesn't retain His anger forever because He delights in unchanging love. He will again have compassion on us. He will tread our iniquities under foot. Yes, Thou will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea."
Isaiah 55:7, "Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to the Lord and He will have compassion on him and to our God for He will abundantly pardon." And in Isaiah 38:17 it says, "Thou hast cast all my sins behind Thy back." And Isaiah 43:25 says, "I, even I," speaking in the first person, God speaking, "I even I am the One who wipes out your transgressions for My own sake." In other words, that puts My own grace and glory on display, "And I will not remember your sins."
These scriptures and many more give testimony to God as a forgiving God by nature. He is the sovereign, divine forgiver of sinners. And He alone can do that. He is the only God, the only holy God, He is the God who has been offended, all sin is against Him. In Psalm 51 David said, "Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned," the reason David said that was because God is the only God, the only God, the eternal God, there is no other God and it is He, the holy eternal God who is offended by our sin. It is His holy will and holy law that is violated. He then becomes our judge and executioner. It is God then and only God who has the right to forgive sin since He alone is the offended One, and He is the judge of all the earth, He sits on the divine bench.
Jesus did an astonishing thing. He forgave that man his sins. When He did that, He was either doing the work of God as God, or He was a blasphemer. In fact, in verse 21 the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason saying, "Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone." They had good sound theology on that point. Nobody can forgive your sins, no priest, nobody. We can forgive one another an offense against us, but we cannot forgive anybody an offense against God. We can tell sinners that if they repent and seek forgiveness from God that He will grant it, but we cannot forgive sins. We cannot say to anybody, "I forgive you your sins," in the sense that we have exonerated that person from all record of iniquity. That only God can do. And their theology was accurate. Either Jesus was God, and He had a right to do it, or He was a blasphemer.
This is the first time He has said this to somebody. He has been talking about preaching the good news to the poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed. He has been giving that message synagogue to synagogue, town to town around Galilee. But Jesus is here claiming to have the authority to forgive sin, and thus He is claiming to be God. He is either God or He is a blasphemer. They were right. He's not anything in between. He's not just a well-intentioned teacher. You can't come to Jesus with any patronizing nonsense about Him being a good teacher, that's not sound theology. That is seriously flawed. If He's not God, then we have to say He is a blasphemer and that is the most heinous crime that can be committed against God. And the Pharisees and the scribes knew it. In no uncertain terms, He claims to be the divine forgiver.
"It came about one day that He was teaching." That's how the story begins. It is interesting to know that Mark records this same incident very early in the ministry of Jesus, so no doubt it happened very early in His ministry in Galilee. Matthew tells us the place was Capernaum. He's taken up residence in the town of Capernaum which is right at the north tip of the Sea of Galilee, a fishing town. Simon Peter lived there with his brother and his family and many believed that Jesus stayed in the house of Simon Peter. This is early in His ministry and the message of forgiveness is the primary message that He preached. Now if we tie in John 5:16, we know by this time the spiritual authorities, the Pharisees and scribes as they are identified here, chief priests, Sadducees were after Him.
They are dogging His steps and they're looking for things that He does for which they can indict Him, some reason to kill Him. They tried to kill Him in Nazareth just for preaching that He was the Messiah, the fulfillment of Isaiah 61. The word about Him is moving fast, that He claims to be the fulfillment of Old Testament promise, the Messiah, that He can heal and His message literally is the opposite of the current Judaistic theology. He is saying that God will forgive. He is saying, "I've come to those who know they're spiritually bankrupt, not to the spiritually elite and self-righteous. I'm come to tell the truth to those who understand and know that they are spiritual prisoners, they are in prison, they are in bondage. I've come to those who know they can't see and are blind and have no hope and no sight. I've come to those who are under the tremendous burden of sin and guilt. That's who I've come for. And you remember He illustrated that by saying that the Lord even in the Old Testament knew there were many widows in the land of Israel but He didn't help any of them. And there were many lepers in the land of Israel but He didn't help any of them. He went to Gentiles because their hearts were right. They knew they were the poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed.
The Jewish leaders didn't believe they were the poor, prisoners blind and oppressed, just like the people didn't. That's why they tried to kill Jesus. They were offended. They were outraged that they could be identified as such. They were the spiritually rich in their minds. They were the free, the liberated. They were those who could see the truth. They had been delivered. Jesus offended them. And if He offended the people sitting in the synagogue in Nazareth and He did that from town to town to town and preached the same message, believe me He offended the leaders who were supposedly, at least in their own minds and the minds of the peoples, the paragon of righteousness.
So here He is and He's in this place, some kind of house in Capernaum and He was teaching. This is always the heart of His work. He didn't come to be a healer, He came to be a teacher. And what He taught was salvation and redemption and that means He told people God would forgive their sins. That's the message of the gospel. And His healings drew immense crowds, and verified that He was of God.
Luke focuses in on one group, "There were some Pharisees and teacher of the law sitting there." There they were, you can believe they were up close, they loved to be seen of men, Jesus said in Matthew 23, they loved it when they were in the place of prominence. And you can believe they wore all of their Pharisaical trappings, they were there. Who are these Pharisees and teachers of the law? The word "Pharisees" comes from the Hebrew term parash which means to separate. They were the separated brethren, the separated ones. They were separated to the law, to God they thought, to righteousness. They disdained anything that in their minds violated that separation.
They were devoted to the Old Testament but it was a lot more than that. They were devoted also to what had been written by the rabbis about the Old Testament and they saw the tradition as equal to the Old Testament. In addition to that, they were devoted to the oral tradition, some of which, of course, had been written down. So they were devotees of the system of religion which included the Old Testament which included the written tradition and the oral tradition.
They were fundamentalists in the sense that they believed in the fundamentals of the Judaism, they believed in what the Bible said. They believed in resurrection. They believed in angels. They believed in demons. They believed in predestination. We find among their writings a belief not only in predestination but human responsibility. They also believed in the written law and the oral law and the tradition and the Old Testament, of course. They believed in the coming of Messiah and they believed that when Messiah came He would establish His Kingdom. So they were premillennialists. Some people think premillennialism was invented two hundred years ago. No, Pharisees were premillennialists, they believed a literal Kingdom would come to Israel, that was the promise of God and the Messiah would bring it. They were non-priests, they were not in the priestly line. They were laymen. They were devoted, however, gave their entire life to keeping the people loyal to the tradition, loyal to the system of Judaism.
They wanted to keep the people loyal and they didn't want the law violated, so they developed manmade regulations. To protect the law from being broken they thought they'd have to reduce the law or define the law or apply the law in six hundred plus little prescriptions that everybody had to keep. Jesus said it was a burden in Matthew 23 that nobody could carry. Their mission was noble in that they wanted to focus Israel on obeying God's law, and they wanted to build a wall of protection around God's law so it wouldn't be violated. But what they did was obscure the true intent of God's law and they replaced it with this manmade complexity of their own invention. They produced what really amounted to an impenetrable, impossible system of self-righteousness and they believed that their fastidious attention to all of these little prescriptions had given them or granted them righteousness. They were, however, void of grace, void of repentance and void of salvation. Matthew 15 Jesus said they had substituted tradition for the commandments of God.
Pharisees were a powerful group, even though there were only about six thousand of them. But they were very influential because they were so fastidious, they were so demanding and they were the ones that the people looked to as the source of spiritual life and conduct. They had a long history. When Israel went back to the land after the Babylonian captivity in 603, 597, 586, right around that time, B.C., when they went back to the land they began to reestablish themselves God raised up a man called Ezra who was a scribe. He was one who was studying the law and he brought the law before the people. He called the people now to reaffirm their belief in the law and to reaffirm their monotheism, their worship of the one true God, and never to fall into idolatry again and never to disobey again or they were going to wind up back in some other Babylon.
Under Ezra, a group of serious men began to develop and they saw as their objective to keep the people committed to the law, to preach the law, teach the law and apply the law. And it was a noble thing and it was a right thing. Over the years the group of men who were the appliers of the law, definers of the law, interpreters of the law, the theologians, as it were, continued to develop from the time of Ezra for several hundred years. And they developed through the time of Antiochus Epiphanes and the reign of the Greeks and they developed through the Maccabean era and they developed through the Roman era and the Herodian era. And so by the time of Christ you've got hundreds and hundreds of years of the development of this group of men who thought it their responsibility to protect the law and keep the people looking at the law and obeying the law. And by the time you get to Christs, it has developed into the Pharisees...self-righteous, hypocritical, degenerate, filled with spiritual pride, living according to external rules and prescriptions and totally obscuring the true character of the law of God and not loving God at all, but loving themselves. They are the rankest legalists and they live under the most deadly illusion, the most deadly delusion and it is that they belong to God when, in fact, Jesus said to them, "You are of your father, the devil."
The extent of their delusion is seen here as it will be through the whole story. They hate the God they say they worship. Jesus is that God and here He is in their midst and they want to kill Him, thinking they're doing God service. That's how deluded their minds have become.
There's another group mentioned, scribes, the legal experts within the Pharisees. In order to teach the law you had to study and interpret the law. There were Pharisees whose particular responsibility was the law. They would have been religious lawyers. When you wanted an interpretation of the law you went to them. They were the elite theologians. All of the Pharisees, to some degree, prided themselves on their theology but this was the elite corps, these were the doctors of the law. They were also self-righteous, externalists, legalists, they were deluded and their presence indicates that this was a high-level conference. They had collectively gone, in fact we find out in verse 17 they had come from every village of Galilee, Judea and from Jerusalem, so this had to be orchestrated.
They were already on the trail of Jesus because too much had happened already to assault their comfortable status. Their self-righteous kind of religion, their religion of works was being attacked and assaulted by Jesus. They were really the people who prided themselves on being the rich and the free and the sighted and the delivered. And Jesus said, "There's no salvation for them, it's for the poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed." They were being attacked by His message, they had been attacked by Him, actually, in the temple although most of the operatives in the temple were Sadducees, they still got the picture that Jesus was after the existing contemporary form of religion.
We'll also see these scribes and teachers of the law sometimes with the Sadducees because the Sadducees were dependent upon them and they got together for certain purposes. Particularly, even though they disagreed, they were in two theological camps, they got together on one thing, they all wanted Jesus dead. The clear message of forgiveness by grace runs right in to this existing legalism. If you wanted an interpretation of the law you went to the doctors of the law, to the scribes who made judgments on the matters related to the law.
This was a large group of them. I don't know how large this place was. There's no indication as to what it was, we know it was in Jesus' own town, as Matthew tells us, and that was Capernaum. It must have been a fairly large house to accommodate this group alone. If nobody was there but the Pharisees and teachers of the law, had come from every village all over Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem, that would be enough to fill up a pretty good sized house. And it seems as though the indication of Mark is that there were other people there as well. So there was a large crowd, this group very prominent, they would be very identifiable as would a group of orthodox Jews who walked in here today and all plunked down in the front row...you'd really recognize them readily. They would have been easily recognizable. They came to see Him, looking to indict Him, get rid of Him. Already here we are barely out of the wonderful account of Christ, the baptism of Christ, the triumphant of Christ, He just begins His ministry and already the hostility of His enemies has reached the point where a concerted effort to do something to destroy Jesus is in motion.
"And the power of the Lord was present for Him to perform healing." Jesus, of course, never ceased to be God. He came to earth in the form of a man, the God/Man, He never ceased to be God. But one of the things we learn in His incarnation, He humbled Himself, He took upon Himself the form of a servant. What that means is, He set aside the independent use of His own deity. He set aside the independent use of His own divine power and attributes and He did only what God willed Him to do and He did only what the Holy Spirit did through Him. If the Holy Spirit hadn't done it in Him, He wouldn't have healed. It was the will of the Father and the agency of the Spirit that did the miracles.
Luke 3:22, "The Holy Spirit descended on Him." Luke4:1, "He was full of the Holy Spirit." "Returned from Jordan, led about by the Spirit in the wilderness." Verse 14, "Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit." Verse 18, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me." And that is the way it is in His ministry, He is subject to the will of the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit in the time of His humiliation. Acts 10:38, Peter preaching says, "You know Jesus of Nazareth how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit, and with power and how He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil for God was with Him." He was God but He set aside the independent use of deity and God had to be with Him in the form of the Spirit to do these things. That tells you the depth of His incarnation. And as I said, eventually His enemies decided that what was being done was being done by Satan which was opposite the truth, one hundred and eighty degrees opposite, and Jesus says, "You have blasphemed the Holy Spirit, and made a conclusion that is damning to you." It was the Pharisees who made that conclusion. They were so wrong, but thought they were so right.
Jesus provides these hostile visitors with an unforgettable experience and a formidable challenge to their theology. Just for a moment, this morning, let me have you look with me at what happened. Verse 18, "Behold some men were carrying on a bed a man who was paralyzed." Whenever Jesus was teaching anywhere, He drew a crowd of people and within the crowd were lots of people who had physical problems because He was healing people everywhere. Here comes a group of friends bringing a man who's paralyzed. Mark tells us there were four men coming and so there were four plus the man on the bed. The word "bed," kline is any kind of a bed. This would have been a portable bed. It's referred to later in the passage as a stretcher, a pallet, could have been a mat with a wooden frame, a very simple bed that this man could be carried on, indicates that the man was not mobile. The man couldn't move. He had paralysis.
In the New Testament, people who have an illness are described as to their symptoms. They're not described as to their pathology. We tend now to talk more about the person in a clinical way. The person had polio, or this person has muscular dystrophy or multiple sclerosis or a person had a spinal-cord injury. Where in ancient times before they knew all that pathology, they would describe a person's illness with regard to the symptoms. People tended, super-sort of pious people, to think that people like that were like that because of some sin. Remember in John 9 when they went to Jesus about the man who was born blind and they said, "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" And Jesus said, "Nobody sinned, this is an illness for the glory of God." But they always felt that in their self-righteousness people who were physically diseased or injured perhaps were simply bearing the consequences of their sin. So he would have been somewhat of a social outcast.
His four buddies were trying to bring him in and set him down in front of Jesus. It may have been that his paralysis was related to syphilis and the goal of the men was to get him in front of Jesus. You might assume that they wanted him to be healed, but in the man's heart what he came for was forgiveness. He may have connected his sickness to his sin and it may have been, if indeed it was syphilis, that that was the cause. That is something we can't be certain about. But the man wanted forgiveness and along with the forgiveness, of course, the healing. He knew Jesus could do both. I think that he believed Jesus, whether he knew He was God, I don't know, he believed Jesus was from God and he believed Jesus represented God and he believed Jesus spoke for God. That's implied in what happens. Surely he believed Jesus could heal him, but more than that, he believed...he hoped that Jesus would forgive his sin.
These men tried to bring him in and set him down in front of Jesus. But unfortunately nobody moved. You can be sure these men begged and pleaded and asked and nobody responded. Those kinds of people tended to be told, "Get out of our sight, don't bother us here,, especially if they happen to run into a group of Pharisees and teachers of the law. The crowd formed a barrier with their bodies and with their hearts. There wasn't any side door, there wasn't any window, there wasn't any way to get in. And they wanted to get right up there in front of Jesus and put that man right down there because the man was desperate and they had captured something of his desperation. Whether or not people liked it, whether there was comfort in that, whether there was a certain amount of embarrassment that they should have felt was long past, we want this man right in front of Jesus so He can't overlook him.
Verse 19 says, "They couldn't find any way to bring him in because of the crowd." Very resourceful..."They went up on the roof." Most of the houses were one-story houses. It probably was a large house because it had tiles. Luke tells us they got up on the roof and they let him down through the tiles. If you put tile on your house, you probably had a little more money. So it might have been a bigger house with a tile roof. They got up on top. There must have been a patio area and some portion of that roof tiled, or else they were heavy tiles that could support people who walked. The word for "tile" is keramos from which we get ceramic. And there are all kinds of tiles that you can walk on. So it wouldn't be brittle tile, but something suitable for a roof, something in a house that would be fairly expensive because it would then indicate that people who owned it had some means. And that would be consistent with having a meeting there big enough to house this kind of crowd.
So they start peeling off the tile. Now they've calculated exactly where Jesus is down below so that they can take the right tiles off and put the man right straight down in front of Him. They do not want Jesus to miss this man. This indicates the passion of this man's heart, "Get me there and I don't want to be outside and I don't want to be inside, I want to be right in front of Him." And so they calculate right where that is and Jesus is teaching and all of a sudden tiles start coming off above His head. And you can imagine this stuff is dropping down around Him as they're taking the tiles off. There's no comment on that but it is an interesting scene. And then you can imagine the people wondering, "What is going on up there? There are guys peeling the tiles back." And the next thing they know, down through the hole comes this man, let him down through the tiles with his stretcher right in the center in front of Jesus. That's exactly where he wanted to be. That's where they came to bring him and that's where they got him.
If you're just sitting there watching all of this, your thoughts are, "What are these guys doing?" And if you're the owner of the house, you're saying "What are these guys doing? They're taking my roof apart." But it had already gotten to the point where with Jesus everything was drama anyway. And when they saw a guy coming down on a stretcher, their thoughts were probably, "This could really be something. Can He heal this man?" Freeze that picture in your mind and then look at verse 20. "And seeing their faith, He said, 'Friend, your sins are forgiven you.'"
He knew exactly what was in that man's heart. As God, He knew everything. Healing...sure. Far more important...I can't stand the weight of my sin. Here was a poor, prisoner, blind and oppressed, in the language of Luke 4:18-19. Here was the perfect candidate for forgiveness. And verse 20 says, "And seeing their faith," all of them had faith, all of them. You don't get saved by proxy. It wasn't the faith of the four guys. It was his faith, too. They all had faith. And it was more than just ordinary faith, this is strong, insistent, persistent, this is dismantling faith. This is indefatigable faith, overcoming all barriers, all barricades, all obstacles.
Jesus did heal people with no faith and sometimes He healed people with little faith. And sometimes He healed people with great faith. But this was not a healing, first of all. No healing here. This is salvation. If your sins are forgiven, my friend, you're saved. Jesus saved the man from his sin. This is salvation. And this indicates where the faith of the man was directed. It was directed at the matter of sin in his heart.
Strangely, no one spoke, at least the narrative doesn't indicate anybody spoke. They didn't make any requests, and that's common, that's usual in the healing accounts. And the man comes in, he's lying there in his paralyzed condition before Jesus. Jesus looks right at what's in his mind. He said, "Friend," and let me tell you something, God doesn't call people "friend" lightly. Matthew and Mark say He also said, "Son." So he was both a friend and a son. "Son," Matthew writes, "take courage." "Friend, your sins are forgiven you," pluperfect in the Greek, means a permanent condition. "Your sins are and always will be forgiven."
The man is shaken with grief and fear over his sins, that's what's gripped his soul. He wants to get to Jesus because he's heard the message to the poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed and he knows it and it's reflected and illustrated, and analogous to his physical condition. Yes he wanted a heavenly healer, but more, he wanted a heavenly forgiver. Jesus knew what he wanted and needed.
No one's ever forgiven apart from faith and repentance. Th man believed that God would forgive and he had a penitent heart. Jesus saw in the man's heart repentance. He saw in the man's heart a longing to be forgiven. He saw the wretched spiritual condition of the man and He said, literally, "Your sins are dismissed permanently." At that moment, Jesus by His own personal authority absolved that man of all guilt permanently. Jesus came to save sinners, didn't He? And here He saves one. This man is the prototype of many to follow in His ministry.
The Pharisees, all the Sadducees, all their self-righteousness are unforgiven. And one poor, prisoner, blind and oppressed, one sad, wretched, vile, outcast sinner with a penitent heart desperately want to get right in front of Jesus and have his sin exposed and forgiven, and he's forgiven. It's like Luke 18, the publican beating on his breast is forgiven, and the Pharisee who told God how good he was was not. Here it is. Two kinds of people get in front of Jesus, the self-righteous and the wretched. The wretched are forgiven, the self-righteous are deluded and damned. Which are you? Jesus came to save the sinners and that day, at that moment, He forgave that man's sins permanently based on his faith and his repentance. He did that for me one day, did that for most of you, didn't He?, one day. One day Jesus said, "Your sins are forgiven, friend, son." And that was it forever. That's the Christian gospel. Do you know that forgiveness?
Only God Forgives Sin, Part 1
Luke 5:21-25
Forgiveness, what a word. Nothing is more foreign to sinful human nature than forgiveness, and nothing is more characteristic of divine nature than forgiveness. Man is eager for vengeance and God is eager for forgiveness. Never are we more like God than when we love our enemies and do good to those that harm us, for then we prove, Jesus said, to be children of God. Forgiveness is man's greatest need and therefore God's greatest gift. God is a God of mercy and grace who will forgive the sinner who comes to Him with a repentant heart and asks for that gift of forgiveness. The Bible tells us that the predicament of fallen humanity is bleak, it is deadly. It is as bad as it can be in time and eternity. Every person is a sinner under the looming sword of God's judgment with no ability to love God, no ability to know God, no ability to please God, no ability to serve God, no ability to obey God.
The verdict of God on man is that man is guilty, helpless and hopeless. By all human measurements and all legal measurements, man is in an absolutely impossible situation. It is an abomination to God to justify a sinner. In fact, God says, "Justifying a sinner or declaring a sinner righteous or declaring someone guilty innocent, that kind of perversion of justice is as bad as declaring an innocent person guilty." That is an affront to God who makes a clear demarcation and distinction between guilt and innocence, a clear demarcation between right and wrong, between sin and virtue. (Proverbs 17:15, Proverbs 24:24) We even have enough of the image of God in us, enough of the knowledge of right and wrong in the moral law of God to understand that it is not only to God an abomination to pervert justice, but it is to man as well. Repeatedly in the Scripture God Himself forbids anybody to declare a sinful person righteous.
Yet that is exactly what God does, and He alone has the right to do it. He is the judge and the law maker. There is a singular governor of the universe who has written the law, who applies the law, interprets the law, judges the sinner and He is also the executioner. Therefore there's only one person in the universe who has the right to do what for all of us is an abomination and that is to justify sinners, to declare guilty people innocent. And that is exactly what God does and that is the wonder of the gospel and the uniqueness of Christianity. Listen to Romans 4:5, where God is called "Him who justifies the ungodly." What God will not allow us to do for the sake of justice, God Himself has done. He justifies the ungodly. The faith of that ungodly person is reckoned as righteousness. So God justifies the ungodly on the basis of faith.
Paul writes further, quoting from Psalm 32, "Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been forgiven, whose sins have been covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account." That, you see, is the message of Christianity. There is one person in the universe who has the power, who has the authority, who has the right to declare guilty people innocent, to declare sinful people righteous and that one singular person is the lawgiver and the judge and the executioner, God Himself. He justifies the ungodly, declaring them innocent, righteous, forgiven. How can He do that? How can He be just and the justifier of sinners? That's the question of Romans 3:26.
He designed a plan by which His Son would take the sinner's place and pay the penalty for the sinner's sin. So justice was satisfied in the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ for our sins. "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." What we can't do, that is we can't justify sinners, it is an abomination to God for us to deal with people unjustly, to let guilty people to appear righteous or righteous people appear guilty. That is a perversion for us. But God can do what He alone can do and that is He can justify the ungodly, forgive the sinner. Not without paying due respect to His law, and that is why He had to send Jesus Christ to satisfy justice and die in our place.
Only God can do this. It is an abomination. It is a perversion. It is sin for us to pervert what is right and what is wrong, what is just and what is unjust, what is innocence and what is guilt. For we have no way to cover sin, only God can be the Forgiver because He has provided the substitute sacrifice. He is the holy One offended. He is the judge, the lawgiver, the executioner, the only one therefore with the power and authority to pardon the guilty sinner. And that is the message of Christianity. That is the singular heart and soul of the gospel, the good news that God will forgive your sins. And that means you will escape eternal punishment, you will escape eternal hell.
The heart of forgiveness is not the remission of the penalty, it's not the escape from hell. The heart of the gospel is the motive that makes God do that. It's wonderful that the penalty is removed, that's the perimeter. But the center of the gospel is the motive that made God willing to do that. And what is the motive? John 3:16, "For God so...what?...loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.." Romans 5:8 says, "God loved us, in fact He demonstrated His love for us...it says...in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
All sin is against God. All sin is a violation of God's law. Since God is the offended one, God is the lawgiver, God is the judge and executioner, only God can forgive the sinner. And in this passage the Pharisees were musing in their minds saying to themselves, "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" Frankly, that was good theology. They knew their Old Testament well enough to know that. They were exactly right. No one, and that was the implication of their musing, "Nobody can forgive sins but God alone. Why is this man Jesus doing saying to this paralyzed man your sins are forgiven? Doesn't He know that only God can do that?" They had sound theology at that point. And that's the heart of the passage. This is a passage about forgiveness and the reason we need to spend a little time dealing with it here is because forgiveness is at the very heart of the gospel. It's at the very heart of the ministry of Jesus, at the very heart of our ministry today. Of course, the truth of the matter is you can't preach the gospel of forgiveness unless people know they're sinners. You can't preach the grace of deliverance from eternal judgment unless people know they're headed for eternal judgment. You want to cut the heart out of the church's gospel message? Just convince them that people are good.
Jesus didn't believe that. That's why they killed Him cause He told them even though they thought they were good, they were bad. They were as bad as bad could be and they were headed for hell. And they were religious. So the heart of the passage is the heart of the gospel. It's about forgiveness and you need to understand it.
In this portion of Scripture we're looking at His power in the moral realm, His power to exonerate the guilty, His power literally to deliver a person from the position of guilt to a position of innocence, to totally change a person's moral estate, as the old writers used to say, moral state, or estate, to move them from being under the judgment of God to being under the blessing of God. Jesus literally had the power to transfer a soul from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of God. He had the power to do that with a word and He did it to this man. He said, "Your sins are forgiven." And the leaders were right, "No man had the power to do that." In fact, for a man to say that, he was treading where angels fear to trod. This powerful story then introduces us to the matter of forgiveness and also to the hostility of the Pharisees and the scribes who eventually sought and achieved the death of Jesus.
Last time we looked, at the context in verses 17 to 19 and we met the Pharisees, these quote/unquote separated men who were non-priests, they were laymen, devoted fanatically to the law and tradition. There were about six thousand of them in Israel at the time of Jesus. They had developed a complex set of regulations to bind on the people in order to keep them loyal to the law. However, their system obscured the law completely and replaced it with a human code. They were self-righteous, they were void of grace, void of salvation. They were legalists. Their system had shut them off from God all together and from salvation.
Among the Pharisees were a smaller group called scribes. They were the legal experts, the scholars. They had gathered together to hear Jesus teach and to see the power of healing that He was able to do by the Holy Spirit, the power of the Lord as it's called at the end of verse 17. So they came really, I think, to incriminate Jesus. They already had heard about Him. They had certainly heard about His message, heard about His healings, heard about His casting out of demons. They came to see for themselves from all over the land of Israel, even from Jerusalem where the most important of them lived.
In verse 18 at this meeting in Capernaum, probably in a large house because it had a tile roof, this was the context in which this forgiveness occurred. Then we see the claim that Jesus makes and it comes very rapidly. Verse 20, "And seeing their faith..." There is no conversation by his friends, apparently. They just plop him there in front of Jesus and Jesus seeing their faith, that's interesting, isn't it? How do you see faith? Well He could see everything. And what He saw was a persistent, intense, relentless faith that literally dismantles the roof if necessary. A very embarrassing thing to do, by the way, to sort of thrust yourself in the middle like that, particularly when you're like this man, a paralyzed man who in the social structure of that day would have been an outcast. Not a leper in the sense that people feared he had a contagious illness, although it was very possible that he may have since paralysis in some forms was a direct connect to venereal diseases. But this man would have been an outcast socially and to embarrassingly plop himself in the middle of this thing by dismantling the roof would take a tremendous amount of faith that Jesus was going to do something dramatic to change the situation. "Seeing their faith He said, 'Friend,'" the other writers tell us He also called him "son." "'Your sins are forgiven you.'"
The issue doesn't seem to be about sin, it seems to be about paralysis. It seems to be about the fact that he can't walk or he can't move. He's confined to this pallet and has to be carried around. What is this about sin? Jesus noted the faith of all of them, just not the four friends, but the man as well. Nobody will ever be forgiven without faith and nobody will ever be forgiven their sins without repentance. So what Jesus saw was not primarily a man who had a physical illness, but primarily a man who had a sinful heart and a man who sought forgiveness. Nobody is ever going to be forgiven by proxy. It wasn't the faith of his friends that brought about his forgiveness. Nobody is ever going to be delivered from sin, delivered from judgment on the basis of somebody else's faith and nobody is ever going to be delivered and forgiven apart from their own faith and repentance. Jesus healed people who didn't have faith. He healed some people who had a little faith and healed other people who had a lot of faith. But He never saved anybody who didn't have faith. Salvation has always been by faith, hasn't it? And always with repentance.
So the indication here is that what Jesus gave this man was not just a healing. In fact, at the point where He forgave his sins He hadn't healed him. That comes later in verse 24 where He says to him, "Get up." Before He ever dealt with the physical problem, He forgave his sins. The man came, I'm sure he had faith in Jesus' healing power. But the real cry of his heart was not the physical need. The real cry of his heart was for forgiveness. He knew that God was a God of mercy and in his heart he wanted to be forgiven. Jesus read his heart. He perhaps had heard that Jesus preached forgiveness because He did. Everywhere He went He preached forgiveness. When the Lord looked at this man He saw not a paralyzed man, a paralytic, He saw a sinner. He saw a sinner who believed that God was merciful and a sinner who desperately wanted God to forgive him because that's the condition of heart to which God responds with forgiveness.
He called him "Friend." Just pulled him in. No longer an enemy. Friend, son, the language of the kingdom and there's no forgiveness ever given anybody without repentance and there's no forgiveness given anybody who doesn't cry out in faith for the mercy of God. This man knew he couldn't earn his salvation by works. This man didn't have any self-righteousness. This man was not only an outcast on the outside physically, but he knew he was an outcast on the inside spiritually and he sought forgiveness. And Jesus gave it to him.
The sinner had to take a look at his own heart and see that he had violated the law of God and violated the law of God. That there was in him nothing but bankruptcy, he had to have that beatitude mentality, that meekness, that poverty of spirit, that bankruptcy, that hunger and thirst for righteousness that you know you don't have where you've looked to yourself against the law of God and you know you fall short and you know you're a sinner and you desperately need forgiveness. And you come to God who alone can give it. And I think he came to Jesus that day not only for physical healing, but even more so because he knew that Jesus was preaching good news to poor people and prisoners and blind and oppressed and he was one of those and he needed deliverance from sin and that's why he came. And Jesus knew that was in his heart and so He forgave him.
Now the question comes at this point, and it's very important to listen because this is a critical matter to have in mind as we go through this. Was it necessary for that man to believe that Jesus was God? Did he believe that Jesus was God? It doesn't say that. It doesn't say what he believed, it just says he had faith. It doesn't say that he believed that Jesus was the Son of God, God in human flesh, the incarnate One, Emmanuel, God with us, or that he believed that Jesus was Messiah, or that he believed Jesus was the Savior, Redeemer of the world. It doesn't say that.
Was it necessary to believe that Jesus was God to be saved? Answer: No. Was it necessary for Moses to believe that Jesus was God to be saved? Was it necessary for David to believe that? Was it necessary for Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah to believe that? Was it necessary for anybody in the Old Testament time to believe that Jesus was the Messiah? Now as we go through this study of the gospel of Luke then, that will be a helpful perspective for you. Don't expect everybody who is forgiven to have a full understanding of who Jesus is. They couldn't be expected to have that until His work was complete. And now the touchstone of the work of Christ is that you must believe that He is Lord and that God raised Him from the dead to verify His deity. But prior to the cross and prior to the resurrection, it was a matter of believing God would forgive by mercy the penitent sinner.
Jesus at that moment, back to verse 20, at that moment on His own personal authority absolved the man of all guilt for his sins. He did what is on the human level an abomination. To bring a man into a courtroom anywhere in the world, I suppose, who is absolutely guilty and declare him innocent is intolerable. It's a breach of justice. Now to bring an innocent man into a courtroom and declare him guilty is a breach of justice that is intolerable. It is an abomination to God that that be done on a human level, but God is able to do because of what He has accomplished in Jesus Christ, namely the satisfaction of His justice on the sinner through a substitute, God is able to do what man can't do, God is able to forgive sin. Only God can do it. And when Jesus did it, He was making the loudest statement possible that He in fact is God.
This continues to be the emphasis of Jesus' ministry. His ministry was about sin and forgiveness. Down in verse 29, Matthew had his friends over. It was a pretty crummy group, a bunch of tax collectors and sinners. And the Pharisees and scribes began grumbling at the disciples saying, "Why do you eat and drink with tax gatherers and sinners?" Well, if you've got a message of forgiveness, you hang around the people who want it. Jesus said, "It's not those who are well that need a physician, those who are sick." That's sarcasm. You of course, are well. I didn't come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The message of Jesus...sin, repentance, forgiveness.
So the man was instantaneously forgiven. Miracles in the angelic realm and miracles in the physical realm to me pale compared to miracles in the moral realm. All you have to do to do a miracle in the physical realm is overpower the laws of nature. All you have to do to do a miracle in the angelic realm is overpower the demons. But to change a man's moral standing before God, that is the greatest alteration of what is conceivable. But here is Jesus and He alone can do it. And when Jesus said to this person, "Friend, your sins are forgiven you," He set Himself apart from every human being who walked on this earth because He alone could do this.
This man became permanently forgiven, perfect tense, permanently forgiven. And this stunned the Pharisees and the scribes. "And the scribes and Pharisees began to reason," their brains start to spin, the grammateus, the legal experts, their minds started to sort out what they had just heard. They knew their theology and only God could forgive sin and Jesus had just forgiven the man, He had just declared the guilty innocent. They also believed that most sick people were sick because they were sinful. And so they got the picture and their brains began to reel with this. And it doesn't say they said anything. Their minds just began to function and I'm sure Jesus was continuing to teach and speak while their minds were whirring with this incredible statement they had just heard. And what they were saying in their minds, verse 21, what they were saying is, "Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?" And frankly, they had very good theology.
If Jesus was a man, this was blasphemy of the worst kind. This is the first time in Luke's gospel they accused Jesus of being a blasphemer but as you go through the record of the gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke and John, this became their constant perspective. Jesus was a blasphemer, Jesus was a blasphemer. Every time He claimed to be God they saw it as blasphemy. Ultimately they determined that what He did not by the power of God, but by the power of Satan. They had to have an explanation that was supernatural so they attributed His works and words to Satan. They accused Him of a blasphemer. They do it so long and so often that finally they get the whole of the populous against Him and they get the Romans to execute Him.
Now the worst crime you could commit within the framework of Judaism was blasphemy because blasphemy was a direct assault on God and they revered God in their own sort of twisted way. And Jewish tradition said that there are three ways you blaspheme God. One, you speak evil of the law of God. You remember that when the apostle Paul came to Jerusalem after his last missionary journey, they accused him of speaking against the law. That was a kind of blasphemy. Any attack on Scripture which was the law of God to them and even their extended law that had developed beyond Scripture, any attack on what they saw as the law of God was a blasphemy. That was the first kind of blasphemy.
The second step in blasphemy was to slander God Himself. First to speak evil of His law, or His Word; second, to speak evil of Him. To reject the law, to depreciate the law, to curse the law, scorn the law, that was bad. Worse was to curse the name of God, to speak evil against God Himself. But the worst of all, the worst of all was to put something in His place as God. Any idol, any other god in violation of the first commandment, worshiping any idol raised up in the place of God.
The worst form of that was to act as if you're God. Blasphemy upon blasphemy upon blasphemy. And their distorted minds were just overwhelmed by this. Claiming to be able to forgive sin, saying to this man your sins are forgiven, you're not exonerated, you just moved from the category of guilty to the innocent, from the unjust to the just, this is more than they can stand. This is the most outrageous blasphemy conceivable. This man is talking as if He is God. He might as well have said He's the Creator of the universe, that He's the Holy One of Israel, that He's the Redeemer of Zion, that He's the holy and Almighty One, the eternal judge, the God of glory. He might as well have said that because they think, "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" And they were right.
You can't come to Jesus with any patronizing nonsense about being the good teacher. He's either God or He is a blasphemer. You understand that? Some people have said, "Well, you know, the Jewish people, they rejected Jesus cause they didn't quite get what He was saying." Yeah, they got what He was saying. They rejected Him because they did get what He was saying. They were exactly right. Who can forgive sin but God alone? Answer? Nobody. So either Jesus is God or He's the rankest blasphemer that ever lived. There aren't any other options.
They knew the Old Testament law. Leviticus 24 told them exactly what to do with a blasphemer, and so they were ready to do it. Jesus is either a blasphemer or He's God. He either can forgive sin as God, or He has blasphemed God by saying He can. In the blindness, of course, of their wickedness, in the blindness of their self-righteousness, they were unable to make the right decision about who Jesus was. They rejected Him as God, concluded that He was nothing but a blasphemer who was energized by the devil himself.
Verse 22, "But Jesus aware of their reasonings..." He knew everything they were thinking. Aware, epiginos...epiginos, from a verb epiginosko that means deep knowledge. Ginosko means to know, epi adds a preposition to the front of it for intensification...deep knowledge. He had penetrating deep true knowledge of their reasoning, their dialogismos, their mental dialoguing. He knew exactly what they were thinking, exactly.
Back in chapter 2:35, Simeon had said, "Many hearts are going to be revealed, the thoughts of many hearts are going to be revealed," and this is one time when the thoughts of the hearts of the Pharisees and scribes were clearly revealed to the Son of God. Mark 2:8 says, "Jesus knowing, or aware in His spirit that they were reasoning that way within themselves." He knew exactly what their thoughts were. So He said to them in verse 22, "Why are you reasoning in your hearts?" The implication is why are you reasoning like that in your hearts? Why are you having those kind of thoughts? Why are you questioning My authority to forgive sin?
Just stop for a moment and say, "Folks, only God knows what people are thinking." First Samuel 16:7, "The Lord looks on the heart." First Kings 8:39, "For You know the hearts of all men." First Chronicles 28:9, "For the Lord searches all hearts and understands every intent of the thoughts." Jeremiah 17:10, "I the Lord search the heart." Ezekiel 11:5, "I know the things that come into your mind, every one of them." And you can read for yourself Psalm 139, particularly the first half that shows about what God knows.
Jesus knew this because He was God. John 2:25 it says, "He knew what was in the heart of man." John 6:62, "He knew what was in the heart of man." Matthew 12:14, "He knew what was in the heart of man." And He knew what they were thinking and He knew they were thinking He was a blasphemer. And He knew they wanted Him dead. This was a tragic, tragic mistake.
Only God Forgives Sin, Part 2
Luke 5:21-26
Only God can remove the sinner from eternal damnation to eternal glory. Only God can remove the indictment, remove the guilt and remove the consequence of sin because only God is the lawgiver, only God is the holy standard, only God is the judge, only God is the executioner. And only God can determine a means whereby He can forgive. Only God can forgive sin.
There are a lot of people who want to patronize Jesus by saying He was a good man, a religious man, an old man, a good prophet, a man of ethics, a man of integrity. He was a man of kindness, a man of goodness. He was a man who represented God and all of that kind of patronizing language. But the fact of the matter is, Jesus is either God or He is the ultimate blasphemer. He's either God or the ultimate blasphemer and there's nothing in the middle.
Because the Pharisees were self-righteous and didn't know God, because they were void of salvation, because they were void of grace, because they were void of truth, because they were blind to reality, they concluded the wrong thing. They might have said, "He must be God, He just forgave sin." But they didn't. They said, "He's not God, He just blasphemed." And immediately their minds began to process back to the book of Leviticus where the prescription was given that a blasphemer was to be stoned to death. He was a man and that's all they were ever going to allow Him to be. They were blinded by the god of this world who blinds the minds of those who believe not. They were blinded by their won self-righteousness, they were blinded by their own ceremonial religion. They were nothing but, Jesus said later, whited sepulchers, on the outside they looked white and clean, on the inside they were stinking with dead-man's bones.
When they're thinking this, Jesus knows their thoughts. They're thinking, "What a blasphemer this man is. He thinks to do what only God can do." Now if He was merely a man, if He was only a man, and it was made known to Him what they were thinking, if He was a good man, then He immediately should have said, "You misunderstood me. I'm not saying I can forgive the man, I simply meant to say that God will forgive the man." If He was a good man, if He was a noble man, if He was a godly man, then He would need to hurry and correct the misconception and say, "Wait a minute, I can't forgive sin, I'm sorry you misunderstood what I intended to communicate. I need to set the record straight, I agree, only God can forgive sin, I'm just here to announce that God can do that and will do that if you believe and repent." But He didn't say that.
There was no verbal testimony from the man about his repentance. There was no statement of contrition. There was no confession of sin. There was no affirmation of faith in God. There was no verbal cry for mercy. There didn't need to be, Jesus could see the man. He could see his heart. He knew exactly what he was thinking, exactly what he was feeling and exactly what he desired and what he wanted and what he wanted far more than a physical healing was the forgiveness of his sins and the hope of eternal life. And Jesus knew that and Jesus as God had the right to give it and He gave it. I am a human mediator of the message of forgiveness. I can't forgive a man and wipe his sins clean. No man can do that. No priest can do that. Nobody can do that but God alone. And anybody who usurps that is either God, or a blasphemer.
But Jesus did not respond in a fashion that indicated that they had misunderstood Him. They were exactly right. Only God can forgive sin and any man who says he can is a blasphemer and Jesus didn't correct their thoughts. They had the right theology. He knew exactly what they were thinking. That's another indication that He was God. Jeremiah 17:10 God says, "I, the Lord, search the heart." Ezekiel 11:5, "For I know the things that come into your mind, every one of them," says God. And here Jesus as God knows as well. John 2:25 it says Jesus knew what was in the heart of man so that nobody needed to tell Him what they were thinking.
"But Jesus aware of their reasonings answered and said to them, 'Why are you reasoning in your hearts?'" He may have even revealed to them what they were thinking. "Why are you thinking the way you are thinking? Why are you thinking I'm a blasphemer? Why are you thinking how you can kill Me as a usurper of the glory of God? Why?" And then He replies again to their thoughts. Verse 23, "Which is easier to say, your sins have been forgiven you or to say arise and walk?"
He questions their motives. Why are you thinking like this? Why are you thinking...why are you full of such hate? Why are you full of such darkness? Why are you full of such rejection? Why are you concluding that I'm a blasphemer and not God? They already knew about Him. He had cleansed the temple in Jerusalem when He started His ministry. He had been in the Judean part of Israel, the southern part around Jerusalem for about a year. He had been in Galilee ministering. There was plenty of information, people were being healed all over the place. There was plenty of information about Him. His message was very widespread about bringing the gospel and forgiveness and all of that. There was plenty of evidence about who He was. And He says to them, "Why do you continue in your mind to reject this truth? Why do you go immediately to blasphemy and death?"
He adds in verse 23. "Which is easier to say...?" He asks them a question. "Which is easier to say, your sins have been forgiven you? Or to say, rise and walk?" You know the answer to that? That's a good question. That's a provocative question. Which is easier to say? Your sins are forgiven? Or, rise up and walk? Not easier to do, easier to say.
For man, any man, you, me or anybody else, both are impossible. Here's a paralytic with muscles atrophied. His bones are brittle. His brain has forgotten how to move his limbs and were he given the ability to move, his brain wouldn't know what to tell his legs what to do, as we know when somebody's been in a condition like this. They have to learn all over again how to walk. Who has the power to say to this man, "Rise up and walk?" No man does. No man can immediately recreate that man, eliminate his paralysis and the cause of that paralysis, give him all brand new muscles, brand new bones and put in his brain a new memory about how to walk. No man can do that. Neither can any man forgive his sins. The two are connected. For a man, both are impossible, but for God, would you agree, both are possible? God alone can forgive sins, the Jews would agree that. And God alone can create, He is the creator and if He needs to create new limbs, new bones, new muscles and a new memory, He can do that. So these two things are only possible to God and not to man.
They really are inseparable. Sin and sickness are inseparable because they're both in the plan of salvation. If you go back to Matthew 8:16-17, the Bible tells us that in the sacrifice of Christ, in the atonement, is not only the salvation of our souls, but the healing of our bodies ultimately. When you put your faith in Jesus Christ your soul is saved, and Romans 8 says you're waiting for the redemption of your body. But in the end, we'll have new souls, new spirits and new glorified bodies. So ultimately God has to deal with the sin that's in our soul and the infirmity as a result of that sin that's in our body. God alone can do that. God alone can deal with sin, the root cause, and sickness and death, the effect of that cause.
If this is the Messiah God, the Son of God, God incarnate who brings the eternal kingdom of heaven, where there is no sin and no sickness and no death, then He has to be able not only to forgive sin, but to remove all its consequences in the physical realm. He could deal with both. The two are absolutely inseparable. Healing and forgiveness go together. They are works of God and God alone. Removing sickness and removing sin, sin being the cause and sickness being one of the symptoms. Jesus said He came to take care of both.
Only God can do this, not man, only God. So Jesus says, "Which is easier to say, your sins have been forgiven you, or to say rise and walk?" And He's kind of picking at their thought process. "How dare Him say forgive...your sins are forgiven, how dare He say that He is God. How dare He blasphemy like that."
So He says to them, "Which is easier to say, your sins have been forgiven or to say rise and walk?" The answer is, it's easier to say your sins are forgiven. It's not easier to do it, both are impossible to man and possible to God. That isn't the question. The question is which is easier to say and that's easy...it's easier to say your sins are forgiven. It's easy to say that because you can't see if it happened, right? I mean, Jesus said to the man, "Your sins are forgiven." Well that was a divine transaction. That occurred in the mind of God. That occurred in the councils of the trinity. That's not visible. He didn't all of a sudden get a permanent halo that marked him. There was no evidence. There was no experimental way to determine whether or not his sins had been forgiven. That's all in the council of God. So Jesus says you're questioning whether I can forgive that man's sin, aren't you? And you think it's real easy to say, "Your sins are forgiven." In fact, you think I'm saying it as a blasphemer and I've overstepped the bounds that any man should ever, every come near. So let me do this for you. Verse 24, "But in order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins...He said to the paralytic...I say to you, rise and take up your stretcher and go home."
You see, it's not easy to say to somebody, "Arise, take up your bed and walk." If they don't do it, you immediately reveal that you're a fake. To say you're healed and to say now you have to go immediately into two years of rehabilitation, might have been a more reasonable approach, but to say to the man, "Get up, take your stuff, put it under your arm and go home," don't take two steps with a walker, go home. You're talking about a creative miracle here.
From the context, the claim, the confrontation, we've moved now to the consequence in verse 25. "And at once he rose up before them, took up what he had been lying on, and went home." Did exactly what Jesus told him to do. All of his bones hardened perfectly, all of his muscles were created right there on the spot by the Lord. All the hinges in his joints worked perfectly. All that dried up and atrophied sinews, all the elements of the physiology of that man were immediately recreated, brand new. His brain went into full function. His arms went into full function so that he could carry what he was...what he was prior lying on and he just went home. We don't know how far home was, but he took and it must have been a wonderful walk. That's one of the things you see in the healings of Jesus is that they were instant, total healings, no rehab. The Creator is creating. He creates new human parts.
Now unlike the leper, there was no fear of contagion of this man's problem, this paralysis and so there was no reentry ceremony, such as a leper had to go through as we saw in the earlier story. He didn't have to go to the temple and make a sacrifice and show himself to the priests so that he could be examined and declared clean so that he wouldn't spread the disease. He just said go home, and he did exactly what Jesus said. The last part of verse 25 says he went home glorifying God. The Bible, of course, sometimes understates things, doesn't it? Glorifying God. But the best part of this wasn't that he was walking home, the best part was that he was cleansed of sin.
He was filled with praise. Honoring God with thanks and joy. And you can be sure now he knew who Jesus was. He may not have had a fully defined Christology before this event but he had one now. He knew that he had just met God. His sins had been forgiven and he had been created new. You could just imagine him kind of feeling around his body and just being in shock over what had happened in the creative miracle that he had just experienced. And here he goes one way, glorifying God, and there go the Pharisees and the scribes the other way, full of anger, resentment, further down the satanic path of rejection, deeper and deeper into their own darkness, seeking to kill God, as it were.
"They were all seized with astonishment..." This is the crowd. You've got the man on one side who has just been regenerated both physically and spiritually. And you've got the Pharisees on the other side who have just plunged deeper into their resentment. And you've got the crowd in the middle. And you're always going to see that. All the way through the story of Jesus you'll see the believers who are transformed. You'll see the angry hostile religious leaders whose hate is escalated by everything they experience. And then you'll see the mass in the middle that's sort of the mixed multitude, divided between sort of onlookers, sort of half-hearted disciples, and those who are becoming true disciples, sort of mixed in the mass in the middle. They were all seized, it says in verse 26, with astonishment. They were literally just shaken with it, seized with astonishment, with astonishment is ekstasis, ecstasy. They were ecstatic. This is a word for amazement. They were stunned. They were shocked by what they had just experienced.
There was absolutely no human explanation for it. They too began glorifying God. "O God, what You have done today has to come from You". They had seen salvation, forgiveness and creation. And I'm sure many of them even in that crowd were temporary, like in John 6, there were many disciples who followed Jesus and when He said hard things, they left. Remember that? And walked no more with Him. And Jesus, remember, said to Peter, "Are you going to go away?" And he said, "To whom shall we go? You and You alone have the words of eternal life." There were in that multitude the mixture of people who were at different places in terms of their understanding and commitment to Christ. But for the moment, they were as they always are through the gospels, the crowds are literally shocked by His power. And they began glorifying God. As I said, for some it was temporary, perhaps and superficial. For others it was the real thing.
And then it says in verse 26, "And they were filled," this means literally overwhelmed, "with fear." What does that mean? What does it mean to be filled with fear? What were they fearful of? The word here phobeo in the Greek, phobos is the noun from which we get phobia, which is a fear. That word has three meanings and I need to explain them to you and then I'll tell you which one is always the one used in the scriptures, in the gospels and Acts.
There is, first of all, the fear we call panic. It is related to circumstance that invades our life. It's what you feel when the house starts to shake and everything starts to come off the wall. It's a chilling kind of terror. The second way in which that word is used is to speak of a general sort of broad long-term apprehension, just anxiety, just that long-term anxiety kind of thing that some people just live generally with, afraid of this, afraid of that. And mostly it has to do with things that haven't happened.
But thirdly, there is that fear that we would call reverence. It is an understanding that God is holy. It is an understanding that God is mighty, that God is powerful, that God is active, that God is present. It's always used of awe and reverence in the heart of a person confronted with divine presence and divine power. It's used of the reaction of the disciples when they saw Jesus walking on the water. It's used of their reaction when He stilled the storm. It's used of the reaction of the people after the raising of the son of the widow of Nain in Luke 7, after the healing of the demonic in Luke 8. It's used, remember back in chapter 1, of the feelings of Zacharias when he saw an angel standing beside the altar. It's used of the people who were stunned when they saw Zacharias the father of John the Baptist receive his speech back. It's used of the shepherds in the field when they heard the angels who came to tell them of the Messiah's birth. It's used of the guards who were shocked at the tomb of the Lord Jesus Christ when the stone was rolled away. It's used of the women who came to the tomb describing their fear, their awe, their reverence. It's even used of the church after the death of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts chapter 5. It's used of the heathen who were trying to be exorcists at Ephesus in the nineteenth chapter. It appears in lots of places and it describes this sense that God is present, that God is moving and God is powerful.
It's a necessary, healthy fear. In fact, in some ways it's the power of a chaste life. You see, the awareness of God's presence, the awareness of God's holiness, the awareness of God's power is the source of great things. It's the source of holiness. 2 Corinthians 7:1, "Perfecting holiness in the fear of God." It's connected with godly sorrow. Also in that 2 Corinthians chapter, further on down in verse 11 when he talks about repentance. It's the source of our...of our godly living, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." It's the basis of our mutual respect and our mutual service. We serve one another with fear, Ephesians 5:21 says, it's the motive for our evangelism, "Knowing the fear of God we persuade men." It just comes up everywhere. When somebody sins, 1 Timothy 5:20 says, we tell everybody if they won't repent in order that all may fear, even if it's an elder or a pastor in the church.
There was a certain fear. Matthew 9:8 adds a little note to this. "The people said that they were stunned that God had given such authority to men, that God had given such authority to men." That's interesting. That tells me that not all the people believed Jesus was God. And remember now, the people didn't know what the Pharisees and scribes were thinking. What Jesus was saying and doing was interacting with their thoughts. And for some of the people, they were still assuming that God had given this power to men. Not good theology. And so that's why I say within the crowd, there's not a uniform commitment that Jesus is God. But what they had seen was stunning and it says at the end of verse 26, "We have seen remarkable things today."
And that's pretty much the way it goes. The crowd concludes that what they're seeing is amazing. What they're seeing is remarkable. In fact, the word used there is paradoxa. They've seen paradoxes, that is things that have no explanation, things which are humanly contradictory. You can't forgive sin and you can't get out of a stretcher in that condition and go home on your own two feet. This is paradox. But they didn't necessarily believe that Jesus was God. As I said, in that crowd in the middle there was all kinds of commitment and that's still how it is, isn't it? Where are you? Only one place you want to be. That fickle crowd shows up later, doesn't it, in the life of Christ on one day asking if He would please take His throne as King and by Friday screaming for His blood.
