Living Stones – Thursday, November 9, 2017
Strange things
Luke 5:26
“… they were all amazed, and they glorified God and were filled with fear, saying, “We have seen strange things today!”
In the Gospel recorded by Luke, chapter 5 verses 17 to 26 we have a very well known story. Jesus is out and about at someone’s big house and a crowd is there. In the crowd are significant people, including Pharisees.
Jesus had a profound effect on the society in His time, and before they had started fighting with Him they were admiring and enquiring about Him.
Suddenly there is a scene of high drama. There is drama developing inside, of course, as always happens when Jesus is face-to-face with the religious leaders of His time. But outside there is drama as well, a sick paralyzed man is being brought to Jesus – who by now had a big reputation as a healer.
This man and his friends arrived late and they were blocked out by the crowd. Being determined to get in, they persevere to the point of climbing and engineering a hole in the roof. In our time, we are accustomed to the paramedics and rescue workers climbing up and finding a way to get the sick, injured, or trapped out to safety. In this case, however, these guys were trying to get the sick man inside.
As the drama outside comes to an end with the brother being lowered before Jesus the Pharisees pick the inevitable fight with Jesus. The Jews would argue that Jesus started it by assuming the place of God by saying to the paralytic, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.”
Jesus, in declaring the forgiveness of the man’s sin, established Himself as God. The Jewish leaders and scholars had a problem with that. They were prepared to attribute to Him the ability to teach and the power to heal but not to accept Him as who He is, God Himself come down to rescue man from sin and restore men to right relationship with God.
Jesus had to deal with the matter of the man’s sin, through forgiveness, before tackling the issue of the man’s health, through healing. The Jewish people had long accepted that there was a relationship between sin and sickness.
In John 9, Jesus and His disciples encounter a man who was blind from birth. The disciples immediately displayed this traditional understanding of the relationship between sin and sickness by asking, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Darrel Bock rightly notes, “Today we tend to leave sin out of the health equation, seeing it primarily as a matter of chemicals and biology.”
As Christians, we believe that God’s model of perfection included perfect bodies for us, but that when sin entered the world through man’s disobedience everything was damaged, including our bodies, so they will be decaying and dying until we are glorified at the coming of Christ.
As Christians, we should also recognise that, in many cases, our physical disease is often directly linked to spiritual dis-ease.
There is often a relationship between sin and the physical brokenness in our lives. The same is true for some mental and emotional brokenness. If a particular sickness or disease is as the result of sin, the sin has to be identified, confessed and forgiven before there is the possibility of healing.
Jesus was making the very simple point that, sin must be dealt with before sickness. Forgiveness has to accompany healing. In Psalm 103:3 David make this very connection while praising God “Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases.”
Jesus, operating in the Jewish environment and context of His time, dealt first with the cause of the sickness before the sickness itself. Also, He dealt with the more important issue of life. Right relationship with God is always more important than good health. For the body will ultimately perish but the souls of men will live on.
The final drama plays out when the paralyzed man springs up to carry the bed that previously carried him. This is indeed a strange thing.
Everything was turned upside down. Some may say that everything was turned right side up. Order is restored in our lives, health, situation, and circumstances, when we can carry the things that carried us. They carried us when we couldn’t carry ourselves, but when we are forgiven and healed we can carry them.
Think on these things:
- Do you ever consider that your physical condition may sometimes be a function of your spiritual condition?
- We are all more conscious today of what we eat and of the relationship between diet, exercise and health. Are you taking care of your health?
- Do you place as much emphasis on your spiritual wellbeing as you do on your physical wellbeing?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would place right relationship with God above good health while taking care of ourselves and remembering that God is our healer.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex