This is the text of a sermon preached on Nehemiah 8:1-12.
A survey asked people how they felt about eight different aspects of modern life including their marriages and other family relationships, their children, their work, their health, their neighbourhood, their finances, and so on. In every category, those who felt pessimistic, worried or fearful for the future were in the majority.
It’s a sad fact that the more advanced and sophisticated our world seems to get, the less happy we seem to get. Joy is a pretty rare commodity in the modern world.
That’s not the way life is supposed to be. Our Bible reading tonight culminates in a great affirmation that the lives of God’s people are to be filled with a special kind of joy that strengthens and protects us as we make our way through life. One of the most distinctive things about the life of the Christian when compared to the lives of those who don’t know Christ and the good news of salvation, is that our lives should be full of joy, where theirs is so often filled with misery, guilt, dissatisfaction, pointlessness, worry and fear in between periodic spells of empty happiness.
So how do we receive this “joy of the Lord” that Nehemiah mentions in verse 10? How do we come to have it in our hearts? Well, the whole of this passage from verse 1 onwards describes a spiritual journey that any person has to make to find the joy of the Lord. There are three stages on this journey, described in this passage. They are:
Discovering the Word of the Lord
Leading to a period of spiritual grief
Finding the joy of the Lord
In one sense this is a journey that we only make once, when we first put our faith in Christ and accept him as our Saviour and Lord. And since that becoming a Christian can never be undone, the joy of the Lord in being saved can never totally be lost. But in another sense, the three stages of this spiritual journey are repeated over and over again in the Christian life as we discover or remember again that something we’ve been doing is wrong in God’s eyes, and then we feel bad inside that we’ve failed and haven’t lived in a way that pleases God, and then as we come back to God sorry for what we’ve done or not done, we receive fresh assurance of God’s love and forgiveness as a son or daughter, and the experience of joy returns again.
We’ll explore each of these stages in turn as we make our way through this passage. It would be useful for you to have the order of service open at the Bible reading so you can follow me as we go.
We begin with: Discovering the Word of the Lord
This passage in Nehemiah chapter 8 gives a remarkable picture of what happens when people take God’s Word seriously and gather to learn from it. It is no accident that having completed the rebuilding of the city’s infrastructure, the people are now led to the even more important work of spiritual renewal. Discovering or rediscovering God’s Word is usually the first step when God’s brings about a reformation or sends a revival to his people. The first step in our spiritual journey from sin to salvation, from death to life, from misery to joy, is to discover or rediscover the Word of God.
In the first seven verses of the passage we see the people in Jerusalem gathering to hear the Word of the Lord. And in these verses there are a number of aspects to their rediscovery of God’s Word that should resonate with us. In these verses, the people give us a number of useful lessons about how we can know God’s Word better as individuals and especially as a church.
The people were already in the city to celebrate the Feast of Trumpets, a festival that the people of Israel were commanded to keep on the first day of the seventh month of the year. But in verse 1 the people ask for something different from the normal festival observance to be done. They tell Ezra to read them the Book of the Law of Moses. The meeting was not held because the leaders demanded that the people listen to God’s Word; it was held because the people demanded that the leaders read them God’s Word. There’s no surer sign that God is at work to bring people to faith and salvation than when there is a spontaneous renewed interest in and demand for the Bible and sound biblical teaching. Many things the church does can be popular with people – things like social events, entertainment, all kinds of meetings and forums and so forth – and though all of these kinds of things have a place, it’s quite possible for people to want to come along to them for reasons that have nothing to do with an interest in God. But when people have a desire to hear the Bible preached, when people are crowding in to a Bible study or prayer meeting, that’s a much better indication that they are open to the things of God, because by nature, people would rather do anything other than gather round God’s Word to learn from it.
The next thing to notice about the people’s eagerness to discover God’s Word is that they are of one mind in this matter. The people of Israel were just as diverse, just as different from each other as people are in Scotland today. They would have been just as likely to be interested in different things in life, to be different kinds of characters, to be unable to agree about everything, but in at least one thing they are agreed: they all wanted to hear God’s Word. Verse 1 says that “all the people gathered as one man.” That’s very important for us today too. Are we single-minded in our desire to hear God’s Word and learn from it? Any kind of genuine Christian unity must draw its fuel from this common desire to know God, to learn his Word, and live as God’s Word commands. Otherwise it’s doomed to failure, because those who love God’s Word could never have unity with others calling themselves Christians who don’t care if God’s Word condemns what they believe or what they do in their churches.
The third aspect of the people’s rediscovery of God’s Word is to note who was in the gathered assembly. Verse 2 says the assembly included men, women and children. The phrase “all who could understand what they heard” refers to children old enough to grasp what was going on. Personally, I always been in favour of children over the age of about 12 staying in for the whole of our services. I think one reason why we lose so many young people in their teenage years is the fact that they are not used to being in church to hear a sermon during the whole of their childhood. They go out to Sunday school or the youth church, in theory right up to the age of 16. At which point we then expect them to suddenly stay in for the whole service, which they haven’t got used to doing. And by that point it’s too late. The good habit of listening to a sermon has not been formed.
The assembly in our passage does things better. If the children were old enough to understand what was going on, they were old enough to listen to God’s Word being read and expounded for three hours! From early morning to midday according to verse 3. Surely our children above the age of twelve can sit through a 20 or 30 minute sermon? They have no problem concentrating for that amount of time watching television or films, or listening to their favourite music!
The fourth thing to note is that the people wanted to be taught. Verse 3 says that the people were “attentive” during the reading of God’s Word. Verse 4 says that they made a wooden platform, or more literally, a tower, for Ezra to stand on as he read from the scrolls. It’s easy to overlook this aspect. But unless we as members of the congregation expect to hear God’s truth proclaimed and eager to receive it, it doesn’t really matter how good the quality of the preaching we “aren’t really listening to” is. If we as hearers don’t “have ears to hear” as Jesus liked to put it, God’s Word can never make a home in our hearts. We need to be enthusiastic and attentive hearers, listening actively and looking for God’s Word to affect us and change us as we listen. It’s a great mistake to think of listening to God’s Word being read and preached as something we passively listen to. We should be listening actively and feel as if we’re involved in the preaching, not just an audience.
The people in the crowd have the right attitudes and are examples to us all. Notice in verse 5, the reverence the people show to God’s Word – they stand as a mark of respect as Ezra opens the scrolls. In our church we stand as the Bible is brought in at the start of the service. We should remember we are not standing as a mark of respect to the minister or preacher, but out of reverence for God’s Word.
And in case anyone is thinking that showing reverence to God’s Word is a form of idolatry, verse 6 makes it clear the reverential attitude of the people wasn’t towards the sacred scrolls, as if they were relics due veneration. No, the reverence comes from knowing whose Word the Bible is. “Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people answered, Amen, Amen.”
They realised that hearing the Bible taught was not an add-on extra to the worship of God – it is at the heart of the worship of God! It is where God speaks to us most clearly in this gospel age. It is an indispensable part of the true worship of God. Our forefathers knew this. That’s why unadorned by gold and fancy works of art, Presbyterian churches tend to be kept simple and plain – because the focal point of worship is not on the building, or even on the communion table, but on the Word of God, heard and preached from the pulpit.
Finally we should briefly look at verse 8. It is a remarkably clear statement of what a Bible-based teaching ministry is all about. It’s in three distinct parts. The first thing is to make sure the we “read from the book…clearly.” Our services are not be built around the latest news headlines, or a few funny stories, or beautiful poems, but around the book, the Bible. In every service, God’s Word should be read, and it should be read loud and clear for everyone to hear. One aspect of this is that it should be read in a language that the people understand. Secondly, it is the preacher’s job to “give the sense” or in other words to explain the reading to his hearers. Whatever else a sermon is, at its most basic, it should explain and make it easier to understand God’s Word. If it fails in that, it’s failed as a sermon, no matter how good it is otherwise. Thirdly, it is the congregation’s job to understand the reading. It’s no good if the Bible is clearly read, and clearly explained, if the people refuse to pay heed to it, or don’t make any effort to understand and remember what they were taught. When these three things happen together then remarkable things can happen.
In our passage something remarkable does begin to happen, but the middle step is the most difficult to go through. Though it will not always be to the same degree for everyone, or be manifested in the same way in everyone, there is a process of going through spiritual grief. We see this in our passage in verse 9. “All the people wept as they heard the words of the Law.”
The grief and sadness that wells up in us as God’s Word is understood in a deep, personal way - expressed by the people in our passage as weeping, perhaps by us in ways we keep hidden inside - is the first reaction that people often have and it’s actually a good sign when people feel that way! It’s a sure sign that people’s consciences have been touched. Theologians tend to call it being “convicted of sin.”
By nature, the Bible tells us in Ephesians 2:1, we are dead in sin. One aspect of that is that before we are Christians, when we sin, we are a bit like a patient under a deep anaesthetic on an operating table – we don’t feel the pain of what we’re doing. When we come to understand the Word of God in a deep personal way, it’s as if the anaesthetic wears off and we see ourselves and our actions as they really are, and it hurts. We become conscious of how different our lives are to how they should be. We see our failures and some people can find that deeply upsetting.
Looking in God’s Word is like looking in a mirror, the Letter to James tells us. Firstly we see the mirror itself dazzling with light and brilliance, then we see the world around us reflected in its light, then if we look closely, we see ourselves as we really are. When we read or hear God’s Word, we see what God is like, in all his glory, his love and mercy, his justice and holiness and we recoil because he is so different, so much better than us in every way. Then we see the world around us and how far removed it is from how God wants it to be. We see how bad it is. And finally, we see ourselves and see how far removed we are from how God wants us to be, and how sinful we are.
It is this revelation of human sin and failure that moved the people in Jerusalem to tears as they heard Law of God read out, revealing his character, his commandments and showing up their utter failure to live as God’s people should live.
But thanks be to God, for when he brings people to that dark place of realising our sinfulness, our guilt and our helplessness before a holy God, he then floods that place with light and love, peace and joy, for the same Word which condemns us as sinners also reveals to us the good news, the gospel, that sinners can be saved through trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ.
God’s Word diagnoses the heart disease at the core of the human condition, which is sin; but it then prescribes the remedy for that disease, which is to come to Jesus, and trust in him to save you. Jesus said, “If anyone comes to me I will never cast him out.”
And when we come to Christ, and know that we have been forgiven by God, the darkness lifts and the weight of sin and shame falls away, and we begin a new life in the light, a life that is everlasting.
Our passage in Nehemiah takes place at a time before Jesus Christ came to the earth. But the same process occurs. When the Levites say to the people in verse 9 “This day is holy to the Lord your God, do not mourn or weep,” they’re saying far more than just that as it’s a special day the people should “put on a happy face” and forget the mournful feelings they had. Some commentators say that’s all the priests were doing, but that doesn’t ring true to me. No, what they are doing is reminding the people of who God is – he is the LORD – the covenant God who chose them and will always remain faithful to his people. They’re reminding them that he is not just God, he is their God.
And in verse 10, when they tell the people to go ahead and have a celebration feast – “eat the fat, and drink sweet wine…” – they are telling the people they can celebrate because God has forgiven them and they are still His covenant people.
Having come through the darkness of being convicted of our sins, and having trusted in God for deliverance, and found his forgiveness, we can then rejoice and celebrate. Surely one of the most beautiful verses in the Psalms is Psalm 30:5:
“For his anger is but for a moment, and his favour is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”
And that brings us to the third step in our spiritual journey:
Finding the joy of the Lord
Verse 10 is one of my favourite verses in the Bible. I come back to it time and time again. “Do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
Let me just say in passing that the grief being talked of here is the grief for sin that has been forgiven. It is not a blanket command that Christians should never grieve about anything. Most especially, this verse does not teach that Christians shouldn’t grieve for the death of their loved ones. The Bible is very clear that it is right and entirely understandable for Christians to grieve at certain times. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is “a time to weep.” In Romans 12:15, far from condemning those who mourn, Paul exhorts Christians to get alongside those who mourn – “weep with those who weep,” he says.
No, the “do not be grieved” in verse 10 is not a general command covering all situations. It is a particular command to those who have grieved for their sins but received God’s forgiveness. Do not grieve over sins that God has forgiven, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.
This joy that is mentioned is a very special thing as we’ll see as we consider where it comes from, what it is and what it does in the life of the Christian believer.
Since it is the joy of the Lord, we know it is a joy that comes from God. It is not something that we can manufacture in our own lives. It is a gift. And it is not something that any other source can provide. It cannot be found in money, or possessions, or in sex, or in drink and drugs, or in success, or fame. It is the joy of the Lord, and is only given to those who know the Lord. In Jeremiah 31:13, the LORD says:
“Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy; I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.
In Galatians 5:22-23, Paul writes:
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
The Spirit only produces such fruit in those who belong to Christ Jesus.
So what is the joy of the Lord? We know it comes from God, but what is it? Well, since this joy comes from God, it is to be distinguished from mere human happiness. Happiness comes from the same root as the word “happen.” Happiness is feeling good when good things happen. It disappears when bad or sad things happen to us. Joy is a different. It is a much deeper, stronger, more robust, more steady feeling of pleasure, gladness and contentment that nothing can take away from us. It persists within us even through times of pain, suffering, loss and mourning. It persists through all these things precisely because it is not only an emotion, a feeling generated solely within us, but because it comes from God, outside of us, as a divine blessing and gift. This is why God’s Word can command us to always be joyful:
Philippians 4:4 says: “Rejoice in the Lord, always; and again I say, rejoice!”
Other verses tells us that going through troubles, cannot affect our joy. Look at what the prophet says in Habakkuk 3:17:
“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”
Or what Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 7:4:
“In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy.”
Even if it "all goes pear-shaped," we can still rejoice in God and know the joy of the Lord, is the promise of the Bible.
We may not feel as if the joy of the Lord is still there in hard times, but even in hard times it is there, like the faint glow of embers in a fire that looks as if it’s about to go out. And like embers it is always ready to be fanned into full flame again if we kindle it by keeping on trusting in the Lord and waiting for the wind of God’s spirit to blow through us again.
The second thing to remember is that the joy of the Lord not only comes from the Lord, it is a joy found in the Lord.
It is a joy that increases the more we come to know about who God is and what he has done. In other words, it is a joy that is increased as we learn about God from his Word. Psalm 119 is the longest in the Bible and its all about God’s Word. Verse 111 of that Psalm says this:
“Your testimonies are my heritage forever, for they are the joy of my heart.”
God’s Word is what gives the Psalmist joy in his heart. Why?
Joy wells up in us as we consider what God is like. As we think about his character – his love, his grace, his faithfulness, his truthfulness, his kindness, his compassion and all his other attributes.
It is a joy that wells up in us as we consider what God has done: when we think about the grandeur and beauty. Or maybe when we consider the intricate order and total control God holds over all things by his sovereign power. And yet he tells us that all of that power, all his sovereign will, works all things for our good.
Most of all, this joy wells up inside us when we consider God’s salvation. As Isaiah 12:3 promises us:
“With joy you will draw waters from the wells of salvation.”
If we know Jesus Christ as our Saviour and Lord, how can we think about the cross and the resurrection without joy flooding into our hearts? When we know that when we stand before God in heaven, he will look upon the righteousness of Christ, which is ours through faith, and we will hear the words, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world,” how can we not rejoice in what he has done for us?
The third aspect of this verse is the realisation and experience that this joy that comes from God and is found in God “is our strength” as we go through life.
Partly that means that the joy of the Lord gives us strength to do what God calls us to do. In our passage as the people are filled with joy and begin to celebrate, they then begin to share the food and wine of their feast with others who don’t have these things. Verse 12: “All the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.”
But when you consider that the word translated “strength” in v.10 has its root meaning in the Hebrew word for a stronghold or fortress, I think the main point is that the joy of the Lord is our defence against the hard and painful things that life throws at us. The joy we carry around with us, deep inside, is like a shield that protects us and enables us to do things we otherwise couldn’t do.
I’m wondering if anyone is sitting here tonight and is saying to themselves, “What is he talking about? I don’t know this joy of the Lord.” Well the thing is this. You can’t know the joy of the Lord until you know the Lord himself. Jesus said in a prayer to his Father:
“This is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)
The question is, do you know Jesus Christ? Not as a figure in history, not as a great moral teacher, not even as the man that other people believe in. The question is, do you know Christ? Have you met him for yourself? Have you trusted in him as your Saviour and Lord? Can you truthfully say what the apostle Paul wrote in Philippians 3:8
“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
If not, God is calling you to himself tonight. He wants you to know Christ and know the joy of the Lord. Don’t miss out on it. Because as the chorus of our closing hymn puts it:
Knowing you, Jesus, knowing you,
There is no greater thing.
You’re my all, you’re the best,
You’re my joy, my righteousness,
And I love you Lord.
“The people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.”
May that be as true for us tonight, as it was for the crowd in Nehemiah’s day, for the joy of the Lord is our strength, this night and forever.
Sunday, 10 December 2006
Friday, 1 December 2006
It's the thought that counts
The editorial from our Church's Magazine for December 2006
There's a saying you often hear around Christmas: "It's not the gift, it's the thought that counts." How very true that is. Let’s look at it in two ways to show it’s true! Firstly, we value the time and thought that someone put into a gift, we prize the love behind the gift far more than the gift itself. When I think back to Christmas as a child I received many lovely presents. I remember one year receiving a set of little plastic farm animals and farm equipment and the farmer with a shotgun tucked under his arm. That was what enthralled me then. Now thinking back, I appreciate even more the wooden farm with hills and little loch, the barn and farmhouse my father made himself from wood. It must have taken him a long time to make and paint it. On the other hand it was only plywood, papier-mâché, bits of sponge and paint. It was worth almost nothing. But that’s the gift that came to mind when I sat down to write this. Why should that be? Because the thought behind it revealed how much my father loved me in a very special way.
On the other hand, how do we feel if we know no real thought went into a gift, even if the gift itself is expensive? There’s a scene in the film Dead Poets Society where it’s the birthday of one of the schoolboys and he’s sitting up on the roof looking very depressed. Another boy sees the expensive desk-set his parents gave him as a present and asks what’s wrong. “They gave me exactly the same set last year,” he says. If no thought went into it – if someone gives us clothes in a size that’s obviously too big or small for us, or if someone gives us a box of chocolates and earlier in the year we told them we’re diabetic (I’m not by the way before you ask!), it inevitably creates disappointment in the giver’s lack of thought.
Another aspect of the thought behind the gift is where the person makes a big deal of the “thinking about you”, but the gift never comes through at all! All thought and no gift isn’t really much thought at all is it? I’m not talking about people who cannot afford a gift here. Please don’t think that. I’m talking about people who like to appear generous but in practice are pretty mean. James in his New Testament letter writes about people like that. He writes at one point (James 2:15-16): "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?" There's something phoney about good wishes that aren't backed up by kind practical actions.
What’s all this got to do with the real meaning of Christmas? Well, the point I wanted to make is that Christmas shows not only God giving us the supremely valuable gift, but it also shows that he gave the gift out of the deepest love, and in doing that he was keeping his promises made in the Old Testament over more than a thousand years. Let’s look briefly at these now, in reverse order.
Unlike people who promise the earth but don’t deliver, God keeps his Word. In the Old Testament he promised to send the Messiah. And he didn’t just leave it as a wonderful idea, a set of fine promises, never followed through and delivered. God is not a politician! When he promises it, he does it. The Scriptures promised many things about him. They tell that he would destroy the devil when he came, that he would be conceived in a virgin, that he would be a descendant of Abraham and King David, that he would be born in Bethlehem, that he would be a Redeemer, a Saviour of his people, and possibly most astounding of all, that it would be through his death that his people will be saved, but that his death will somehow not be the end of his life. Look at Isaiah 53:5, 9-10: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed…And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.”
The second thing to remember is that in sending us his Son, God sent us a priceless gift, the most valuable and precious thing he had, the thing he loved most. Probably the most famous verse in the Bible says it most clearly: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16). God’s gift is no mere “stocking filler” if I can dare to put it that way. He gave us his beloved Son! From eternity, the holy trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit had existed in a perfect bond of unity and love, knowing and loving each other more deeply that we can ever imagine. And that first Christmas, God the Father sends God the Son down to such a world as this, to save us.
That leads us to consider the thought in the Father’s mind behind the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. The “thought that counts” most supremely of all at Christmas is the Father’s strongest and deepest saving love for his chosen people. A lot of people treat God’s election of his people as the dirty secret of Christian doctrine, something we should hide or be embarrassed about. Well we shouldn’t be and I’m not. I rejoice in it and I don’t care who knows it. From before the beginning of the world he knew and loved us. Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 1:9 that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” Or as he put it in Ephesians 1:4 “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.”
How can we begin to conceive of such a love as this? A love that has been working since before time, and all through human history, to order all things for our good (Romans 8:28) and to save us through Jesus Christ (Romans 8:30).
If John 3:16 is the best known verse in the Bible, it should be joined by Romans 5:8, where Paul writes: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While all the wonderful verses about predestination fill all who believe in Jesus Christ with joy, those who don’t yet know Christ may feel excluded, wondering if God didn’t choose them. But that’s where verses like this are so important. It was while we were sinners, Christ died for us. If you are not a Christian, you don’t need to worry about whether God chose. God is calling you to come to Christ and believe in him. It’s that choice, whether to accept God’s gift or not, that should concern you. There is no qualification required to come to Christ other than to accept you are a sinner in need of a Saviour, because it was for sinners like you and me that Christ died to save.
This Christmas may we all see that in Christ both the gift and the thought count. And may we never despise or reject either.
There's a saying you often hear around Christmas: "It's not the gift, it's the thought that counts." How very true that is. Let’s look at it in two ways to show it’s true! Firstly, we value the time and thought that someone put into a gift, we prize the love behind the gift far more than the gift itself. When I think back to Christmas as a child I received many lovely presents. I remember one year receiving a set of little plastic farm animals and farm equipment and the farmer with a shotgun tucked under his arm. That was what enthralled me then. Now thinking back, I appreciate even more the wooden farm with hills and little loch, the barn and farmhouse my father made himself from wood. It must have taken him a long time to make and paint it. On the other hand it was only plywood, papier-mâché, bits of sponge and paint. It was worth almost nothing. But that’s the gift that came to mind when I sat down to write this. Why should that be? Because the thought behind it revealed how much my father loved me in a very special way.
On the other hand, how do we feel if we know no real thought went into a gift, even if the gift itself is expensive? There’s a scene in the film Dead Poets Society where it’s the birthday of one of the schoolboys and he’s sitting up on the roof looking very depressed. Another boy sees the expensive desk-set his parents gave him as a present and asks what’s wrong. “They gave me exactly the same set last year,” he says. If no thought went into it – if someone gives us clothes in a size that’s obviously too big or small for us, or if someone gives us a box of chocolates and earlier in the year we told them we’re diabetic (I’m not by the way before you ask!), it inevitably creates disappointment in the giver’s lack of thought.
Another aspect of the thought behind the gift is where the person makes a big deal of the “thinking about you”, but the gift never comes through at all! All thought and no gift isn’t really much thought at all is it? I’m not talking about people who cannot afford a gift here. Please don’t think that. I’m talking about people who like to appear generous but in practice are pretty mean. James in his New Testament letter writes about people like that. He writes at one point (James 2:15-16): "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?" There's something phoney about good wishes that aren't backed up by kind practical actions.
What’s all this got to do with the real meaning of Christmas? Well, the point I wanted to make is that Christmas shows not only God giving us the supremely valuable gift, but it also shows that he gave the gift out of the deepest love, and in doing that he was keeping his promises made in the Old Testament over more than a thousand years. Let’s look briefly at these now, in reverse order.
Unlike people who promise the earth but don’t deliver, God keeps his Word. In the Old Testament he promised to send the Messiah. And he didn’t just leave it as a wonderful idea, a set of fine promises, never followed through and delivered. God is not a politician! When he promises it, he does it. The Scriptures promised many things about him. They tell that he would destroy the devil when he came, that he would be conceived in a virgin, that he would be a descendant of Abraham and King David, that he would be born in Bethlehem, that he would be a Redeemer, a Saviour of his people, and possibly most astounding of all, that it would be through his death that his people will be saved, but that his death will somehow not be the end of his life. Look at Isaiah 53:5, 9-10: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed…And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.”
The second thing to remember is that in sending us his Son, God sent us a priceless gift, the most valuable and precious thing he had, the thing he loved most. Probably the most famous verse in the Bible says it most clearly: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16). God’s gift is no mere “stocking filler” if I can dare to put it that way. He gave us his beloved Son! From eternity, the holy trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit had existed in a perfect bond of unity and love, knowing and loving each other more deeply that we can ever imagine. And that first Christmas, God the Father sends God the Son down to such a world as this, to save us.
That leads us to consider the thought in the Father’s mind behind the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. The “thought that counts” most supremely of all at Christmas is the Father’s strongest and deepest saving love for his chosen people. A lot of people treat God’s election of his people as the dirty secret of Christian doctrine, something we should hide or be embarrassed about. Well we shouldn’t be and I’m not. I rejoice in it and I don’t care who knows it. From before the beginning of the world he knew and loved us. Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 1:9 that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” Or as he put it in Ephesians 1:4 “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.”
How can we begin to conceive of such a love as this? A love that has been working since before time, and all through human history, to order all things for our good (Romans 8:28) and to save us through Jesus Christ (Romans 8:30).
If John 3:16 is the best known verse in the Bible, it should be joined by Romans 5:8, where Paul writes: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While all the wonderful verses about predestination fill all who believe in Jesus Christ with joy, those who don’t yet know Christ may feel excluded, wondering if God didn’t choose them. But that’s where verses like this are so important. It was while we were sinners, Christ died for us. If you are not a Christian, you don’t need to worry about whether God chose. God is calling you to come to Christ and believe in him. It’s that choice, whether to accept God’s gift or not, that should concern you. There is no qualification required to come to Christ other than to accept you are a sinner in need of a Saviour, because it was for sinners like you and me that Christ died to save.
This Christmas may we all see that in Christ both the gift and the thought count. And may we never despise or reject either.
Sunday, 5 November 2006
How to Choose Your Friends
There’s a verse I was reading recently in the book of Proverbs that stuck with me. Proverbs 13:20: "He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm." (NIV).
It’s so simple, so straightforward, and so true. But what is wisdom you may be asking. Well it’s not intelligence. That’s quite different. Some of the most intelligent people I met at university were the biggest fools when it came to living their own lives. Then I’ve known other people who weren’t what you’d call "an intellectual", but they had wisdom to spare. And it’s not knowledge either, though knowledge does play a part in being wise. The computer I’m writing this on has more knowledge (i.e. information) stored in its memory banks and available on the Internet than my brain could ever hold. But it’s not wise. It’s just a machine. It can’t really think for itself. No, wisdom is something else. Wisdom is a down to earth, practical knowledge of about how to live and practical skill for living life.
In that light, the verse in Proverbs is true for everyone reading this, whoever you are. And it’s not a difficult concept to grasp. It’s almost self-explanatory. If you spend your time with wise people, their wisdom will rub off on you. If you spend time with fools, their foolishness will rub off on you and you are likely to suffer as a result.
In Bible times, the proverb mainly concerned actually spending time with people. And that’s the most important aspect of this proverb, but if we take the principle this proverb lays down and update it for other time spent with people, it also applies to the authors of the books we read, the makers of the films and television programmes we watch, the singers in the music we listen to, the columnists in the newspapers and magazines we read, and so on. And when we read it in that light, how much more challenging is it about how we spend (or should that be waste!) our time? In our daily life, if we even considered for a minute the question "Will this leave me a wiser person?" how many of us would make different choices about what we read, watch and listen to? It reminds me of Paul’s advice in Philippians 4:8:
"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things."
Yet having said that, clearly the main thing this verse teaches is about who we spend our time with. The fact is that those you spend your time with not only reveals a lot about you, it affects you much more than you might want or realise. For example if you spend all of your week, except one hour on a Sunday, basically in the company of people who don’t know Jesus Christ and don’t worship our God, or worse who hate and ridicule him and don’t mind telling you so, you will find yourself much more open to being influenced to think the world’s way, to take a secular view of life, to take a materialistic view of life, and to be subtly encouraged to forget God during the week and get on with your own life. You may even find yourself, like Peter, denying Christ and doing things you know are wrong, simply to avoid being ridiculed or disliked yourself. That’s surely one aspect of "suffering harm" as a companion of fools?
Now clearly I’m not advocating the setting up of monasteries, and retreating from the world physically. But on the other hand, if you spend time with your fellow believers not just on a Sunday morning, but maybe on a Sunday night too, on a Wednesday night at our "Unlock" Bible study meeting, maybe at an organisation like the Regnal or Guild during the week, then you keep just that little bit more in touch not just with each other, but as God’s people, with God too.
There is a whole strand of teaching throughout the Bible that makes it very clear that although we are to live in the world, be good neighbours, live peaceably with everyone, get to know people outside the church, be good colleagues of those we work with and so on, we are not "of the world," or be "friends" with the world, and should not live as if we are. Jesus says to his disciples "You do not belong to the world." (John 15:19). In Romans 12:2 Paul says "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Although we will have friends and acquaintances outside the church, we should be careful of how much influence they have over us. And we should try wherever possible to make sure our best and most trusted friends should be in the church. They should be the ones we spend much time with and learn from. Our closest companions should be those who fear the Lord, who hold him in awe and wonder, who love him, who trust in him and will help us in our walk as we seek to do so too. After all, if we are to walk with the wise, we must walk with those who fear the Lord, for Proverbs teaches that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 9:10).
The most important application of this verse from Proverbs that I can think of is the way it should encourage us to spend more time with Jesus in our own private times of prayer, Bible study and worship. After all, 1 Corinthians 1:24, Paul says that Christ is "the wisdom of God." It follows then that he or she that walks with Christ will grow wise. We will become wise in the things that matter most: in the knowledge of what God is like as he reveals himself through Christ and his written Word, the Bible, and in how we can live a life that will glorify him and enable us to enjoy him forever.
So let him be your teacher as you walk through life. There is no greater teacher. And his lessons are the easiest to remember, even though the practical work can be hard at times. His school is always open to take new students and no one who joins his classes will ever be expelled or sent home. You only need one textbook too. Best of all, once you sign up for his classes you can’t fail the exam at the end of term. You see, the teacher has already corrected all his pupils mistakes and answered all their examination questions correctly, well before the exam is marked. He did it a long time ago for them at a place called Calvary.
And how do you get into this remarkable teacher’s class? You just knock and the door will be opened to you. Ask him, and he’ll let you in. Put your trust in him, and you’ll never regret it. It will be the wisest thing you’ve ever done.
It’s so simple, so straightforward, and so true. But what is wisdom you may be asking. Well it’s not intelligence. That’s quite different. Some of the most intelligent people I met at university were the biggest fools when it came to living their own lives. Then I’ve known other people who weren’t what you’d call "an intellectual", but they had wisdom to spare. And it’s not knowledge either, though knowledge does play a part in being wise. The computer I’m writing this on has more knowledge (i.e. information) stored in its memory banks and available on the Internet than my brain could ever hold. But it’s not wise. It’s just a machine. It can’t really think for itself. No, wisdom is something else. Wisdom is a down to earth, practical knowledge of about how to live and practical skill for living life.
In that light, the verse in Proverbs is true for everyone reading this, whoever you are. And it’s not a difficult concept to grasp. It’s almost self-explanatory. If you spend your time with wise people, their wisdom will rub off on you. If you spend time with fools, their foolishness will rub off on you and you are likely to suffer as a result.
In Bible times, the proverb mainly concerned actually spending time with people. And that’s the most important aspect of this proverb, but if we take the principle this proverb lays down and update it for other time spent with people, it also applies to the authors of the books we read, the makers of the films and television programmes we watch, the singers in the music we listen to, the columnists in the newspapers and magazines we read, and so on. And when we read it in that light, how much more challenging is it about how we spend (or should that be waste!) our time? In our daily life, if we even considered for a minute the question "Will this leave me a wiser person?" how many of us would make different choices about what we read, watch and listen to? It reminds me of Paul’s advice in Philippians 4:8:
"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things."
Yet having said that, clearly the main thing this verse teaches is about who we spend our time with. The fact is that those you spend your time with not only reveals a lot about you, it affects you much more than you might want or realise. For example if you spend all of your week, except one hour on a Sunday, basically in the company of people who don’t know Jesus Christ and don’t worship our God, or worse who hate and ridicule him and don’t mind telling you so, you will find yourself much more open to being influenced to think the world’s way, to take a secular view of life, to take a materialistic view of life, and to be subtly encouraged to forget God during the week and get on with your own life. You may even find yourself, like Peter, denying Christ and doing things you know are wrong, simply to avoid being ridiculed or disliked yourself. That’s surely one aspect of "suffering harm" as a companion of fools?
Now clearly I’m not advocating the setting up of monasteries, and retreating from the world physically. But on the other hand, if you spend time with your fellow believers not just on a Sunday morning, but maybe on a Sunday night too, on a Wednesday night at our "Unlock" Bible study meeting, maybe at an organisation like the Regnal or Guild during the week, then you keep just that little bit more in touch not just with each other, but as God’s people, with God too.
There is a whole strand of teaching throughout the Bible that makes it very clear that although we are to live in the world, be good neighbours, live peaceably with everyone, get to know people outside the church, be good colleagues of those we work with and so on, we are not "of the world," or be "friends" with the world, and should not live as if we are. Jesus says to his disciples "You do not belong to the world." (John 15:19). In Romans 12:2 Paul says "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Although we will have friends and acquaintances outside the church, we should be careful of how much influence they have over us. And we should try wherever possible to make sure our best and most trusted friends should be in the church. They should be the ones we spend much time with and learn from. Our closest companions should be those who fear the Lord, who hold him in awe and wonder, who love him, who trust in him and will help us in our walk as we seek to do so too. After all, if we are to walk with the wise, we must walk with those who fear the Lord, for Proverbs teaches that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 9:10).
The most important application of this verse from Proverbs that I can think of is the way it should encourage us to spend more time with Jesus in our own private times of prayer, Bible study and worship. After all, 1 Corinthians 1:24, Paul says that Christ is "the wisdom of God." It follows then that he or she that walks with Christ will grow wise. We will become wise in the things that matter most: in the knowledge of what God is like as he reveals himself through Christ and his written Word, the Bible, and in how we can live a life that will glorify him and enable us to enjoy him forever.
So let him be your teacher as you walk through life. There is no greater teacher. And his lessons are the easiest to remember, even though the practical work can be hard at times. His school is always open to take new students and no one who joins his classes will ever be expelled or sent home. You only need one textbook too. Best of all, once you sign up for his classes you can’t fail the exam at the end of term. You see, the teacher has already corrected all his pupils mistakes and answered all their examination questions correctly, well before the exam is marked. He did it a long time ago for them at a place called Calvary.
And how do you get into this remarkable teacher’s class? You just knock and the door will be opened to you. Ask him, and he’ll let you in. Put your trust in him, and you’ll never regret it. It will be the wisest thing you’ve ever done.
Tuesday, 8 August 2006
Encounters with Jesus: The Crippled Man
There's a true story of a Spanish father and son who had become estranged from each other. The son ran away, and the father set off to find him. He searched for months to no avail. Finally, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an advert in a Madrid newspaper. The advert read: "Dear Paco, meet me in front of this newspaper office at noon on Saturday. All is forgiven. I love you. Your Father." On the Saturday 800 men named Paco turned up, looking for forgiveness from their fathers.
The point that true story makes very graphically is that the need for forgiveness is a very strong human emotion. And the burden of guilt is one of the worst things that can afflict a person’s life. Feeling guilty about something can eat a person up inside and ruin their life. Knowing forgiveness, on the other hand, heals broken hearts and restores inner peace.
This passage of Scripture we’re going to look at tonight has some really important things to teach us about forgiveness. We can break it down into three aspects and we’ll spend a bit of time on each of these. The three main lessons for us are:
Firstly, spreading the gospel of forgiveness to sinners is the most important purpose of the church.
Secondly, the Lord Jesus Christ, who forgives sinners, is the most important person who has ever lived because his actions prove he is no less than God incarnate.
Thirdly, coming to faith in Christ, so that we can receive God’s forgiveness, is the most important choice any of us can make in this life.
So let’s work through this passage as we see each of these aspects in turn. As always I would suggest you keep the passage before you as we go through it as I will be referring to the text quite a lot as we progress through the story.
Verse 1 follows right on from the passage we looked at last week. You may remember that after Jesus healed the two demon-possessed men and sent the demons into the pigs that were drowned, the people of that place came out to meet Jesus and they begged him to leave their region. Verse 1 tells us that Jesus did exactly that.
"And getting into a boat he crossed over and came to his own city."
His own city is Capernaum back on the other shore of the Sea of Galilee. We know this from Matthew chapter 4, verse 13, which says:
"And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali."
That’s why Capernaum is referred to as "his own city." People tend not to realise this. But the fact is that although Christ was born in Bethlehem, and grew up in Nazareth, it was actually in the seaside town of Capernaum in Galilee that he made his home, and he used it as a base to conduct most of his earthly ministry.
And then in verse 2, we are told that "some people brought to him a paralytic, lying on a bed." As is often the case with Matthew’s Gospel, most of the details are stripped away from his account of the events and just the bare bones of the story are told. We get much more vivid detail about exactly what happened from the parallel accounts in Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels. Listen to the picture Mark gives of the same story, and notice not only the lengths the crippled man’s friends went to in order to bring him to Jesus, but also notice the circumstances of this encounter, which explains why there were scribes there to witness everything. This is Mark chapter 2, verses 1 to 4:
"Several days later Jesus returned to Capernaum, and the news of his arrival spread quickly through the town. Soon the house where he was staying was so packed with visitors that there wasn't room for one more person, not even outside the door. And he preached the word to them. Four men arrived carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They couldn't get to Jesus through the crowd, so they dug through the clay roof above his head. Then they lowered the sick man on his mat, right down in front of Jesus." (NLT)
So there was a quite a meeting going on in the house where Jesus was staying. The place was jam-packed with people inside and outside, all there to hear Jesus preach to them. Mark points out that there wasn’t room for any more people to get in through the door. And this crippled man’s friends come up with a unique solution to the problem. They climb up on the roof – remember the houses in Israel at that time would have flat roofs covered with a kind of mixture of dried clay and straw thatch rather than slates or tiles that we have – and they make a hole in the covering and then they lower the crippled man down on ropes, still in his bed until he lands right in front of Jesus in the room below. What an amazing thing to do! It’s such a remarkable detail that it’s maybe surprising that Matthew doesn’t mention it. But Matthew really wants his readers to focus on what happened once the crippled man was in the room, rather than how he got there.
This man’s friends really go the extra mile on his behalf, don’t they? They go to enormous lengths to make sure that their friend is brought to hear Jesus’ teaching. I think they challenge us. What are we doing to bring our friends and family to Jesus? In a different sense to this story perhaps, but with equal importance, what are we doing for those who can’t "walk through the door of the church" to bring them to hear the gospel? Are we capable of coming up with ideas as ingenious as this crippled man’s friends came up with to make sure he didn’t miss out from hearing the Saviour’s words for himself?
Well surely this autumn we will all have a marvellous opportunity to do something when our church will be putting on the Christianity Explored course. Of course, we should pray for this, but we should also think carefully if there’s someone we know who we could bring to Jesus because they either can’t or won’t walk into this church on their own.
But to get back to our passage, once the crippled man is in the room, lying right in front of Jesus on his bed, Jesus sees what has happened and he sees both the faith of the friends, probably peering down from their vantage point through the hole in the roof, and the faith of the crippled man too. There’s certainly no indication here that the crippled man was brought to Jesus against his will. Quite the opposite. It seems obvious to me that the man on the stretcher was probably the driving force that persuaded the able-bodied men to do what they did. At the very least we know he did not object to it. But I think he was desperate to meet Jesus.
What we don’t really know is why this man and his friends went to such lengths to come before Christ. It is possible he was merely wanting to hear Jesus’ teaching and not at all looking for his paralysis to be healed. But it seems more likely that the possibility of being healed played at least some part in his motivation to be brought into Jesus’ presence. Whatever he was expecting, Jesus’ completely ignores the fact that the man is a cripple. He cuts to the chase and immediately gets to the man’s most pressing need by saying to him, "Take heart, my son," (which could also be translated, "Be of good cheer, my child," – it is a term of endearment and kindness), "Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven."
Jesus’ words, though very gentle and loving, are also quite shocking. He doesn’t say to him, as we might have expected, "Take heart, my son, you’re faith has made you well." No! "Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven."
As so often in the gospels, Jesus cuts through all the baggage and dross, all the peripheral things. And he get to the heart of the matter. "Your sins are forgiven." Notice that no one has asked Jesus anything at this point. Certainly no one has raised the subject of sin at all. Bringing a crippled man to the most renowned healer in Palestine might have spoken for itself we might suppose. The most obvious assumption would that this cripple must be looking to be healed. But Jesus knows this man’s deepest needs. So he purposely switches the incident around and makes it about the forgiveness of sins.
And this is where I think the first of the three main lessons I mentioned is made apparent by Christ. I think a principle is laid down for us here and it’s this: the main purpose of the Church is to spread the gospel of forgiveness. To preach the good news that forgiveness, salvation, eternal life is offered to all sinners who will come to Christ in faith and repentance. It’s a crucial principle for the church to grasp. Telling people about God’s salvation through Christ Jesus is the primary – I might almost say the paramount – mission for Christ’s church. You see there’s a temptation to get bogged down in a "social gospel" of social work, health care, famine relief, drug rehabilitation, housing the homeless and so on. Now I’m not decrying any of these things. Of course I’m not. The church’s practical ministry of mercy to the poor, the sick and the needy is a vital part of a healthy church’s life. A church that has all its doctrines right, and pure worship according to the Word of God, and so forth, but which doesn’t show practical love to those in need is travesty of the church God calls his people to be. But the point I’m making here, is that it is also a travesty if a church thinks that as long as it does the practical things it is getting the most important things right. Because it isn’t. It’s far too easy to get sucked into that social gospel mentality which seeks to help people on this world’s terms first, with the idea being that after that, those we help will automatically become Christians because we have shown them love. Or else we say, let’s sort out their earthly lives first and then we can they’ll listen to the gospel later. Only in reality, "later" never comes and somehow proclaiming the gospel is missed out like an optional extra.
I can’t overstress how wrong I think this kind of approach is. The correct, biblical approach is for both practical help and gospel teaching to go hand-in-hand, both coming together. But of the two, the most important is spreading the gospel. If it doesn’t have primacy, we’ve got it wrong. Practical only lasts for this life. Bringing someone to faith in Christ lasts forever. Remember that Jesus didn’t say to the crippled man, "Your faith has made you well," nor did he say to him, "I will heal you first and then we’ll see about your sins." No, the Saviour lays down the principle for his church. First and foremost, the church’s "business" is telling people how they can find forgiveness for their sins and how they can find a new life in covenant relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. All the social action we can do we certainly should do, but only to back up our mission to "Go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations…teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded." Only to back this up, never to replace it.
The second significant lesson for us to take away from this passage is the obvious conclusion Matthew expects readers of his gospel to come to: Jesus Christ is the most important person who has ever lived. He is no less than one true God come to earth as a human being.
As soon as Jesus says the words, "Your sins are forgiven", some of the hearers pick up on this and the alarm bells start to go off in their minds. In verse 3, some of the scribes in the room start saying to themselves "This man is blaspheming."
In the gospels we hear quite a lot about "the scribes." When we use the word scribe we usually mean a writer – particularly someone who writes things down for other people. But in the Bible, the scribes are the scholars of the law of God. They were students of the Old Testament, experts in applying God’s law to every situation in life. They are sometimes called "lawyers" or "doctors of the law" or "teachers of the law" in some translations.
It’s a group of these Old Testament legal scholars who hear Jesus saying to the paralytic "Your sins are forgiven." And though they don’t say anything out loud, in their hearts they say to themselves "This man is blaspheming." Or as some translations put it "This fellow is speaking blasphemy." And there is certainly a note of contempt for Jesus in their choice of words.
Here we should note that from their point of view there is a sense in which they are right, or at least their feelings have some justification. If Jesus is just a good man, or a great teacher, or whatever other humanistic label is put on him, then he is was sinning when he claimed to have authority to forgive sins against God. Technically speaking, the scribes were wrong to call it blasphemy. That crime was recognised in the Jewish law as only applying when the name of God was misused by the blasphemer – and the penalty was death by stoning. So the scribes are pushing it a little in calling this blasphemy, but it is certainly sinful for a mere man to claim the authority to forgive someone else’s sins. Only God can forgive sins because sin is an affront to God and a breaking of God’s laws. As Psalm 51:4 makes clear, when David prayed to God:
"Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight."
In Psalm 32:5 the psalmist says, addressing God directly:
"I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD’, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin."
In Isaiah 43:25 the LORD says:
"I, I am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins."
So for a mere man to say he has the authority to forgive sins, when the Bible testifies that forgiveness is the sole prerogative of God, is indeed a terrible wrong.
But of course there is a very good reason why Jesus could say to the crippled man "your sins are forgiven" and yet was not guilty of any wrongdoing in saying so. Probably no one present at the house that day realised it – not even when the extraordinary events of verses 4 to 6 took place. The crowd certainly gets it wrong in their explanation which we find in verse 8. They come up with the conclusion that God had changed and had now decided to give the authority to forgive sins to at least one mere man, rather than reserve it to himself. The phrase "who had given such authority to men" in verse 8 should not be read as implying they though every man now had this authority. Nothing in the passage suggests they thought that. No, their amazement was that any man at all could be given this power. But they were forced to conclude that Jesus and only Jesus had it.
But all these are wrong explanations. The real reason why Jesus can forgive sins, even though the Bible teaches that only God can do that, is because Jesus is God. This is what the New Testament teaches in many many passages. Let me read a few of them to you.
John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
And of course John leaves us in no doubt that "the Word" is Jesus Christ.
John 8:57-59: "So the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple."
Here the reason the crowd act so violently to what Jesus said is because they understood that he was claiming to be God here. Not only does he claim to have been in existence before Abraham lived, which was of course more than two thousand years before Christ was born, but when he says "I am" the crowd realises he is taking God’s covenant name for himself. Remember when Moses asked God what his name was at the burning bush? God said his name was "I am." Jesus here says he is "I am."
Romans 9:5 very clearly states that Jesus is God:
"Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them [that’s the Jews] is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, for ever praised." (NIV)
And finally, Paul’s great affirmation of the glory and deity of Christ in Colossians 1:15-19:
"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell."
So yes, the Old Testament does teach that only God can forgive sins. But the New Testament teaches that Christ is God. And that’s the reason why when Christ says to the crippled man "Your sins are forgiven" he had every right to say it.
And by what happens in the rest of our reading after Jesus says these key words, he proves that his words are true and he proves that he does have the authority of God, and is God, in three ways:
Firstly, he can tell what the scribes are thinking, even when they don’t say a word or give any outward indication. In verse 4, Jesus says to the scribes: "Why do you think evil in your hearts?" Almost as if he could hear the very words about blasphemy that they only thought silently to themselves. And he is right to call what they were thinking evil because they were actually accusing God himself of blaspheming against God! But by this display of knowledge, he shows himself to have the knowledge of God.
Secondly, he states again that he can indeed forgive sins. He does it in an oblique way though. He doesn’t come right out and say it again. Instead, he says in verse 5, "Which is easier, to say ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk?’" And of course what he’s practically saying is that if he can say the second and prove it to be true, what reason can anyone have for doubting the first statement. He’s saying to them, "Look, the proof of the pudding is in the eating." He’s saying, "Okay, you want me to put up or shut up? Then watch this!"
Thirdly, he then goes on to actually heal the crippled man. In verse 6 he says this is "that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins." And then he speaks the word, and it is done. And doesn’t that remind you of the very beginning of creation, where God speaks: "Let there be light, and there was light." He says it and it happens.
He bids the crippled man rise and walk, and he does. And here he shows such power, such miraculous power than no mere man could have, that he is showing the people there and us by his actions, that he is God. Imagine what it would have been like to be in that room and see that happen! Verse 8 tells us that the crowd there were afraid. And no wonder! The healing here was truly miraculous. No medical procedure, not even such as we have today could achieve what Christ achieved by his word alone.
The reason I say that is because of the particular word that Luke uses to describe this man in his Gospel. He doesn’t just call him a cripple, or a paralytic. He calls him a paraplegic. His condition was of long standing and degenerative. His bones were deformed. His muscles were wasted away. There was just no way medicine could help him. And no natural explanation for how such a man could ever stand on his own two feet never mind walk home.
But that’s what happened. He rose and walked out of the room, carrying the very bed he had been carried in on. And Luke adds in his account that he went home that day glorifying God, not just because of his miraculous healing, but even more so because of he knew the burden of his sins had been forever taken away by Christ and he had Christ’s promise from his own lips that he was now forgiven. You see that as well as showing that his forgiveness was real to the scribes, Christ was also re-assuring the crippled man that his sins really were forgiven.
That brings us to the third of the main lessons we should draw from this passage. Coming to faith in Christ, so that we can receive God’s forgiveness, is the most important choice any of us can make in this life.
The passage tells us that Jesus Christ has the authority to forgive our sins. And that is such a wonderful thing in itself that we must never forget it. Amazing though Jesus’ miracles of healing and his ability to cast out demons are, the fact that Jesus can take our sins away is even more amazing! This passage is the first time in the gospel that the issue of forgiveness of sin is mentioned. As William Hendriksen says in his commentary on this passage: "So far Jesus has healed. He has dealt with many human afflictions. But now he deals with the worst affliction suffered by men and women – sin."
Because it’s here in the forgiveness of sin that Jesus gets to the very root of all misery, which is human guilt and pollution. In forgiveness, Christ deals with the evil that separates man from his Maker. Sin unforgiven is Satan’s best friend, man’s worst enemy.
We know that the crippled man came to Christ in faith and received forgiveness and healing. What about us?
A Sunday School teacher had just concluded her lesson and wanted to make sure she had made her point. She said, "Can anyone tell me what you must do before you can obtain forgiveness of sin?" There was a short pause and then, from the back of the room, a small boy spoke up. "Sin," he said.
Well that little boy had a point didn’t he? Although obviously his answer wasn’t what his Sunday school teacher was looking for, he wasn’t wrong. Unless there is some wrong done to us, unless someone has done something to us, there’s nothing for us to forgive. Forgiveness just doesn’t come into it unless there’s something that has caused some kind of breakdown in the relationship between the person who is guilty of the wrongdoing and the person against whom the wrong has been done. Forgiveness goes hand-in-hand with guilt. Where there is guilt there is the possibility of forgiveness, and without guilt there is nothing to forgive.
In the case of the relationship between mankind and God there is always guilt because we are all sinners. The Bible could not be clearer on this point.
Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
1 John 1:8 "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."
So according to the Bible, all of us, every single one of us needs God’s forgiveness, because all of us are guilty of sinning against him.
But the Bible also teaches that forgiveness is no easy thing for God. It’s not just a matter of saying the words. And Jesus knew that very well. Indeed, he knew it better than anyone else. For God to forgive anyone’s sins, his justice still had to be satisfied. Atonement had to be made. For God to forgive a sinner, a substitute had to be punished in the sinner’s place. For Christ to forgive the crippled man took no less than for the Son of God to shed his blood on the cross.
Paul writes in Ephesians 1:7: "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace."
Now the point is this: the only way to be forgiven, to receive God’s pardon, to have your sins blotted out and carried away is through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. To receive God’s forgiveness there is nothing you can do and nothing you are asked to do by God except come to Jesus Christ, even though crippled by sin and loaded down with guilt and ask him to forgive you. Come to him, trusting and relying on him to be your Saviour and you will be saved. And no one who does this will ever be disappointed.
Think of this crippled man who was saved by Jesus. He began that day crippled not only physically but also spiritually. He went home that night not only able to walk but knowing his sins were gone, forgiven and forgotten by God. And he glorified God because his sins were washed away by the blood of the Lamb.
To accept God’s offer of salvation through Christ is to have eternal joy in heaven. To reject Christ is to face eternal woe in hell. That’s why the choice to accept or reject Christ is the most important decision you will ever make.
Jesus said in John 5:24: "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."
He also said in John 3:36: "He who believes on the Son has everlasting life, and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides upon him."
And the choice is before all of us. A choice and a question.
As an old gospel hymn asks:
"Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
"Lay aside the garments that are stained by sin,
and be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
there’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb!
"Are you washed in the blood
in the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless?
Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"
There is no more wonderful thing than to be able to answer "yes" to that question. It is the first step that takes you from being a sinner crippled on a bed of sin and guilt to being a saint whose journey will end entering the gates of the holy city in heaven. May we all rise up and walk there through the grace of our God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
The point that true story makes very graphically is that the need for forgiveness is a very strong human emotion. And the burden of guilt is one of the worst things that can afflict a person’s life. Feeling guilty about something can eat a person up inside and ruin their life. Knowing forgiveness, on the other hand, heals broken hearts and restores inner peace.
This passage of Scripture we’re going to look at tonight has some really important things to teach us about forgiveness. We can break it down into three aspects and we’ll spend a bit of time on each of these. The three main lessons for us are:
Firstly, spreading the gospel of forgiveness to sinners is the most important purpose of the church.
Secondly, the Lord Jesus Christ, who forgives sinners, is the most important person who has ever lived because his actions prove he is no less than God incarnate.
Thirdly, coming to faith in Christ, so that we can receive God’s forgiveness, is the most important choice any of us can make in this life.
So let’s work through this passage as we see each of these aspects in turn. As always I would suggest you keep the passage before you as we go through it as I will be referring to the text quite a lot as we progress through the story.
Verse 1 follows right on from the passage we looked at last week. You may remember that after Jesus healed the two demon-possessed men and sent the demons into the pigs that were drowned, the people of that place came out to meet Jesus and they begged him to leave their region. Verse 1 tells us that Jesus did exactly that.
"And getting into a boat he crossed over and came to his own city."
His own city is Capernaum back on the other shore of the Sea of Galilee. We know this from Matthew chapter 4, verse 13, which says:
"And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali."
That’s why Capernaum is referred to as "his own city." People tend not to realise this. But the fact is that although Christ was born in Bethlehem, and grew up in Nazareth, it was actually in the seaside town of Capernaum in Galilee that he made his home, and he used it as a base to conduct most of his earthly ministry.
And then in verse 2, we are told that "some people brought to him a paralytic, lying on a bed." As is often the case with Matthew’s Gospel, most of the details are stripped away from his account of the events and just the bare bones of the story are told. We get much more vivid detail about exactly what happened from the parallel accounts in Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels. Listen to the picture Mark gives of the same story, and notice not only the lengths the crippled man’s friends went to in order to bring him to Jesus, but also notice the circumstances of this encounter, which explains why there were scribes there to witness everything. This is Mark chapter 2, verses 1 to 4:
"Several days later Jesus returned to Capernaum, and the news of his arrival spread quickly through the town. Soon the house where he was staying was so packed with visitors that there wasn't room for one more person, not even outside the door. And he preached the word to them. Four men arrived carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They couldn't get to Jesus through the crowd, so they dug through the clay roof above his head. Then they lowered the sick man on his mat, right down in front of Jesus." (NLT)
So there was a quite a meeting going on in the house where Jesus was staying. The place was jam-packed with people inside and outside, all there to hear Jesus preach to them. Mark points out that there wasn’t room for any more people to get in through the door. And this crippled man’s friends come up with a unique solution to the problem. They climb up on the roof – remember the houses in Israel at that time would have flat roofs covered with a kind of mixture of dried clay and straw thatch rather than slates or tiles that we have – and they make a hole in the covering and then they lower the crippled man down on ropes, still in his bed until he lands right in front of Jesus in the room below. What an amazing thing to do! It’s such a remarkable detail that it’s maybe surprising that Matthew doesn’t mention it. But Matthew really wants his readers to focus on what happened once the crippled man was in the room, rather than how he got there.
This man’s friends really go the extra mile on his behalf, don’t they? They go to enormous lengths to make sure that their friend is brought to hear Jesus’ teaching. I think they challenge us. What are we doing to bring our friends and family to Jesus? In a different sense to this story perhaps, but with equal importance, what are we doing for those who can’t "walk through the door of the church" to bring them to hear the gospel? Are we capable of coming up with ideas as ingenious as this crippled man’s friends came up with to make sure he didn’t miss out from hearing the Saviour’s words for himself?
Well surely this autumn we will all have a marvellous opportunity to do something when our church will be putting on the Christianity Explored course. Of course, we should pray for this, but we should also think carefully if there’s someone we know who we could bring to Jesus because they either can’t or won’t walk into this church on their own.
But to get back to our passage, once the crippled man is in the room, lying right in front of Jesus on his bed, Jesus sees what has happened and he sees both the faith of the friends, probably peering down from their vantage point through the hole in the roof, and the faith of the crippled man too. There’s certainly no indication here that the crippled man was brought to Jesus against his will. Quite the opposite. It seems obvious to me that the man on the stretcher was probably the driving force that persuaded the able-bodied men to do what they did. At the very least we know he did not object to it. But I think he was desperate to meet Jesus.
What we don’t really know is why this man and his friends went to such lengths to come before Christ. It is possible he was merely wanting to hear Jesus’ teaching and not at all looking for his paralysis to be healed. But it seems more likely that the possibility of being healed played at least some part in his motivation to be brought into Jesus’ presence. Whatever he was expecting, Jesus’ completely ignores the fact that the man is a cripple. He cuts to the chase and immediately gets to the man’s most pressing need by saying to him, "Take heart, my son," (which could also be translated, "Be of good cheer, my child," – it is a term of endearment and kindness), "Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven."
Jesus’ words, though very gentle and loving, are also quite shocking. He doesn’t say to him, as we might have expected, "Take heart, my son, you’re faith has made you well." No! "Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven."
As so often in the gospels, Jesus cuts through all the baggage and dross, all the peripheral things. And he get to the heart of the matter. "Your sins are forgiven." Notice that no one has asked Jesus anything at this point. Certainly no one has raised the subject of sin at all. Bringing a crippled man to the most renowned healer in Palestine might have spoken for itself we might suppose. The most obvious assumption would that this cripple must be looking to be healed. But Jesus knows this man’s deepest needs. So he purposely switches the incident around and makes it about the forgiveness of sins.
And this is where I think the first of the three main lessons I mentioned is made apparent by Christ. I think a principle is laid down for us here and it’s this: the main purpose of the Church is to spread the gospel of forgiveness. To preach the good news that forgiveness, salvation, eternal life is offered to all sinners who will come to Christ in faith and repentance. It’s a crucial principle for the church to grasp. Telling people about God’s salvation through Christ Jesus is the primary – I might almost say the paramount – mission for Christ’s church. You see there’s a temptation to get bogged down in a "social gospel" of social work, health care, famine relief, drug rehabilitation, housing the homeless and so on. Now I’m not decrying any of these things. Of course I’m not. The church’s practical ministry of mercy to the poor, the sick and the needy is a vital part of a healthy church’s life. A church that has all its doctrines right, and pure worship according to the Word of God, and so forth, but which doesn’t show practical love to those in need is travesty of the church God calls his people to be. But the point I’m making here, is that it is also a travesty if a church thinks that as long as it does the practical things it is getting the most important things right. Because it isn’t. It’s far too easy to get sucked into that social gospel mentality which seeks to help people on this world’s terms first, with the idea being that after that, those we help will automatically become Christians because we have shown them love. Or else we say, let’s sort out their earthly lives first and then we can they’ll listen to the gospel later. Only in reality, "later" never comes and somehow proclaiming the gospel is missed out like an optional extra.
I can’t overstress how wrong I think this kind of approach is. The correct, biblical approach is for both practical help and gospel teaching to go hand-in-hand, both coming together. But of the two, the most important is spreading the gospel. If it doesn’t have primacy, we’ve got it wrong. Practical only lasts for this life. Bringing someone to faith in Christ lasts forever. Remember that Jesus didn’t say to the crippled man, "Your faith has made you well," nor did he say to him, "I will heal you first and then we’ll see about your sins." No, the Saviour lays down the principle for his church. First and foremost, the church’s "business" is telling people how they can find forgiveness for their sins and how they can find a new life in covenant relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. All the social action we can do we certainly should do, but only to back up our mission to "Go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations…teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded." Only to back this up, never to replace it.
The second significant lesson for us to take away from this passage is the obvious conclusion Matthew expects readers of his gospel to come to: Jesus Christ is the most important person who has ever lived. He is no less than one true God come to earth as a human being.
As soon as Jesus says the words, "Your sins are forgiven", some of the hearers pick up on this and the alarm bells start to go off in their minds. In verse 3, some of the scribes in the room start saying to themselves "This man is blaspheming."
In the gospels we hear quite a lot about "the scribes." When we use the word scribe we usually mean a writer – particularly someone who writes things down for other people. But in the Bible, the scribes are the scholars of the law of God. They were students of the Old Testament, experts in applying God’s law to every situation in life. They are sometimes called "lawyers" or "doctors of the law" or "teachers of the law" in some translations.
It’s a group of these Old Testament legal scholars who hear Jesus saying to the paralytic "Your sins are forgiven." And though they don’t say anything out loud, in their hearts they say to themselves "This man is blaspheming." Or as some translations put it "This fellow is speaking blasphemy." And there is certainly a note of contempt for Jesus in their choice of words.
Here we should note that from their point of view there is a sense in which they are right, or at least their feelings have some justification. If Jesus is just a good man, or a great teacher, or whatever other humanistic label is put on him, then he is was sinning when he claimed to have authority to forgive sins against God. Technically speaking, the scribes were wrong to call it blasphemy. That crime was recognised in the Jewish law as only applying when the name of God was misused by the blasphemer – and the penalty was death by stoning. So the scribes are pushing it a little in calling this blasphemy, but it is certainly sinful for a mere man to claim the authority to forgive someone else’s sins. Only God can forgive sins because sin is an affront to God and a breaking of God’s laws. As Psalm 51:4 makes clear, when David prayed to God:
"Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight."
In Psalm 32:5 the psalmist says, addressing God directly:
"I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD’, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin."
In Isaiah 43:25 the LORD says:
"I, I am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins."
So for a mere man to say he has the authority to forgive sins, when the Bible testifies that forgiveness is the sole prerogative of God, is indeed a terrible wrong.
But of course there is a very good reason why Jesus could say to the crippled man "your sins are forgiven" and yet was not guilty of any wrongdoing in saying so. Probably no one present at the house that day realised it – not even when the extraordinary events of verses 4 to 6 took place. The crowd certainly gets it wrong in their explanation which we find in verse 8. They come up with the conclusion that God had changed and had now decided to give the authority to forgive sins to at least one mere man, rather than reserve it to himself. The phrase "who had given such authority to men" in verse 8 should not be read as implying they though every man now had this authority. Nothing in the passage suggests they thought that. No, their amazement was that any man at all could be given this power. But they were forced to conclude that Jesus and only Jesus had it.
But all these are wrong explanations. The real reason why Jesus can forgive sins, even though the Bible teaches that only God can do that, is because Jesus is God. This is what the New Testament teaches in many many passages. Let me read a few of them to you.
John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
And of course John leaves us in no doubt that "the Word" is Jesus Christ.
John 8:57-59: "So the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple."
Here the reason the crowd act so violently to what Jesus said is because they understood that he was claiming to be God here. Not only does he claim to have been in existence before Abraham lived, which was of course more than two thousand years before Christ was born, but when he says "I am" the crowd realises he is taking God’s covenant name for himself. Remember when Moses asked God what his name was at the burning bush? God said his name was "I am." Jesus here says he is "I am."
Romans 9:5 very clearly states that Jesus is God:
"Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them [that’s the Jews] is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, for ever praised." (NIV)
And finally, Paul’s great affirmation of the glory and deity of Christ in Colossians 1:15-19:
"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell."
So yes, the Old Testament does teach that only God can forgive sins. But the New Testament teaches that Christ is God. And that’s the reason why when Christ says to the crippled man "Your sins are forgiven" he had every right to say it.
And by what happens in the rest of our reading after Jesus says these key words, he proves that his words are true and he proves that he does have the authority of God, and is God, in three ways:
Firstly, he can tell what the scribes are thinking, even when they don’t say a word or give any outward indication. In verse 4, Jesus says to the scribes: "Why do you think evil in your hearts?" Almost as if he could hear the very words about blasphemy that they only thought silently to themselves. And he is right to call what they were thinking evil because they were actually accusing God himself of blaspheming against God! But by this display of knowledge, he shows himself to have the knowledge of God.
Secondly, he states again that he can indeed forgive sins. He does it in an oblique way though. He doesn’t come right out and say it again. Instead, he says in verse 5, "Which is easier, to say ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk?’" And of course what he’s practically saying is that if he can say the second and prove it to be true, what reason can anyone have for doubting the first statement. He’s saying to them, "Look, the proof of the pudding is in the eating." He’s saying, "Okay, you want me to put up or shut up? Then watch this!"
Thirdly, he then goes on to actually heal the crippled man. In verse 6 he says this is "that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins." And then he speaks the word, and it is done. And doesn’t that remind you of the very beginning of creation, where God speaks: "Let there be light, and there was light." He says it and it happens.
He bids the crippled man rise and walk, and he does. And here he shows such power, such miraculous power than no mere man could have, that he is showing the people there and us by his actions, that he is God. Imagine what it would have been like to be in that room and see that happen! Verse 8 tells us that the crowd there were afraid. And no wonder! The healing here was truly miraculous. No medical procedure, not even such as we have today could achieve what Christ achieved by his word alone.
The reason I say that is because of the particular word that Luke uses to describe this man in his Gospel. He doesn’t just call him a cripple, or a paralytic. He calls him a paraplegic. His condition was of long standing and degenerative. His bones were deformed. His muscles were wasted away. There was just no way medicine could help him. And no natural explanation for how such a man could ever stand on his own two feet never mind walk home.
But that’s what happened. He rose and walked out of the room, carrying the very bed he had been carried in on. And Luke adds in his account that he went home that day glorifying God, not just because of his miraculous healing, but even more so because of he knew the burden of his sins had been forever taken away by Christ and he had Christ’s promise from his own lips that he was now forgiven. You see that as well as showing that his forgiveness was real to the scribes, Christ was also re-assuring the crippled man that his sins really were forgiven.
That brings us to the third of the main lessons we should draw from this passage. Coming to faith in Christ, so that we can receive God’s forgiveness, is the most important choice any of us can make in this life.
The passage tells us that Jesus Christ has the authority to forgive our sins. And that is such a wonderful thing in itself that we must never forget it. Amazing though Jesus’ miracles of healing and his ability to cast out demons are, the fact that Jesus can take our sins away is even more amazing! This passage is the first time in the gospel that the issue of forgiveness of sin is mentioned. As William Hendriksen says in his commentary on this passage: "So far Jesus has healed. He has dealt with many human afflictions. But now he deals with the worst affliction suffered by men and women – sin."
Because it’s here in the forgiveness of sin that Jesus gets to the very root of all misery, which is human guilt and pollution. In forgiveness, Christ deals with the evil that separates man from his Maker. Sin unforgiven is Satan’s best friend, man’s worst enemy.
We know that the crippled man came to Christ in faith and received forgiveness and healing. What about us?
A Sunday School teacher had just concluded her lesson and wanted to make sure she had made her point. She said, "Can anyone tell me what you must do before you can obtain forgiveness of sin?" There was a short pause and then, from the back of the room, a small boy spoke up. "Sin," he said.
Well that little boy had a point didn’t he? Although obviously his answer wasn’t what his Sunday school teacher was looking for, he wasn’t wrong. Unless there is some wrong done to us, unless someone has done something to us, there’s nothing for us to forgive. Forgiveness just doesn’t come into it unless there’s something that has caused some kind of breakdown in the relationship between the person who is guilty of the wrongdoing and the person against whom the wrong has been done. Forgiveness goes hand-in-hand with guilt. Where there is guilt there is the possibility of forgiveness, and without guilt there is nothing to forgive.
In the case of the relationship between mankind and God there is always guilt because we are all sinners. The Bible could not be clearer on this point.
Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
1 John 1:8 "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."
So according to the Bible, all of us, every single one of us needs God’s forgiveness, because all of us are guilty of sinning against him.
But the Bible also teaches that forgiveness is no easy thing for God. It’s not just a matter of saying the words. And Jesus knew that very well. Indeed, he knew it better than anyone else. For God to forgive anyone’s sins, his justice still had to be satisfied. Atonement had to be made. For God to forgive a sinner, a substitute had to be punished in the sinner’s place. For Christ to forgive the crippled man took no less than for the Son of God to shed his blood on the cross.
Paul writes in Ephesians 1:7: "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace."
Now the point is this: the only way to be forgiven, to receive God’s pardon, to have your sins blotted out and carried away is through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. To receive God’s forgiveness there is nothing you can do and nothing you are asked to do by God except come to Jesus Christ, even though crippled by sin and loaded down with guilt and ask him to forgive you. Come to him, trusting and relying on him to be your Saviour and you will be saved. And no one who does this will ever be disappointed.
Think of this crippled man who was saved by Jesus. He began that day crippled not only physically but also spiritually. He went home that night not only able to walk but knowing his sins were gone, forgiven and forgotten by God. And he glorified God because his sins were washed away by the blood of the Lamb.
To accept God’s offer of salvation through Christ is to have eternal joy in heaven. To reject Christ is to face eternal woe in hell. That’s why the choice to accept or reject Christ is the most important decision you will ever make.
Jesus said in John 5:24: "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."
He also said in John 3:36: "He who believes on the Son has everlasting life, and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides upon him."
And the choice is before all of us. A choice and a question.
As an old gospel hymn asks:
"Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
"Lay aside the garments that are stained by sin,
and be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
there’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb!
"Are you washed in the blood
in the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless?
Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"
There is no more wonderful thing than to be able to answer "yes" to that question. It is the first step that takes you from being a sinner crippled on a bed of sin and guilt to being a saint whose journey will end entering the gates of the holy city in heaven. May we all rise up and walk there through the grace of our God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Encounters with Jesus: The Evil Spirits
The history of the Scottish Church is nothing if not eventful. And it is a history marked by conflict. The big battle in the Church in the 1600s was between the Stuart monarchs, who thought the king should be the head of the church and in control of the church through a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops, and the Covenanters, who maintained that Christ was the only head of the church and that the Presbyterian system of church government – that is government by a plurality of elders all of the same rank – was the system taught in the Bible. This conflict was only resolved at the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to 1690, but early on the battle lines were clearly drawn at a famous meeting between King James VI and Andrew Melville, the leader of the Presbyterians, where at the end of a particularly acrimonious argument, Melville called the King "God’s silly vassal". He then said this to the king: "Sir, as divers times before so now again I must tell you, there are two Kings and two Kingdoms in Scotland: there is Christ Jesus, and his Kingdom the Kirk, whose subject King James VI is, and of His Kingdom not a King or a Head nor a Lord, but a member."
Well I for one think Andrew Melville was right. And to this day, although the Queen is our head of state and is also considered the head of the Church of England, she is only a member of the Church of Scotland, because we Presbyterians still recognise no other king and head of the Church than Jesus Christ himself. But you might be saying to yourself, "That’s all very interesting, but what’s that got to do with the passage of Scripture we read?" Good question if you were asking it to yourself.
The point is that just as Melville could see two kingdoms in Scotland – the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom – so the Bible pictures two kingdoms in this world at perpetual war with each other. One kingdom is the kingdom of God, where Christ is King, the great church invisible made up of all God’s people, the hearts of all who believe in Jesus Christ. The other kingdom is a very different place. The Kingdom of the darkness, where the Prince of this world rules from a counterfeit throne over a kingdom of sin and evil. It is in rebellion against God’s kingdom and at constant war with it. It is ruled over by a usurper, who has no legitimate claim to rule it at all. It is called the kingdom of this world. It is the counterfeit kingdom of Satan and all the fallen angels and evil spirits who follow him.
Jesus himself states that Satan has a "kingdom" in Matthew 12:25-26:
"Knowing their thoughts, he said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?’"
Paul describes the kingdom of darkness that Christians are called to fight and wrestle against like this in Ephesians 6:12-13:
"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm."
It is the kingdom that rules in the hearts of everyone who does not follow Jesus Christ. They don’t know they are subjects of Satan, but they are.
Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 and 2: "In the past you were spiritually dead because of your disobedience and sins. At that time you followed the world's evil way; you obeyed the ruler of the spiritual powers in space, the spirit who now controls the people who disobey God."
Most of the time God’s kingdom and Satan’s kingdom war with each other invisibly, in the spiritual realms that we don’t see. But occasionally, the fighting breaks out, as it were, in our world. The passage we are looking at tonight is such an occasion and it gives us a vivid picture of the constant struggle going on between good and evil in the universe. As we study it, I think we will firstly gain an insight into our enemies – the principalities and powers in Satan’s kingdom that Paul talked about in Ephesians 6. And I think we will also gain a tremendous insight into the courage and strength and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ as he shows his supreme authority over all the powers of darkness.
So, the events in our passage quite neatly can be divided into three aspects of the demons and their work, and then three aspects of King Jesus and his work. We’ve therefore got quite a lot to get through. I hope you’ll follow me as we go through the passage. Once again it will be helpful to have the passage to hand as we go through it as I will be referring to it.
The three aspects of the demons in this passage I want to look at tonight could be summarised as: their activities, their knowledge and their character.
We’ll look firstly at their activities, which we find described in verse 28:
"And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way."
The events immediately preceding this passage take place in the town of Capernaum which was Jesus’ base at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus and his disciples then crossed the lake and during the journey Jesus calmed the storm which made the disciples wonder to themselves, "What sort of man is this, that even the winds and waves obey him?"
And now here again in this passage they will be challenged to ask themselves "Who is this man?" as another series of extraordinary events takes place.
Jesus and his disciples land in their boat at the south-east shore of the Sea of Galilee which is here called "the country of the Gadarenes". There was a town called Gadara about 6 miles inland from the shore and it is likely, many scholars believe, that the whole region was named after the main settlement in that area (a bit like a county or shire being named after the main town in it in our country). And in this area there are steep hills or cliffs that come right down to the water’s edge, and in those hills there are caves visible to this day that were then used as tombs. It is almost certain that this area was populated by Gentiles rather than Jews. This is evidenced by the fact that the herdsmen in this region kept pigs. This would not be tolerated in a Jewish area, as pigs are an unclear animal that Jews are neither permitted to eat or touch.
It’s here in this rather desolate and barren landscape that Jesus and his disciples encounter these two men deeply disturbed and quite frightening in their appearance. I think this was precisely why Jesus wanted to go to this area in the first place. After all, it was not really on the way to anywhere else, and by the end of this passage, Jesus heads back to where he had just came from on the other side of the Sea of Galilee at Capernaum. So the only reason for going to the country of the Gadarenes would seem to be to meet the demon-possessed men.
I should just mention in passing that Matthew’s account is the only one that mentions two men in this story. Both Mark and Luke only mention one demon-possessed man. The most likely explanation would seem to be that the other gospel writers concentrate their story on the man who does the talking while Matthew concentrates on the fact that the demons were able to possess more than one person at a time and make them act in concert with each other. Where all the gospels agree is that there was certainly more than one demon involved. In Mark 5:9, when Jesus asks the demon’s name, it replies, "My name is legion for we are many."
As regards the activity of the demons, we should note right away that everything these men do and say in this passage is not their own doing but the doing of the demons through them. And it for that reason that I called this service Jesus and the Evil Spirits rather than Jesus and the Demon-Possessed Men. The men are passive in the story, completely under the control of the evil spirits.
The first thing I want you to note is that demon-possession was a real phenomenon. It was not, as liberal scholars suggest, merely the way that mental illness or abnormality, or unexplained sickness, was "explained away" in biblical times. I believe as God’s Word, the Bible cannot contain such errors. If the Bible describes demons possessing a human being, I believe that is what happened. No, demon-possession was a real phenomenon that happened to people at the time of Christ. And by that I mean at the time of Christ in particular. There is very little mention of demon-possession in the Old Testament and there are almost no references to demon-possession in the New Testament outside the Gospels. What this seems to indicate is that during the years of Christ’s life on earth, and particularly then, Satan’s legions were for some reason granted this particular ability to "possess" a human being, quite possibly because Satan knew the crucial importance of trying to stop the Lord Jesus’ ministry for succeeding and so he concentrated all his forces on those brief thirty or so years of Christ’s earthly life. This would explain why there is either no such thing as demon-possession in our day, or else it is a very rare occurrence indeed.
The two men in our story certainly do not seem to be in control of themselves. Both their actions and their words appear to be those of the demons in control of them rather than the men themselves.
And this leads us to look at what the demons did through the men they have possessed. I want to stress that everything about it is contrary to the way God wants people to live and designed people to live. Everything about it is evil. (And remember this is the demons’ doing, not so much the men under their control).
I think this expresses itself in two ways in the passage. At the beginning of the passage it seems that these demon-possessed men were living alone, cut-off from the rest of society, either living in the entrance chambers to the tombs or in abandoned tombs either in natural caves or in man-made caves hewn in the rocks. This is what is meant by "coming out of the tombs" in verse 28. God designed us to live with other people, in families, social groups, tribes and nations. One of the joys of being human is to spend time in other people’s company. But the demons destroy this – taking the men off into a wilderness, living alone, in abandoned graves, cut off from other people.
The second manifestation of evil is the uncontrollable violence they exhibit. We know from verse 28 that these two demon-possessed wretches had been causing havoc in that area for some time. They are described as "so fierce" (or "exceedingly violent" as Leon Morris translates these words in his commentary) that people knew to steer clear of that area and not try to pass through it. In the parallel account of this incident in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, verse 4, it says that at least one of these men:
"had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him."
It seems almost as if the demons gave the men superhuman strength and aggression!
From the mention of violence and people’s reticence to pass through the hills where these two men roamed about, it seems quite obvious that there was a history of these two characters assaulting, maybe even killing, people whom they came across in their aggressive, irrational, and evil mental states. And again this turns God’s will upside down. "Love your neighbour" is the summary of our duty towards our fellow human beings. Senseless violence against other human beings is the ultimate Satanic dismissal of God’s way of life for mankind.
If the activities of the demons strikes us what we might expect, as we move on to look at the knowledge these demons have of Jesus and of the future, this might strike us as more surprising.
The two demon-possessed men see Jesus and his disciples and approach him. But rather than attack them, they cry out to him – this is the demons crying out through the men remember, not the men themselves – literally they "scream out at Jesus", probably in a hair-raising, horrible voice:
"What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come to torment us before the time?" (verse 29)
Two questions certainly, but two questions that reveal the demons already had a significant amount of knowledge about Jesus.
The first question is: "What have you to do with us, O Son of God?" A literal translation would be something like "What is to us and what is to you, O Son of God?" The meaning is really "Why are you bothering us?" – we have nothing in common with you."
And we notice immediately that the demons know who Jesus is. They recognise the man who gets out of the boat as the Son of God. This reminds me of a passage in the Letter of James. James 2:19:
"You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe--and shudder!"
William Hendriksen comments on this first question the demons ask Jesus: "They recognise Jesus as the Son of God…They know they are face-to-face with their arch enemy – their Judge – and they are suddenly terrified of him." You know the look of horror that passes over a villain’s face when they finally see the superhero standing in the doorway, arms folded, ready to dispense justice? Well that’s the scene here as far these demons are concerned. And so they blurt out the first question in fear, "What have you to do with us, O Son of God?"
And then they ask the second question: "Have you come to torment us before the time?" And I think this is an even more amazing question. Not only do they know who this is, they know that one day he is going to judge them and send them to hell. When we use the word "torment" it usually carries with it connotations of mere annoyance. We’d tell a child not to torment its brother or sister. But "torment" here means "torture". "Have you come to torture us?" "Have you come, is this the moment, you will send us into the fires of hell?" "Is this the appointed day of judgment for us?" This is the kind of undertone to this question. I find it slightly ironic that the devils themselves believe in hell, but many a liberal theologian denies there is such a place. Go figure.
They know a lot these demons, but I must also point out that they don’t know everything. They are not omniscient. Only God is. They don’t know why Christ has come to them. They don’t know if this is the day of judgment for them. And as we shall see they don’t know what will happen once they go into the pigs. In the end the evil spirits are just creatures, with limited knowledge and power. And it is important that we remember this to keep things in perspective here. But even so, let’s not underestimate the intelligence and knowledge possessed by our spiritual enemies.
One thing we certainly shouldn’t underestimate about them is what their character is like. They are evil. They are truly evil in everything they do – they are violent, they are destructive, they are cunning, and they enjoy wickedness for its own sake – just because it is the opposite to God’s commandments. We have already seen how they made these two men behave. And now when confronted by Jesus they look for some way out of the situation and how to best carry on their devilish activities.
And it’s then they notice the herd of pigs feeding some distance away (verse 30). Mark’s Gospel tells us that there were actually around 2000 pigs in the herd. So it’s a big herd we’re talking about here, not just a few porkers on a hillside. It is very likely the demons asked for permission to enter the first living creatures they could see as they quickly look around for a bolt-hole. The pigs would have been an ideal host of course. Not only were they unclean animals according to God’s law, which the demons would doubtless have approved of as their new home, but they probably see the chance through possessing the pigs to cause more destruction (pigs in the wild are well-known to be destructive of crops and farmland) and also, it could just be, that these demons realise that by ruining the herd of pigs, Jesus is likely to be feared and despised by the local population.
So that’s what the demons are like. That’s what Satan and his minions are like. That’s what the kingdom of darkness is like. A pretty awful bunch they are. Evil through and through, destructive, the enemies of God and the enemies of humanity, out to make our lives a misery.
All this could be pretty depressing were it not for what this passage also teaches us about the Lord Jesus Christ. Again there are three I want to focus on:
The first and main lesson is that Jesus Christ has authority over Satan and all his demons. He has absolute power and control over them, as a master controls a muzzled dog on a leash. This is the reason that the demons are afraid of him. They know that they are under his power. They have no choice but to obey his voice. Notice in verse 31 that the demons are forced to beg Jesus that if he is going to cast them out of the two men, they would be allowed to enter into the pigs. Notice too, that they can neither refuse to come out of the men if Christ commands it, and they cannot then enter the pigs without Christ’s permission to allow it.
Jesus' authority over evil, the reluctance of their obeying him, but their inability to do otherwise, is well-illustrated by this story – it’s a true story told in the words of Frank Koch of the United States Naval Institute. "Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on manoeuvres in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities.
Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing reported, "Light, bearing on the starboard bow." "Is it steady or moving astern?" the captain called out. The lookout replied, "Steady, Captain," which meant we were on a dangerous direct collision course with that ship. The captain then called to the signalman, "Signal that ship: 'We are on a collision course, advise you change course twenty degrees.'" Back came the signal, "Advisable for you to change course twenty degrees." The captain said, "Send: "I'm a captain, change course twenty degrees.'" "I'm a seaman second-class," came the reply. "You had better change course twenty degrees." By that time the captain was furious. He spat out, "Send: 'I am a battleship. Change course twenty degrees.'" Back came the flashing light more urgent than ever, "I am a lighthouse." The captain changed course immediately. It was either that or we would founder on the rocks.
This is always the relationship between the powers of evil and God. If you read the early chapters of the Book of Job you will read there how Satan comes before God and has to ask God for permission to attack Job before he can do it, and of course God permits Satan to take away Job’s possessions, his family, his health and so on. But each time, God puts a limit on what Satan is allowed to do, and Satan is bound to obey God’s will.
In our passage the same principle is at work. The demons have to ask for permission to go into the pigs and wait for Jesus to give the word, which he does in verse 32.
"Go" says Jesus. "Go ahead," he says. Literally "Begone." And immediately the demons come out and enter into the herd of pigs. Leon Morris in his commentary on this passage points out that this is Jesus giving them an order and they have to obey it.
And then things really get out of hand. The pigs go berserk when the demons possess them and they stampede down the slope right into the sea where they are all drowned. We don’t know why the pigs react like this, although it has all the hallmarks of a blind panic. I don’t think this was the demons’ doing. I don’t think they saw this coming, though that is possible. But my reading of the passage is that this is something that Jesus knew would happen but the demons didn’t.
Now the question that tends to be asked here is: Why? Why did Jesus allow this? Why did he bring this about. William Hendriksen has a good discussion about the possible reasons in his commentary on this Gospel. He begins by stating what are probably the wrong explanations that have been given. Some commentators say that the reason is mainly because the herd was pigs. They were unclean animals and those who kept them were breaking God’s laws. But Hendriksen rejects this reason and I think rightly. He points out that this was a Gentile area, where keeping pigs was not an issue as Gentiles are not under the kosher laws of Israel. Instead Hendriksen gives two reasons for why Christ allowed the pigs to be drowned and agree with both of his reasons. The first thing Hendriksen says is that Christ knew that this was not the time for the demons to be cast into hell forever, but in the meantime, before that final judgment, he wanted to remove the demons from harming anyone else. I think this is the key. We don’t quite know what happened to the demons after the pigs drowned but it certainly seems that they never came back to bother anyone again. It seems likely to me that once the pigs drowned, the demons were once again banished to hell to await their final justice. I think Jesus knew that would happen and wanted that to happen. Secondly, Hendriksen says that Christ wanted to teach those who dwelt in this region that the lives of human beings were worth much more than any number of pigs. And he could hardly have pushed that lesson home any more forcefully than by allowing the pigs to drown after the two demon-possessed men are delivered from their spiritual bondage.
That leads me on to the second lesson this passage teaches us about Christ. It teaches us that he is a compassionate Saviour. Although Matthew’s account doesn’t say anything about the men who the demons came out of, the other gospels do mention them and there is real encouragement for us in what happened to them. We should not overlook the fact that in the midst of all the other action that’s going on, two men whose lives had been a living hell were restored to normality, to good health, to rationality, to peace, to living like human beings again, and best of all, to faith in Christ. In Luke’s account of this story, when the people of the region come to meet Jesus, Luke chapter 8, verse 35 says they "found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind."
You know, there might not be demon-possession in our society. But there are many many people in our society whose lives are in bondage to other evils. And whether that be drug or alcohol addiction, gambling, sexual sins, materialism, new age religion, the occult, whatever it is, Christ is still just as powerful a Saviour. He is still able to come to those who are outcasts, those who are feared and shunned by society, and he is able to command whatever evils possess them to come out, to leave them clothed with his righteousness and in their right mind again. That’s one reason why the gospel is to be preached to every creature, as Mark 16 puts it, because it is good news for every kind of person, no matter who they are, no matter what they’ve done, no matter how far from God or from God’s standards they feel they are. Christ is able to save anyone and he is willing to save anyone who comes to him. "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved" is the gospel and it’s true for anyone who believes.
And so we come to our final point this evening.
The third thing this passage teaches us about Jesus Christ is that it is impossible not make a decision about him once you hear the good news. There can be no sitting on the fence where Jesus Christ is concerned.
Some people believe in him, follow him and have their lives changed. This was certainly true for at least one of the two men who had been saved by Jesus from the demons. Not only was he restored to his right mind, he then went on to become a witness for Christ in his home town, telling others what the Lord had done for him. This is told in the parallel account of this story in Luke chapter 8, verses 38 and 39:
"The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him."
But not everyone reacts to Jesus the same way. Not everyone accepts him or his message. Verses 33 and 34 at the end of our passage show this all too clearly as well:
"The herdsmen fled, and going into the city [or probably more a village or small town] they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region."
What a sad ending to a great story! Imagine it if you will. News reaches us that Christ has come back to earth. He’s appeared in George Square with all the drug addicts in the city and he’s healed them. People whose lives were being destroyed and are now in their right minds again. Free and able to enjoy life for the first time in years. But in so doing that, he took all the drugs and gathered them into every sleazy night club and dance hall in the city and burned up all the drugs and all the dens of iniquity burned up with them. And the people gather in the city centre. They crowd into George Square. And they call out, begging Jesus to leave Glasgow and never come back. Look at all the property that’s been lost. Look at all the revenue that could have come from these places. How are we going to enjoy ourselves now? they shout. Look at all we’ve lost, just so a few junkies could be made well? Imagine it. Because that’s just the kind of reaction that the people in this region have to Jesus in our story tonight. They come across as a pretty heartless community. Rather than rejoicing that two of their neighbours had been rescued, they feared that if Jesus stayed and changed any more people’s lives, they would lose out financially and materially as the herdsmen did. So they put money before people. They put mammon before God. And rather than praise Jesus for what he did, they ask him to go away out of their lives.
And so they ask Jesus to leave them and he does. The first verse of the next chapter in Matthew tells us that he went away in the boat again back to the other side of the lake.
And isn’t there a real challenge and choice laid before all of us in these different reactions that the man who was rescued and the people of the town had to Jesus? You see everyone must come to a conclusion about him one way or the other. You are either for him or against him. You either want to live with him and follow him, or you want him to leave your region or your life as the people in our reading did. Do you rejoice each time a person leaves the rebel kingdom of darkness and comes home to the kingdom of God, or deep down do you see Christians as sad people who have wasted their lives, living boring lives without any excitement or enjoyment? Do you look forward with hope and joy to the end of this world, and eternity in heaven? Or do you dread that it might be true? Is your joy in life to be Christ’s servant? Or are you more like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost who said that he would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven?
Well whether you are for him or again him he will triumph. He has already destroyed the works of the devil through his cross and resurrection. He still has absolute authority over all the powers of darkness, and they are permitted to do their works only in so far these comply with God’s sovereign will and eternal decrees. And slowly but surely, whatever happens in our lives, whatever happens in the world, Christ’s kingdom goes from victory to victory, according to God’s unchangeable plan, so that "the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ. And he shall reign for ever and ever," (as Revelation chapter 11, verse 5 puts it).
Or in the words of Martin Luther’s great hymn, Ein’ Feste Burg:
"And though the world seems full of ill,
with hungry demons prowling,
Christ’s victory is with us still,
we need not fear their howling.
The tyrants of this age
strut briefly on the stage:
their sentence has been passed.
We stand unharmed at last,
a word from God destroys them.
"God’s word and plan, which they pretend
is subject to their pleasure,
will bind their wills to serve God’s end,
which we, who love him, treasure.
Then let them take our lives,
goods, children, husbands, wives,
and carry all away;
theirs is a short-lived day,
ours is the lasting kingdom."
Well I for one think Andrew Melville was right. And to this day, although the Queen is our head of state and is also considered the head of the Church of England, she is only a member of the Church of Scotland, because we Presbyterians still recognise no other king and head of the Church than Jesus Christ himself. But you might be saying to yourself, "That’s all very interesting, but what’s that got to do with the passage of Scripture we read?" Good question if you were asking it to yourself.
The point is that just as Melville could see two kingdoms in Scotland – the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom – so the Bible pictures two kingdoms in this world at perpetual war with each other. One kingdom is the kingdom of God, where Christ is King, the great church invisible made up of all God’s people, the hearts of all who believe in Jesus Christ. The other kingdom is a very different place. The Kingdom of the darkness, where the Prince of this world rules from a counterfeit throne over a kingdom of sin and evil. It is in rebellion against God’s kingdom and at constant war with it. It is ruled over by a usurper, who has no legitimate claim to rule it at all. It is called the kingdom of this world. It is the counterfeit kingdom of Satan and all the fallen angels and evil spirits who follow him.
Jesus himself states that Satan has a "kingdom" in Matthew 12:25-26:
"Knowing their thoughts, he said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?’"
Paul describes the kingdom of darkness that Christians are called to fight and wrestle against like this in Ephesians 6:12-13:
"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm."
It is the kingdom that rules in the hearts of everyone who does not follow Jesus Christ. They don’t know they are subjects of Satan, but they are.
Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 and 2: "In the past you were spiritually dead because of your disobedience and sins. At that time you followed the world's evil way; you obeyed the ruler of the spiritual powers in space, the spirit who now controls the people who disobey God."
Most of the time God’s kingdom and Satan’s kingdom war with each other invisibly, in the spiritual realms that we don’t see. But occasionally, the fighting breaks out, as it were, in our world. The passage we are looking at tonight is such an occasion and it gives us a vivid picture of the constant struggle going on between good and evil in the universe. As we study it, I think we will firstly gain an insight into our enemies – the principalities and powers in Satan’s kingdom that Paul talked about in Ephesians 6. And I think we will also gain a tremendous insight into the courage and strength and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ as he shows his supreme authority over all the powers of darkness.
So, the events in our passage quite neatly can be divided into three aspects of the demons and their work, and then three aspects of King Jesus and his work. We’ve therefore got quite a lot to get through. I hope you’ll follow me as we go through the passage. Once again it will be helpful to have the passage to hand as we go through it as I will be referring to it.
The three aspects of the demons in this passage I want to look at tonight could be summarised as: their activities, their knowledge and their character.
We’ll look firstly at their activities, which we find described in verse 28:
"And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way."
The events immediately preceding this passage take place in the town of Capernaum which was Jesus’ base at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus and his disciples then crossed the lake and during the journey Jesus calmed the storm which made the disciples wonder to themselves, "What sort of man is this, that even the winds and waves obey him?"
And now here again in this passage they will be challenged to ask themselves "Who is this man?" as another series of extraordinary events takes place.
Jesus and his disciples land in their boat at the south-east shore of the Sea of Galilee which is here called "the country of the Gadarenes". There was a town called Gadara about 6 miles inland from the shore and it is likely, many scholars believe, that the whole region was named after the main settlement in that area (a bit like a county or shire being named after the main town in it in our country). And in this area there are steep hills or cliffs that come right down to the water’s edge, and in those hills there are caves visible to this day that were then used as tombs. It is almost certain that this area was populated by Gentiles rather than Jews. This is evidenced by the fact that the herdsmen in this region kept pigs. This would not be tolerated in a Jewish area, as pigs are an unclear animal that Jews are neither permitted to eat or touch.
It’s here in this rather desolate and barren landscape that Jesus and his disciples encounter these two men deeply disturbed and quite frightening in their appearance. I think this was precisely why Jesus wanted to go to this area in the first place. After all, it was not really on the way to anywhere else, and by the end of this passage, Jesus heads back to where he had just came from on the other side of the Sea of Galilee at Capernaum. So the only reason for going to the country of the Gadarenes would seem to be to meet the demon-possessed men.
I should just mention in passing that Matthew’s account is the only one that mentions two men in this story. Both Mark and Luke only mention one demon-possessed man. The most likely explanation would seem to be that the other gospel writers concentrate their story on the man who does the talking while Matthew concentrates on the fact that the demons were able to possess more than one person at a time and make them act in concert with each other. Where all the gospels agree is that there was certainly more than one demon involved. In Mark 5:9, when Jesus asks the demon’s name, it replies, "My name is legion for we are many."
As regards the activity of the demons, we should note right away that everything these men do and say in this passage is not their own doing but the doing of the demons through them. And it for that reason that I called this service Jesus and the Evil Spirits rather than Jesus and the Demon-Possessed Men. The men are passive in the story, completely under the control of the evil spirits.
The first thing I want you to note is that demon-possession was a real phenomenon. It was not, as liberal scholars suggest, merely the way that mental illness or abnormality, or unexplained sickness, was "explained away" in biblical times. I believe as God’s Word, the Bible cannot contain such errors. If the Bible describes demons possessing a human being, I believe that is what happened. No, demon-possession was a real phenomenon that happened to people at the time of Christ. And by that I mean at the time of Christ in particular. There is very little mention of demon-possession in the Old Testament and there are almost no references to demon-possession in the New Testament outside the Gospels. What this seems to indicate is that during the years of Christ’s life on earth, and particularly then, Satan’s legions were for some reason granted this particular ability to "possess" a human being, quite possibly because Satan knew the crucial importance of trying to stop the Lord Jesus’ ministry for succeeding and so he concentrated all his forces on those brief thirty or so years of Christ’s earthly life. This would explain why there is either no such thing as demon-possession in our day, or else it is a very rare occurrence indeed.
The two men in our story certainly do not seem to be in control of themselves. Both their actions and their words appear to be those of the demons in control of them rather than the men themselves.
And this leads us to look at what the demons did through the men they have possessed. I want to stress that everything about it is contrary to the way God wants people to live and designed people to live. Everything about it is evil. (And remember this is the demons’ doing, not so much the men under their control).
I think this expresses itself in two ways in the passage. At the beginning of the passage it seems that these demon-possessed men were living alone, cut-off from the rest of society, either living in the entrance chambers to the tombs or in abandoned tombs either in natural caves or in man-made caves hewn in the rocks. This is what is meant by "coming out of the tombs" in verse 28. God designed us to live with other people, in families, social groups, tribes and nations. One of the joys of being human is to spend time in other people’s company. But the demons destroy this – taking the men off into a wilderness, living alone, in abandoned graves, cut off from other people.
The second manifestation of evil is the uncontrollable violence they exhibit. We know from verse 28 that these two demon-possessed wretches had been causing havoc in that area for some time. They are described as "so fierce" (or "exceedingly violent" as Leon Morris translates these words in his commentary) that people knew to steer clear of that area and not try to pass through it. In the parallel account of this incident in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, verse 4, it says that at least one of these men:
"had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him."
It seems almost as if the demons gave the men superhuman strength and aggression!
From the mention of violence and people’s reticence to pass through the hills where these two men roamed about, it seems quite obvious that there was a history of these two characters assaulting, maybe even killing, people whom they came across in their aggressive, irrational, and evil mental states. And again this turns God’s will upside down. "Love your neighbour" is the summary of our duty towards our fellow human beings. Senseless violence against other human beings is the ultimate Satanic dismissal of God’s way of life for mankind.
If the activities of the demons strikes us what we might expect, as we move on to look at the knowledge these demons have of Jesus and of the future, this might strike us as more surprising.
The two demon-possessed men see Jesus and his disciples and approach him. But rather than attack them, they cry out to him – this is the demons crying out through the men remember, not the men themselves – literally they "scream out at Jesus", probably in a hair-raising, horrible voice:
"What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come to torment us before the time?" (verse 29)
Two questions certainly, but two questions that reveal the demons already had a significant amount of knowledge about Jesus.
The first question is: "What have you to do with us, O Son of God?" A literal translation would be something like "What is to us and what is to you, O Son of God?" The meaning is really "Why are you bothering us?" – we have nothing in common with you."
And we notice immediately that the demons know who Jesus is. They recognise the man who gets out of the boat as the Son of God. This reminds me of a passage in the Letter of James. James 2:19:
"You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe--and shudder!"
William Hendriksen comments on this first question the demons ask Jesus: "They recognise Jesus as the Son of God…They know they are face-to-face with their arch enemy – their Judge – and they are suddenly terrified of him." You know the look of horror that passes over a villain’s face when they finally see the superhero standing in the doorway, arms folded, ready to dispense justice? Well that’s the scene here as far these demons are concerned. And so they blurt out the first question in fear, "What have you to do with us, O Son of God?"
And then they ask the second question: "Have you come to torment us before the time?" And I think this is an even more amazing question. Not only do they know who this is, they know that one day he is going to judge them and send them to hell. When we use the word "torment" it usually carries with it connotations of mere annoyance. We’d tell a child not to torment its brother or sister. But "torment" here means "torture". "Have you come to torture us?" "Have you come, is this the moment, you will send us into the fires of hell?" "Is this the appointed day of judgment for us?" This is the kind of undertone to this question. I find it slightly ironic that the devils themselves believe in hell, but many a liberal theologian denies there is such a place. Go figure.
They know a lot these demons, but I must also point out that they don’t know everything. They are not omniscient. Only God is. They don’t know why Christ has come to them. They don’t know if this is the day of judgment for them. And as we shall see they don’t know what will happen once they go into the pigs. In the end the evil spirits are just creatures, with limited knowledge and power. And it is important that we remember this to keep things in perspective here. But even so, let’s not underestimate the intelligence and knowledge possessed by our spiritual enemies.
One thing we certainly shouldn’t underestimate about them is what their character is like. They are evil. They are truly evil in everything they do – they are violent, they are destructive, they are cunning, and they enjoy wickedness for its own sake – just because it is the opposite to God’s commandments. We have already seen how they made these two men behave. And now when confronted by Jesus they look for some way out of the situation and how to best carry on their devilish activities.
And it’s then they notice the herd of pigs feeding some distance away (verse 30). Mark’s Gospel tells us that there were actually around 2000 pigs in the herd. So it’s a big herd we’re talking about here, not just a few porkers on a hillside. It is very likely the demons asked for permission to enter the first living creatures they could see as they quickly look around for a bolt-hole. The pigs would have been an ideal host of course. Not only were they unclean animals according to God’s law, which the demons would doubtless have approved of as their new home, but they probably see the chance through possessing the pigs to cause more destruction (pigs in the wild are well-known to be destructive of crops and farmland) and also, it could just be, that these demons realise that by ruining the herd of pigs, Jesus is likely to be feared and despised by the local population.
So that’s what the demons are like. That’s what Satan and his minions are like. That’s what the kingdom of darkness is like. A pretty awful bunch they are. Evil through and through, destructive, the enemies of God and the enemies of humanity, out to make our lives a misery.
All this could be pretty depressing were it not for what this passage also teaches us about the Lord Jesus Christ. Again there are three I want to focus on:
The first and main lesson is that Jesus Christ has authority over Satan and all his demons. He has absolute power and control over them, as a master controls a muzzled dog on a leash. This is the reason that the demons are afraid of him. They know that they are under his power. They have no choice but to obey his voice. Notice in verse 31 that the demons are forced to beg Jesus that if he is going to cast them out of the two men, they would be allowed to enter into the pigs. Notice too, that they can neither refuse to come out of the men if Christ commands it, and they cannot then enter the pigs without Christ’s permission to allow it.
Jesus' authority over evil, the reluctance of their obeying him, but their inability to do otherwise, is well-illustrated by this story – it’s a true story told in the words of Frank Koch of the United States Naval Institute. "Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on manoeuvres in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities.
Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing reported, "Light, bearing on the starboard bow." "Is it steady or moving astern?" the captain called out. The lookout replied, "Steady, Captain," which meant we were on a dangerous direct collision course with that ship. The captain then called to the signalman, "Signal that ship: 'We are on a collision course, advise you change course twenty degrees.'" Back came the signal, "Advisable for you to change course twenty degrees." The captain said, "Send: "I'm a captain, change course twenty degrees.'" "I'm a seaman second-class," came the reply. "You had better change course twenty degrees." By that time the captain was furious. He spat out, "Send: 'I am a battleship. Change course twenty degrees.'" Back came the flashing light more urgent than ever, "I am a lighthouse." The captain changed course immediately. It was either that or we would founder on the rocks.
This is always the relationship between the powers of evil and God. If you read the early chapters of the Book of Job you will read there how Satan comes before God and has to ask God for permission to attack Job before he can do it, and of course God permits Satan to take away Job’s possessions, his family, his health and so on. But each time, God puts a limit on what Satan is allowed to do, and Satan is bound to obey God’s will.
In our passage the same principle is at work. The demons have to ask for permission to go into the pigs and wait for Jesus to give the word, which he does in verse 32.
"Go" says Jesus. "Go ahead," he says. Literally "Begone." And immediately the demons come out and enter into the herd of pigs. Leon Morris in his commentary on this passage points out that this is Jesus giving them an order and they have to obey it.
And then things really get out of hand. The pigs go berserk when the demons possess them and they stampede down the slope right into the sea where they are all drowned. We don’t know why the pigs react like this, although it has all the hallmarks of a blind panic. I don’t think this was the demons’ doing. I don’t think they saw this coming, though that is possible. But my reading of the passage is that this is something that Jesus knew would happen but the demons didn’t.
Now the question that tends to be asked here is: Why? Why did Jesus allow this? Why did he bring this about. William Hendriksen has a good discussion about the possible reasons in his commentary on this Gospel. He begins by stating what are probably the wrong explanations that have been given. Some commentators say that the reason is mainly because the herd was pigs. They were unclean animals and those who kept them were breaking God’s laws. But Hendriksen rejects this reason and I think rightly. He points out that this was a Gentile area, where keeping pigs was not an issue as Gentiles are not under the kosher laws of Israel. Instead Hendriksen gives two reasons for why Christ allowed the pigs to be drowned and agree with both of his reasons. The first thing Hendriksen says is that Christ knew that this was not the time for the demons to be cast into hell forever, but in the meantime, before that final judgment, he wanted to remove the demons from harming anyone else. I think this is the key. We don’t quite know what happened to the demons after the pigs drowned but it certainly seems that they never came back to bother anyone again. It seems likely to me that once the pigs drowned, the demons were once again banished to hell to await their final justice. I think Jesus knew that would happen and wanted that to happen. Secondly, Hendriksen says that Christ wanted to teach those who dwelt in this region that the lives of human beings were worth much more than any number of pigs. And he could hardly have pushed that lesson home any more forcefully than by allowing the pigs to drown after the two demon-possessed men are delivered from their spiritual bondage.
That leads me on to the second lesson this passage teaches us about Christ. It teaches us that he is a compassionate Saviour. Although Matthew’s account doesn’t say anything about the men who the demons came out of, the other gospels do mention them and there is real encouragement for us in what happened to them. We should not overlook the fact that in the midst of all the other action that’s going on, two men whose lives had been a living hell were restored to normality, to good health, to rationality, to peace, to living like human beings again, and best of all, to faith in Christ. In Luke’s account of this story, when the people of the region come to meet Jesus, Luke chapter 8, verse 35 says they "found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind."
You know, there might not be demon-possession in our society. But there are many many people in our society whose lives are in bondage to other evils. And whether that be drug or alcohol addiction, gambling, sexual sins, materialism, new age religion, the occult, whatever it is, Christ is still just as powerful a Saviour. He is still able to come to those who are outcasts, those who are feared and shunned by society, and he is able to command whatever evils possess them to come out, to leave them clothed with his righteousness and in their right mind again. That’s one reason why the gospel is to be preached to every creature, as Mark 16 puts it, because it is good news for every kind of person, no matter who they are, no matter what they’ve done, no matter how far from God or from God’s standards they feel they are. Christ is able to save anyone and he is willing to save anyone who comes to him. "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved" is the gospel and it’s true for anyone who believes.
And so we come to our final point this evening.
The third thing this passage teaches us about Jesus Christ is that it is impossible not make a decision about him once you hear the good news. There can be no sitting on the fence where Jesus Christ is concerned.
Some people believe in him, follow him and have their lives changed. This was certainly true for at least one of the two men who had been saved by Jesus from the demons. Not only was he restored to his right mind, he then went on to become a witness for Christ in his home town, telling others what the Lord had done for him. This is told in the parallel account of this story in Luke chapter 8, verses 38 and 39:
"The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him."
But not everyone reacts to Jesus the same way. Not everyone accepts him or his message. Verses 33 and 34 at the end of our passage show this all too clearly as well:
"The herdsmen fled, and going into the city [or probably more a village or small town] they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region."
What a sad ending to a great story! Imagine it if you will. News reaches us that Christ has come back to earth. He’s appeared in George Square with all the drug addicts in the city and he’s healed them. People whose lives were being destroyed and are now in their right minds again. Free and able to enjoy life for the first time in years. But in so doing that, he took all the drugs and gathered them into every sleazy night club and dance hall in the city and burned up all the drugs and all the dens of iniquity burned up with them. And the people gather in the city centre. They crowd into George Square. And they call out, begging Jesus to leave Glasgow and never come back. Look at all the property that’s been lost. Look at all the revenue that could have come from these places. How are we going to enjoy ourselves now? they shout. Look at all we’ve lost, just so a few junkies could be made well? Imagine it. Because that’s just the kind of reaction that the people in this region have to Jesus in our story tonight. They come across as a pretty heartless community. Rather than rejoicing that two of their neighbours had been rescued, they feared that if Jesus stayed and changed any more people’s lives, they would lose out financially and materially as the herdsmen did. So they put money before people. They put mammon before God. And rather than praise Jesus for what he did, they ask him to go away out of their lives.
And so they ask Jesus to leave them and he does. The first verse of the next chapter in Matthew tells us that he went away in the boat again back to the other side of the lake.
And isn’t there a real challenge and choice laid before all of us in these different reactions that the man who was rescued and the people of the town had to Jesus? You see everyone must come to a conclusion about him one way or the other. You are either for him or against him. You either want to live with him and follow him, or you want him to leave your region or your life as the people in our reading did. Do you rejoice each time a person leaves the rebel kingdom of darkness and comes home to the kingdom of God, or deep down do you see Christians as sad people who have wasted their lives, living boring lives without any excitement or enjoyment? Do you look forward with hope and joy to the end of this world, and eternity in heaven? Or do you dread that it might be true? Is your joy in life to be Christ’s servant? Or are you more like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost who said that he would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven?
Well whether you are for him or again him he will triumph. He has already destroyed the works of the devil through his cross and resurrection. He still has absolute authority over all the powers of darkness, and they are permitted to do their works only in so far these comply with God’s sovereign will and eternal decrees. And slowly but surely, whatever happens in our lives, whatever happens in the world, Christ’s kingdom goes from victory to victory, according to God’s unchangeable plan, so that "the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ. And he shall reign for ever and ever," (as Revelation chapter 11, verse 5 puts it).
Or in the words of Martin Luther’s great hymn, Ein’ Feste Burg:
"And though the world seems full of ill,
with hungry demons prowling,
Christ’s victory is with us still,
we need not fear their howling.
The tyrants of this age
strut briefly on the stage:
their sentence has been passed.
We stand unharmed at last,
a word from God destroys them.
"God’s word and plan, which they pretend
is subject to their pleasure,
will bind their wills to serve God’s end,
which we, who love him, treasure.
Then let them take our lives,
goods, children, husbands, wives,
and carry all away;
theirs is a short-lived day,
ours is the lasting kingdom."
Encounters with Jesus: The Centurion
When preparing for tonight’s service I read something that J C Ryle said that I thought was very interesting – one of those things that sounds quite obvious once you hear it, but I had not really considered before. He said that the events of these chapters of Matthew were very significant because they follow right after the three great chapters of the Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. After the teaching comes a series of great miracles performed by Jesus to show everyone, including anyone reading this Gospel today, that the authority of Jesus’ words are backed up by the authority of his actions.
That’s the key I think to understanding the miracles of Jesus. Certainly they demonstrate Christ’s power and authority, they proclaim his deity as God the Son, but they are far more than mere divine magic tricks. They back up his teaching and more often than not they present to us his teaching in visual form. And finally they display the character of Jesus – his compassion, mercy and love for people – and I think we will see all these elements in our readings tonight and over the next two Sunday evenings.
Now, as we look at this passage from Matthew’s Gospel this evening it would be very helpful to have the words of Scripture before you in the printed order of service as I will be referring to the passage quite a lot.
It is apparent even on a cursory reading of this passage that it is all about faith. Twice at key points in the passage, Christ mentions faith explicitly. In verse 10: "With no one in Israel have I found such faith." And again in verse 13: "Let is be done for you as you have believed."
Like so many passages of the Bible the more you meditate on a passage like this and study it, the more you see in it. So in the first part of this sermon I would like us to think about the man of faith in this passage, the Centurion; and then in the second part of the sermon I think we should consider some very important things this passage tells us about the one in whom the Centurion put his faith.
Let us begin then by thinking about this Centurion who comes to Jesus at the beginning of the passage. Now as you probably know as centurion was a rank in the Roman army – an officer placed in command of one hundred men. Actually many centurions commanded more men than this, but the name comes from the fact that an officer of this rank commanded one hundred men. It is almost certain that there would be a Roman garrison in a town like Capernaum and it could well be that this centurion is the garrison commander. The commentators tell us that Centurions were the "working officers, the backbone of the Roman army," lower than a colonel or general but higher than a mere lieutenant - something like the rank of Captain in the British army. So here was a fairly important man in the Roman occupied town of Capernaum.
But there’s something different about this particular Centurion that made him stand out, and caused the Gospel writers to record this passage for us to read all these years later. The thing that stands out is that this Centurion is a man of faith. Whether he had heard the Sermon on the Mount, or whether he had seen or heard of other miracles that Jesus had performed before this we don’t know. But we do know that he certainly knew of Jesus and probably he knew quite a lot about Jesus as well. And on the basis of whatever knowledge he has, he uses it, leading to faith and action.
Before we go any further I’ll just briefly address the supposed contradiction between Matthew’s account of this incident and Luke’s account. In Luke’s account the Centurion and Jesus do not meet face-to-face, but communicate through messengers. The commentators get worked up about this. The best explanation it seems to me is simply that Luke’s account gives the details that there were go-between messengers involved, whereas Matthew simply omits this detail. This doesn’t make Matthew’s account inaccurate. He just distils the story down to the essentials. In the ancient world, when a messenger conveyed the words of one person to another it was regarded as if they had spoken personally to each other. Just as if in our day we say we talked with so-and-so, we might omit the detail that we spoke on the telephone. It doesn’t mean we did not speak. So here the messengers that Luke mentions were really the telephones of their day and are omitted from the story in Matthew’s version.
There are several aspects of this Centurion’s faith that merit our attention this evening. In fact there are five aspects of his faith I would like to mention.
Firstly, this Centurion has a practical living faith. We’ve seen that already. In verse 5, the Centurion "came forward to him, appealing to him." This man’s faith obviously affects how he lives his life. It’s not just something intellectual or emotional for him. So when his young servant is laid low with a terrible crippling illness, in verse 5 the Centurion seeks out Jesus to make his appeal to him. "To beg him" wouldn’t be too strong a translation, such is the strength and intensity of the Centurion’s appeal. And what is his heart-felt appeal? To heal "his servant." The words translated "my servant" are literally "my boy", so it is likely it was a young male slave in the Centurion’s household who was lying in bed, literally "thrown down onto his bed," paralysed and in a lot of pain. Calling the servant "my boy" surely indicates that the Centurion had real affection for him. He thought of him as more than just a commodity to do work for him. This in part probably explains why the Centurion went to such lengths to try to get him healed. And there’s a lesson here for employers I think, who no longer think of the people who work for them as "personnel" but merely "human resources"! But we’ll not go any further down that road tonight, except to note that this important military man is concerned for his servant and takes the time to do what he believes will be of most benefit to him and that was going to him and asking Christ to heal him.
This is not to downplay the importance of medicine. I am not advocating "faith healing" over modern medicine. I am reminded of a story I read about how some people get the wrong idea about what real faith is. There was once a great flood somewhere in the Southern United States and one farmer’s house was flooded right up to the rooftop. And on the roof the farmer stood clinging the chimney. A rescue boat with two fireman in it came along and they shouted to the farmer to come over and climb in the boat. But the old farmer shook his head. "I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he said. They tried to persuade him to come with them, but he was having none of it and finally they had to go off in the boat to see if they could find someone else needing rescued. The water continued to rise and even the roof began to go under water and the farmer had to climb right up on top of the chimney stack to keep dry. Just then a helicopter flew over and started to hover overhead. The pilot shouted down on a loud hailer, "Hold on and we’ll lower down a man on a winch to get you." But the old farmer waved the helicopter off. "No way, I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he shouted. Well the helicopter was running low on fuel and couldn’t stay over the farmer’s house any longer so it flew away. Not long afterwards the flood went over the top of the house and old farmer drowned. When he got to heaven and met God the first thing he said to him was this: "Lord, I trusted in you real hard. I never doubted you for a second. I never thought you would fail me like this and let me drown." And God replied, "Fail you? Didn’t you see the boat and the helicopter I sent to rescue you?"
Well modern medicine is a bit like the boat and the helicopter in that story. Just because something is discovered or invented by the hand of man doesn’t mean that the hand of God isn’t behind it.
But let’s get back to our Centurion now. We’ve seen that the Centurion’s faith expresses itself in real love for other people. Our faith too must be practical and loving if it is to be a living and not a dead faith, which the Letter of James tells us will is useless. We should be looking for opportunities to help our neighbours and show them practical care and support. And of course where there is sickness and suffering we should take the time to seek out Jesus and bring those in need to our Saviour in prayer. Whether he chooses to heal through normal medicine or through something that modern medicine can’t explain is up to him.
Then secondly, in verse 8 we see that the Centurion had a humble faith. "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof," he says. He comes to Jesus not proud and arrogant as we might expect an officer in an occupying army to behave. But filled he comes to Jesus full of humility and self-deprecation. Even though a Roman officer used to soldiers obeying his orders, he is not too proud to come to a poor Jewish Rabbi for help. That must have taken a big heart to do that, not knowing what his men, or the other officers, or his superiors would think if news got back to them. To me that’s probably the best piece of evidence that this Centurion’s faith in Christ was not merely the faith a patient might have in a doctor. Because the human heart is not humble, not genuinely humble, by nature. By nature we want to make ourselves the centre of attention. By nature we’re number one and we want people to know it. But when a person is born again by the Holy Spirit, given a new heart and made spiritually alive, their whole perspective on life changes. No longer are they number one: Jesus is number one in their lives. And, like John the Baptist says, as he "increases" we must "decrease". Our selfishness diminishes. Our whole life view alters and we begin to see that it is God’s glory that counts in life, not our own glory, for we have none.
Thirdly, the Centurion has a strong faith. The whole passage demonstrates this. It is quite clear this Centurion really believed that bringing his servant’s illness before Christ would be a way of bringing relief from suffering and real healing to the young man paralysed. In verse 8 again, "Only say the word and my servant will be healed," he says. It is a confident faith – and by that I mean not a faith confident in itself, but a faith supremely confident of the one in whom his faith is placed. "Just say the word, Lord and it will happen" is his attitude. There’s no doubt in the Centurion’s mind or heart. He believes Jesus can heal his servant and he believes Jesus will heal his servant, even though he is too ashamed to have the Saviour even come into his house. Perhaps this because the Centurion knows that his life is not all it should be, perhaps because having heard parts of Jesus’ teaching, he knows he does not deserve to receive any blessings from God. So combined with a strong trust is a strong sense of unworthiness and a realisation perhaps that his relationship with Christ is based entirely on grace. Merit doesn’t come into it. And that’s certainly something we need to keep constantly in mind as well. We should never take God’s help for granted. He doesn’t owe it to us. He blesses us only out of grace and love because he wants to.
Fourthly this Centurion has a faith built on knowledge. In other words, this Centurion’s faith is not ignorance, it is not a blind faith. It is built on what he knows about Christ. In verse 9 the Centurion shows a remarkable understanding of who Jesus is and what authority he has from God. It’s really quite a deep insight that the Centurion displays here. He has a rather profound theological understanding it seems to me to make the comparison he does between his life as a Captain in the Roman army and Christ’s ministry on earth. And he certainly does make that comparison. "I too am a man under authority," he says. He realises that Christ is under the authority of God the Father. In John chapter 17, verse 4 Christ himself says as much as he prays to the Father: "I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do." And in the Great Commission at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 28, verse 18, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," he said, which clearly implies that Someone gave Christ all authority, and that can only be God the Father. In some way, we don’t know how sketchy his knowledge is, but at a basic level at least, this Centurion grasps something of that truth: "I too am a man under authority."
But the second piece of knowledge the Centurion has about Jesus, and upon which his faith is built, is the knowledge that as well as being under someone else’s authority - and indeed because of it - the Centurion also realises that Christ has authority over other people, events, illness, over everything in fact. And as a result, Christ has authority to tell people what to do – even to tell illnesses what to do. "I say to one, ‘Go’ and he goes, and to another ‘Come’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this’ and he does it." And of course what the Centurion is really saying here is that Jesus has that kind of power and authority not over junior soldiers but over things that only God has power over: to say ‘Go’ and demons will leave the person they are possessing, or to say ‘Come’ and a paralysed man will rise from his bed, or to say ‘Do this’ and sinners dead in trespasses and sins will be born again, come to faith in Christ and be saved.
Every indication here is that the Centurion realises this Jesus is far more than just a popular Jewish teacher and healer. He surely sees him as the Son of God, His Lord and Saviour. And that leads us on to our last point. Fifthly, this Centurion has an unexpected faith. A professional solder is perhaps not the kind of person we would think of as most likely to come to faith in Jesus, or the kind of person whose way of life we would tend to think of as being godly. But more than that this man was a Gentile, not a Jew at all. Both of these facts make it all the more amazing that such a man had come to genuine, life changing faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus himself proclaims that he had not come across such faith even among his fellow Jews. In verse 10 he says, "with no one in Israel [that’s the Jewish nation] have I found such faith."
Today we are used to the fact that the Gospel has gone out to the Gentiles – the non-Jewish people like us – and we know that God’s plan of salvation is to bring people from all the nations into his covenant people. But in Jesus’ time it would have been astonishing for Matthew’s first readers for not only a Gentile, but a member of the hated occupation army, to be singled out and praised by the Jewish Messiah.
It is this last aspect of the Centurion’s faith – the remarkable fact that here is a Gentile soldier trusting in the Jewish Messiah – that Jesus focuses on to make a beautiful, encouraging and challenging prophecy in verses 11 and 12. "Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven," Jesus says. These are words we should treasure because it is a prophecy that is directly fulfilled in we Scottish Christians! There is much we could say about this verse, but time is short. We can be certain of one thing from this verse: the Gospel coming to the Gentiles was no accident and it was no afterthought – it was part of God’s plan and Christ knew it even here. The Centurion is a forerunner of millions of Gentiles who would put their faith in the Jewish Messiah and find salvation. Those who have faith in Christ have eternal life, whatever their race or background or whatever they have done. They are safe and blessed now and in heaven they will enjoy the great feast of the Lamb forever, even reclining at table with the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But where verse 11 contains a wonderful promise, verse 12 contains a stern warning. Those who do not believe in him, those who reject Christ and his gospel, no matter who they are, no matter how entitled they are think they are to call themselves God’s people, no matter what a great history their earthly nation has of glorifying God, if they do not have Christ they will not be blessed. They will be cursed in hell, which Jesus here describes as a dark and terrible place like a Roman dungeon, damp, dirty, full of disease and the stench of death, cut off from God and form every good thing in this world. Here Jesus has primarily in mind the Jewish nation which rejected him, but it equally applies to everyone who thinks of themselves as religious, but doesn’t know Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.
That’s the real challenge this Centurion’s faith makes to us. The question this passage forces us to ask of ourselves is whether we have a faith like this in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do we have a practical living faith? A faith built on knowledge of God revealed to us in the teachings of the Bible? A humble faith that realises God owes us nothing and any blessing we have from the Saviour is pure grace? A confident trust in Christ as our Lord and Saviour, able to meet all our needs in this life and all our hopes of heaven in eternity? An unexpected faith that challenges us to do things we would never do naturally, like turning from our sins, and doing good to others, and confessing Christ and witnessing to God’s love in Christ before the entire world?
This is the kind of faith this Centurion had. This is the kind of faith that saves us if we have it – not because it is great faith, but because it is true faith in a great Saviour. This is the kind of faith that Christ blesses. Let us not forget that our passage ends with the servant beings healed. Even though Christ doesn’t meet the servant face-to-face, he does speak the word and the servant is healed – at that very moment. Christ’s word is shown to be powerful and effective.
Just as Christ prophesied, this faith is now possessed by people of every nation, tribe and language. This is the faith that will be shared by all the saints who will gather in heaven to praise God at the end of time. Echoing Jesus words in this prophecy, the apostle John in his vision of glory in the Book of Revelation, says this about the worldwide church of God gathered in heaven in Revelation, chapter 5:
"And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying, "Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth."
We do not know this Centurion’s name, or anything about him except his military rank and that he was a man of deep personal faith in Jesus Christ. But one day, we will meet him in heaven along with the vast multitude of the redeemed who have trusted in God for salvation through Christ down, through the ages. Remember Jesus’ gracious words:
"Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven."
Rejoice if you are among their number. Repent and believe the gospel if you are not. Come to Christ now and put your faith in him. Nothing in life is more necessary or more important.
That’s the key I think to understanding the miracles of Jesus. Certainly they demonstrate Christ’s power and authority, they proclaim his deity as God the Son, but they are far more than mere divine magic tricks. They back up his teaching and more often than not they present to us his teaching in visual form. And finally they display the character of Jesus – his compassion, mercy and love for people – and I think we will see all these elements in our readings tonight and over the next two Sunday evenings.
Now, as we look at this passage from Matthew’s Gospel this evening it would be very helpful to have the words of Scripture before you in the printed order of service as I will be referring to the passage quite a lot.
It is apparent even on a cursory reading of this passage that it is all about faith. Twice at key points in the passage, Christ mentions faith explicitly. In verse 10: "With no one in Israel have I found such faith." And again in verse 13: "Let is be done for you as you have believed."
Like so many passages of the Bible the more you meditate on a passage like this and study it, the more you see in it. So in the first part of this sermon I would like us to think about the man of faith in this passage, the Centurion; and then in the second part of the sermon I think we should consider some very important things this passage tells us about the one in whom the Centurion put his faith.
Let us begin then by thinking about this Centurion who comes to Jesus at the beginning of the passage. Now as you probably know as centurion was a rank in the Roman army – an officer placed in command of one hundred men. Actually many centurions commanded more men than this, but the name comes from the fact that an officer of this rank commanded one hundred men. It is almost certain that there would be a Roman garrison in a town like Capernaum and it could well be that this centurion is the garrison commander. The commentators tell us that Centurions were the "working officers, the backbone of the Roman army," lower than a colonel or general but higher than a mere lieutenant - something like the rank of Captain in the British army. So here was a fairly important man in the Roman occupied town of Capernaum.
But there’s something different about this particular Centurion that made him stand out, and caused the Gospel writers to record this passage for us to read all these years later. The thing that stands out is that this Centurion is a man of faith. Whether he had heard the Sermon on the Mount, or whether he had seen or heard of other miracles that Jesus had performed before this we don’t know. But we do know that he certainly knew of Jesus and probably he knew quite a lot about Jesus as well. And on the basis of whatever knowledge he has, he uses it, leading to faith and action.
Before we go any further I’ll just briefly address the supposed contradiction between Matthew’s account of this incident and Luke’s account. In Luke’s account the Centurion and Jesus do not meet face-to-face, but communicate through messengers. The commentators get worked up about this. The best explanation it seems to me is simply that Luke’s account gives the details that there were go-between messengers involved, whereas Matthew simply omits this detail. This doesn’t make Matthew’s account inaccurate. He just distils the story down to the essentials. In the ancient world, when a messenger conveyed the words of one person to another it was regarded as if they had spoken personally to each other. Just as if in our day we say we talked with so-and-so, we might omit the detail that we spoke on the telephone. It doesn’t mean we did not speak. So here the messengers that Luke mentions were really the telephones of their day and are omitted from the story in Matthew’s version.
There are several aspects of this Centurion’s faith that merit our attention this evening. In fact there are five aspects of his faith I would like to mention.
Firstly, this Centurion has a practical living faith. We’ve seen that already. In verse 5, the Centurion "came forward to him, appealing to him." This man’s faith obviously affects how he lives his life. It’s not just something intellectual or emotional for him. So when his young servant is laid low with a terrible crippling illness, in verse 5 the Centurion seeks out Jesus to make his appeal to him. "To beg him" wouldn’t be too strong a translation, such is the strength and intensity of the Centurion’s appeal. And what is his heart-felt appeal? To heal "his servant." The words translated "my servant" are literally "my boy", so it is likely it was a young male slave in the Centurion’s household who was lying in bed, literally "thrown down onto his bed," paralysed and in a lot of pain. Calling the servant "my boy" surely indicates that the Centurion had real affection for him. He thought of him as more than just a commodity to do work for him. This in part probably explains why the Centurion went to such lengths to try to get him healed. And there’s a lesson here for employers I think, who no longer think of the people who work for them as "personnel" but merely "human resources"! But we’ll not go any further down that road tonight, except to note that this important military man is concerned for his servant and takes the time to do what he believes will be of most benefit to him and that was going to him and asking Christ to heal him.
This is not to downplay the importance of medicine. I am not advocating "faith healing" over modern medicine. I am reminded of a story I read about how some people get the wrong idea about what real faith is. There was once a great flood somewhere in the Southern United States and one farmer’s house was flooded right up to the rooftop. And on the roof the farmer stood clinging the chimney. A rescue boat with two fireman in it came along and they shouted to the farmer to come over and climb in the boat. But the old farmer shook his head. "I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he said. They tried to persuade him to come with them, but he was having none of it and finally they had to go off in the boat to see if they could find someone else needing rescued. The water continued to rise and even the roof began to go under water and the farmer had to climb right up on top of the chimney stack to keep dry. Just then a helicopter flew over and started to hover overhead. The pilot shouted down on a loud hailer, "Hold on and we’ll lower down a man on a winch to get you." But the old farmer waved the helicopter off. "No way, I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he shouted. Well the helicopter was running low on fuel and couldn’t stay over the farmer’s house any longer so it flew away. Not long afterwards the flood went over the top of the house and old farmer drowned. When he got to heaven and met God the first thing he said to him was this: "Lord, I trusted in you real hard. I never doubted you for a second. I never thought you would fail me like this and let me drown." And God replied, "Fail you? Didn’t you see the boat and the helicopter I sent to rescue you?"
Well modern medicine is a bit like the boat and the helicopter in that story. Just because something is discovered or invented by the hand of man doesn’t mean that the hand of God isn’t behind it.
But let’s get back to our Centurion now. We’ve seen that the Centurion’s faith expresses itself in real love for other people. Our faith too must be practical and loving if it is to be a living and not a dead faith, which the Letter of James tells us will is useless. We should be looking for opportunities to help our neighbours and show them practical care and support. And of course where there is sickness and suffering we should take the time to seek out Jesus and bring those in need to our Saviour in prayer. Whether he chooses to heal through normal medicine or through something that modern medicine can’t explain is up to him.
Then secondly, in verse 8 we see that the Centurion had a humble faith. "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof," he says. He comes to Jesus not proud and arrogant as we might expect an officer in an occupying army to behave. But filled he comes to Jesus full of humility and self-deprecation. Even though a Roman officer used to soldiers obeying his orders, he is not too proud to come to a poor Jewish Rabbi for help. That must have taken a big heart to do that, not knowing what his men, or the other officers, or his superiors would think if news got back to them. To me that’s probably the best piece of evidence that this Centurion’s faith in Christ was not merely the faith a patient might have in a doctor. Because the human heart is not humble, not genuinely humble, by nature. By nature we want to make ourselves the centre of attention. By nature we’re number one and we want people to know it. But when a person is born again by the Holy Spirit, given a new heart and made spiritually alive, their whole perspective on life changes. No longer are they number one: Jesus is number one in their lives. And, like John the Baptist says, as he "increases" we must "decrease". Our selfishness diminishes. Our whole life view alters and we begin to see that it is God’s glory that counts in life, not our own glory, for we have none.
Thirdly, the Centurion has a strong faith. The whole passage demonstrates this. It is quite clear this Centurion really believed that bringing his servant’s illness before Christ would be a way of bringing relief from suffering and real healing to the young man paralysed. In verse 8 again, "Only say the word and my servant will be healed," he says. It is a confident faith – and by that I mean not a faith confident in itself, but a faith supremely confident of the one in whom his faith is placed. "Just say the word, Lord and it will happen" is his attitude. There’s no doubt in the Centurion’s mind or heart. He believes Jesus can heal his servant and he believes Jesus will heal his servant, even though he is too ashamed to have the Saviour even come into his house. Perhaps this because the Centurion knows that his life is not all it should be, perhaps because having heard parts of Jesus’ teaching, he knows he does not deserve to receive any blessings from God. So combined with a strong trust is a strong sense of unworthiness and a realisation perhaps that his relationship with Christ is based entirely on grace. Merit doesn’t come into it. And that’s certainly something we need to keep constantly in mind as well. We should never take God’s help for granted. He doesn’t owe it to us. He blesses us only out of grace and love because he wants to.
Fourthly this Centurion has a faith built on knowledge. In other words, this Centurion’s faith is not ignorance, it is not a blind faith. It is built on what he knows about Christ. In verse 9 the Centurion shows a remarkable understanding of who Jesus is and what authority he has from God. It’s really quite a deep insight that the Centurion displays here. He has a rather profound theological understanding it seems to me to make the comparison he does between his life as a Captain in the Roman army and Christ’s ministry on earth. And he certainly does make that comparison. "I too am a man under authority," he says. He realises that Christ is under the authority of God the Father. In John chapter 17, verse 4 Christ himself says as much as he prays to the Father: "I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do." And in the Great Commission at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 28, verse 18, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," he said, which clearly implies that Someone gave Christ all authority, and that can only be God the Father. In some way, we don’t know how sketchy his knowledge is, but at a basic level at least, this Centurion grasps something of that truth: "I too am a man under authority."
But the second piece of knowledge the Centurion has about Jesus, and upon which his faith is built, is the knowledge that as well as being under someone else’s authority - and indeed because of it - the Centurion also realises that Christ has authority over other people, events, illness, over everything in fact. And as a result, Christ has authority to tell people what to do – even to tell illnesses what to do. "I say to one, ‘Go’ and he goes, and to another ‘Come’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this’ and he does it." And of course what the Centurion is really saying here is that Jesus has that kind of power and authority not over junior soldiers but over things that only God has power over: to say ‘Go’ and demons will leave the person they are possessing, or to say ‘Come’ and a paralysed man will rise from his bed, or to say ‘Do this’ and sinners dead in trespasses and sins will be born again, come to faith in Christ and be saved.
Every indication here is that the Centurion realises this Jesus is far more than just a popular Jewish teacher and healer. He surely sees him as the Son of God, His Lord and Saviour. And that leads us on to our last point. Fifthly, this Centurion has an unexpected faith. A professional solder is perhaps not the kind of person we would think of as most likely to come to faith in Jesus, or the kind of person whose way of life we would tend to think of as being godly. But more than that this man was a Gentile, not a Jew at all. Both of these facts make it all the more amazing that such a man had come to genuine, life changing faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus himself proclaims that he had not come across such faith even among his fellow Jews. In verse 10 he says, "with no one in Israel [that’s the Jewish nation] have I found such faith."
Today we are used to the fact that the Gospel has gone out to the Gentiles – the non-Jewish people like us – and we know that God’s plan of salvation is to bring people from all the nations into his covenant people. But in Jesus’ time it would have been astonishing for Matthew’s first readers for not only a Gentile, but a member of the hated occupation army, to be singled out and praised by the Jewish Messiah.
It is this last aspect of the Centurion’s faith – the remarkable fact that here is a Gentile soldier trusting in the Jewish Messiah – that Jesus focuses on to make a beautiful, encouraging and challenging prophecy in verses 11 and 12. "Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven," Jesus says. These are words we should treasure because it is a prophecy that is directly fulfilled in we Scottish Christians! There is much we could say about this verse, but time is short. We can be certain of one thing from this verse: the Gospel coming to the Gentiles was no accident and it was no afterthought – it was part of God’s plan and Christ knew it even here. The Centurion is a forerunner of millions of Gentiles who would put their faith in the Jewish Messiah and find salvation. Those who have faith in Christ have eternal life, whatever their race or background or whatever they have done. They are safe and blessed now and in heaven they will enjoy the great feast of the Lamb forever, even reclining at table with the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But where verse 11 contains a wonderful promise, verse 12 contains a stern warning. Those who do not believe in him, those who reject Christ and his gospel, no matter who they are, no matter how entitled they are think they are to call themselves God’s people, no matter what a great history their earthly nation has of glorifying God, if they do not have Christ they will not be blessed. They will be cursed in hell, which Jesus here describes as a dark and terrible place like a Roman dungeon, damp, dirty, full of disease and the stench of death, cut off from God and form every good thing in this world. Here Jesus has primarily in mind the Jewish nation which rejected him, but it equally applies to everyone who thinks of themselves as religious, but doesn’t know Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.
That’s the real challenge this Centurion’s faith makes to us. The question this passage forces us to ask of ourselves is whether we have a faith like this in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do we have a practical living faith? A faith built on knowledge of God revealed to us in the teachings of the Bible? A humble faith that realises God owes us nothing and any blessing we have from the Saviour is pure grace? A confident trust in Christ as our Lord and Saviour, able to meet all our needs in this life and all our hopes of heaven in eternity? An unexpected faith that challenges us to do things we would never do naturally, like turning from our sins, and doing good to others, and confessing Christ and witnessing to God’s love in Christ before the entire world?
This is the kind of faith this Centurion had. This is the kind of faith that saves us if we have it – not because it is great faith, but because it is true faith in a great Saviour. This is the kind of faith that Christ blesses. Let us not forget that our passage ends with the servant beings healed. Even though Christ doesn’t meet the servant face-to-face, he does speak the word and the servant is healed – at that very moment. Christ’s word is shown to be powerful and effective.
Just as Christ prophesied, this faith is now possessed by people of every nation, tribe and language. This is the faith that will be shared by all the saints who will gather in heaven to praise God at the end of time. Echoing Jesus words in this prophecy, the apostle John in his vision of glory in the Book of Revelation, says this about the worldwide church of God gathered in heaven in Revelation, chapter 5:
"And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying, "Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth."
We do not know this Centurion’s name, or anything about him except his military rank and that he was a man of deep personal faith in Jesus Christ. But one day, we will meet him in heaven along with the vast multitude of the redeemed who have trusted in God for salvation through Christ down, through the ages. Remember Jesus’ gracious words:
"Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven."
Rejoice if you are among their number. Repent and believe the gospel if you are not. Come to Christ now and put your faith in him. Nothing in life is more necessary or more important.
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