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.
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