We are all sick. All the physical diseases that Jesus dealt with point to our moral sickness. For example, leprosy highlighted our uncleanness, fever emphasised our unrest and disquiet and palsy underlined our complete powerlessness and dependence.
So we come to Capernaum. Jesus is in a house casually chatting about the Word until four friends push through the extraordinary crowd, unroof the house Jesus was in and lower their paralysed friend to Jesus to be healed. Straightaway Jesus forgives the man his sins. The word means much more than a judicial decision to simply put the sins away. It also means that God has removed the guilt of those sins and has granted a positive righteousness to that person forever.
To impart righteousness to anybody is something that only God can do so the Pharisees, who must have jostled in early for the best positions near to Jesus, were angry. To prove to them that He alone spoke with the authority of God He commanded the paralysed man to get up and walk around and to keep on walking around. Not only was the man to get up, but his continued action proved he had had a complete and permanent cure, just like his sins had been permanently cured. In so doing, Jesus had proven conclusively to the astounded Pharisees that He was God.
Any person with any spiritual vision at all would have recognised that they were in the presence of the Lord ‘who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases’ (Psa. 103:3). Unfortunately, however, the Pharisees had spiritually dimmed eyes and denied this conclusion and spread this disbelief. It was Jesus who later declared: “Capernaum, are you to be lifted up into heaven? You will be taken down to hell. If the powerful works which were done in you had been done in the city of Sodom, it would be here to this day. But I say to you that it will be better for the land of Sodom on the day men stand before God and are told they are guilty, than for you” (Matt. 11:23-24 NLV).
This paralysed man has taught us that we are completely powerless to save ourselves: Jesus alone can save our souls. He does this so completely that the effects of that healing go on and on forever. We can’t do a single thing to add to our salvation, just like the paralysed man couldn’t do a single thing to add to his physical healing.
Our salvation is an act of pure grace from the One who existed as the Word and Son of God from all eternity, and was with God His Father from everlasting. ‘From the first announcement I have not spoken in secret; at the time it happens, I am there. And now the Sovereign Lord has sent me, endowed with his Spirit’ (Isa 48:16 NIV).
Discover today just who Jesus was, and is and is to come.
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