Forgiven = Healed

Luke 5:22-26

The Pharisees were inside, and down front, but there was a huge crowd behind them, and many who couldn’t get in. The context indicates that this man was sick because of personal sin in his life.  Here’s how we know:  because usually Jesus dealt with the physical need first before the spiritual.  He would heal a person in their body before He dealt with their soul’s need.  But in this case, He goes straight to the cause of the physical problem, which sometimes is spiritual in nature.  Now, certainly most physical problems aren’t rooted in sin, but sometimes they are!

Jesus went straight to the heart of the matter.  He went directly to the root of the problem.  This man needed forgiveness of his sins and he knew it.  He had faith just as the men who bore him did, and man’s faith leads to God’s grace! 

You see, our problem is not our outward behavior…that’s just the symptoms.  Our problem is an inward condition of sin.  For this reason we do not need REFORMATION, but rather TRANSFORMATION! 

We don’t need to ‘turn over a new leaf’…we need a whole new tree!  And that’s only possible by the PARDON which Jesus offers to us.

vv. 21-23         Which is easier to say?  Your sins are forgiven?  Or, rise up and walk?  Not easier to do…which is easier to say? Hold that question!

No one can immediately recreate the body of a man, eliminate his paralysis and the cause of that paralysis, give him all brand new muscles, brand new bones and put in his brain a new memory about how to walk.  No man can do that.  Neither can any man forgive his sins.  The two are connected.  For a man, both are impossible. God alone can forgive sins. The Pharisees would agree to that.  And God alone can create. He is the creator and if He needs to create new limbs, new bones, new muscles and a new memory, He can do that.  So these two things are only possible to God and not to man.

Sin and sickness are inseparable because they're both in the plan of salvation. 

Matthew 8:16-17

¹⁶ When the even was come, they brought unto him many that were possessed with devils: and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick: ¹⁷ That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses. [w/ His stripes…]

The Bible tells us that in the sacrifice of Christ, in the atonement, is not only the salvation of our souls, but the healing of our bodies ultimately.  When you put your faith in Jesus Christ your soul is saved, and Romans 8 says you're waiting for the redemption of your body.  But in the end, we'll have new souls, new spirits, and new glorified bodies.  So ultimately God has to deal with the sin that's in our soul and the infirmity that's in our body as a result of that sin. 

If this is the Messiah God, the Son of God, God incarnate who brings the eternal kingdom of heaven, [where there is no sin and no sickness and no death] then He has to be able not only to forgive sin, but to remove all its consequences in the physical realm. 

When Jesus came into the world and healed people, He was making a very important statement.  He came, forgiving sin; that's dealing with the cause. And He came, healing sickness, to show He could also deal with the symptoms.  When we go to heaven, there's no sin and there's no sickness and there's no death.  What good would it do if Jesus could put away sickness, if He could put away disease, if He could put away death, overpower paralysis, and even bring people back from the dead, but He couldn't forgive sin?  Sin would keep leading to awful symptoms and there never would be heaven.  And there never would be a sinless paradise. 

Healing and forgiveness go together.  They are works of God alone. 

Now let's go back to the question.  "Which is easier to say, your sins have been forgiven you, or to say rise and walk?"  And He's kind of picking at their thought process.  The answer is: It's easier to say your sins are forgiven.  It's easy to say that because you can't see if it happened, right?  I mean, Jesus said to the man, "Your sins are forgiven."  Well that was a divine transaction.  That occurred in the mind of God.  But that's not visible.  He didn't all of a sudden get a permanent halo that marked him.  There was no evidence.  There was no experimental way to determine whether or not his sins had been forgiven. 

So Jesus says you're questioning whether I can forgive that man's sin, aren't you?  And you think it's real easy to say, "Your sins are forgiven."  In fact, you think I'm saying it as a blasphemer and I've overstepped the bounds that any man should ever come near.  So let me do this for you…  Verse 24          Now remember, man can do neither, God can do both.  You see, it's not easy to say to somebody, "Arise, take up your bed and walk."  If they don't do it, you immediately reveal that you're a fake.  You're human.  “So, to prove I have the power [authority] to forgive sins…” Whoa, what a statement.  This is the heart of the matter.

Jesus calls Himself Son of Man eighty times in the gospels. Only once is Son of Man used of Him by somebody else.  It's His own title for Himself.  And yes, it is an expression of His humanity.  That was sort of a common idiom.  James and John were kind of bombastic, sons of thunder, remember that?  And we who are sinful are called sons of wickedness, an expression that's used in 2 Samuel, chapter 3.  And that's one way to express that that's something of our nature.  And it is true that Son of Man does speak of Jesus as human, but more than that, it is an expression of the promise of God through Daniel [ch. 7] of the Messiah, the One who would have a kingdom and who would reign and who was there on the throne with God Himself.  So Jesus says you need to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, and so that I can prove that I can do what you can't see, I'm going to do something you can see. 

Now, just think about it again.  Here is this man who is paralyzed, atrophied, and his brain has forgotten how to walk.  To say you're healed and to say now you have to go immediately into two years of rehabilitation might have been a more reasonable approach. But to say to the man, "Get up, take your stuff, put it under your arm and go home," don't take two steps with a walker, go home.  You're talking about a creative miracle here.  I always kind of wonder why the people on TV at Benny Hinn's meetings when they get healed fall over.  In Luke chapter 5 Jesus healed this man, told him to get up and go home.

Well, just to take the controversy to a fever pitch, we come to verse 25.  He did exactly what Jesus told him to do.  All of his bones were hardened perfectly, all of his muscles were created right there on the spot by the Lord.  All the hinges in his joints worked as designed.  All those dried up and atrophied sinews, all the elements of the physiology of that man were immediately recreated, brand new.  His brain went into full function.  His arms went into full function so that he could carry what he was lying on and he just went home.  We don't know how far home was, but it must have been a wonderful walk. 

The last part of verse 25 says he went home glorifying God.  The Bible, of course, sometimes understates things, doesn't it?  Glorifying God.  I mean, you could go on for paragraphs describing this guy who was probably jumping and leaping and dancing and praising and singing hallelujah and could hardly stand it until he could get to the house and walk in the door, ‘ta da’, you know, and everybody could see what had happened.  But the best part of this wasn't that he was walking home, the best part was that he was cleansed of sin.  And I don't know what he expected when he started out that morning. I don't know what his four buddies expected, but I'm sure he didn't expect what he got.  ‘Glorifying God.’  It reminds me of the angels. That's what they were doing when they announced the Messiah.

You could just imagine him kind of feeling around his body and just being in shock over what had happened in the creative miracle that he had just experienced.  And here he goes in one direction, glorifying God, and there go the Pharisees and the scribes the other way, full of anger, resentment, further down the satanic path of rejection, deeper and deeper into their own darkness, seeking to kill God, as it were.

v. 26        This is the crowd.  You've got the man on one side who has just been regenerated both physically and spiritually.  And you've got the Pharisees on the other side who have just plunged deeper into their resentment.  And you've got the group in the middle, the crowd in the middle.  And you're always going to see that.  All the way through the story of Jesus you'll see the believers who are transformed.  You'll see the angry, hostile religious leaders whose hate is escalated by everything they experience.  And then you'll see the mass in the middle that's sort of like the mixed multitude, divided between sort of onlookers, sort of half-hearted disciples, and those who are becoming true disciples, sort of mixed in the middle. 

“amazed” is ekstasis, ecstasy.  They were ecstatic.  There was absolutely no human explanation for it.  And they too began glorifying God.  They had seen salvation.  They had seen forgiveness.  They had seen creation.  And I'm sure many of them even in that crowd were temporary followers. Like in John 6, there were many disciples who followed Jesus and when He said hard things, they left.  Remember that?  And they walked no more with Him.  And Jesus, remember, said to Peter, "Are you going to go away too?"  And he said, "To whom shall we go?  You and You alone have the words of eternal life."  There were in that multitude the mixture of people who were at different places in terms of their understanding and commitment to Christ. 

V. 26 says filled with fear. What does that mean?  What were they fearful of? From the Greek phobe [phobia] is that fear that we would call reverence.  It is an understanding that God is holy, and that God is present.  Never in the gospels and Acts is this word used except to describe that kind of fear.  It's always used of awe and reverence in the heart of a person confronted with divine presence and divine power.  It's used of the reaction of the disciples when they saw Jesus walking on the water.  It's used of their reaction when He stilled the storm.  It's used of the reaction of the people after the raising of the son of the widow of Nain in Luke 7, after the healing of the demoniac in Luke 8.  It's used of the feeling of Zacharias when he saw an angel standing beside the altar.  It's used of the people who were stunned when they saw Zacharias the father of John the Baptist receive his speech back.  It's used of the shepherds in the field when they heard the angels who came to tell them of the Messiah's birth.  It's used of the guards who were shocked at the tomb of the Lord Jesus Christ when the stone was rolled away.  It's used of the women who came to the tomb describing their fear, their awe, their reverence.  It's even used of the church after the death of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts chapter 5.  It's used of the heathen who were trying to be exorcists at Ephesus in Acts 19.  I mean, it just appears in lots of places and it describes this sense that God is present, that God is moving, and God is powerful.

And it's a necessary fear.  It's a healthy fear.  Second Corinthians 7:1: "Perfecting holiness in the fear of God."  Then v. 11 says "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."  We serve one another in fear, Ephesians 5:21 says. It's the motive for our evangelism, "Knowing the fear of God we persuade men." 

1 Timothy 5:20 Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear.

“We have seen strange things…” - the word used there is paradoxa.  They've seen paradoxes, that is, things that have no explanation, things which are humanly contradictory.  You can't forgive sin and you can't get out of a stretcher in that condition and go home on your own two feet.  This is a paradox. 

In the world you have those of us are going home glorifying God because we've been forgiven, we know our healing is coming.  And then there are those who hate God, hate Christ, and would do everything they could to stamp out every expression of the gospel, every representation of Jesus Christ.  Then there's the mass in the middle who at one level or another are sort of amazed and wonder about Jesus.

That fickle crowd shows up later, in the life of Christ one day asking if He would please take His throne as King and by Friday they are screaming for His blood.  I don't know where you want to be, but I want to be going to my heavenly home glorifying God, don't you?  Because my sins have been forgiven. Where are you?  Only one place you want to be.