Piety Police

Luke 5:17-21

Jesus had already generated heat on Himself.  When He began His ministry down in Judea before He came to Galilee, the first thing He did was make a whip and clean out the temple which didn't make Him popular with the Jewish authorities.  So He already had the ire of those leaders. Then He went up to Galilee and as He began to minister there was an explosion of interest around Him.  He banished illness from the Galilee during that period of time.  He went from town to town to town preaching.  And everywhere He went He was also healing.  So the word about Him was spreading like wildfire and the already hostile authorities in Judaism were getting more and more angry. They already wanted Him dead.  They tried throwing Him off a cliff already! And they kept pushing that issue until they finally got the Romans to crucify Him. They were the self-appointed ‘Piety Police’.

So they are now dogging His steps and they're looking for things for which they can indict Him.  They tried to kill Him in Nazareth just for preaching that He was the Messiah. 

He is saying, "I've come to those who know they're spiritually bankrupt, not to the spiritually elite and self-righteous.  The religious leaders were offended.  Luke focuses in on their group.

v. 17        There they were and you can believe they were up close. They loved to be seen of men, Jesus said in Matthew 23. They loved it when they were in the place of prominence.  And you can believe with all of their Pharisaical trappings, they were there. They hate the God they say they worship.  Jesus is that God and here He is in their midst and they want to kill Him, thinking they're doing God service.  That's how deluded their minds had become.

It must have been a fairly large house to accommodate this group alone. V. 19 mentions a tile roof which was expensive. So again, it’s a big place with a big crowd. Jesus provides these hostile visitors with an unforgettable experience and a formidable challenge to their theology. 

v. 18        Here comes a group of friends bringing a man who's paralyzed.  Mark tells us there were four men coming and so there were four plus the man on the bed, or cot.  These fantastic four were quite a quartet of believers themselves.

New Testament people who have an illness are described as to their symptoms.  They're not described as to their pathology.  We used to do that, but we don't do that anymore.  We used to talk about crippled people, or talk about handicapped people.  We tend now to talk more about the person in a clinical way.  The person has polio, or this person has muscular dystrophy or multiple sclerosis.  But in ancient times before they knew all that pathology, they would describe a person's illness with regard to the symptoms.  It could have been some genetic defect.  It is also very possible that this could have been caused by syphilis which was common and eventually could have this effect.  People who were in this condition were generally left out of society.  This man bore a social stigma that would have alienated him, made him somewhat of an outcast and he would have been typically shunned.  And people tended to think that people like that were like that because of some sin.  Remember in John 9 when they went to Jesus about the man who was born blind and they said, "Who sinned, this man or his parents?"  And Jesus said, nobody sinned, this is an illness for the glory of God.

His four buddies bring him and they wanted to get him right up front.  Of course they wanted him to be healed, but in the man's heart we see what he came for and that was forgiveness.  He believed Jesus was from God.  That's implied in what happens. 

v. 19                Down through the hole comes this man on a stretcher right in the center in front of Jesus.  That's exactly where he wanted to be.  Well the drama is really fascinating to me.  If you're just sitting there watching all of this, your thoughts are, "What are these guys doing?"  And if you're the owner of the house, you're saying, "They're taking my roof apart."  And when they saw a guy coming down on a stretcher, their thoughts were probably, "This could really be something.  Can He heal this man?"  Freeze that picture in your mind and then look at verse 20. 

He knew exactly what was in that man's heart.  He was guilty, and felt shame. He believed Jesus could help, and had humbled himself to ask. Here was the perfect candidate for forgiveness.  And verse 20 says, "And seeing their faith." All of them had faith, all of them.  You don't get saved by proxy.  It wasn't the faith of the four guys.  It was his faith, too.  They all had faith.  And it was more than just ordinary faith, this is strong, insistent, persistent. This is the kind of faith that will overcome all barriers, all barricades, all obstacles.

Now Jesus did heal people with no faith and sometimes He healed people with little faith.  And sometimes He healed people with great faith.  But this was not a healing, first of all.  No healing is mentioned here.  This is salvation.  Was healing implied? I think he almost certainly was healed, but that wasn’t the real point. Jesus saved the man from his sin.  This is salvation.  And this indicates where the faith of the man was directed.  It was directed at the matter of sin in his heart.

The word for man could be translated as "Friend," and let me tell you something, God doesn't call people "friend" lightly.  Matthew and Mark say He also said, "son."  So he was both a friend and a son.  And then the verb tense of forgiven means a permanent condition.  "Your sins are and always will be forgiven."

Let me tell you something. No one's ever forgiven apart from faith, and no one's ever forgiven apart from repentance.  And so we know that if Jesus forgave his sins, he believed that God would forgive and he had a penitent heart.  Jesus saw in the man's heart repentance.  He saw in the man's heart a longing to be forgiven.  He saw the wretched spiritual condition of the man and He said, literally, "Your sins are dismissed permanently."  At that moment, Jesus by His own personal authority absolved that man of all guilt permanently.  Jesus came to save sinners, didn't He?  And here He saves one.  This man is the prototype of many to follow in His ministry.

How interesting, these religious leaders — the ‘Piety Police’, with all their self-righteousness — are unforgiven.  And one sad, wretched, vile, outcast sinner with a penitent heart desperately wants to get right in front of Jesus and have his sin exposed is forgiven.  It's like Luke 18, the publican beating on his breast is forgiven, and the Pharisee who told God how good he was, was not.  Here it is.  Two kinds of people get in front of Jesus, the self-righteous and the wretched.  The wretched are forgiven. The self-righteous are deluded and damned.  Which are you?  Jesus came to save the sinners and that day, at that moment, He forgave that man's sins permanently based on his faith and his repentance.  He did that for me one day, did that for you?  That's the Christian gospel.  Do you know that forgiveness?