Month: July 2024

July 26, 27 A.D.  Jesus Calls Matthew #42

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , ,

Week 23 ———  Jesus Calls Matthew
Matthew 9:9b-14 — Mark 2:14-22 — Luke 5:27-39

Matt. 9:9   As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.
And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.   And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”   But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Jesus is passing by the edge of the town of Capernaum (likely the eastern border because the tax collector booth would be near the border of Herod Antipas’ territory, where the Jordan River enters the Sea of Galilee.) He would be there to collect customs duties on items brought into the territory and taxes on the town members. Verse 10 mentions “many tax collectors” at the banquet, so Matthew’s was one of many in Capernaum.  

“Tax collectors and sinners” is a common phrase in the Bible, revealing how the Jewish community regarded this profession.  Tax collectors seem to be universally held in poor regard, especially in this situation where they were seen as collaborators with an oppressive occupation government.  Added to that is the common knowledge that these tax collectors frequently became wealthy by overcharging people and keeping the overages.  The Pharisees would never consider calling a tax collector to be a disciple.  Jesus calling Matthew would have been quite a surprise to everyone, almost as surprising as Matthew’s decision to give up a wealthy position and become a disciple.  

We are not told how the disciples react to Matthew’s calling, though The Chosen series was not afraid to make a fictionalized response that I think is in keeping with the personalities involved as we know them.

So Matthew joins Jesus, and then Jesus has him throw a banquet at his home for all the other tax collectors.  (Jesus is not embarrassed to invite himself to anyone’s home (the Centurion in Matthew 8, or Zacchaeus in Luke 19. )  He certainly doesn’t escape the notice of the Pharisees who ask Jesus’ disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”  

But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 

Jesus repeats what he said in the Beatitudes at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount.  The Beatitudes are descriptions of who will be part of Jesus’ kingdom.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” There are two Greek words for poor, ‘penes’ and ‘ptochos’.  ‘Penes’ describes the poor person who is surviving day-to-day.  They hope to make enough money today to pay for today’s food.  ‘Ptochos’ describes the completely destitute, homeless street beggars.  They are totally bankrupt.  They are dying.  They have nothing and have little hope of ever escaping their poverty.  They have had to learn how to beg, and because they are starving, they have developed a single-minded purpose in life: to find grace from someone or die.  Jesus uses the word ‘ptochos’ for the ‘poor in spirit,’ and he says the people who realize they are in this state spiritually (bankrupt) are the fortunate ones.  Because of them, the kingdom of God exists.  

There is a temptation to fight against this realization that we are all spiritually ‘ptochos.’  We attempt to cover our spiritual poverty with material wealth.  We build ornate church buildings to attend; we dress in our finest clothes; we magnify the parts of scripture that seem to pronounce judgment on others and ignore the words that might convict us.  We come and donate money, sing songs, and then return to our self-sufficient grand lifestyles, scared to admit that we are beggars.  Jesus sent a letter to a church like that.  You can read it in Revelation 3:14-22.  He says, “For you say I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. (Rev. 3:17)

Jesus has this same idea in mind in the story of the two men who went to pray:

Luke 18:10-14   “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.   The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’   But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’   I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

It is the man who knows the depth of his spiritual need who will be justified.

Also, there is the story that Jesus tells of the rich man and Lazarus (whom Jesus describes as ‘ptochos’). Unless we understand our need to come before God as beggars, we can not be ready to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Finally, in Matthew 21, Jesus tells the chief priest and elders a parable of two sons and then tells them, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.”  

Pope Francis said it this way:  “There is a poverty that we must accept, that of our own being; and a poverty that we must seek instead, from the things of this world.”  But there is a quote I think summarizes Matthew 5:3 even better.  I found it on my daughter’s Instagram page as her bio quote. (We don’t know the original source.)  It takes a phrase Forbes magazine made popular: having a seat at the table, which means being a part of the decision-making process in business.  Her quote is, “I brought nothing to the table, and he gave me a seat.”   Only those who recognize their complete spiritual poverty can become part of the Kingdom of God.  So Jesus goes to those people who will understand: the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the poor, and the outcasts.  As a physician, I get it, Jesus; it is hard for those who wrongly feel they are healthy to understand the need for treatment.

Then Jesus says to them:

Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

“Go and learn” is a common rabbinic phrase used to persuade listeners to dig into a portion of scripture to learn its true meaning.  So, did you do that?  Did you go back to Hosea 6:6, research the context, and seek the text’s true meaning through the Holy Spirit, prayer, and fasting?  This is the way you read the Bible. (If you don’t know about the Bereans, read that section in #35.)

First, here is a little context on the book of Hosea.  I recommend that anytime you start studying a Bible book, watch the 5-7 minute corresponding video at bibleproject.com.  Dr. Tim Mackie and his team have developed excellent yet simple videos for each book of the Bible that give you the context, the organization, and the overall message of the book.  Here is the link for the video on Hosea:

If you can’t watch it now, I’ll summarize.  The book’s first part is about Hosea’s marriage to a woman named Gomer.  She is brazenly unfaithful in her marriage, sleeping around with multiple men.  God tells Hosea that despite her unfaithfulness, he is to remain faithful to his marriage vows, find her, pay off the debts to her lovers, and commit his love and faithfulness to her again.  Hosea’s story is then an object lesson.  God enters a covenant relationship with Israel at Sinai, like a marriage.  Israel is unfaithful, committing adultery with other gods.  God had every right to break off the covenant relationship, but he chose to pursue Israel and reestablish the covenant only because of his ‘chesed.’  Mackie says the central theme of Hosea is “Israel has rebelled, and God will bring severe consequences, but God’s covenantal love and mercy are more powerful than Israel’s sin.”

Jesus quotes from Hosea 6:6, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

“Steadfast love” is from the Hebrew ‘chesed.’ This word appears 249 times in the Old Testament and is translated variously as “love,” “kindness,”  “grace,” “loyalty,” “mercy,” “favor,” “lovingkindness,” and others.  Since your browser has already been on the Bible Project site, check out the video on Chesed: https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/loyal-love/.    

Chesed is one of the five characteristics God uses to describe himself to Moses. (We looked at this in Exodus 34:6 last time (#41).  Chesed combines unconditional loyal love, mercy, and kindness, all based on a covenant relationship.  Both parties in this covenant should show chesed to each other.  Hosea tells Israel in 6:6 that chesed is what God wants from his people.  Jesus feels the religious leaders of his day were very good at the mechanics of religion, sacrifices, tithing, etc., but failing at what God really desired – chesed.  

Then Hosea says God prefers the “knowledge of God” to burnt offerings. 

When I was in Egypt in 2016, we were staying in a hotel on an island in the middle of the Nile.  We had taken a boat south on the Nile that morning, stopping at various places. It had been a long, hot day; we had hiked 6 miles and were returning north on the Nile to our hotel.  We pulled the boat up to the dock, expecting to walk from the pier to the hotel for supper.  But we instead transferred to some sailboats.  We sailed a short way further north down the Nile, a very peaceful, restful trip with some Egyptian music playing and the sun beginning to set, with only the wind driving the boat.  We stopped on an empty beach on the banks of the Nile, and our teacher said, “We have been on the Nile or just beside it all day.  Do you feel like you know the Nile?”  He then went on to explain the Biblical concept of knowing something. 

The Hebrew root word for ‘know’ is ‘yada,’ which comes from the word for the palm of the  hand, ‘yad.’  Biblically, to know something is to hold it in your hand, experience it, and have a relationship with it.  (This is why the Bible says, “And Adam knew Eve, his wife, and they conceived and bore Cain.”)  So, our leader instructed us to drop our packs, remove our hiking boots, and get to know the Nile.  And we got to know the Nile up close; we swam and splashed around for a while. Yada is relational knowledge.  This is what God desires.  Not just an intellectual understanding of him, but a knowledge based on relationship and experience.  Again, going through the motions of religious practice, no matter how well you do it, is no substitute for an intimate, ongoing relationship with the Father.

Jesus said he came to call the sinners, not the righteous.  Only those who know they are sinners are capable of repentance.  If you feel you are righteous, then you do not need the righteousness of God.  So Jesus spends most of his time with sinners because he has something to offer them.  Who do you hang around with?  Do you seek out people who need help or prefer to spend your time with those who have no needs?

July 21, 27 A.D.  Jesus Heals a Paralytic that Drops By #41

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog ,

Week 23 ———  Jesus Heals a Paralytic that Drops By
Matthew 9:2-8,  Mark 2:1-12,  Luke 5:17-26

Mark 2:1-12   And when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home.  And many were gathered together, so that there was no more room, not even at the door. And he was preaching the word to them.  And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men.   And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay.   And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts,   “Why does this man speak like that?  He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”   And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question these things in your hearts?   Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?   But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—   “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.”   And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”

“And when Jesus saw their faith”    

This is a concept we desperately need to understand.  Faith is something you can see.  We often talk about “faith” as if the word is simply a belief you have.  “What faith are you?”  Do you have faith?  Is your faith strong?  That is not the way Jesus talks about faith here.  This faith is not a belief or idea in your mind but an action you can see.  

These four friends went to a lot of trouble to get their paralytic friend to Jesus.  They tore a hole in the roof and dropped him in, knowing they would be responsible for repairing it.  They would not have gone through this trouble if there was any doubt in their mind that Jesus could heal their friend.  

Let’s look at this differently.  Say these friends had a ‘little bit of faith’ in Jesus.  They thought there was a possibility that Jesus could heal the man, but they weren’t quite sure.  I would imagine that they would have gone back home when they approached the home and saw it was impossible to go to the door.  So, this ‘little bit of faith’ would lead to inaction.  Is that really any faith at all?

In Matthew 17, there is a story about a boy possessed by a demon. The disciples are unable to help him. Jesus rebukes the demon, and the boy is healed. This has the disciples wondering.

Matthew 17:19-20   Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Here, “little faith” (Greek oligopistia) means having faith less than a mustard seed.  The black mustard plant in Israel grows all over in the wild.  I have seen it on the banks of the Jordan and the side of highways outside of Jerusalem.  This mustard seed is even smaller than your local grocery store’s 1 mm mustard seeds.  Jesus is saying that any faith less than that size is, in effect, no faith at all. “Faith,” in Matthew, means the confidence that God can and will act on his people’s behalf; without that, however much a person may “believe” intellectually, they are, for practical purposes, “faithless.”

R.T. France, in The New International Commentary on the New Testament, says it this way:

“Faith is not a measurable commodity, but a relationship, and what achieves results through prayer is not a superior “quantity” of faith but the unlimited power of God on which faith, any faith, can draw. The disciples, Jesus implies, had failed to bring any faith at all to bear on this situation.”1

“Fatih is a relationship,” France said.  You can think of it as trustworthiness.  Our faith in God is never blind.  It is the result of built-up trust over the years. In what is perhaps the most important verse in the Old Testament, Exodus 34:6, God describes himself to Moses with five character traits, the final one being faithfulness.  The Hebrew word there is ‘emet,’ a derivative of the commonly used transliterated word ‘amen,’ which means “that is true.”  

Throughout the Old Testament, we see God’s faithfulness in keeping his promises and being a reliable covenant partner. Trust builds in the relationship as one repeatedly shows himself to be true to his word. Our faith is not blind but is based on a long history of God always keeping His promises in the Bible and our relationship with Him, in which we likewise experience the reliability of His word and covenant with us.  Your trust in God, your faith, grows with every day you experience God’s reliability in keeping promises to you.  

So the paralytic and his four friends know that Jesus can heal.  They probably heard of his healing others and likely witnessed some healings.  Perhaps one of the friends was healed himself.  Regardless, their faith was not blind but was based on experience.  When they picked up the bed on which their paralyzed friend lay, they were making their faith visible.  Jesus saw their faith not just of the one who would be healed but of all of them.  This is not the only time in the Bible that the faith of an outside party led to the healing of another.  It was the Centurion’s faith that healed his servant in Matthew 8:10-13.  It was the faith of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 that healed her daughter oppressed by a demon.  This is why we lift up others in prayer.  We come before the Father, trusting in His promises to be a loving, merciful God who wants to work all things for good.  Our faith in God can lead to the healing of others.

Is your faith visible?  Can Jesus see your faith?  

James 2:14-20   “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?  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?   So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.   You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!   Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless?”

Don’t misread James.  James is not a proponent of “works-based righteousness.”   Martin Luther was not a big fan of the book of James because, for a while, at least, he felt it contradicted Paul’s idea of justification by faith alone.  He called James an “epistle of straw” [from his preface to the New Testament.)  He considered it a ‘lesser book’ because it “has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.”2 

This tension of grace and works is something we have invented — it wasn’t a problem for Paul.  Paul states in Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”  But in the very next verse (10), he says what the result of salvation is: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”  Paul had no trouble seeing that God’s saving us leads to us doing the good works that he created us to do.  Works are not the cause of our salvation, but they are a natural result of our salvation.  Our faith has to be visible.  It is manifest in our works.

We will continue this conversation of faith, “little faith,” and doubt as we move through Jesus’ ministry. But I want to briefly discuss Jesus’ statement to the paralytic that his sins were forgiven and the scribes’ response to this statement.

Jesus surprises everyone by saying, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  To this point, Jesus has not demonstrated that forgiving sins are a requirement for healing.  Certainly, in the day’s culture, many believed that all illnesses resulted from sin. (Jesus will specifically contradict that idea later.)  Faith, not forgiveness, seems to be the prerequisite for healing elsewhere.  Here, the pronouncement of forgiveness is related to the healing of illness only because the proof of Jesus’ authority to forgive is the healing of the paralysis.  

“Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts,   “Why does this man speak like that?  He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

Jesus “perceived their thoughts.”  The Greek word for ‘perceived’ carries the idea of seeing or witnessing. Jesus ‘saw what they were thinking.’  This doesn’t mandate the use of Jesus’ supernatural power to know people’s thoughts, though the Gospel writers are not hesitant to show that Jesus has this power (Matthew 12:25 and 22:18, for example). We all have experienced occasions where it is easy to discern what others are thinking by their expressions or body language.  (Perhaps, like me, you have a friend whose facial expressions are always in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!)

They think Jesus is committing blasphemy because he has just claimed to have the power only God has – to forgive sin.  Then Jesus responds “ “Why do you question these things in your hearts?  Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?”  Notice that Jesus didn’t ask them what was easier to do, but what was easier to say?  Clearly, forgiving sins is the more difficult task. Many Old Testament prophets were able to heal, but none forgave sins.  We have the ability (and requirement) to forgive others when they wrong us, but I like how Chad Bird says it:  

“Sometimes we treat forgiveness like it is our property… we’re going to decide to whom we can give it because it is ours to give.  But in Christianity, forgiveness is never your property…forgiveness always belongs to Jesus…When we forgive someone else, really, what’s happening is that the stream of forgiveness, which flows from the heart of God our Father through Jesus Christ, passes through us and into the heart of someone else.  We just don’t dam it up. We don’t stop it.  It is not our property.”3

But Jesus said, “Which is easier to say…”.  Anyone can say, “Your sins are forgiven,” because a claim to forgive is not easily tested, but a claim to cure paralysis is easily observed immediately as true or false.  So, Jesus uses his healing power to prove his ability to forgive.  And the scribes think, “But only God can do that,” to which the story proclaims, “Exactly.”

Before we conclude, remember that I often ask you to put yourself into the story.  Especially the very familiar stories in the Gospel.  See these stories through the eyes of all those involved.  So, just for a moment, put yourself in the place of the paralyzed man.  Consider how this has affected your life in the days of Jesus, when medical care was primitive by our standards. You have no wheelchair (much less motorized).  If not for friends, you are immobile and unable to care for yourself.  There are no social programs to support you.  You have to depend on friends for food and shelter, or you have to beg.  Then, one day, you have hope.  This prophet is in your area.  He is healing many diseases.  You have heard about it.  You know he can heal you if you can only get close.  Some friends are kind enough to carry you there.  But the crowd is so thick you can’t get anywhere near Jesus.  Disappointment.  Then, one of your friends has the crazy idea of dropping you down through a hole they cut in the roof.  It sounds ridiculous, but this is your only chance, so you agree.  Carrying you up the ladder to get to the roof was sketchy, and now your friends demolished this person’s home.  They tie ropes to your bedding and lower you down in front of Jesus.  How will he react?  Will he admonish you for destroying property?  Will he have mercy and heal you?  Then he says, “Take heart, my son. Your sins are forgiven.”  

How do you respond to Jesus’ statement?  You didn’t come here for forgiveness; you came for healing.  What good is forgiveness if you can’t walk?  Can’t Jesus just heal?  Consider the moment while Jesus has the interchange with the scribes.  Why didn’t Jesus heal me?  “Didn’t you see what horrible shape I am in, Jesus?”

Indeed, Jesus saw.  Jesus saw that this man’s greatest need was not for legs to be made new but for a life to be made new.   His primary need was not for his legs to be strengthened but for his heart to be strengthened.  “Take heart, my son,” Jesus said.  What you need most is to know your heart has found peace with God, to know that I have called you son. 

After that brief pause, Jesus heals this man’s paralysis and proves his authority to heal and forgive. But we will not all find healing so quickly. Some of us will not be healed until Jesus comes again. But we can all find that peace with God if we desire it.  All who seek healing will not be healed in this life, but the gift of salvation is free to all.  

Finally, we have to compare ourselves to the four friends. They would stop at nothing to bring their friend who needed healing to Jesus. They were willing to demolish a roof. What are we willing to do in order to bring our friends to Jesus. Do we bring our sick or troubled friends before God’s throne in prayer with this kind of fervor? Are we willing to go out on a limb or put ourselves at risk to make sure our friends find Jesus. God forgive us for taking our access to you for granted.

  1. France, R. T.  The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdsman. (2007).
  2. Luther, Martin.  Word and Sacrament Volume 1.  page 362.
  3. Bird, Chad.  From a TikTok video: https://www.tiktok.com/@chadbird1517/video/7197510765635669294]  

July 15, 27 A.D.  Jesus Cleanses a Leper #40

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , , , ,

Week 22 ———  Jesus Cleanses Someone You Thought Had Leprosy
Matthew 8:1-4,  Mark 1:40-45,  Luke 5:12-15

This entry is the text of a sermon I gave this past week at the first meeting of an annual Camp Meeting we have attended for many years. (It is my favorite ten days of the year.)  It will read a little differently than my usual blog (including an invitation.)  

Jesus just finished the sermon on the Mount on this day, 1997 years ago. What does he do next?

In the sermon, he describes just who will be the initial people of his kingdom—and they are the people no one would expect. He explains God’s heart behind the Old Testament law, teaches them to pray, and tells them how to be members of God’s kingdom and how to act in God’s kingdom. 

Now, he will demonstrate what he just taught them because actions speak louder than words.   Actions teach better than words. Sunday school teachers, are you listening? Small group leaders, did you hear that?   Pastors?   You can give a well-crafted lesson or sermon, but people will learn more from watching how you live your life than they will ever learn from what you say.  Sometimes, we who preach spend too much time talking and not enough time letting people see how we live it out.  If we aren’t demonstrating what we are saying, then why would anyone listen?  Matthew reports what Jesus taught in chapters 5-7. The following two chapters will be about how Jesus lives it out — demonstrating his teaching by action.

So, let’s join the crowd following Jesus down the mountain.  His first encounter after the sermon is an important one, where Jesus will first put his words into practice.  So walk down the mountain with me, and let’s see who Jesus first meets after he preaches these messages:

Matthew 8:1-4
When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”

Okay, Jesus heals a leper. It’s a great story. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Let’s sing a song and eat some ice cream. Not so fast, my friends. I want to give you some context. I want you to see this story like Andrew, Simon, and the crowds saw it.

First, I must put my doctor’s hat on for just a minute.  Matthew tells us a man with leprosy comes to Jesus.  Well, that is not exactly what Matthew said.  You can read much about leprosy in the Old Testament — except it is not leprosy.  When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek about 250-200 BC (the Septuagint or LXX), the Hebrew word ‘Tsa’arat’ was translated as ‘lepra.’   That was a good word choice because ‘lepra’ was the Greek word Hippocrates used to describe a variety of relatively minor skin disorders (eczema, psoriasis, vitiligo, scurvy), all of which involved flaking skin or whitening of the skin. Now, fast forward to 383 AD, and Jerome, a Bible scholar, is translating the Bible into Latin. He translated the Greek word ‘lepra’ into ‘leprosy,’ the Latin word for a very different disease.  It was an honest mistake.  ‘lepra’ and ‘leprosy’ sound similar. 

But Tsa’arat or lepra has nothing to do with what we call leprosy or Hansen’s Disease today.   Hansen’s disease did not exist in the Middle East until over 1000 years after the time of Leviticus and Moses.  Tsa’arat in the Bible is described as white, flaky skin, occasionally with white hair within it.  Modern leprosy lesions are always dark, never white.  Tsa’arat in the Bible can affect buildings and clothing.  Hansen’s Disease is caused by a bacteria.  It cannot affect inanimate objects.  They are entirely different diseases.

So, Jerome’s simple mistake in 383 AD led to a tremendous misidentification. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate became the primary Bible for over 1,000 years and is still used today in the Catholic Church. This incorrect translation persists today, even in modern biblical translations done in the past ten years.  Even though we know better now, they still keep the mistranslation going.  Tradition wins over correctness again.

So, the man Jesus encounters in Matthew 8 coming down from the mountain does not have the contagious, disfiguring disease we know today as leprosy. He had tsa’arat, or lepra, a skin disease with white, flaky skin that was not contagious.  Yes, the skin lesions were not contagious.   You could not catch it from touching someone.2

Why, then, do we have all these Bible stories of people with tsa’arat having to live outside the camps if it is not contagious?  Why were they avoided as if they had the plague?  Why couldn’t they go into the Temple?  Why is it such a big deal for Jesus to touch this man in Matthew 8?

Because it is not about a contagious medical problem; it is all about ritual purity.   Now, bear with me a bit here because ritual purity is something we poorly understand. If you want to understand anything in the Bible, you have to go back to the beginning. 

God designed a world where he could dwell with us.  The Garden was made for man to dwell with God.  But man chose to sin, and the earth became a place of sin and death — no longer a place where man could dwell with God.  So, the Garden was shut down.  The rest of the Bible after Genesis 3 is the story of God’s plan to return the world to a place where he could dwell with mankind.  God chose one man, Abraham, to build a nation that would be a nation of priests to teach all the other nations about God.  They end up as enslaved people in Egypt.  God rescues them and leads them to a mountain. (I’ll bet you saw that movie.)  There, God enters into a covenant with them.  He wants to restore that Eden relationship with man.  So God tells Moses on Mount Sinai, “Build me a tabernacle that I may dwell…in it”…. No! Not that God may dwell ‘in it’… but God says, “Build me a tabernacle that I may dwell with you.” (Exodus 25:8). God wants to dwell with man.

But there must be some rules if God is going to dwell with man. To see those rules, we go back to your favorite book of the Bible, Leviticus:

Leviticus 11:44-45   For I am Yehovah your God. Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not make yourselves unclean with any defiling things.  For I am Yehovah who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.”

The key word in this passage: ‘holy.’   And in this passage, we see that the opposite of holy is ‘unclean.’  God is holy and will place himself in the middle of Israel, so they must be holy, too.  We think of holiness more in terms of morality, and that is a part of it.  But ‘holiness’ carries more of an idea of being unique, set apart, and pure.

There are two types of impurity in the Bible, and if you don’t understand this, then you will misunderstand a lot of what Jesus says because he talks about impurity a lot.  There is moral impurity and ritual impurity.

Moral impurity is the result of sin. If you never sin, you are morally pure; if you sin, you become morally impure. We understand this. Moral impurity is not contagious. The person sitting beside you can’t spread their sin to you by touching you.  Moral impurity is cured by punishment or atonement. The wages of sin is death.  

Ritual impurity is very different.  First of all, ritual impurity is not sinful.  You don’t become ritually impure by sinning, and it is not sinful to be ritually impure.  Ritual impurity is unavoidable.  Everyone who lives life will become ritually unclean.

Numbers 5:1  Yehovah spoke to Moses, saying, “Command the people of Israel that they put out of the camp everyone who is leprous or has a discharge and everyone who is unclean through contact with the dead.” 

You can become ritually impure by touching a dead body, touching bodily fluids, and tsa’arat.  All these things represent corruption or death.1  And death is foreign to God.  He created a world without death.  Death was not to be a part of the world he made.  Death is not part of who God is.  So you don’t bring death or the forces of death into God’s presence. To enter the temple in an impure state was a sin.  Again, it is not sinful to be ritually impure unless you go in that state into the temple.   And unlike moral impurity, ritual impurity is spread by contact.  If you touch the fluids, if you touch a corpse, if you touch someone with tsa’arat, then you become ritually impure.  

  The cure for ritual impurity was simple:  washing with water and a time of waiting.  However, everyday activities in life would routinely cause people to become ritually impure again.  So they set up these pools to immerse themselves (mikveh) all around the temple, so everyone would ritually wash before entering the temple, in case they had become ritually impure.  Unless you had tsa’arat, the skin disease.  You couldn’t be clean as long as you had the skin lesions.  So, people with tsa’arat could never enter the temple.  They could never go in and sing the psalms of praise.  They couldn’t make an offering to atone for their sin.  They were banned from God’s presence.  And no one would touch them.

Now, that all sounds a little weird to us.  But you need to realize that every time you open your Bible to read, you are traveling to a foreign country with a different culture.  Now if I travel to Boston and make fun of them and call them ignorant because they don’t have sweet iced tea or grits, and they talk funny, then you call me a dumb intolerant hick from Alabama.  Just because a culture is different doesn’t mean it’s wrong.  Every culture has standards of purity and defilement.   The Hindu will not touch people of lower caste.  Certain sicknesses are taboo to touch in many societies.  Come on, it hasn’t been that long since COVID-19.  “Keep 6 feet away from people.”  “Wear masks.” “Don’t breathe their air.  “Don’t touch them.”  I half expected to see people out in public ringing a bell, “Unclean, Unclean!”   We became very good at fearing medical impurity.  (If only we feared moral impurity with such commitment.)

I have seen people afraid to touch some of our homeless people. I understand. Several times, I picked up homeless hitchhikers, and about 30 seconds later, I realized that I was going to be reminded of their journey with me every time I got in my truck for the next several months. Some odors really linger. 

You may think you have trouble grasping the concept of a holy set aside place where you must be clean to enter.   But there is a unique set-aside place in my hospital.  We call it the operating room.  And it is a place to promote life.  It is a place where the forces of death are defeated, and life is brought into the world.  But not just anyone can go walking in there. There are barriers.  You have to wear special clothes (scrubs), special head coverings, masks, and gloves, and everyone must wash away all uncleanness thoroughly before entering.  It is a unique set-aside place.  Maybe it is not so strange a concept.

When the Israelites were taken captive in Babylon for 70 years and the temple was destroyed, there became much more focus on ritual impurity over moral impurity.  After all, they couldn’t deal with any moral impurity (sin) because there was no temple at which to sacrifice.  But they could still concentrate on the ritual impurity because there was water to cleanse in Babylon.  When they returned and rebuilt the temple, then sin sacrifices could resume, but the focus on ritual impurity remained through the days of Jesus.  But the biggest deal for God was always moral impurity.  It was sin that caused death and the separation of men from God.  

So God wants to dwell among Israel in the Tabernacle.  But there were barriers— fabric walls around the tabernacle with only one opening.  You had to be ritually pure to enter.  Then, there was a holy place where only the priest could go after they washed in the bronze basin.  A barrier of thick curtain, a veil, separated the holy place from the most sacred place that contained the ‘mercy seat’ for the presence of God.  

The religious leaders liked these barriers.  They liked them so much that they created more when they built the temple.  They constructed a five-foot-high wall to keep Gentiles from coming too close to the temple, under threat of death.  (One of the signs listing the threat of death to Gentiles that entered was recently found by archeologists.)   Women could go a little further, but not where the men could go, not where the ‘real worship business,’ the sacrifices were made.  Men can go where the offerings were made, but only priests can go further, and then, as in the Tabernacle, only the high priest can enter the holiest place through the veil.   

There were barriers.  (By the way, ladies, that whole ‘court of women’ thing was not God’s idea.  God never prescribes it in the Bible. It is the creation of man. (So don’t blame God for that.)

Enter Jesus.  Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus breaking down barriers of anything that separated people from God.  Jesus goes charging down the mountain after the sermon on the mount, and the first person he runs into has a skin disease; he is unclean.  He has not been able to go to the temple for a long time, and unless his skin disease is cured, he never will again.  He is an outcast by the religious leaders. He is outcast by the people, but he is not outcast by Jesus.   What does he say to Jesus, “If you are able, you can make me clean.”  No, that is not what he says.  He says, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”  See, this man has no doubt that Jesus has the power to make him clean.  He is just not sure Jesus is willing to do it.  His past experience with holy men was that they walked a wide berth around him.  They give him the Covid 6 feet.  They don’t give him the time of day.  They ignore him.   If robbers beat him up and he was lying half-dead on the side of the road to Jericho and these holy men came by, they would just leave him there on the side of the road because they didn’t want to become ritually impure.  (That would make a good story.)

I see this in some of our neighbors without homes today—they know the church can help them; they know the church is able to help them, but they have had some past experiences with church people who ignored them and were afraid to touch them.  They are not sure if the church is willing to help them, so they stay away.  They are like the man in Matthew 8 who is wondering, ‘Does Jesus care about me? ‘Is he willing to cleanse me?’

Let me make this easy for you. Jesus is always willing to help you. I don’t care how unclean you think you are or how much sin you have committed.  Jesus is always willing.

He runs down that mountain. He can’t wait until he finds a man with tsa’arat so he can show the people the power of the Gospel.  Jesus is not afraid of this man.  And Jesus doesn’t stop there.  The next thing he does is offer to go to a Gentile Roman soldier’s house to heal his servant.  The crowd gasps.  ‘Go to a Gentile’s house?  No way, Jesus, they are so unclean!’  And then, in the next chapter of Matthew, Jesus is on his way to a dead girl’s room — What?  That is the worst form of uncleanness!   But on his way, the woman with the issue of blood touches the tassel on his garment. 

Do you see what Matthew is doing here?  He has shown Jesus face down all the causes of uncleanness known in the two chapters following the sermon on the mount.  Jesus is breaking down all the barriers that keep people from God.  He is not just talking about it; he is doing it.  

Now, don’t get from this that Jesus is throwing away the purity laws.  Jesus doesn’t think the laws from Leviticus were wrong or bad.   He wrote the laws; he gave Moses the purity laws. He tells the man who is unclean from skin disease to obey the law of Moses and show himself to the priest. This is important: Jesus doesn’t do away with the laws of impurity; he does away with impurity itself.  

When Jesus reaches out and touches the man with the skin disease, you can almost hear the crowd gasp.  Because they thought the man’s uncleanness would make Jesus unclean.  But it didn’t.  Because when Jesus touched the man, his skin disease was gone.  Jesus didn’t touch a man with tsa’arat.  He touched a man who had been cleansed of tsa’arat.  Jesus didn’t get contaminated by the woman with the issue of blood.  Because that is not who grabbed his tassel; it was a woman who had been healed, a woman who used to have a problem that Jesus took care of.  Jesus didn’t touch a corpse; he touched a girl who was dead but was now alive. Every time Jesus encounters a corpse, it comes to life.  Jesus was not afraid of ritual impurity because he took away the cause of the impurity.  

And we need not fear ritual impurity today; that same power of Jesus, the same power that took away uncleanness, the same power that raised Jesus from the grave, lives in us.  Jesus overcomes all uncleanness.  And this should not have surprised anyone. The prophets had predicted a time when all uncleanness would be dealt with: 

Ezekiel 36:25-29    I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from fall your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. (moral and ritual impurity)  And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. .. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. 

It is the same way with moral impurity.   Jesus is not scared of sin.  You may have heard before, “God can not stand sin in his presence.”  That is not Biblical.  You may have heard that God turned his back on Jesus when Jesus took on our sins on the cross.  Jesus shouted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”   Jesus wasn’t saying God forsook him.  He was quoting Psalm 22.  (Remember, they didn’t have chapter numbers in Jesus’ day.  He couldn’t say, “Hey, remember Psalm 22.”  So their method of pointing someone to a particular passage of the Bible was to quote the first line.)  Look it up.  Psalm 22 is the story of the crucifixion.  The Psalm says, “For God has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted one and he has not hidden his face from him, [he has not turned his back on him.] but had heard when he cried to him.”  The Psalm tells us Jesus was not forsaken but would be vindicated, and all the nations will come and praise the Lord because God has done this great thing.  The Psalm ends with this one Hebrew word, ‘Asah,’ which can be translated: ‘He has done this,’ or as Jesus said, “It has been done (finished).”

How can you say God cannot stand sin in his presence?  God put his Tabernacle right in the middle of the children of Israel.  Do you think they were without sin?   God looked at this sinful, lost world.  He didn’t stay away from this world of sin; he chose to enter it himself as a baby.  Jesus is not scared of sin.  He runs down the mountain, looking for the worst sinners he can find to build his kingdom.  He is walking through Jericho and finds the most wicked cheating businessman he can.  He invites himself over to Zacchaeus’ house.  The crowd grumbles, but Zacchaeus repents of cheating people and vows to repay them plus more.  And then Jesus says, “The son of man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”  Jesus came seeking out sin.  Jesus doesn’t avoid sinners because he conquers sin.  Jesus doesn’t avoid touching corpses because he conquers death.  

Do you sometimes feel distant from God?  Do you feel like some sin you have committed makes God want to be distanced from you?  What is it that separates us from God?  Sin?  God says no, I have that covered.  What keeps God out of my life is not my sin.  What keeps God out of my life is I don’t make space for him.  If we make space for God, he will fill it.  God told the Israelites, “Build me a tabernacle that I may dwell with you.”  If they don’t build a space for God, then he can’t dwell with them.  If you don’t make room for Jesus in your heart, he can’t dwell with you.  If you don’t make room for God in your life, then he cannot be a part of your life. From the beginning of time, God’s desire was to live with his children and walk with them as he did in the Garden.  

Jesus came to break down those barriers.  On the cross, he broke the last one, the biggest one.  When he died, that last barrier, that thick veil in the temple that separated all people from the place reserved for God the holy of holy place, That veil tore in two top to bottom, letting you know that the barriers are all down. 

 Being a Gentile will not keep you from God, being unclean will not keep you from God, and being a woman will not keep you further away than men.  The veil is torn.  God has left the building.  His presence will not be contained in a small room that only the high priest can enter.   Sin will not keep you from God. Death will not keep you from God. God will live with you, within you, if only you will make a place.

Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount over several days. The sermon begins with Jesus teaching his disciples, but as he teaches, the crowds gather.  People gather from all over, coming together to hear messages from God.   And here we are today, 1997 years later, gathered from all over.  We will listen to messages from God this week.  When this week is over, we will leave here.  This week comes and goes — as the sermon on the mount did almost 2000 years ago last week.

We can leave this place in 10 days, as some left the sermon on the mount.  Some left saying, “I like that line about the ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”   “And that prayer he taught was nice.  Short and sweet.  Yeah, Jesus did a good job; let’s invite him back and do this again next year.” You can leave this meeting like that, saying it was a good meeting with some good sermons.  It was hot as Hades, but the music was good.  You can leave here feeling good but not be changed.  Or you can be like that crowd after the sermon on the mount who decided they needed more Jesus; like them, you can follow Jesus down the mountain to see what he will do next.  When we leave here in 10 days, and you are traveling down from this mountaintop experience, I will pray that God puts somebody right in front of you that the world thinks is unclean.  I’m praying that God stops you in your tracks so you have an opportunity to live out your faith.

For so many years, I think we have left this place and left blessings on the table. There is so much God wants to give us, but we come and listen and go. You can leave this meeting in 10 days just exactly as you came, or you can leave with a renewed spirit, a renewed energy to live as Jesus wants you to live, a renewed knowledge of scripture, a renewed heart for people, and a renewed dedication to do life differently. Jesus would call it doing life abundantly.

Right now you can decide how you will leave in 10 days.  You can make the most out of this time with Jesus or let it pass by.  We are going to sing, and our altar is open.  Maybe you have never made space in your life for Jesus.  Perhaps today is the day you open your heart to the one who can cleanse you.  Maybe you just want to come and say to God and everyone that you want to dedicate this time to God as a time for you to grow as a disciple.  Whatever God has laid on your heart, you are welcome. 

Jesus is always willing, are you?

  1.   Why these three things?  They all represent corruption or death.  Touching a corpse is self-explanatory, but bodily fluids?  These are particular bodily fluids that are a part of the formation of life (semen, menstrual flow, etc.)  Tim Mackie of the Bible Project explained it as well as I have heard, and I paraphrase:  ‘If you and another person both spit on the ground, then new humans don’t spring up there.  So saliva is not a special fluid and will not make you unclean.  But bodily fluids that are involved in the production of life are included.  Life is sacred, and there is something unclean with encountering these fluids outside the place where they are involved in creating life.’  Tsa’arat represents a corruption of normal skin and is included for that reason.  I don’t expect you to understand exactly how that works, for this concept was formed in a completely different culture, and we will likely never understand.  (And that is okay.  I also don’t know why a “thumbs up” sign is seen as a positive response in the US but interpreted differently in parts of Africa.)
  2. One of the diseases Hippocrates included in his ‘lepra’ category of skin diseases that whitened skin was fungal diseases.  Some of these can occasionally spread from person to person, but never by incidental contact, only by prolonged, close contact.

July 9, 27 A.D.  A Miraculous Catch of Fish #39

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , ,

Week 21 ———  A Miraculous Catch of Fish
Luke 5:1-11

Luke 5:1-11   On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret1, and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.  Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word, I will let down the nets.” And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking.  They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink.  But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”  For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.”  And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.

Because we don’t read the gospels chronologically, we often miss that this particular miracle of the massive catch of fish happened twice.  And it was no accident that the setting of these two miracles was the same.  In the story we read just now, Jesus asked the four fishermen who had been with him on and off for several months to go all in.  He asked them to leave their boats and become full-time disciples.  The other occasion for this miracle is in John 21.  Jesus has been resurrected, and he is to meet them in Galilee.

John 21:1-12   After this, Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias2, and he revealed himself in this way.   Simon Peter, Thomas (called the Twin), Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together.   Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night, they caught nothing.

Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the shore, yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.  Jesus said to them, “Children, do you have any fish?” They answered him, “No.”   He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because of the quantity of fish.   That disciple whom Jesus loved therefore said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work, and threw himself into the sea. The other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, but about a hundred yards off.

When they got out on land, they saw a charcoal fire in place, with fish laid out on it, and bread.   Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.”   So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, 153 of them. And although there were so many, the net was not torn.   Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.”

So, the disciples have seen Jesus several times since his resurrection.  He told them to go to the Galilee to meet him.  They are waiting around, and Peter decides it is time to go fishing.  I have heard people say Peter is returning to his old business.  He was a disciple, but now that has changed.  He saw himself as a colossal failure as a disciple.  The worst thing a disciple could do is betray their rabbi.  And he did three times. It is not a stretch to think Peter is returning to being a fisherman.  Or maybe he is just fishing while he is waiting on Jesus.  But like our other story in Luke, they catch nothing all night.  Then Jesus showed up, and there was a miraculous catch of fish.  By the way, isn’t it a coincidence that these professional fishermen had a bad night in both stories?  Not a single fish.  Who do you think kept their nets empty all night so He could miraculously fill it the next day?  Maybe there is a lesson for us there.  The next time you find yourself having an incredibly unproductive day, it might be Jesus prepping you for a miracle.  But you know what happens next.  Jesus forgives Peter and has him recommit to do the work of a disciple, or now an apostle. 

So you have these two stories of miraculous catches of fish, and both are followed by Jesus’ call to these men to be fishers of men.  The next time one of you catches a whole lot of fish, you had better listen up.  God may be calling.

But what I want to talk about is the miracle.  God is at work in so many ways: the birth of a baby, the wondrous workings of our complex bodies, and the incredible immense universe we live in.  But some things happen constantly, so we often begin to think of them as ordinary.   Do not forget that God is at work in all of it. There is nothing ordinary about the birth of a baby.  Every baby is a gift straight from God.  We shouldn’t take these everyday works of God for granted.

But God acts in extraordinary ways also.  The Bible calls these “signs and wonders”.  They are signs in that they point to something.  When you read about a sign or miracle in the Bible, you should always ask what the sign is meant to highlight or reveal.   What is the message of the miraculous catches of fish on these two occasions?  Both times, Jesus is inviting Peter and the disciples to join the work of fishing for men.  The catch of fish lets them know that he will be the power behind their efforts.  On their own, without him, they can’t even be successful as fishers of fish. What they will accomplish in their ministry will not be due to their abilities. It is God who will provide the catch.  And with these miracles, they can never forget this lesson— boy, does Jesus know how to teach a point!

You can read the Bible and get the idea that God “used to do miracles all the time.”  But the miracles in the Bible are primarily centered around certain people or times (Moses and the Exodus, Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Jesus and his apostles.)  There are hundreds of years between times of miracles.  These disciples of Jesus saw a lot of miracles.  But what of the hundreds of thousands of other people living in the world in Jesus’ day?   In perhaps the largest-viewed miracle, over 5 thousand were fed with five loaves and two fish.  But there were (according to the Museum of Natural History) 170 million people living in Jesus’ day.  That’s only 0.006% of people who saw a miracle.   Only a tiny percentage of people living in the days of Jesus saw a miracle.   Why?  They weren’t where Jesus was.  They weren’t following Jesus.  You see, the closer you follow Jesus, the more miracles you will see.  Want to see more miracles?  Follow Jesus closely.

I want to be careful about not calling everything a miracle (A parking spot opened right in front of the store for me. “It’s a miracle.”)   I also want to be careful not to dismiss miracles, seeking to explain everything away as a scientific occurrence or as coincidence, for I know miracles still happen.  I find no evidence in scripture that God drew a line in time and stopped doing what he had always done.  Instead, I see more and more miracles after Jesus comes, all through the New Testament.  And I have seen signs and wonders more than a few times with my own eyes.  I’ll tell you a few of my stories today.

My wife was on a committee with some ministers in our county to see if there was a homeless problem that we could help with.    Some people told us there were no homeless people in Marshall County.  They didn’t see them on the streets with signs.  So they did some research and found there was indeed a large number of homeless, including many children in our schools who did not have homes.  So, about ten people met around a table one night and decided we had to do something about it.  We were about six weeks away from cold weather hitting, and we felt we needed some plan to help those without homes before the cold weather arrived.  But how could these few make the need known, raise money, and assemble a program to house the homeless in 6 weeks?  Someone said it would take a miracle to do that.  But we had prayed and asked God to break our hearts with the things that broke his heart.  So we jumped in.   6 weeks later, we organized ten churches, had a benefit that raised $30,000, and started housing people in an emergency cold weather shelter.  Was that a miracle, or just people responding quickly to a need?  You decide.  That ministry began with ten people and no money 12 years ago, and this year, we own two buildings that can house 40 people with over 30 acres of land (with no debt). It has served hundreds of people yearly and changed hundreds of lives.  Last year, it provided shelter and fed our neighbors without homes with the equivalent of over $750,000 in services.  Lives have been put back together, and people have come to Jesus.  God is doing a great thing.  Would you call this a miracle?  Or would you call it God just doing what God does through his people?  I’ll let you decide.

Let me tell you about a mission hospital in Ghana, Africa, where we have worked.  Our friends were big supporters of the ministry in the hospital.  Every year, they would gather supplies to support the missionaries.  They would spend months filling a large shipping container with donated bed linens, bandages, and other supplies.  They packed the container in February, and there was a little space left.  A local hospital had a baby incubator they were willing to donate so they went to pick it up.   When they arrived to pick up the incubator, there was a box of other old medical equipment.  The hospital said they were welcome to it.  It was all used and outdated, but they would throw it out if the mission couldn’t use it.  They had room in the truck, so they took it.  And there was enough room in the shipping container, so they threw the box in.   It takes months for a shipping container to be shipped from Cartersville, Georgia, to Nalerigu, Ghana.  Amazingly, it arrived in Ghana at the same time we did that summer.  So, our friends who had packed the container in February got to unload it in June.  The first thing off the container was that box of medical junk they threw on at the last minute.  They told my friend Tommy to carry the box to the supply room and that they would sort it out later.

Now, while my friends were unloading the shipping container, I had finished rounds in the Pediatric ward and was about to start seeing patients in the walk-in clinic.  I had just met an OB/GYN surgeon who had come in that week to work with the resident missionary doctors.  He was there to teach them a new procedure to help women who were having bladder problems after having difficult deliveries.  It was a common problem there where many women deliver babies outside the hospital.  They had 35 women set up to have that surgery that week while the visiting surgeon was there so he could give the missionary doctors good experience in the procedure while he helped refine their skills. He brought his equipment to do the procedures, including a special endoscope and planned to leave it with them when he returned home.  But his endoscope was damaged during the trip.  The light was broken, making it unusable.  They had searched for something they could use to replace it, but it was a specialized device.  Nothing else would work.  He was frustrated because now, they could not help those 35 women that week, and he would not be able to teach the procedure to the doctors there to help others.  He was walking back to help see patients in the clinic since they would have to cancel the surgeries. That is when he passed my friend Tommy in the hall carrying the box of junk.

He stopped Tommy.  “Hey, what’s in that box?” he asked.  “Just some medical junk,” Tommy replied.  He asked to take a look.  Guess what was in the top of the box.  The same brand of endoscope our surgeon had.  It’s not the same device he used, but one made by the same company.  Do you think there was any possibility the light would fit his broken device?  Of course, it did.  He could do the surgeries that had been arranged and train the local doctors to help countless more women.  Was that a miracle or a coincidence?  The very light device he needed just happened to be placed in a box of junk that would have been thrown away, but there just happened to be enough room in a shipping container that was packed in February, that just happened to arrive five months later at the same time as the surgeon whose device happened to get broken.  And they just happened to pass in the hall that day.  Was it a miracle, or was it God just doing God things?  It enabled the healing of many people and brought praise to Yehovah, so call it a sign, a wonder, or a miracle.  Every time I think about this story, I think about how good God is.

Look back at Peter’s reaction in our first story in Luke.

Luke 5:8-9  But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”  For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon.

   He reminds me of Isaiah, when he was in the temple and got a vision of God.  He falls down and exclaims, “Woe is me, for I am lost.  I am a man of unclean lips…”3  There is no other appropriate reaction when you see God move.   The ESV says they were “astonished.”   The NASB gives a more thorough translation of the Greek:  “For amazement had seized him and all his companions because of the catch of fish which they had taken.”   The Greek for ‘seized’ is  ‘periecho’ which means ‘wrapped up in’, ‘gripped by’, or ‘surrounded by’ amazement.  Seeing God act is overwhelming, and you are ‘wrapped up in emotion.’

Some other day, I will tell you other stories, of prayed-for rain that ended a drought, of a hole that opened in the sky to allow an evangelistic gathering to take place in Mexico, of a miracle spark plug in a cardboard box, and of an empty plastic pharmacy bin in Guatemala that kept supplying medicine for children for days of clinics.   And then there are the medical miracles I have seen.  Stage 4 cancer in a child that disappeared with no treatment (other than prayer), children born with large portions of their brain missing that should have died after birth, running down the hall years later shouting my name and giving me a hug.   I have not seen the dead raised to life.  Oh, I have seen people who flatlined their EKG come back.  But more impressively, I have seen the spiritually dead brought back to life.  I will never forget the night we left the house at 2 am to go pick up a young man who was determined to commit suicide.  He had a long road through returning to Jesus, defeating his drug addictions, working his way out of homelessness, and regaining custody of his young son.  Seeing him now, he is very successful in his job, happily married and raising his boy, owns his own home, is active in his church, and volunteers in the homeless ministry.  He is a picture of redemption and grace, God’s goodness.  Is that a miracle, or is it just what God does?

You will never see a miracle if you don’t throw out your net.  It made no sense for those disciples to fish when they had gone all night with nothing.  Galilean fishermen did not fish in the daytime.  They didn’t have the transparent plastic nets we have today.  They used linen nets.  They fished at night because, in the dark, the fish couldn’t see the nets.  In the daytime, they had no chance of catching fish.  Jesus asked them to do something impossible.  They could have thought Jesus was joking.  They could have said, “Jesus is a nice guy, but he’s no fisherman.”   But they said, “At your word, I will.”  What are you willing to try for Jesus?  Maybe you would be willing to try something easy.  Jesus might ask you to call a friend to encourage them.  Maybe you would be willing to do that.  Or perhaps He will ask you to do something harder.  Maybe he will ask you to talk to a stranger. Perhaps he will ask you to speak to a neighbor you’ve never met.  Maybe he will ask you to talk to a homeless person.  Maybe he will ask you to get them help.  Maybe he will ask you to bring them home to live in your house for a while.  (If this sounds wild to you, clearly, none of you have ever been married to my dear wife.  Yeah, it happened more than a few times.)   Maybe God will ask you to do something you think is pointless, difficult, or impossible.

Perhaps we don’t see miracles because we aren’t willing to throw out the net.  We live lives of relative calm.   Calm and peaceful lives.  That is what everybody wants, right?    Let me tell you one more story.  I love reading missionary biographies, and one reason is that you keep running into stories of miracles. This is one of my favorites. The Story of John G. Paton Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals.  Paton felt called to the South Sea Islands, where, in the 1800s, no one wanted to go. Today, these islands are highly sought-after vacation spots: Tahiti, Fiji, and Vanuatu.  But in John Paton’s day, the natives were all cannibals.  Talk about going into the deep waters.

He eventually established preaching outposts on several of the tiny islands there and other missionaries joined him there.  He tells of a time when he was seeking to replace the small sailing boat missionaries used to travel between the islands and distribute food and supplies.       

“The Missionaries on the spot had long felt this, and had loudly and earnestly pled for a new and larger Vessel, or a Vessel with Steam Auxiliary power, or some arrangement whereby the work of God on these Islands might be overtaken, without unnecessary exposure of life, and without the dreaded perils that accrue to a small sailing boat from deadly calms and from treacherous gales.”4

That phrase struck me – “deadly calms” and “treacherous gales.”   Now, I can certainly understand “treacherous gales,” but what about the “deadly calm”?  I’m not a sailor, so I didn’t realize what was deadly about the calm.  A sailboat, dependent on the wind for propulsion, becomes “dead in the water” when the wind is calm.  It falls victim to the mercy of the waves and may capsize, or you may be stuck in the middle of the ocean for days.  I think I need to learn to recognize the danger of the “deadly calm” in my life.  In my effort to control my schedule tightly, I may keep my life too calm.  Now, I am not talking about not being busy, for I am guilty of over-committing myself and leaving no empty space on the calendar. Instead, I am talking about only planning activities and projects that fall within my comfort zone.  I am only attempting things I know I can do.  When I read the Bible, I see that God continually calls people to leave their comfort zones and go places they have never been before —Abraham to “the land I will show you,” Israel to the promised land, or the disciples to Samaria.  God continually calls people to do things they have no experience with — Noah building an ark, Moses leading a people, or fishermen becoming preachers. God constantly calls people to do impossible or very unlikely things — conquering giants, fishing in the daytime, or walking on water.  If we choose to remain in our ‘calm’ lives, then we choose a life of disobedience, a life of missed opportunities, a life that is less than the abundant life Jesus promised each of us.

Jesus asked these fishermen to leave the shallow water and go out into the deep.  We won’t see miracles if we are fishing in the kiddie pool.  It is through experiencing God that our faith grows.  If we never put ourselves in situations where we must depend on Him, then we will never see His power come through.   I have most experienced this on medical mission trips to other countries. In my medical practice in Alabama, I am very careful only to see patients for whom I have the proper training and experience to help.  If someone would be better served seeing a surgeon or a psychiatrist, I refer them there.  I carefully control my schedule. That is good practice for a doctor.   But many times on these trips, I have found myself in situations where I had absolutely no control over the situation, as helpless as a boat with no oars. I have seen authorities confiscate all of our medicine at the border, leaving us without any means to treat the patients.   I have seen a large evangelistic event threatened to cancel in a storm.  I have faced medical situations that required my actions but were way beyond anything I had ever been trained to do.   But in these (and many other) situations, I saw God take charge and make things happen.  He miraculously provided; He swept back the clouds; He enabled me through His power.  Praise His name!  Through these experiences, my faith grew in leaps and bounds.   Where would my faith be if I had not left the ‘deadly calm’? 

God is still in the miracle business today — only if we allow him to be.  Jesus was rejected at Nazareth.  Mark tells us Jesus was shocked at their unbelief and relates a very sad scripture:  “And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them” (Mark 6:5).    Jesus wanted to heal more and perform more miracles. But they were not interested because they had no faith in him.  We can be the limiting factor that keeps God from doing the good works He wants to do.

What about you?  I don’t know if you call these things that I’ve talked about miracles or not.  But I know God is still doing God things.  Things only God can do.  Do you want to see God do these kinds of things?

First, you must be a follower of Jesus.   You have to be with Jesus to see what Jesus does.  You have to have a relationship with God to have your eyes opened to see the wonders of the spiritual world.  Second, you must be willing to go where he asks you.   You must be willing to leave the shallow waters and go out into the deep, leaving the deadly calm of your neat, scheduled existence.  You must be willing to leave your comfort zone.  Finally, you must be willing to do what he asks you to do.  You must be willing to throw out the net.   It doesn’t matter if you’ve been throwing it all night with no results.  It doesn’t matter if it seems impossible.  Just be obedient.  If we only attempt to do things we can without divine help, then we don’t need God.  We must attempt God-sized tasks to leave room for God to do God things. 

  1. That is the Sea of Galilee.
  2. Again, the Sea of Galilee.
  3. Isaiah 6:5.
  4. The Story of John G. Paton Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals.  Paton, John Gibson and Paton, James.  Kindle Edition loc 2330.

June 14, 27 A.D.  A Demon in the Congregation #38

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , , , ,

Week 18 ———  A Demon in the Congregation
Mark 1:21-28  Luke 4:31-37

Today, in 27 AD, Jesus is still on his three-week tour of Galilee without his disciples. Since we have no stories of this time, I will back up to discuss what happened on that Sabbath in Capernaum (the day before he left on the trip).

Picture it.  It is Saturday morning in Capernaum.  Jesus is teaching in the synagogue.  Luke says, “They were astonished at his teaching, for his word possessed authority.” Things are going so much better for Jesus here than in Nazareth.  As the people sit and intently listen, Jesus suddenly gets heckled.  Like the drunk guy who interrupts the act in a comedy club,  a man yells: “Leave us alone!”  Let’s read the scripture:

Luke 4:31-34  And he went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee. And he was teaching them on the Sabbath, and they were astonished at his teaching, for his word possessed authority.   And in the synagogue, there was a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice,   “Ha!  What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.”

Now I am thinking, ‘What is a demon-possessed man doing in the worship service?’  But Jesus does not seem to be surprised.

Luke 4:35-37   But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent and come out of him!” And when the demon had thrown him down in their midst, he came out of him, having done him no harm. And they were all amazed and said to one another, “What is this word? For with authority and power, he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out!” And reports about him went out into every place in the surrounding region.

Luke 4:40-41   Now, when the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him, and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. And demons also came out of many, crying, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak because they knew that he was the Christ.

Mark 1:39    And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I am usually hesitant to talk about demons and Jesus casting them out.  I am not an expert on that subject. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, and no one ever talked about that.  But you can’t read the New Testament and ignore that Jesus did a lot of “casting out demons” and led his disciples to do the same.  We have so many misconceptions about demons from our tradition, from poor translations, and from all the supernatural stuff in movies, TV, etc. — so many misconceptions that it is complicated to talk about.  You have some people who believe that the talk of demon possession in the New Testament is only their first-century way to describe seizures, psychoses, or other disorders that we modern, informed intellectual people would describe as mental illness or medical disease.  There seem to be two groups of people.  One would attribute everything that goes wrong in the world to “the devil and his demons,” and another that denies the existence of evil spiritual beings.

It would be easier for me to skip this subject. But if I am covering Jesus’ 70-week ministry day by day. I can’t skip over every instance of him casting out demons because it is a big part of his ministry.

My question is, “Do you believe the Bible is true?”  If you say the Bible is true, then you are forced to believe in spiritual beings that we cannot see, for they are plainly discussed throughout the scriptures.  Michael Heiser gives a good overview of this in his book Supernatural, a shorter, simpler version of his book The Unseen Realm.  My thoughts here lean heavily on Heiser’s books, for that is where I learned to appreciate  (and gain at least a little understanding of) the vast discussion of the spiritual realm in the text of the Bible.  Before discussing the concept of Jesus casting out demons, we need at least some basic awareness of the spiritual forces at work in our world.  That is the focus for today.  Later, we will expand this discussion to what Jesus did in the synagogue in Capernaum that day and throughout his ministry.

In the beginning, there was God.  Yehovah.  There is one God who is the creator of everything. But other spiritual beings were created by God and are in place when man is created. God has a heavenly council of spiritual beings with whom he discusses his plans and often assists God in carrying out his will. These beings are frequently referred to as the heavenly host, gods, or “sons of god.”  The council is seen in Psalm 82.

Psalm 82:1-2    God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods, he holds judgment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?

Does that mention of “in the midst of the gods” bother you?  It sure used to bother me.  If the Bible teaches there is only one God, where did these others come from?  It is the Hebrew elohim, here translated as ‘gods,’ but don’t get hung up on that because that word“refers to any inhabitant of the spiritual world.”1  So Yehovah is elohim, as are demons and the human dead in the afterlife because they are all inhabitants of the spiritual world.    When our translators choose the word ‘god’ to translate ‘elohim,’ we can be confused, thinking the Bible is talking about other beings similar to Yehovah.  Certainly, that is not true.  The Bible is consistent in noting the uniqueness and superiority of Yehovah:

1 Kings 8:23   O Yehovah, God [elohim] of Israel, there is no god [elohim- spiritualbeing] like you.

Psalm 97:9   For you, Yehovah, are most high over all the earth;  you are exalted far above all gods [elohim- spiritualbeings].  

These spiritual beings were created to dwell with Yehovah and to be a heavenly council. 

We see them in the scripture doing 2 basic things: 1. to take part in decisions and 2. to be his task force to accomplish certain things. (When they are in the job of messengers, we see them called ‘angels’ for ‘angel’ is the English derivative of the Greek ‘aggelos’ and Hebrew ‘malach’, both words which mean ‘messenger.’ )  In 1 Kings 22, Yehovah has decided that the wicked king, Ahab, has to go.  In the meeting of the divine council, Yehovah lets the council decide how Ahab will meet his end.  They also assist in the judgment of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (Daniel 4).  [Read the chapters listed.  Both of these decisions end in very creative punishment.]  Heiser says, “God doesn’t need a divine council, but he chooses to use one.” In the same way, Yehovah does not need humans to help him in his work, but he chooses to work with us.  He didn’t have to have Moses raise his staff to part the sea or have the people march around Jericho to make the walls fall.  He can do anything without us.  But God chooses to live in community with us.  He wants us to work with him in his kingdom. He chooses family.  

In the beginning, it wasn’t just God and Adam and Eve in the garden.  Yehovah’s heavenly family was there also.  The garden was designed to be where all of God’s family could live together.  And Yehovah wants so much for all of his family to be together.  It is like a mother’s joy when all her children are back in the house together.  But one of God’s heavenly beings decided to rebel.  The accuser, the satan, a heavenly being, rebelled against Yehovah and convinced the humans to rebel also.  When sin and rebellion came, the garden in Eden was shut down, and God could no longer dwell with his earthly family.  The rest of the Bible after Genesis 3 is the story of God’s plan to reunite his family all in the same place.

I had been taught that before humanity was created, there was a great rebellion, and 1/3 of the heavenly beings were cast out.  This is based on Revelation 12:7-9, but that passage is associated with the birth of the Messiah. This rebellion in Genesis 3 is the first of three rebellions by heavenly beings.    When the satan rebelled, he was expelled from God’s presence and “thrown down to the ground” (Isaiah 14:12).  The earth now is a place of death (introduced by sin) and is no longer fit to be a place for God and his heavenly beings.  The satan becomes the ruler over the place of death and over all who die.   And things on earth go from bad to worse.

After the satan and the humans are cast out of God’s space, evil multiplies to the point that Genesis 6:5 tells us:   “Yehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  Also, in Genesis 6, in this setting of man’s horrible dive into wickedness, the second rebellion of the heavenly beings happens.  There we have that story of “the sons of God” fathering earthly children, whom the Bible calls the Nephilim.  Genesis 6:4 tells us the “Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward,” and calls them “mighty men.”  They were giants, fierce warriors, and they were evil.  You must refer to the New Testament for further information(2 Peter 2:4-6 and Jude 6.)   Peter and Jude both share information from the book of 1 Enoch, which, though not considered scripture, was deemed worthy of quoting in scripture. (This book teaches that demons are the unembodied spirits of the Nephilim who perished in and after the flood.)  These rebellious heavenly “sons of God” were sent to hell to be judged later.  We will see more of the Nephilim later.

God commanded humans to “be fruitful and multiply” to spread his kingdom throughout the earth.  But they don’t want to disperse and so they build a tower in Babylon.  This displeases Yehovah, so he meets with his heavenly council and says, “ Come, let us go down and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7).  We all know this part of the story that tells how the nations listed in Genesis 10 came to be.  However, many of us have never noticed Moses’ comments on the Tower of Babel story in Deuteronomy.

“Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations;  ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you.  When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.  But Yehovah’s portion is his people,  Jacob his allotted heritage.  (Deuteronomy 32:7-9)

God divided the people into nations, assigned to be under members of his heavenly council (the “sons of God”).  There are 70 nations mentioned in this part of Genesis.   The nation God left for himself was Jacob (Israel). That is why the next thing in Genesis is God calling Abraham.  But God did not abandon the other nations.  He planned to make of his people, Israel, a kingdom of priests to carry his message to the world.  Through his people, through Abraham, Yehovah planned to bless the nations.  But these members of the heavenly council took advantage of these nations.  They managed the nations unjustly and demanded to be worshiped.  So, the other nations began to worship these members of God’s council instead of Yehovah, God himself. This is the Third Rebellion of God’s Spiritual Beings.

So, back to Psalm 82, where we see Yehovah  judging them:

Psa. 82:1    God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.”
Arise, O God, judge the earth;
for you shall inherit all the nations!

Yehovah says to the divine council in Psalm 81:6, “You are elohim, sons of the Most High, all of you.”   They are his sons; he created them to be family, just as he created us to be part of his family.  They were created to assist him in ruling over creation, much like we were created to have dominion over the earth.  But something went wrong.  They did not follow Yehovah’s method of dealing justly with the nations.  They were supposed to shepherd the nations and teach them the ways of Yehovah, but instead, the people learned nothing.  They were left in the darkness instead of leading them back to Yehovah.  The spiritual beings demanded to be worshipped instead of Yehovah.  So verse 7 tells us, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.”  This council is being judged and found guilty, and the wages for their crimes is the loss of their immortality; they will die like humans. And Yehovah will inherit all the nations.

Now, back to those Nephilim.   The Nephilim who died became demons.  But many lived on the earth and reproduced and carried this bloodline through the time of David.  We see them in Numbers 13:33 when the children of Israel were at the edge of the promised land, and they sent spies to the land. In the report of the spies sent in to scout out the land of Canaan:  “And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”  

Their fear of these giants is greater than their faith in Yehovah’s promises to conquer the land for them. They choose not to enter the land, so all of these adults (other than Joshua and Caleb) die.

But their children are given another chance.  Just before entering the land 40 years later, God directed them to go against the armies of Sihon and Og, the king of Bashan.  The Bible tells us these two Amorite kings were rulers of the Rephaim3 (Deuteronomy 2).  This time, instead of running scared, they face and eliminate the descendants of the Nephilim.  They continue to encounter these giants, and you see that this conquest of Canaan is a spiritual battle as well as a physical battle, and you begin to understand why God insisted some cities be destroyed entirely and everyone killed.  The bloodline of the Nephilim was demonic and needed to be destroyed to stop their influence in the land.  But they were not completely successful.  Joshua 11:21-22 tells us, 

Joshua 11:21-22   “ And Joshua came at that time and cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua devoted them to destruction with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain. 

Unfortunately, the few descendants of the Nephilim that remained continued to cause trouble for Israel.  We know that Gath becomes a Philistine city. You know the name of one of the Rephaim from Gath.  He was defeated by the shepherd boy David.  (Gath was the hometown of Goliath and other Anakim.)

Once again, Yehovah desires to reunite us all, as it was in Eden.  God’s plan at the Tower of Babel to start over with the nation he would build from Abraham does not bear fruit because, again, humans are disobedient and faithless.  There were some excellent leaders of the people of Israel, but even the best of them, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and David, were sinners and disobedient to God’s plan.  So God’s nation, Israel, fails to be what God wanted them to be.   But God has not given up on humankind.  He still wants to redeem us and live together with us in a new Eden.  Heiser says: 

“Humanity could not be trusted with reviving the Edenic kingdom rule.  Only God himself could do what needed to be done.  Only God could meet the obligations of his own covenants.  But humanity would not be set aside.  Instead, God would have to become man.  Instead, God would have to fulfill the Law and the covenants himself and then take upon himself the penalty for all human failure.” 2 

So God has a plan for Jesus to be the one who could live a life without sin and remove the curse of death. Have you ever wondered why God’s plan for Jesus to die for sins and to remove the curse of death is not simply described in the Old Testament?   Scattered prophecies hint at this, but why didn’t God spell it out plainly?”  Why didn’t God say, “Hey, in a few hundred years, I’m going to send Jesus to be the Messiah and die on the cross for the sins of mankind”?   Instead, we have all of Isaiah’s prophecies of the suffering servant, but nowhere in Isaiah’s prophesies is the word ‘messiah’ found.   It is almost like God wanted to keep this plan a secret that could only be seen after it happened.

And that is the point.  God did want to keep it a secret.  Jesus was to come and live a sinless life and be an innocent man crucified by the forces of darkness and then resurrected.  But if the forces of darkness, the satan, and the demons (the fallen former council members) knew God’s plan, then they wouldn’t fall for it.

That is how Paul understood it:

1 Corinthians 2:7-8   But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Near the end, when Jesus tells his disciples he must suffer and die, You don’t hear them say, “Well, of course, you are… that is just what we read in the scriptures.”  No!  Peter basically tells Jesus that it is a dumb plan.  Those Old Testament scriptures that we now, looking backward, see so easily were predicting Jesus’ death and resurrection, which were almost impossible to know before it happened.  Even after the resurrection, the disciples need supernatural help to understand what happened:  

Luke 24:44-45   Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”  Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”

These evil beings used to be in God’s council.  They are intelligent; they know the scriptures.  But they are not all-knowing.  They recognized that Jesus came as the prophesied son of David to be the Messiah.  You see these demons over and over shout it out, “You are the holy one of God” You are the son of God.”  And so they know they have to do something to stop him.  So they arranged to have him betrayed and crucified.  And when he died and was buried, they thought they had won.  Imagine their surprise when Jesus shows up in the place of the dead and lets them know he is just there for a few days because he is being resurrected.

Jesus defeats the curse of death.  Our debt of sin is paid in full.  Death no longer has any hold on us.  The satan, the lord of death, and his demons no longer have any hold on us.  God’s kingdom is being rebuilt, one believer at a time.  God is redeeming us so that we can again live with him.

Following Jesus’ ascension, Pentecost comes. Pentecost is the grand reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel.  At Babel, God divided the people into nations with different languages and gave each nation to his heavenly council to reign while he chose one nation to rule himself.  At Pentecost, God brings all these nations together:

Acts 2:5  Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.

It is not a coincidence that the nations listed in Acts 2 are the same nations listed in Genesis 10.  While at Babel, the nations were divided because they couldn’t understand each other’s language, at Pentecost, every nation can now understand the disciples, and God reunites the nations under Him.  About 3000 are saved. These new believers in Jesus will leave Jerusalem and return to their home countries to spread God’s message.   The kingdom is expanding, and the nations are being redeemed.

God’s message will be spread.  His will will be done.  The battle is over, and the forces of darkness have already lost.  If you are in Christ, the satan has no hold on you. He is lord of the dead, and death has been defeated in Christ.  The demons have no hold on you.  You are no longer part of their kingdom when you join the Kingdom of God.  Jesus will come again and fully restore God’s kingdom.  As Peter says, we will be promoted to heavenly status, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). The Bible refers to it as ‘glorification.’  We will be as God created Adam and Eve to be: immortal, glorified images of God, dwelling in the presence of God.

But until then, we must see the world as Paul did: Our struggle in this world is not against people but against the spiritual forces of evil.  

Eph. 6:10-13   Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.  Put on the whole armor of God so that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. 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 armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.

In the past few weeks, we have talked about discipleship as apprenticeship, about how we need to spend time with Jesus so that we can imitate him.  I shared Romans 8:29, which said God had destined us from the beginning of time to be conformed to the image of his Son.  This is something God will accomplish.  I don’t want you to feel guilty about those areas of your life where you are not like Jesus.  Being like Jesus is not a task you do, so God will not be angry with you.  Guilt is not the attitude you should have.   Instead, this is the attitude I want you to have:   Gratitude.  

Be grateful that our God Himself is looking forward to the day He will bring about our glorification.  When he will transform us, when we replace this perishable body with the imperishable, when we put on immortality and become partakers in the divine nature, when “we shall be like him.”   Meanwhile, we live in such a way that the people around us, who have been ensnared by the trap of the devil, will want to join us in the family of God

  1. Heiser, Michael. Supernatural. Kindle edition, page 18.
  2. You will see these descendants of the Nephalim in the Old Testament called ‘The Anakim’ (the giant descendants of Anak), or the Rephaim (which is Hebrew for “lofty terrible ones”).
  3. Ibid. page 96.