Reflective Bible Study

As we continue moving through Luke’s gospel, we come to an event, specifically a miracle, where it appears as though Jesus uses this event to prove a point. However, this event does more than simply prove a point that most Christians currently believe today. In this event, we discover just how powerful faith in Jesus is and we discover something amazing about who Jesus was.

Our event and passage for this episode is found in Luke’s gospel, chapter 5, and we will read it using the Contemporary English Version of the Bible. Starting in verse 17, Luke tells us that:

¹⁷ One day some Pharisees and experts in the Law of Moses sat listening to Jesus teach. They had come from every village in Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem.

God had given Jesus the power to heal the sick, ¹⁸ and some people came carrying a crippled man on a mat. They tried to take him inside the house and put him in front of Jesus. ¹⁹ But because of the crowd, they could not get him to Jesus. So they went up on the roof, where they removed some tiles and let the mat down in the middle of the room.

²⁰ When Jesus saw how much faith they had, he said to the crippled man, “My friend, your sins are forgiven.”

²¹ The Pharisees and the experts began arguing, “Jesus must think he is God! Only God can forgive sins.”

²² Jesus knew what they were thinking, and he said, “Why are you thinking that? ²³ Is it easier for me to tell this crippled man that his sins are forgiven or to tell him to get up and walk? ²⁴ But now you will see that the Son of Man has the right to forgive sins here on earth.” Jesus then said to the man, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk home.”

²⁵ At once the man stood up in front of everyone. He picked up his mat and went home, giving thanks to God. ²⁶ Everyone was amazed and praised God. What they saw surprised them, and they said, “We have seen a great miracle today!”

In this event, three big ideas jump off the page at me.

First, it is amazing in my mind how Luke describes Jesus meeting this crippled man. Verse 20 describes this moment for us by saying, “When Jesus saw how much faith they [referring to this man’s friends] had, he said to the crippled man…”

While we are quick to jump to the message Jesus shared with the crippled man regarding this man’s forgiveness, it is very easy to skip over the detail that Luke alludes to. This man didn’t have significant faith in Jesus. Instead, this man’s friends had the unstoppable faith that, one way or another, they would get their friend in front of Jesus.

This is significant for us to pay attention to because it tells us that our faith can impact the lives of unbelievers around us. This man’s friends, while they were not receiving much of any personal benefit from carrying their crippled friend to Jesus, made a huge impact on the crippled man’s life. This miracle happened entirely because this man’s friends had faith in Jesus!

Second, when we look at Jesus’ message, the reaction of the religious leaders, and then at the miracle that happened, we are left to conclude something powerful. If Jesus had spoken outside of God’s will, God would not have allowed the man to be healed. Because of this, Jesus’ teaching was validated by God regardless of whether the religious leaders believed Jesus had the power or authority that He claimed to have.

This detail is significant for us to pay attention to because sometimes God will validate a message He sends with a miracle. However, don’t expect this to be God’s default method. In the gospels, this might be the only time Jesus uses a miracle to prove a spiritual point. In every other case I can think of right now, the miracles were given to help people and to cause people to pay attention. Once people were paying attention, Jesus then teaches a message that stood on its own.

Regardless of whether you believe Jesus’ message here, I don’t believe God would have let this man be healed if this teaching negatively impacted the impression those present had of God.

The third big idea I see in this passage comes in what Jesus’ key idea is. While Jesus does ultimately claim the right to forgive sins, this is not the key piece of His message. The key part of Jesus’ message is that this man’s sins were forgiven. Luke writes Jesus’ words in verse 20, saying, “My friend, your sins are forgiven.”

Looking at the details of what is said and what isn’t said here, Jesus does not say, “My friend, I forgive your sins” even though Jesus potentially could have said this. While the way the Pharisees and religious leaders respond seems to appear that they heard Jesus directly forgiving sins, Jesus’ message to this crippled man was one that assured him that his sins were forgiven.

From the earlier details that Luke includes, Jesus saw faith in the actions of this man’s friends. Luke does not indicate this crippled man had any faith. From the context of the message of forgiveness Jesus shared with this man, part of me wonders and could logically conclude this man believed God was punishing him for some sin in his past, and because of this sin, there was no hope that God loved him enough to heal him. The man’s friends had faith in Jesus’ healing ability, but this man doubted that God even wanted him to be healed. If God was punishing this man for a sin in his past, there would have been no way for Jesus to heal him against God’s will!

Jesus’ message to this man was not, “I forgive your sins”; Jesus’ message to this man was that his sins were forgiven. God was not holding a grudge against this man and punishing him by keeping him crippled. Instead, God loved this man enough that He led four friends to carry this man to Jesus, and to not be discouraged or give up when a crowd was not interested in letting them through.

Jesus ultimately does challenge those present regarding His authority to forgive sins, but the bigger message here is that Jesus came to assure us that our sins have already been forgiven and that God is not angry with us. God loves us and that is the entire reason why Jesus came to this world! God loves you and me and Jesus came to help us understand just how much God loves humanity!

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As I always challenge you to do, intentionally seek God first in your life and choose to accept that He has forgiven you of your sins. Accept this truth through what Jesus came to this world to accomplish. Choose to place your faith, hope, trust, and belief in Jesus and His sacrifice for you and me on our behalf.

Also, continue praying and studying the Bible for yourself to learn and grow closer to God. Through prayer and Bible study, discover just how much God loves you and I and discover what He was willing to give to redeem us from being trapped in sin. Don’t let your relationship with God be based on the opinions of others. Study out God’s truth for yourself from the Bible to discover what God wants you to learn from His Word.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or doubt yourself out of where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!

Picking up where we left off in our last episode, our passage and episode for this week gives us a foundation for why our last episode’s prophecy about Jesus spending a season in Egypt would ultimately happen. However, like many of the prophecies we have covered so far, as well as many other prophecies we will look at as we move though this podcasting year, this prophecy seems out of place in the context of the broader passage where the prophecy is found.

In this passage of Jeremiah, the Old Testament book where our prophecy is found, we discover a surprisingly dark prophecy within an otherwise positive and happy portion of scripture. However, when we take a few minutes to focus on this paradox, we discover a powerful truth that can be applied into our own lives living over 2,000 years later.

Our passage and prophecy are found in the book of Jeremiah, chapter 31, and we will read it using the New American Standard Bible translation. Starting in verse 10, Jeremiah writes:

¹⁰ Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,
And declare in the coastlands afar off,
And say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him
And keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock.”
¹¹ For the Lord has ransomed Jacob
And redeemed him from the hand of him who was stronger than he.
¹² “They will come and shout for joy on the height of Zion,
And they will be radiant over the bounty of the Lord—
Over the grain and the new wine and the oil,
And over the young of the flock and the herd;
And their life will be like a watered garden,
And they will never languish again.
¹³ “Then the virgin will rejoice in the dance,
And the young men and the old, together,
For I will turn their mourning into joy
And will comfort them and give them joy for their sorrow.
¹⁴ “I will fill the soul of the priests with abundance,
And My people will be satisfied with My goodness,” declares the Lord.

¹⁵ Thus says the Lord,
“A voice is heard in Ramah,
Lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
She refuses to be comforted for her children,
Because they are no more.”

Let’s stop reading here. Those of us who are familiar with Jesus’ birth story will recognize the event this prophecy refers to. However, it is amazing that both before and after this prophecy is given, Jeremiah focuses on sharing a positive message about Israel’s redemption from exile, and the promised abundance God has in store for His people.

However, the event that is prophesied is nothing short of tragic. Without the angel warning Joseph in a dream to escape to Egypt, which we looked at in our last episode, Jesus’ life wouldn’t have lasted long. In Matthew’s gospel, chapter 2, starting in verse 16, we read:

¹⁶ Then when Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he became very enraged, and sent and slew all the male children who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the magi. ¹⁷ Then what had been spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice was heard in Ramah,
Weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children;
And she refused to be comforted,
Because they were no more.”

In this passage, Matthew’s gospel draws our attention onto how Herod’s savage and hostile action was actually a fulfillment of prophecy. This event was also Satan’s first swift attempt to end Jesus’ life before the plan of salvation could be realized. If the plan of salvation simply needed Jesus to die, then having Him die when only weeks or months old would have been easier from one perspective.

However, the contrasting point of view to this idea is that Jesus would not have then ultimately chosen His death. If Jesus had died as an innocent baby, then while salvation would become an option for all who repent and return to God, we likely wouldn’t have any idea the depth of God’s love for us. The same is true for many, if not all of the other times Satan attempted to kill Jesus prior to the cross. Every attempt on Jesus’ life would not bring glory to God or keep God’s name pure.

Three times come to mind where Satan tried to end Jesus’ life prior to the cross. The time we are focusing in on in this episode when Jesus was a Baby is the first one. If Herod had succeeded, then God would be to blame for not keeping His child safe. God would appear weak because Satan would have easily succeeded at his goal.

The second time is when Jesus is teaching in the Nazareth synagogue and He challenges them with ideas they were not open to accepting. In response to Jesus’ challenge about God valuing gentiles, those in the Nazareth synagogue attempt to push Jesus towards and off of a nearby cliff. However, Jesus miraculously is delivered from this event, and in some divine way the Bible doesn’t describe in detail, Jesus walks through the crowd and away from the town.

If those in the Nazareth synagogue succeeded at throwing Jesus off of the cliff, Jesus’ death would have been 100% the fault of the localized Nazareth synagogue, and a murder that would be emotionally driven and justified by claiming that Jesus spoke hearsay.

Allowing Jesus to reach the cross allows for the stage to be set for all major groups of humanity to reject Jesus, from Judas Iscariot, the disciple and a representative of Christianity, to the Roman secular culture, who carried out the execution. Jesus’ death on the cross could only have happened if Jew, Gentile, and Christian were all united in rejecting Jesus, and as we will discover later this year, that is exactly what happened. If those in the Nazareth synagogue succeeded, Jesus’ rejection and death would not have been because all groups of humanity had rejected Him, and even the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem could have sided with Jesus by denouncing the Nazareth synagogue as being rogue.

The third time Satan attempted to end Jesus’ life before the cross was while Jesus was sleeping in the back of the boat while the disciples were crossing the lake. A sudden, likely supernaturally strong storm caught the disciples off guard, and if Jesus hadn’t have spoken the word to calm the storm, or if the disciples had not gone to wake Jesus up, it is possible that storm could have ended Jesus’ life. However, if that had happened, those in the first century would have concluded that God killed Jesus and His followers, because it was not a death that humanity had directly caused, and God would be implicated in Jesus’ death. At the very least, God would be implicated by allowing the storm that ultimately took the life of His Son in this hypothetical scenario. In this third event, Jesus would not have chosen death, and like the other two possible deaths, while salvation would technically have opened up for humanity, we would not have as clear of a picture of God’s love for us.

Within the framework for this prophecy in Jeremiah, we see a strangely realistic scenario. While God is actively seeking to restore and unify His people while also preparing them for eternity, Satan is actively working to cause difficulty, pain, and even death to all who are even remotely associated with Jesus. In the first century, simply being born within the vicinity of Jesus was a death sentence, as our prophecy and reading of Jesus’ escape to Egypt reveals.

In a similar, but hopefully not too similar, way, allying our lives with Jesus in this life may bring hostility and trials that would not otherwise come. However, allying ourselves with Jesus is the only way to ultimately receive the reward He promises us – specifically the reward that He made available through His trip to earth and His death on the cross.

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As I always challenge you to do, intentionally seek God first in your life and choose to accept Jesus’ sacrifice on your behalf. Understand that allying your life with Jesus may bring Satan’s hostility into your life, but on the other side of his hostility, is a reward that cannot be matched. Choose to lean on Jesus for strength to face Satan’s trials today, so that eternity is guaranteed.

To keep your connection with God strong, always pray and study the Bible for yourself, and grow that personal relationship with God. Through prayer and Bible study, discover a God who loves you more than you can imagine, and a God who was willing to do whatever He could to redeem you from sin.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or deviate away from where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!