Hey, I'm Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I got a question for you. I know that there are some of you who listen to this who have no debt. Maybe you've never even known what debt was like. I do not resent you for that. Good for you. That is awesome. But I would guess that the majority of you know what debt is like, and that the majority of you know what debt feels like right now. Have you ever sat around and just fantasized what it would be like if all of that went away? If there was some general amnesty or declaration that somehow wouldn't destroy the very economy that you want to participate in when you get out of debt, but somehow just all your debt vanished. A benefactor, a stroke of the pen, a meteor, I don't know what it would take, but it just all goes away. If you have debt, how can you not think about it? Because it's this big, gigantic thing that just sits right there and it stands between you and how you want life to be. And sometimes you can't help but think, like, oh, what is just all the stuff that I could do or that life could look like if I didn't have this obligation on me all the time. And maybe some of you have got to a place where you actually got to shut down your debt and be like, there, it's over, it's done, it's retired. Now what do I do? And you feel like Tom Hanks at the end of the castaway when you're at that intersection, you're like, my whole life is open before me. How will things be now? I think we got a situation in Matthew chapter nine where you've got a dude who is experiencing exactly that. How many times in this guy's life had he thought about two things? What would it be like as a guy who's been paralyzed since forever, if my legs worked? What could I do? What could I achieve? What could life look like? These suckers take this for granted. They don't know what they have. If I had functioning legs, I would do everything. And I'm guessing the other thing that he sat around and thought is the same thing that you and I have sat around and thought as well. What if all the stuff that burdens us from our past were gone? What if it were as far as the East is from the West and it was over, like it never happened? What if we were declared innocent? What if the people who we'd hurt were given the promise of things being made right for them as well? What would that look like? And what could we do with the freedom of conscience and mind that would come with such a lifting of our debt? Again, in Matthew chapter nine, we encounter a scenario where we get to watch a guy go through that process and imagine what he's feeling and thinking. And then we get done with Matthew chapter nine and we're like, wait a second, is that for me too? Am I supposed to get done with this and not have just enjoyed a fantasy story about a distant, far-off character who got to experience something cool and dream about what that would be like? But am I supposed to be able to experience something like this myself? And I think the answer is yes. That is what the text is holding out. That the liberation of debt and limitation that this man in Matthew chapter 9 had lifted from him by Jesus is an implication of the kingdom to which you and I and everybody for all of time, regardless of how you look or what you say or where you're from, to which all of us are invited. So this thing has serious implications, so serious, in fact, that it runs into opposition. Pretty much everything that's really good and matters and is really transformative is going to run into a degree of opposition, no exception here. Here's the passage once again. Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over, and came to his own town. That's Capernaum. Some men brought to him a paralytic lying on a mat, and when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven. We know from other passages that this guy was lowered through the roof of a crowded house where Jesus was at teaching. At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, This fellow's blaspheming, but knowing their thoughts, Jesus said, Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts? Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven, or to say, Get up and walk. But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, then he said to the paralytic, Get up, take your mat, and go home. And the man got up and went home. And when the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe and they praised God who had given such authority to men. It's a bold move by Jesus to forgive debts, period. But it's a really bold move that he did it this way. I mean, think about the whole Jesus thing could have derailed right here in front of all these people. You got a big room full of witnesses who all think different things. And Jesus does the Babe Ruth call a shot. He points out to the fence, he's like, I'm gonna hit a home run right there, right now. I'm gonna do something amazing that nobody else can do. Watch this. Well, if Babe Ruth goes and does that on the next swing, as the legend goes, everybody's like, Babe Ruth's greatest baseball player ever, it's the most amazing thing ever. Like, you knew he was gonna hit a home run. How do you predict something like that? And so obviously, if Babe Ruth calls his shot for a home run and then he pops out in foul territory, it's a pretty big hit to Babe Ruth's reputation and legend. And likewise, if Jesus is like, get up, take your mat, and go home, then nothing happens, or there's like a little farting sound and then like a little fizzle. And he's like, sorry about that. This almost never happens. Hang on just a minute. I said, get up, take your mat and go home. And then nothing happens again. And then he gets more and more nervous and starts sweating, and people are like, oh, okay, uh, this is just vicariously embarrassing. I'm just gonna leave. And he just keeps saying it and then kind of starts crying, and the guy just continues to not get better. Like, if he calls his shot like that and then doesn't deliver, he looks like a huge idiot, and the whole thing probably derails right there. But on the contrary, if he calls a shot like that and then immediately delivers and it's a shot that you just can't call, you just can't say that's going to work. It's impossible. That is not within the realm of the physical world. And then it happens, well, then that raises a lot of questions, or maybe just brings us to a lot of automatic conclusions. One being he had absolute certainty this was definitely, absolutely, completely going to work. He was absolutely sure of his authority over the physical world and the situation at hand, which means it would follow that he would then be absolutely sure and right in being absolutely sure that he can declare sins forgiven and purge records of guilt, as it were. It also means, and this is something we're gonna see a lot more as we get further into the book of Matthew, that he has absolute confidence in his father and the commissioning that his father gave him that we saw in the baptism thing, where he's like, Hey, this is my son, I'm pleased with him. He has absolute certainty that his father has his back and that he's doing exactly the thing that the Trinity, that he and the Father and the Spirit agreed to do when he showed up. So this is a very high stakes move on the part of Jesus. If it works, this is utterly amazing. If it doesn't, you can pretty much shut the whole thing down right now. Wow. So you guys are gonna grumble and you're gonna get mad about this thing. And instead of being excited that forgiveness of sins is at hand, that debts could be lifted. Instead of getting fired up about that, because apparently it benefits you guys to have this problem of debts being dragged around by people, and the only reason you have a job is because people feel guilty about things. So instead of celebrating something that, yeah, admittedly, would change your jobs or maybe eliminate the need for it forever, but would solve everybody's problem ever, you're gonna get mad and you're gonna tweet angry things and you're gonna be grouchy about stuff. So, okay, you guys are thinking this is something that's impossible and only God could possibly forgive sins. So I just want to ask you guys, I'm pretending to be Jesus right now. I don't know if it's going well or not. I just want to ask you guys who are complaining about this, like which one would be more difficult to do? For me to say your sins are forgiven and mean it? Or for me to break the laws of time and space in front of your faces right now and tell that guy right there, laying on that mat, who a whole bunch of you know because he lives in this town and you've seen him laying there forever, to tell that guy right now, to right now to get up and take his mat and walk. Which would be more tricky? Now let's just game it out real quick. Jesus didn't say all this stuff, I'm just filling it in. Let's just game it out real quick. One is a statement of spiritual authority, you can't see it. The other is gonna require me to say, in so many words, okay, all of your bones and ligaments and sinews and muscle memory is gonna be healed in an instant. We're not gonna do therapy, we're not gonna do years of relearning that muscle memory and figuring out how to work with your body that is now active and functional again. So we're just gonna skip all that, and you are not only immediately going to have the use of your legs, but you're gonna know how to use them, and you're gonna get up and you're gonna walk out of here in front of everybody. Which one of those seems like more dazzling? And I think implicitly the answer to Jesus' rhetorical question is uh, hmm, what you know, I don't know. Which one is more impressive? Uh for there's a long time where I would read this passage and I'd be like, oh, well, the miracle is more impressive. It's insane. But as I get a little bit older and I feel the pain of guilt, and I become more aware of the things that I've done that create hurt and havoc, and I've thought about those things. You get old enough to have two or three moments in life where you go and stand in the shower and just look down the drain and feel awful about what you said or what you did or where you're at with stuff, and some sort of cumulative guilt, maybe over time. And you start to think, you know, maybe the relieving of all the debts is the more impressive thing, is the more difficult thing. Here's what I think the best answer is to Jesus' question. Those are both really, really impressive. It's really impressive that you wield the authority to end guilt, that you have the authority to wipe debts away. It's also really impressive that you have the authority to knit together somebody's body and skip physical therapy and have them just recover instant muscle memory for how to use all of those muscles that you just fixed. So I'm just gonna go with both demonstrate an authority that I think could only rightly be ascribed to God. But this is one of those places where, again, in the Bible, we see all the miracles point toward a theological reality. They don't just happen willy-nilly because the guy on the mat was better than the paralyzed guy who was down the street who wasn't getting healed. Yeah, there's the element of the right posture before the king, but the key point here is that miracles are not cheap handouts for nothing. When those miracles are recorded in the text, there's always a theological reality that they illustrate. And in this case, the theological reality is huge. Everything that is broken and wrong and screwed up and crappy about us could be resolved. If this is actually God in the flesh, if, and I know we haven't seen enough yet to say for sure one way or the other, and even after we have seen it all, there are gonna be some of us who I respect and I understand are gonna look at that and say, I just don't see it. I just don't think Jesus was God, I don't think these things happened, I'm not in. Okay, cool, like we can still get along. We're gonna see this stuff different at times, but there are gonna be other people who look at this and are like, you know what, that is enough. That passes my threshold of belief. And I think that this is actually God in the flesh, that this God actually operates outside of time, that this God is actually still present in reality today. And if this God is unlimited in knowledge and understanding and being and power, then this God knows who I am by name. He knew that I was gonna be here, he knows what I was gonna screw up, and he ordained, if this God is in charge of everything, that I would exist from the dawn of time, even with all the stuff that would maybe not go great and the stuff that maybe would go great. And this forgiveness of sin, this taking up our infirmities and carrying our diseases that we see playing out in this passage, that would mean by proxy, this is also for you. This is also for me. There's this thing that people do, I've seen it for a long time doing what I do for a living, where we craft narratives for ourselves. We write a story in our brain about, ah, I was this, and then this happened. I was once an adventurer like yourself, then I took an arrow to the knee. I was gonna be a great parent, but then one of my kids went awry, and I guess I was a bad parent. I was going to experience love, but the person I loved cheated on me and everything fell apart. I was going to do this, or I did these things, but it cost me that, or I've done much and I'm happy with life, but I have it, like we just all have this story with ups and downs, like the movies that we watch. That's what Don Henley meant when he said we've been poisoned by these fairy tales. There's good and there's bad that comes from embracing a narrative. And one of the things that's bad is those narratives are not very flexible. They're rigid, and we get locked into seeing ourselves and the people in our lives as certain types of characters, and the story flows a certain way. And what Jesus is doing here is a disrupt to this man's narrative. It is a disrupt to everybody's narrative in the room about how things actually are, and how guilt and time and failure and the bitter sweetness of life unfolds over the course of a human lifetime, and just how determined that is or maybe isn't. Very subtly, perhaps one of the greatest authorities that Jesus demonstrates throughout his interactions with people in the Gospels is authority over the seemingly cemented, unmovable narrative that we craft for ourselves by adding up the things we chose to do, the things that happened to us by the choices of others, and the moment in history in which we couldn't help but live. We add that stuff up, we make a story, and for most of us that seems absolutely immutable, unbreakable, unchangeable. And then along comes Jesus in this guy's life. And with a few simple words, he demonstrates that he has the authority to say, your narrative is rewritten, your story is different. This isn't going where you think it's going. This doesn't have the conclusion that bad writing on TV. As soon as you see this happens, oh, that means now this is gonna happen. Bummer. We're not doing that. There's a total twist in this guy's story, and as we move ahead in Matthew, we're gonna go from feeling like maybe that could be for me too, to no, dang. He is definitely saying this is for anyone who desires to be a part of this kingdom. This is for anybody who sees this, resonates with it, and wants to be a part of it. This rewriting of the narrative to something beautiful and filled with kingdom values is for everybody, no matter how weird or different or outsider to religion and religious stuff we might imagine ourselves to be. And for me, that is why the passage we just looked at is where Matthew gets real. It flips from an abstraction and a fascinating character and a what if and an I wish to a dang, what if this were real? What if this were for me, and what if this were something I could experience too in my own way? What if my story were to be rewritten? I'm very intrigued by that, and you deeply have my attention. Let's keep gaming it out together. Let's try to be fair to the text. But whether you're religious or not, if you feel a tiny little pang of optimism about stuff you haven't allowed yourself to feel optimistic about in forever, lean into that. Okay and let's see where it goes.