Hey Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we're in Matthew chapter 9, where Jesus just had a paralytic guy get lowered down to him through a hole in the ceiling. He doesn't say that in Matthew, but we know from other books of the Bible that's what the situation is. And he gets lowered down there in front of Jesus, and Jesus just absolutely has to take the opportunity to be like, what? That is faith and action, and I am going to address this situation. But weirdly, instead of Jesus saying, You are healed, young man, he instead says, Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven. And before we get into breaking down more of the angry resistance and grouchy tweets that Jesus gets in response to this thing that he's doing, let's just break down what he is actually saying there or how the original audience would have understood Jesus responding to seeing a sick guy and saying your sins are forgiven. Okay, on the most basic level, it looks like what Matthew is showing us is that Jesus wanted to use this opportunity to demonstrate his authority, not just over the physical world, but to say my authority over the physical world points to my authority over the stuff that you would want to use your time travel tokens on to go back and fix, the stuff that's broken and wrong with all of us, well, all of us accept Jesus, because we all get stuff wrong and screw things up and have regret, and that's just the way things are. So that is part of how the original audience was intended to understand this. But another layer to how the original audience was intended to understand this is made evident in a couple of other places in the New Testament. In particular, I think the example of the people who came to Jesus and were like, hey, you know, why does this guy have this physical affliction? Is it he or his parents who sinned? And there was some kind of belief that there was a connection between sin and physical frailty. And maybe there's a validity to that. I mean, on the psychological level, we believe that there are psychosomatic responses today where people can be so overcome with grief or guilt or anxiety that it actually physically affects them, that it manifests as an ailment. I don't know where we're at in terms of the research on it, but I know for the longest time people would say, well, like stress can lead to heart disease and maybe male pattern baldness. I don't think I'm stressed out. I don't know, maybe I should try to relax more, breathe deeply, do some yoga or something. I don't think that hair is coming back, that ship is sailed. So on the surface, it sounds preposterous to be like, what? So there's some kind of failure or wrongdoing on a person's part, and that manifests in a physical ailment. Like, come on, that's a joke. But history is actually looked somewhat favorably on this in terms of the history of medicine and science, and there's at least some connection between what goes on in the life of the mind and the soul, and how that manifests in the life of the body. But I think the connection was a little more pronounced for the original audience than you or I might believe today, in terms of just psychosomatic stuff. I think people really believed that there was some kind of almost Yahweh God of the Old Testament karma, where maybe it was an extension of the idea of the Mosaic covenant, which was very conditional. Remember the Mosaic covenant, so the deal that God made with the Hebrew people through Moses, where he's like, all right, well, I'm gonna be your God and you're gonna be my people, and if you obey me, I'm gonna bless you, and everybody around is gonna know that I'm your God, the one true God, and that you're my people, because you'll do things that I said and I'll bless you. And if you don't obey me, I'll punish you, and everybody will still look at that and be like, dang, they didn't do the thing that their God said, and they got punished. Surely he must be the one true God, and those must be his people. So this is woven into the DNA of the original audience here, and I don't think we can really criticize them for it. These are the ground rules they've become accustomed to working with. And as a modern audience, even a modern Christian audience, we might be tempted to look back and be like, ah, it's dumb and superstitious. That isn't how things work because those aren't the ground rules that most of us believe we draw from the Bible. Most of us would say, I don't know, people get sick, it happens. God doesn't seem to do tons of miraculous things these days, stuff runs its course, God has already made the points that he needs to make, and the rain falls on the righteous and the wicked, and if you're naughty, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be unhealthy, and if you behave really well, it doesn't mean you're not necessarily gonna get debilitating cancer or something. But all of that to say, the original audience in their brain would have had a little different connection between sin and physical ailment than you and I have. They would have looked at a passage like Isaiah 53:4, which is quoted in the middle of Matthew chapter 8, that says he took up our infirmities and carried our diseases, and they would have been like, infirmities and diseases, how do you really heal infirmities and diseases? Well, there's the physical element, but there's also the spiritual element, the guilt element. You and I have to work harder to make this connection. The original audience would have made the connection much more quickly. So at the beginning of Matthew chapter 9, it says, Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over, and came to his own town. 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. When the original audience encountered that, they both would have been like that computes and makes sense, and also, whoa, we're going there. We're claiming to have that level of authority. And that's kind of vindicating for what happens next in chapter three when the angry tweets come from the teachers of the law, because they understand the implications as well. If Jesus is claiming to forgive sins, who else can do that but God? Who's in a position to be the arbiter of all truth and time and justice and rightness and wrongness and the releasing of outstanding guilt, the payment of penalties, other than the one who is the owner of justice and rightness and truth and knowledge and everything. This is an I am statement in Matthew. John, just as an aside here, you get at least seven I am statements from Jesus that are his way of subtly, really not so subtly, acknowledging that he is God in the flesh. I am being the name that God gave to Moses when he was talking with him. Say that I am sent you. That is, that God is the very essence of being. Being is contained in him. His name isn't like Todd or Kyle or Daryl or something. Those are fine names, by the way, if those are your names. His name is being, to be, all things, the infinite, all in one. In a more subtle, nuanced way, Jesus has just claimed to be the very essence of being incarnate before them, and therefore fully authoritative to do what only a time travel token could do otherwise, and that is to resolve sin. It just doesn't fit. Wine and wineskins, patches on old clothes, like this is just ripping the fabric of the thought structure that holds things together for the original audience, and especially for the people who teach the stuff the original audience think. And so, in a little bit of sympathy to these guys, I get why they were upset and baffled by it. Like, that's this is blasphemy. You just can't do that. But Jesus does something amazing here. Rather than getting into the mud and firing back and forth some angry tweets and retweeting it to his followers and doxing somebody or going with some reaction gifts that make them look like total idiots for being wrong, he does something that you can't do on Twitter, and that is appeal directly to an inarguable, massive authority that ends the discussion. Knowing their hearts, verse four, 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, dot, dot, dot. Then he said to the paralytic, get up and 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. And we gotta break down their response a little bit more in just a minute here as well. But let's focus on the authority side. Think about what he just did in this one little statement. He demonstrated authority over time. Stuff that was done and frozen in historical carbonite that this paralytic had got wrong in the past. Jesus thaws that and resolves it. He demonstrates authority, therefore, over time. Over debt, all wrongdoing is a debt against ultimately God, and Jesus releases him from this debt. He also implicitly is claiming the ability to release this man from the debt he owes to all the people he ever wronged. You've got to be pretty authoritative to do that. Third, he demonstrates authority over cultural demands and cultural sensibilities and expectations of the original audience for the humility of a person by doing something that is effectively a straightforward claim to deity. He demonstrates authority over judgment and justice. He owns dishing out the penalty or lack thereof. That's what he's saying. I mean, you don't have to believe it, but that's what he's claiming. That's the gauntlet he's throwing down to all people through all time, is to say, I alone own whether this penalty happens or the penalty doesn't for stuff that individuals get wrong. And finally, he demonstrates authority over the individual and self-ownership. Though in this instance he did not inflict a new narrative on this paralytic guy's life, he still effectively did so by forgiving his sins. And maybe after just the raw forgiveness element of this, the rewriting of the narrative is the second most stunning demonstration of authority to me. And for the sake of time, I'll tell you a little bit more about why I think that and what we do with this whole passage in general tomorrow, as we land the plan on the whole Matthew 9, 1 through 8 thing and the story of the paralytic getting forgiven and healed. I can tell you this much. As we finish processing this stuff tomorrow, what I think becomes evident is that this story, maybe as much as anything else we've looked at, goes way beyond a cold, cool, casual outside observer position for you and me and takes us right into asking the question can he actually do that? Does he actually exist? Does he actually wield this kind of authority? Is he actually still doing stuff like this? And is it possible that that time travel token scenario of me dealing with stuff that is broken from my past might actually, in a way, be even more attainable through the work of this God who the book of Matthew holds out as having been around here a couple thousand years ago in the flesh? This has implications for you and me. That's my point. We'll game out what they are tomorrow. I'm Matt is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.