Hey friends, this is going to be another one of those where we pick it up really abruptly. We're talking about Matthew chapter eight. I just want to read that passage again so that we reset this since you know it's been a day or whatever. It goes like this. When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, Lord, if you're willing, you can make me clean. Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. I am willing, he said. Be clean. Immediately he was cured of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, See that you don't tell anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded as a testimony to them. All right, hopefully that jogged your memory. Here's some intra music, and then we'll just pick up where we left off. And it's reminiscent of what happens in it's over in Luke chapter, I want to say five, but it's definitely coming up for us in Matthew chapter nine. Luke arranges it a little bit more closely. Matthew has a few other events that occur between the healing of the leper and the one I'm about to talk about, but this is the pardon of the paralytic. And when you get to this particular passage, your Bibles won't usually say the healing of the paralytic. It'll say the pardon, because Jesus said that was the point of emphasis. So I want to read this passage to you that I think is a parallel from Matthew chapter 9. It says Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over, and came to his own town. Some men brought out 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. At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, This fellow is blaspheming, knowing their thoughts. Jesus said, Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your heart? 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? And 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. I think the passage we're looking at here with the healing of this leper and declaring him clean is a precursor. It frames the question of what we get into a little bit later on with the passage we just looked at in Matthew chapter nine. Which one of these things is harder? To do something miraculous and a cool trick that everybody's impressed by once, that then the people will die and for the next generation might forget about, or to fundamentally change the hearts of people and what is revolting and clean, those most deeply held visceral values that we hold. And there's a reason that this comes right after the line about Jesus being authoritative and not like their teachers of the law, who just squawk about things and talk about different topics with hot takes to keep stuff interesting, but don't have the authority to make any real change. Jesus made real change. Now this goes even one step deeper, and that's why this has to be a two-part episode. Level one of this miracle is break the laws of time and space. Level two of this miracle is challenge and turn upside down all of people's most deeply held visceral assumptions, not about what they even intellectually think, but about what is desirable and what is gross. But level three of this little anecdote that only requires five words from Jesus is that in Matthew 5.17's the entire Levitical law about clean and unclean. You remember Matthew 5.17, right? This is the one where it says, Don't think that I've come to abolish the law and the prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. People are still wondering, wow, what do you mean by that? That's maybe the most confusing verse to the original audience in the entire Sermon on the Mount, and we get an answer to it as soon as we walk off the hill. Here's what fulfillment looks like. We're gonna fix this thing. And instead of everybody learning how to work around this problem and to just tolerate this tragedy because this is the best we can do to mitigate the fallenness of the world and of humanity, I'm just gonna fix it. I'm gonna fix it. You're gonna see it fixed with your eyes physically, and then I'm going to declare that spiritually, in a greater reality, what you just saw physically is manifest spiritually as well. In other words, he didn't just do a solid to some guy who was brave and courageous and a pity case and an outsider who's the underdog who came through with a gesture of faith. No, I mean, I guess there's that. The guy didn't have leprosy anymore. But the bigger thing that he did here is he made a profound theological point, even theological shift through a miracle. And this is part of why I'm not always hyped on modern claims of miracles. They don't do anything theologically, they're just handouts for people who imagine they were in the right place at the right time. It doesn't follow the same pattern of what we see Jesus doing, where there are profound theological implications to these miraculous things. Does that mean that I think that God couldn't break the laws of time and space today? No, I'm not saying that and just being honest with you about my healthy skepticism, and I still like you, and we can get along if you don't have that same skepticism. But the bottom line is this is why you and I spend so much time bouncing back to the Old Testament, and I read you lengthy passages of Old Testament law stuff. This is why we took all that time to break down all the five different levels of the law. Remember when we talked about the different types of rules that existed in my house and they're not really the same, but they're all technically rules of the house? The reason we did all of that stuff is because Jesus is the fulfillment of all of that stuff piece by piece, bit by bit. And we are getting one key component of that here. The kind of human problem, the human stain that isn't your fault. It just happens. We all know what it's like to be a victim and to just be around stuff that's broken and bad and destructive, and we didn't mean for it to happen, and there's nothing we can do. We're victims of it, or just by merit of our state of being, we decay, things break. No one did anything wrong to make that happen. That is what the clean and unclean thing is symbolic of. And here, Jesus out and out resolves it. So Matthew's description of the authority with which he spoke is further accentuated by Jesus saying, I am master of clean and unclean. I am master of even the deeply held societal revulsions that people feel. And if Jesus can fix that physically, then maybe Jesus does have the authority to declare things that are broken and beyond our control and just part of what is wrecked about this world, unrecked and unbroken, and not beyond the control of all entities, but rather only beyond the control of all entities other than God Himself who can resolve it. A lot of people say in Matthew, you don't get claims to deity from Jesus like you do in John. John, you've got all these I am statements where Jesus literally uses the name of God to describe himself, and in doing so is saying, I am God in the flesh. But this is a short-sighted read on Matthew, because every time he makes a claim like this, he's saying, I have the authority to do this. Who has the authority to do this? Everybody in the physical original audience of Jesus, everybody in Matthew's original audience to whom he wrote this would have known that if you make a claim like that, you are claiming deity. Remember over in Matthew 9, when the Pharisees are like, this is blasphemy. Well, what did Jesus actually say that made them say this is blasphemy and get mad? Remember, he said, Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven, because who can forgive sins except for God Himself? Well, those are two claims in two chapters of Jesus that would be as loud and clear as saying, I am God. So Jesus, in five words and one gesture, confirms the authority that people saw him having in the Sermon on the Mount, confirms that he does have the credibility to make giant sweeping claims about how things actually are, how the kingdom actually is. Lots of also ran Messiah attempts came along. They couldn't do anything, they couldn't back it up. They were really nothing more than a cable news pundit. Jesus has just put himself squarely in a different and fully unique category of potential claimants to the title of Messiah. Now, just in passing, real quick here, you notice that Jesus said, don't go tell anyone, but it just happened in front of a gigantic crowd. You and I are reading it now. So some people are gonna look at this and you'll hear it said that this was Jesus saying, Oh, I don't want to be overwhelmed or mobbed by other requests for miracles and things like that. And that might make sense in some of the future moments we're gonna get to, where he says, don't go tell anybody after he does something miraculous. But in this situation, again, everybody saw it. It seems to be more of an urgency to say, don't forget the law. Let's see this through. You got to go and do the whole priest thing. And okay, I guess that means we need to talk about why he needs to go do the priest thing. So then Jesus said to him, see that you don't tell anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded as a testimony to them, is a completion of Leviticus 14. Why is he doing that? Is it because he's carrying forward a law that says if you get like acne real bad and then you go to the mall to that vending machine that sells like the acne clearing stuff, and then you rub it all over your face for a couple months and your acne goes away, then you're supposed to go to like a Jewish rabbi or something and show him? No, I don't think there's any evidence Jesus is carrying forward that law. I think what he's saying is take it all the way through all of the religious tests. You'll see he's clean, and he's gonna be declared clean by the priest in the same way that in Leviticus 14, priests would see somebody who got better and healed up, they would know what to look for medically, and they would say, You are clean, you are readmitted to society. Jesus is playing along with that in a language his original audience would understand to more further demonstrate that his claim, you're clean, is an absolute pronouncement that means that that man is no longer removed from the fellowship of things involving God. He now has access to all of the things involving God again, both literally and implicitly metaphorically for the larger audience. If I had more time right now, we'd jump over to Acts chapter 10 and look at Peter's vision of the sheet being lowered from heaven and the animals and that and stuff, because that kind of rounds out the thought. But you're smart, you can go check out Acts chapter 10 as homework and see how this plays out a little more thoroughly on your own. With every air compressor still running and every drill still firing off, I have one more thing that I want to cover here. And that is that I noticed a couple days ago that two or three of you here at the beginning of the month tapped out on the whole Patreon support thing. And I want you to know it is not weird between you and me. That is totally cool. Thank you for the time that you were able to be a part and help out. I really do appreciate that. But also to people who do the Patreon thing and people who don't. I cannot stress enough how thankful I am for everybody who's a part of this thing. And for those of you who jumped in for a little bit and that was the amount of time that it made sense, that's ridiculously over the top generous of you. And thank you. So it ain't weird. You're awesome. Thanks everybody for being a part of this week of the TMBH podcast. And next week we'll keep cruising through Matthew 8 and just go item by item through all the different things that Jesus does to demonstrate that he has the authority to back up the bold claims that we saw in the Sermon on the Mount. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. I appreciate you. Let's do it again soon.