Day 188: Skin Diseases 2

July 7
Today's Connected Passages: 

• 2 Kings 5:19-27 
• 2 Chronicles 26 
• Matthew 8:1-4 
• Mark 1:40-45 
• Luke 5:12-16; 17:11-19 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Canon Connected, where we read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections of the Bible. I appreciate you joining us here on day number 188 of the Canon Connected. And right now we are in a study of about six days on things in the Old Testament where God that God classified as either clean or unclean. And we're starting with skin diseases because this is an actual big deal in the Bible. Um the when a person had a skin disease, leprosy or some other skin disease, there obviously were a lot of things that God told the people to do in response to that. We read that yesterday in the Old Testament. But the Bible also gives us quite a few stories, I would say, of people who had leprosy and what um and why they why they contacted it and what they were what they were supposed to do in response. And I think the fact that, again, the Bible doesn't give us just rules and laws and regulations and even in another sense philosophies and that sort of thing, but it gives us real people and real circumstances as proof, again, that God cares about us understanding this deeply because it is so real to us to see a real person go through the things that God talks about, you know, in laws, in regulations, in rituals, and all the other ways that the Bible gives us truth. But a huge percentage of the Bible is stories, it's narrative. And so we see many of those today. One of those is the end of the really famous story about Naaman. And I didn't really include the first part of Naaman because we've studied it in other passages, but just for context, again, he contacted leprosy and then praise God for the servant girl that was from Israel who didn't have a negative attitude, but told, you know, eventually got around to telling him, you know, you can go see this prophet, you know, one of the Jewish prophets, and he can heal you. Um Elisha had the power to do it. And so even though she was kidnapped, and even though she was, you know, almost like a trafficked, you know, slave, she still loved her master enough um to point him to healing from the power of God. And so this is it's very interesting because uh a skeptic could wonder why didn't God just do this? Why didn't he send a prophet to every single person? Why all the laws about staying outside the camp and waiting and then having to be approved by the priest? Why couldn't he just do this every time? And Jesus uses this as an example, as I've alluded to many times. This is definitely one of those scriptures that's always at the top of my head. Luke chapter 4. God could have healed any sort of leper in the Old Testament. He didn't heal, at least as far as we know, like this, any of the Jewish lepers. He told them to go wait outside of the camp, you know, and wait to be healed and to spend time in their pitiful condition and in their ostracized condition. And yet for Naaman he healed him. But part of this story, too, is not just that God chose the Gentile to heal, but it's this is this Gehazi, uh, this servant of Elisha who selfishly takes it upon himself to try to get money and and as recompense. And Elisha was hardcore against this. He wanted all of the honor and glory to go to God. He was not in this for the money. Um, he was not in it for the recognition, and yet Gehazi, or however you say his name, was not satisfied with that. And he tried to lie to a prophet of God. Isn't it crazy how often people think they can deceive God? It's it's ridiculous. But I mean, I feel like I do it myself, you know, in modern times too. But the the point though is to see though that again he was judged with leprosy. And so this to me mirrors pretty similarly the story of Uzziah, the Uzziah that you read today. And because Uzziah was again somebody else who was judged with leprosy, and again, who who suffered a terrible fate because of it, just to accentuate again how horrible it was, a judgment from God. We could have even, again, used Miriam, but she was a part of other stories. She had the same thing happen to her. But it is a judgment, that could have been a connection, but a judgment from God because, again, the people needed to understand, you know, just how serious sin is. And so he would give them things, again, that were unnatural. You know, wages of sin is death sort of thing, but the consequences of sin so often are things that uh that absolutely were never intended to be a part of our world. And so Uzziah got to be proud, had a successful, you know, reign. He was on top of the world. He seemed like he, you know, he was following God, he was humble, and then he got too proud and he and he did something the kings were never supposed to do in the temple. And his men stood up to him, and he was he was judged with leprosy. And that really, if you read the story, it sounds like that was his legacy, that he had leprosy, you know, before um uh until the day he died. Um, because again, this was you know, God showing how seriously, you know, pride is. And even though a lot of people gain the disease innocently, there is a great sense in which people, you know, in the Old Testament, we can see at least three examples of how it was given in the form of judgment. And then Jesus, strong connections here, because this happened a lot, okay, in Jesus' ministry. He didn't just heal blind people and lame people and sick people, he didn't even just raise the dead, but he did something that would have been very outrageous and very outlandish and very offensive, as again we have seen over and over and over again. You know, I was just thinking of Good Friday, oh not that long ago, and how offensive the cross is. Well, it's offensive, and even against the law, so to speak, to touch a leper, and yet Jesus shows how he transcends the law because he shows God's heart for people like this, not in their case, you know, for them to be continually judged for it, but for them to find healing. And so Jesus healed lepers. Again, that uh again, just how outrageous this would have been, you know, in his time and his context is really hard to overstate. Um there's been several diseases, you know, throughout human history that were so contagious and so and so uh and so looked down upon that people were ostracized for them. And I even think about, you know, there's the the the heart of the Armenian and Calvinist debate is centered on two men and their teachings over 400 years ago. But I even read, you know, about Jacobus Arminius, way outside of the debate about salvation and how if God you know chooses people or if the people have free will at all. Jacobus Arminius was a pastor and he was somebody who went into people's houses during the bubonic plague to to minister to them, to give them food, to help them, and he was willing to risk his own health to do so. And that to me reflects the heart of Jesus Christ. I'm not advocating at all people never to show any sort of common sense in dealing with you know disease or things like that, and I'm very grateful for hospitals, you know, in modern medicine. But during Jesus' day, he was willing to touch lepers because he wanted to show just the how merciful our God is, Son of David, if you remember all the way back to Holy Week. But Jesus healed lepers regularly in his life, and he always told them about the law of Moses, and I didn't even mention this yesterday, but it's part of the law, as you could you could have read yesterday, to give an offering. You know, not offerings we're supposed to meant, you know, sin or atonement. We talked about that way back when. But they gave an offering again as a way to be reconciled to God because the disease again was reflective of a state of separation from God because the disease and death were never supposed to enter our world. And so in every one of these cases, some of these are parallel passage, but Jesus says, you know, go to the priest, uh, make your offering, and do what the law requires. So he expedited the process of healing. They didn't have to stay outside of the camp continually. He stopped that because he had the power to do so as the as the as the almighty, sovereign God, the merciful God. But then he had them follow the law in response to what they were supposed to do. Because Jesus never advocated breaking the law, he corrected misunderstandings of law, especially about the Sabbath day, but Jesus never truly broke the law. And then Luke 17, which is one of the more famous stories because it's a story of Thanksgiving, and we'll get to the Thanksgiving as well. But they're lepers, and it's the Samaritan, just like with uh Elisha and and uh and Naaman, how we see that the Gentile is the one who's favored. Here Jesus tells a story as he often did. Luke chapter 4 is just one of many examples where he offends people by making the non-Jew the hero of the story, because here the fact he makes the Samaritan the one who gives thanks for being healed from leprosy makes him the one who is the most humble and the most gracious and the most godly truly. And just like the story of the Good Samaritan is not just about loving your neighbor who's who's in pitiful conditions, it makes the Samaritan the hero of the story. And it proves again that God loves all people, and they're and these foreigners who were looked down upon and were absolutely just avoided, and and and the Jews had prejudice against him, he's the hero of the story, and every one of them is healed by Jesus, though, because again, he wanted to undo just as he did with death and his own his own death and other people's deaths, three of them that we've seen. He wanted to undo the sinful effects of this fallen world, of disease, of blindness, you know, of people not being able to walk, not being able to hear. Jesus did this all the time. Jesus brought mercy, justice, and healing to this world, and the way that he interacted with lepers is absolutely a probably the the best example because of how they were treated. And I'm sure that the blind and the lame um and the sick were were treated very similarly, but I doubt anybody in Jesus' day was as ostracized as lepers were. But God was about healing. He wanted his camp to be pure and his camp to be pristine, and he wanted to reflect the purity of the body of Christ, the purity of his own purity. But also Jesus proves again he loves these people. It was never about punishment, you know, for punishment's sake. But it was about, you know, understanding God's mercy and at the same time understanding his holiness, because they're not in competition with each other. So praise God for Jesus teaching us just how to see people who are like this. And so this is again just one of the three different subtopics we're going to talk about on this dial. We're gonna tomorrow we're gonna get to you know clean and unclean food, which again is very practical to me. The stories of Jesus and Naaman and Gehazi and uh and Uzziah, they're very practical. They help us understand things in a very three-dimensional way, in a very real-world way. But clean and unclean food is a big deal in the Old Testament as well. Kosher, it's sometimes referred to as, and some people still adhere to this, of course, Jewish people in particular. But the way the Bible talks about clean and unclean food, new to Old Testament, is something we absolutely should understand, I think. And so we will study that tomorrow and the next day, two days of this. So come back and be with us again tomorrow as we continue to read the connections, see the connections, and say the connections. Thank you.