There was a technical problem this week, and there is no audio

“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever” (1-John 2:15–17).

One main reason those closest to Jesus in the days of his life took a long time to understand him was because they were much more in league with the world than they realized.

When Peter in Matthew 16 confesses Jesus to be the Messiah, he does so only because the Father has revealed the point to him. Then, immediately after his great confession, Peter, confusing Jesus’ explanation of this fact with a compliment, thinks he is in a position to correct Jesus as to the nature of his mission, and receives a stern rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan! Peter was far more attached to the world and its thinking than he realized.

In the same way, people today are just like Peter, because we are more deeply bound up in allegiance to the world than we think.

Many are active followers of Jesus, as was Peter, but our allegiance is still warped by exaggerated estimates of our own spiritual insight and wisdom. We are more deeply affected by the wisdom of the world than we think.

The confrontation between Jesus and the world helps to clarify the nature of both Jesus and the world. As a result, we gain understanding of who Jesus is and who we are; it forces us to choose, to assess whether our allegiance is to Jesus or to the world.

What comes to mind when we use the word authority?

Matthew 7:29 “When Jesus had finished saying these things the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law”

Matthew has drawn our attention to Jesus’ authority in his teaching ministry, now he displays Jesus’ authority as it is demonstrated in powerful deeds as well as in powerful words.

The Authority of Jesus to Heal and Transform

The prophet Isaiah had foreseen the time the Messiah would be sent to preach good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners. Isaiah 53- 61. The Old Testament Scriptures preserve many such prophecies, and the miracles of Jesus bring at least some of these prophecies to fulfillment.

When John the Baptist entertains doubts about who Jesus is, Jesus himself replies in words deeply kin to Isaiah. The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me” (Matthew 11:4–6). Jesus’ ministry of power, displayed in his miracles, constituted evidence of his identity as the promised Messiah.

Jesus Heals the Leper

The cure of this disease was considered a singular mark of God’s intervention by the Jews. Jesus himself understood the healing of leprosy to be a mark of the dawning of the messianic age (Matthew 11:5).

When Jesus comes in contact with defilement, he is never defiled. His touch has the power to cleanse.

The authority of Jesus to heal and transform is implicit in his person and mission. The authority is already his. He needs only to will the deed, and it is done. No lesson is more for the church to know than this. Hope for reformation and revival lies in the authority of Jesus.

In his ministry certain religious leaders approach Jesus and ask him to perform a miraculous sign; but they earn only rebuke from the Master. They had ample opportunity to witness Jesus’ miracles; but they wanted a miracle on demand. If Jesus had given in to their request he would have been compromised, he would appear to be a trained stuntman programmed to perform tricks on command. The invading power of the kingdom is at Jesus’ disposal, not theirs. To avail oneself of Jesus’ transforming power, one must come as a humble petitioner in need, or not at all.

We are in danger of forgetting this. In regard to healing, opinion is polarized. One faction is persuaded there can be no miraculous healings today, as if the dawning of the kingdom ceased when Jesus returned to glory, not to be manifest again until he returns. Another faction treats healing as a sovereign right, to be gained by the appropriate manipulation of formulas. Both sides are in danger of trying to domesticate Jesus.

Jesus is Above & Fulfills the Law of Moses, Yet Submissive to It

He is submissive to the Scripture, and to the law of Moses in particular. Leviticus 14:10ff provides detailed information on what the person is to do who believes himself healed of leprosy.

Jesus instructed the healed to show himself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them. Jesus wants the cured leper’s obedience to the law to serve as a witness; whether it will prove a positive witness and an incentive to faith, or a negative witness that exposes the depth of unbelief.

In his very act of submission to the law, Jesus makes the law point to himself.

Authority, When Jesus Speaks, God speaks

Centurions constituted the military backbone of the Roman Empire. He understood when he spoke, he was not speaking as one man to another but as a representative of Rome. The centurion was under the authority of his commanding tribune. The centurion applies to Jesus this grasp of his own position and authority. When the centurion speaks, Rome speaks; when Jesus speaks, God speaks.

The centurion’s argument reveals an astonishing level of faith that recognizes that the powerful deeds Jesus was performing did not turn on magic, ritual, or subterfuge, but on his authority,

Jesus Authority Comforts & Terrorizes

His authority comforts the faithful and brings terror to the merely religious.

Jesus’ fellow Jews were steeped in the Scriptures, and their race had enjoyed centuries of covenantal relationship with God, yet this Gentile’s faith far surpassed theirs. He appears to have a better understanding of Jesus authority than the religious Jews.

Jesus insists that many will come from the east and the west (a way of referring to Gentile peoples), “and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven”. The picture is that of the messianic banquet.

Not everyone recognizes Jesus’ authority; others sense the power but do not respond with faith. Even some who naturally belong to the kingdom, that is, the Jews who had lived under the old covenant and had been the heirs of the promises, turn out to be rejected.

This teaching is not very acceptable to many western Christians today. It is opposite of the great god Pluralism who holds much more of our allegiance than we are prone to admit. The test for religious validity today is no longer truth but sincerity, as if sincerity were a virtue even when the beliefs underlying it are entirely mistaken. Teaching about hell is unpopular it is popular and easy to believe in the love of God and difficult to make much sense of his holiness and wrath.

It is startling thing to accept that Jesus says far more about hell than anyone else in the Scripture.

The few images of hell presented in the Scripture, do not suggest that its residents ever repent. It is quite possible that hell continues on and on because the rebellion of its citizens continues on and on. Hell becomes a continuation of a life orientation on this side: “Let him who does wrong continue to do wrong; let him who is vile continue to be vile” (Revelation 22:11).

Most of us have an inadequate understanding of sin. The heart of sin is not so much discrete acts of moral failure, but the attitude of life that is foundationally self-centered. That is the nature and measure of our sin.

Those that will be rejected are religious people, “good” people, religiously privileged people. The only difference between them and those like the centurion who come from the east and the west to sit with the patriarchs at the messianic banquet is faith, the kind of faith displayed by the centurion. That type of faith is the faith that approaches Jesus with the understanding of a person who sees their need and sees in Jesus the sufficient answer to that need. It sounds jus like the poverty of spirit Jesus spoke of in the Beatitudes.

Satisfied self-centeredness, in religion is harmful to transforming faith.

Jesus Authority and His Work on the Cross

All these healings are merely examples of many healings and exorcisms he performed. All this took place, we are told, to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows”.

This quotation is from the well-known passage of Scripture (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). The passage seems to present the Servant as a sacrifice substituted that others might be spared. But here, apparently, Matthew is saying that Jesus’ healing ministry, not his atoning death, is the way he “took up our infirmities and carried our diseases.”

Both Scripture and Jewish tradition understood that all sickness is caused, directly or indirectly, by sin. But not every illness is the direct result of a specific sin. Sickness may reflect the fact that all of us live this side of the fall, under the curse, limited by mortality. Such sickness will plague us until the consummation of the kingdom spoken of in Revelation 22:3. In this larger sense, sickness is still connected with sin; but the connection is indirect, and finally remedied only by the return of Christ at the end of the age.

The New Testament recognizes both the direct and the indirect connection to sin and sickness. In John 5, the man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years is told not to sin lest a worse thing befall him, which presupposes that the paralysis was the direct result of a specific sin. But on the other hand, in John 9, when the disciples ask Jesus whether the man born blind or his parents had sinned that he should be so afflicted, Jesus says neither option is correct: this situation came about for the glory of God.

The heart of the matter can be summarized this way.

First, all sickness is the result of the condition of sinfulness in which we find ourselves, but only some sickness is the direct result of immediate and specific sin. That perhaps suggests that illness ought to serve as an occasion for the thoughtful person to engage in a little quiet self-examination.

Second, whatever the immediate cause, some sickness is healed in the Scripture, and some is not. Modern voices that suggest God cannot or does not heal miraculously today have little exegetical warrant to support their stance; but equally, those modern voices that insist God inevitably grants healing provided only that there is adequate faith have forfeited the balance of Scripture and pursued a reductionism that once again tries to domesticate God.

Today we are in a better position to understand why Matthew cites these lines from Isaiah. Matthew understands that Jesus came to save his people from their sin: he emphasizes that point in his first chapter. Isaiah tells us that the Servant bears our infirmities and carries our sicknesses. It is in that context of the Servant Song, that shows us that the way the Servant bears the sicknesses of others is through his suffering and death, by which he deals with both sin and suffering.

Matthew draws a connection between Isaiah 53 and Jesus’ healing ministry. Matthew understands that Jesus’ healing miracles were not simply acts of power, but were performed as a function of Jesus’ atoning death still to take place.

Because even within Jesus’ ministry, before the cross, the kingdom was being inaugurated and demonstrated, it was appropriate that healings and exorcisms should be performed in anticipation of the great day when sickness and demonic power would be removed once and for all from God’s people. Because all of benefits stem from Jesus’ atoning death, those same healings can be understood to point beyond the authority of Jesus to the cross of Jesus.

These were signs not only of Jesus’ authority but also of his servanthood. As they are the anticipation of the consummated kingdom still awaited, so also are they the fruit of the cross-work of Jesus not yet performed. Matthew, writing after the death and resurrection of Jesus and therefore easily perceiving the connection, draws attention to it by citing Isaiah 53 in connection with Jesus’ healing ministry.

When Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law, the centurion’s servant, the leper, and all the others, he did so not merely out of the abundance of power, but because he was to absorb in his own person, in his own act as a willing, atoning sacrifice, the sin bound up with suffering. Because the healings were done in anticipation of Calvary, they fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases.”

When the New Testament thoughts are put together, the death and resurrection of Jesus stand at the heart of everything.

There is healing in the atonement, and the atonement provides God’s people with all benefits that ultimately come to them. There is a resurrection body in the atonement; but no one uses that point to argue that all believers today should have a resurrection body now, and failure to do so shows a lack of faith.

The question is not whether or not the atonement stands as the basis for all blessings that come to God’s children, but which of those benefits can we try to apply now, and which of them will only come later. Healing, is one of those benefits that has been secured by the cross, occasionally applied now, and promised for the new heaven and the new earth. If in God’s mercy he grants healing now, whether by “normal” or “miraculous” means, we must be grateful; but we have no right to claim the benefit now in every case just because it has been secured by the work of Jesus on the cross.

There is no name it and claim it, Jesus still decides.

I hope that all of us who read and study His Word will pledge ourselves again to submit joyfully to Jesus’ authority, and remind ourselves that only he can meet our needs and sustain us both in this life and in the life to come. That we will give Him thanks that all of his transforming power, and authority, whether exercised now or at the consummation of the ages, comes from the costly sacrifice he made for us.