So we have in this passage that
we read earlier, one of the best known of Jesus' healing miracles. And it's the fourth of the healing
miracles in Mark's gospel. And as we've said so often, each
of them tell us something important about the way the Lord Jesus
saves his people. In fact, when he was named at
his birth, you shall call his name Jesus because he will save
his people from their sins. And so we have in Mark chapter
one, the healing of the demon possessed man, showing that all
mankind is born under the reign of Satan, held captive by him
until the Lord sovereignly intervenes. We had Peter's mother-in-law,
a woman with fever, showing the sickness, the sin sickness of
all of our bodies. The man we talked about last
week was full of leprosy and our sin consumes all of our being
and makes us cry out unclean, unclean. And so in today's passage
we come to the paralytic man and in the story of the paralytic
man we see the inability of us doing anything to aid ourselves. We are in a state of helplessness
until God Almighty intervenes in saving grace and so to go
to chapter 1 of a chapter 2 verse 1 it says when he'd come back
to Capernaum after several days afterwards it was heard that
he was at home Capernaum was the town that Jesus made his
home as he began his ministry. And Capernaum stands in the book
of God as a testament to all believers of the danger of religion. This is the town in which Jesus
made his hometown during his earthly ministry and we need
to read of the end of this town which saw Jesus in their midst
more than any other town Israel and saw miracles after miracles
Matthew 11 23 says and you Capernaum will you will not be exalted
to heaven will you you will descend to Hades for if the miracles
had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained
to this day. Nevertheless, I say to you that
it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day
of judgment than for you. It is just so dangerous to play
games when it comes to matters of your eternal soul. So many
of these people sought the gifts and miracles, but not the giver. It is possible to eat the bread
and fish that the Lord Jesus created by a miracle, and not
yourself, no, the Savior. This story will show that it's
possible to be theologically very correct and miss Christ
altogether. The most serious and dangerous
activity you can be involved in is the spiritual activity
of Christianity. The sun, which melts the wax,
hardens the clay. Exposure to Christian religious
activities can be the cause of the most hardened response. No town in all Israel had the
privileges of Capernaum. The Sodomites were openly wicked
in ways which are shocking. The men of the town gathered
to rape the angels of God, and then Lot, to appease them, offered
his virgin daughter for them for the night. But Jesus' assessment
of the people of Capernaum sees their activity as worse. And
why? Because sin despising greater
light is much more serious. And so for us in this day, 2010,
as we move further away from the cross of the Lord Jesus in
time, we don't grow less responsible for getting the gospel right,
but we actually grow more responsible. As God shows us, through the
events of history, His faithfulness to His promises, we have seen
with our own eyes the fulfilment of God's promises as He brings
His gospel to expose men's hearts, to bring godly repentance and
great joy and peace or sadly hardening. With great privilege
comes great responsibility to be faithful to the light that
we have received and to hold fast to the gospel and its power. So in Capernaum Jesus was very
popular, Mark 2.2 says, and many gathered together, so that there
was no longer room, not even near the door, and he was speaking
the word to them. Again, we see the main emphasis
of Jesus' work. It was a teaching ministry. The
kingdom of God is at hand. The dominion of the king is here. And what lessons the Lord Jesus
must have taught those people. Oh, to be in their midst and
to hear him speak these words. And then we have this wonderful
story of the paralytic 2-3. And they came to him bringing
to him a paralytic carried by four men. The leper came driven
by his helplessness. This man was carried by others. We never get to know the names
of these men or what happened to them. What a great example
they are to us. They had great faith. They had
great care and compassion for their friend. They had great
perseverance. They were willing to make any
effort that this man should reach the presence of the Lord. And
yet, their lives are now hidden with Christ in God. We hear nothing
more of them. but their memory should be held
in esteem. And so their zeal is shown in
the next verse, being unable to get to him, get to the Lord
Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him. And
when they had dug an opening, they let down the pallet on which
the paralytic was lying. It's an extraordinary scene,
isn't it? This house surrounded by such a crowd of people, that
you can't get in, you can't get near the door, you can't get
to the Lord Jesus. And the houses of those days
had a stairway that went up the outside to a flat roof. And sometimes
these roofs were covered with tiles. And so there you have
seen the Lord Jesus with the Pharisees and the teachers of
law sitting in front of him, a crowd around that was pressing
in at the doors and windows. And there above the Lord Jesus,
There is a breaking through the roof and you can imagine the
dust and all the other things that fell down because they had
four men had to let a paralyzed man down. So the hole they made
must have been nearly two meters long and a meter wide to let
a paralytic down. It was a huge hole in the roof.
And so faith of these men that the Lord Jesus commended doesn't
take any notice of obstacles, nor the opinions of men, nor
the physical things around them. But it always seeks the face
of the Lord Jesus, just like the leper. No one else can help. We must seek the Redeemer, and
until we do, we will not be satisfied. True faith is restless until
it finds its rest in the presence of the Lord personally. And Jesus, seeing their faith,
said to the paralytic, Jesus saw their faith. It is God alone
indeed who sees faith, God alone indeed who knows faith, because
true faith is a gift from God. There's a sevenfold definition
of faith, and it's in your bulletin, and I can read some of them out
to you from Ebenezer Erskine, a sermon of his some considerable
time ago. Faith is the gift of God. It's
not a product of free will. It is the operation of the Spirit
of God by the Word of God, and it is the parent of all other
graces. Faith has Christ Jesus as its
principal object, for it is faith in Christ Jesus, our Lord, Saviour,
mediator and hope. Christ is the bread, faith is
the mouth that eats. Christ is the brazen serpent,
faith is the eye that looks. 5. Faith is receiving Christ,
not just hearing about Him or acknowledging Him, but committal
to Him. 6. Is Christ food? Then eat. 7. Is Christ living water? Then
drink. 8. Is Christ the refuge? then
flee to him, is Christ Lord, then worship him. Faith is to
rest upon Christ, rest in the Lord, Psalm 37.7. Faith is not
an isolated act based on an intellectual knowledge of some facts, but
it is trusting in and resting upon Christ to perform all that
I need. Faith is to rest upon Christ
alone. The word alone is important.
Most men by nature try to add something to the sacrifice and
intercession of Christ. God has established a bridge
of communication between heaven and earth by the obedience and
blood of Christ. And every other passage is blocked
by the holiness and justice of God. Faith rests upon Christ
as he is presented in the gospel. We ask no other sign than the
Word of God. Faith is to believe the record
that God has given concerning His Son. He that has the Son
of God has life. Faith rests upon Christ for salvation,
sanctification, righteousness and full redemption. The goal
of faith is the salvation of our souls. And this our Lord
undertook in the eternal covenant and which he completed on Calvary
when he cried, it is finished. And so in response to the faith,
but in a sovereign act, the Lord Jesus says to this man, he says,
son, your sins are forgiven. He calls this man son. He's one
of the family, one of my family, a child of God. Galatians 4 says
that because you are sons, God sends the spirit of his sons
into our hearts so that we cry out, Abba, Father. Romans 8 says
that if we are sons, then we are heirs, joint heirs with Christ. Son, it's a wonderful declaration
of relationship. And then he says to the paralytic
man, your sins, your sins. Sins are always personal. You
might say, what sins can a man commit who can't walk and is
paralyzed? Well, there are two answers to
that. One is that we all sinned in our father Adam. And all the
pain and suffering and disease that we see in this world flows
from that one act. So to be human is to be a sinner. But sins also are not just our
acts, but our acts reflect what the real problem is, and that
is our hearts. This man was limited in ability
to commit sins physically, but according to God, his heart was
desperately wicked and beyond cure. So how much do we need
forgiveness? How much do we need that we know
that we are forgiven? The head of a British medical
institution said, if my patients could be assured of forgiveness,
half of them would go home tomorrow. The greatest need of all human
beings is to be forgiven. But the Lord Jesus says something
even more remarkable in these words. He says, your sins are
forgiven. It's a vivid activity. And it's a passive. It means
that God is the author. It means that your sins are forgiven,
not by your activity. They are forgiven by God and
God alone. And it's a present, it's a present
continuous action. and it says really your sins
have been forgiven once and for all and basically as my friend
Andrew Spurgeon said basically the Lord is equating himself
with God by making it a perfect and a present that at that moment
that person was totally forgiven. And as Andrew says, wow, a reminder
of our salvation. What a sweet promise from our
Savior. Only those who have experienced the depth of their hopelessness
can know something of the wonder of such a promise. And the question
that's before all of us always, isn't it? Have you had God, the
Holy Spirit, apply these words to your soul? These are the sweetest
words in all the world. Not that your sins will be forgiven
when you've done some good deeds, or been through the fires of
purgatory, or been baptized to perform some religious duty.
They are forgiven. forgiven by God, because all
sin is against God. As David said, against you and
you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. But you might say to me, you
said at the beginning of your messages, these miracles are pictures of
God's salvation of his people. But this man had just come in
faith. He didn't do anything. He couldn't do anything. Jesus
didn't ask him to obey any rules. Jesus didn't ask him what he
had done. And that precisely is the point
of this miracle. Salvation is by free grace. It cannot require you to do anything
because you are like the paralytic. You are like the leper. Salvation
is free. It comes as a gift from God through
the work of the Lord Jesus. It's totally dependent upon God. And then sadly in Mark 2, 6,
we see a contrast between the Lord Jesus and His way of saving
people and the religious people of the day. But some of the scribes
were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts. Here in this
miracle we have the first confrontation between the Lord Jesus and those
who would oppose Him for the rest of His ministry and hound
Him to His death, thinking all the while that they were truly
serving and honouring God. Jesus wants them to be in no
doubt whatsoever about His claims about Himself. He claims clearly
that He is God and He says to His enemies, I want you to be
absolutely clear about who I am and how I save my people, how
I love and how I save my bride. He leaves no room for any doubt
and His enemies confirm their understanding of His claim. It
is sobering to note that as these men pursued the Lord to crucifixion,
they sought to paralyse the One who healed the paralytic. They
nailed His hands and feet to the cross, publicly humiliating
Him as much as possible, leaving Him naked between heaven and
earth as they mocked His inability to save Himself after He had
saved so many. O, the wickedness of the human
heart! And what do they say? They understand
clearly what Jesus claims. Verse 7. Why does this man speak
in that way? He is blaspheming, for who can
forgive sins but God alone? Their understanding of the Scriptures
was exactly right, but here before them was the God of the Scriptures,
and their personal knowledge of the Messiah in their midst
was just hopeless. It was just darkness. And the
darkness was greater because they claimed to see. It's interesting
to note that after three and a half years of Jesus' public
ministry to these people, this allegation is the only one they
could lay to his charge. And Jesus shows them that he
will not deny his deity. And now they have three years
to examine him closely and test his teaching and his life against
the scriptures. Again and again the scribes,
the teachers of the law and the Pharisee, reveal the hardness
of their heart. They find it impossible to rejoice
in healing and deliverance, but always seek to find fault. And
Jesus here attacks the very foundation of their self-righteous lives.
Their religion had shown them that they had established place
of power and prominence and status and honor and money by their
work at the temple and by their proclamation of the law of God.
But in fact sin had blinded their eyes to who they really were. They were paralyzed in their
sins and their religious devotion only caused them to be harder
in heart. They needed to be forgiven. 4
Sin had blinded their eyes to who stood before them, Jesus
granting grace and mercy, and they couldn't acknowledge it
even in his presence. 5 And they were in desperate
need of the Lord Jesus' mercy and grace. 6 If the light within
them was dark, how great was the darkness of their hearts!
Now unto the Lord Jesus goes on to say, Beware of the yeast
of the Pharisees. It works through the whole batch
of dough. Beware of works and law-based
religion. Mark 2.8, Immediately Jesus,
aware in his spirit that they were reasoning that way within
themselves, said to them, Why are you reasoning about these
things in your heart? And what the Greek means is that
he not only immediately was aware of their thoughts, but he was
fully and clearly aware of what they were thinking. There is
nothing hidden from the sight of the One whose knowledge is
infinite, especially our hidden thoughts. We all think that our
thoughts are hidden from others and it's a good thing they are,
but we make a big mistake if we ever think God does not know
our thoughts even before we do. We have often talked of this
immersion in repentance. The totality of our beings need
to be immersed in repentance because every part of us needs
cleansing. and wonderfully that immersion
in repentance leads to an immersion in the forgiveness of sins. Sins
of not only the activities that we do but sins of the things
that we think. And the Lord Jesus now finally
brings the test. It's all very well to say these
things as Jesus says, which is easier? To say to the paralytic,
your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up, pick up your pallet
and walk. We have an expression that chalk
is cheap, meaning it is much easier to say something than
to do it. It is easy to say, son, your sins are forgiven,
but how much harder is it to achieve it? because God is holy
and God is just and sins must be punished and without the shedding
of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. In reality the answer
to the question is that both these things are impossible. Impossible unless God does something. So the Lord Jesus had begun his
time by teaching and teaching the gospel of God, the gospel
from God, the gospel which is himself. And now he demonstrates
who he really is. The Lord Jesus makes it really
clear to these people that His miracle of healing and His words
that He had taught them before and now His words of promise
are joined inseparably. We cannot divide the works of
Jesus from the words of Jesus. In 2.10 He says to them, But
so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth
to forgive sins. He said to the paralytic, He said to him, get up, pick
up your pallet and go home. The Lord Jesus says that he has
authority and to have authority is to have power. It's to have
power to do things, it's power to do things lawfully. It combines
the idea that it is right and there is might. Authority or
right is what the real meaning is. And so the Lord Jesus has
authority. In Ephesians 1, He says that
His children are blessed with every spiritual blessing in the
heavenlies. They are chosen, they are holy, they are without
blame, they are loved, they are accepted in the Beloved. So Jesus
alone has the right because he is God. Jesus alone has the authority
because Jesus is God. And because of Jesus' death,
it is lawful and it is right for God to say to this man, your
sins are forgiven because before the holy justice of God, God
has taken away the sins of this man. so salvation again is by
free grace and so then we come to the miracle in 211 Jesus says
to the paralytic man I say to you get up pick up your pallet
and go home and so in this miracle story we have three three examples,
three clear teachings, and three clear examples of the Lord Jesus'
deity. Jesus is God. The first one is
that He and He alone can pardon sins. and he does it by just
speaking a word. He had been teaching these people
the word and now they will see the impact of his word that the
kingdom of God, the dominion of God's king, the Lord Jesus,
is in their midst. The second act of proof that
he is really God was that Jesus knew their thoughts. and acted
upon that knowledge and told them what they thought so that
they were in no doubt themselves that he really did see exactly
what was going on in their minds. Jeremiah 17 10 says I the Lord
search the heart I test the mind So God actually searches our
hearts and He really knows. And now there is the third evidence
of Jesus' claim to be God as He heals this man instantly and
completely. And in this miracle the Lord
Jesus seems to demand attention to His character as Messiah because
He calls Himself the Son of Man, which in Daniel 7 is a messianic
title for God's Son as He comes to this earth. And so the miracle
and His words of promise to this paralytic man are intricately
linked together. And what joins it all together
is the deity of our Lord Jesus, his absolute infinite sovereignty,
that his word speaks promise and his word speaks life. And
then we have the great response. The Pharisees and the teachers
of the law and the scribes on one hand, they're critical of
Jesus. But the man got up and immediately
picked up the pallet and went out in the sight of everyone,
so that they were all amazed and were glorifying God, saying,
We have never seen anything like this. There's a great verse in
Isaiah 35, as all the works of the Lord Jesus are just acted
out, acting out the Old Testament promises. In Isaiah 35, he talks
about strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are faint hearted, be strong, do not fear. Behold, your God will come with
vengeance. with recompense here will come. Then the eyes of the blind shall
be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then
the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the dumb sing."
What a wonderful description of what we have here before us.
This man got up immediately and went out and they were all amazed
and they glorified God. And so the Lord Jesus shows that
He loves His brethren, He loves His bride more than they can
imagine. He is willing and able to do more for them than they
think possible. How much our lives Maybe I ought
to talk about mine. He's lived doubting His goodness,
His sovereignty, His love and His grace. How often I live as
if His word of promise is not true. O Saviour, please visit
us again by Your Spirit through Your Word to bring us showers
of blessing, comfort for the brokenhearted. peace that passes
understanding, that we may walk afresh by faith, to stand with
new arms and legs renewed by your power, standing in your
strength, resting in your providence, refreshed by your love, looking
to your word of promise. May we, like this crowd, be amazed
and glorify God for His wonders among us. And may we, like this
man, if the Lord grants us grace, go forth skipping as we are released
from the stools, as we realise that God has completely dealt
with all of our sins. There are none left. They have
been taken away. They are hidden, cast into the
sea. And that we stand before God
as dearly, dearly loved children. And He cares for us more than
we can imagine. Let's pray.