So we're in our continuing Bible
study in Luke 17, and we're concerned today with verses 11-19. And this is a narrative about
ten lepers that approached Christ for their issue. the results of that. I thought
we'd go back. We kind of covered the law of
the leper in chapter 5 of Luke some long time ago. So I thought
we might go back and review just a little bit of that to talk
about leprosy and what that represents and what it took to overcome
that. And then the bulk of the lesson
will be spent on issue with the Ten Lepers and
the name of the message today is, where are the nine? One turned back, out of the ten
after they were cleansed, it says. And the other nine went
on to visit the priests, but one turned back and with a loud
voice glorified God. So we'll look at why is that
and why that happened. First off, let's just read this
block of Scripture here in Luke 17 beginning in verse 11. And
it came to pass, It was like that, just talks about God directing
things. It came to pass, not an accident. It wasn't a happen chance. It came to pass as he went to
Jerusalem, he was on his way there for a specific purpose.
that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee, and that
word kind of intimates that he was kind of going down the border
between those two regions of Galilee on one side and Samaria
on the other. And as he entered into a certain
village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood
afar off. And they lifted up their voices,
and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. And when He saw
them, He said to them, go show yourselves to the priests. And
it came to pass as that they went, they were cleansed. And one of them, when he saw
that he was healed, turned back and with a loud voice glorified
God and fell down on his face at His feet giving Him thanks.
And he was a Samaritan. And Jesus answering said, were
there not ten clans? Where are the nine? Are there,
there are not found that returned to give glory to God save this
stranger? That none of them came back except
the Samaritan. And he said unto them, arise,
go thy way, thy faith has made thee whole. So, interesting,
presentation here as he deals with them. One of the things
that was interesting to me as we go through this was, there's
two aspects here. It talks about cleansing and
healing. And there are two different words.
Healing is where, in the Greek, is where we get the, it's therapeuos,
where we get the word therapy from in medicine and where we
go in for therapy to overcome some debilitating process that
we've had. I have a friend that's in the
hospital right now who's had a couple of strokes and he's
going through some therapy to regain usage of his arm and leg. Let me get to my spot here. This
word cleanse is Catharizo and it means to cleanse, to make
clean, to purge, to purify. Where's this other word? That word, when we look up the
word healed, when the Lord healed some, in this verse here, it's
a little bit different version of it, but here it's to cure,
to make whole. But in the usual sense, it has
to do with a servant. a menial servant, and it has
the word adoration attached to it. And then it has the word,
the sense of to help to make them well. And so we have those
two aspects of Christ here. He purges and purifies, and He's
this adoring servant that loves His people. Isn't that interesting?
We always run into these little words that tell us how the Lord
feels about the church. They're his little flock, his
little group, and his sheep, his elect, and he loves them,
and we've gone through that in so many of our lessons, and here
we find he kind of adores them. Remember in our lesson from Song
of Solomon, where the dialogue between the Lord and the church
is, Oh, you're the best. And he says, no, no, you're the
best. And they said, nope, nope, it's
you. Back and forth, they're saying, we love you, and you're
the greatest. And he says, I love you, and
you're special. And so we kind of have that aspect
here represented. So as he went through Jerusalem,
or to Jerusalem, He's on His way there for the last time,
and He's on this specific mission to save His people from their
sins. You know, there's just so many
similarities between here and Luke chapter 5, which we examined
in that lesson called Law of the Leper. The Law of Moses was
very specific regarding the diagnosis of leprosy. There was a procedure
that had to be adhered to, the person that had the symptom would
go to the priest, and the priest would look them over, take them
outside to the camp, really, and then look them over from
head to toe and look for certain signs. And if he found them,
then he would say, oh, you got it. You're unclean, and now you
have to take yourself out and live outside the camp, and you
can't be around any of those people that aren't infected.
And anybody comes near you, you have to shout out, unclean, unclean,
as a warning. And so they had these specific
things that they had to do that are covered in Leviticus chapter
13. And, you know, nowadays, leprosy
has kind of been destigmatized and it's called Hansen's disease.
And there's a couple of variations of it. And it's treatable now
with antibiotics and steroids and stuff, they can kind of take
care of it now. But back in the Bible, it was
bad. There was no cure for it outside
of God. It just wasn't. And it just took
a miracle for that disease to go away. And that's why Jesus
always, when he healed one of those lepers, he always says,
go show yourself to the priest for a testimony to them, because
they need to acknowledge that how this cure came about. They
need to acknowledge that God is in their midst, God with us. And you know, in those days it
was incurable, and eventually it was fatal, and it was so hideous
it was often referred to as living death. And what a metaphor for
sin. living death. It just ate them
away. The effects of it were just awful. Those who developed leprosy,
they were cast out of the camp and they were forced to live
alone and maybe just in the company of other lepers. They couldn't
approach anyone. It was just a scourge of a disease.
What a picture of sin. And it was in God's purpose that
this happened, according to His will, according to His purpose.
And we find it represented in the Scriptures here as just a
metaphor for this. sin in our life. And it starts
out, as we mentioned in our other lesson, it kind of starts out
as these little red spots. it's caused by a strain of bacteria
and over time it kind of progresses kind of slowly and over time
it attacks the peripheral areas of the body like the fingers
and the toes and the nose and the mouth anything that's kind
of isolated on your body and sticks out your ears or the and
what happens is this bacteria attacks the nerves in those areas
and disables them And they're not able to sense things. They're not able to sense physical
sensations, and they don't sense pain. And Norm was mentioned
in Lance, having a little accident with a chainsaw. I'll bet he
had sensation there. But if you were a leper, you
might not. And you might go on for quite
a while and not realize that you've been injured, unless you
just visually saw it. Because there wouldn't be any
sensation of pain or physical feeling there. And so a lot of
these injuries that lepers sustained got infected and ended up in
a hideous way. And so they were prone to damage
by injury or heat. And you could burn yourself really
bad and not know it. And so they were prone to just
lose fingers and toes and nose cartilage would just disintegrate
and kind of resulted in these gross deformities. So physically
it was just a hideous picture. But spiritually speaking, that's
kind of what sin does to us. It's such a perfect picture of
what sin does to us in our natural condition. And in this metaphor
of how it is spiritually, sin starts out the same as leprosy.
It just starts out in small things. And little by little, it destroys
a person's awareness. Pretty soon, they're not even
aware that they're a sinner. They just, eh, it's nothing. You fall down and hurt yourself,
you say, oh, I'm okay. Well, that's what people say
about sin. Ah, it was nothing. nothing to get upset about. I
don't know why God is so upset about this particular sin or
any kind of sin. And that kind of segues us into
our lesson today of that they just have a gross misunderstanding
of God and His righteousness and His justice and His holiness,
and they misunderstand sin and the effects of it and the causes
of it. And so here in both texts, in
Luke 5 and 17, both cases the lepers are told
to show themselves to the priests. The ones that were tasked with
proclaiming the Gospel to the people. The ones that were tasked
with declaring God Almighty. You know, it was clearly known
there was no cure for leprosy except by God, and the priests
would then be confronted with the truth that God was truly
with them. Because these priests, someone
would come up to them and say, I think I got leprosy. And he
would look them over, and he would go through Leviticus 13
and say, OK, you got this, and I checked that. Yep, sure enough. get away from me, you have leprosy." So they would be aware of those
people. And then for one of them to come
back to them, it was so rare. I think I mentioned in the chapter
5 lesson that I bet it was so rare for someone to be cured
of leprosy that the priest said, I got to go get this 14 scroll,
because I don't know what to do. I don't know what the procedure
is here for someone that's cured of leprosy, because it just outside
of God, there is no cure. So these ones that they went
to the priest for a testimony, they would be confronted as God
was with them. Nicodemus, you know in Nicodemus
in chapter 3 of John, he says, Rabbi, we know that thou art
a teacher come from God because for no man can do these miracles
that thou doest except God be with him. He recognized that
these were not natural phenomenon. You couldn't rationalize them
away. He knew that it had to come from God. But unless the Lord blesses you
with that sight, with that hearing, Jesus says, unless man's born
again, he can't see the kingdom of God. Can't see it, can't understand
it, can't really know much about it. These priests would have to go
get the leprosy chapter two version of Scroll Out and look up the
procedure. It was pretty interesting. The procedure was they would
look them over and say, yeah, you look pretty good. Then they
would do a sacrifice. They would take two birds, usually
doves, I think, or pigeons. And there was so many similarities
with the priests, the sanctification of the priests, of Aaron's sons
and the priests, the Levitical priesthood. They would take these
two birds and they would kill the one and save the blood and
they would turn the other loose. Kind of reminds you of the scapegoat
procedure. And then they would take some
of the blood, and they would apply the blood. And it was such
a picture of Christ dying for our sins, and the blood applied,
and then the bird being released as a symbol of Him rising up
and being our justification. So there's just a lot of similarities
there that were there on purpose to bring those things to light,
see Christ in all those, we like to mention those verses like
in Luke 24 where He expounded to them, those two on the road
to Emmaus, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things
concerning Himself. Well, if you're not born again,
if you don't have any spiritual understanding, you just say,
well, here's the rules. If you do this, then you have
to go and you have to kill two birds. You turn this one, and
you do this, and you apply this, and then you turn the other one
loose, and then turn around in a circle three times and say
hallelujah, and then you're done. physically speaking, but spiritually
speaking, it's such a picture of the Lord, and what He does
to save His people, and what's involved in that. But again,
unless a man be born again, he can't see the Kingdom of God. So, as he goes on his way to
Jerusalem, and these ten lepers approach him, They stood afar off, and that's
just another scriptural, spiritual picture of how we are in our
natural condition. We're killed, we're these living
dead, as it were, in sin, and we're afar off. And they need
help. And what a picture of our natural
condition before God. We're killed by the leprosy of
our hearts, and we're far off from God, and we need physical
and, more importantly, spiritual cleansing. It's interesting that
he uses that term, we kind of defined that a minute ago, that
term cleansing, he cleansed them. These guys are deformed and parts
of them are missing probably and they're all messed up and
he said, oh you need cleansing. That's a, it just doesn't, from
a physical standpoint, it doesn't seem like it would be enough.
But spiritually, it's everything. And in Ezekiel 36, 25 says, then
will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean.
From all your filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse
you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I
put within you. And I will take away the stony heart out of your
flesh and will give you a heart of flesh." I'll cleanse you. What a picture of what the Lord
does for us spiritually. And here we see the sovereign
God Almighty effectually working, drawing His elect to Himself. John 6, 44 says, No man comes
to Me except the Father which sent Me draw him. And yet we
have these ten. Where are the nine? And so we have a really classic
here example of how many are called but fewer chosen, as the
scripture mentions. Some drawn for the physical possibility
of healing, one drawn for and realizing the deeper spiritual
healing. And it's similar. When I read
through this block of Scripture, it reminded me of John chapter
6. He did a big miracle there. There's
5,000 people, and he feeds them with a couple of fishes and five
loaves of bread, and feeds 5,000 people. And they had stuff left
over. And you can find that in John
6, chapter 6, verse 26. And he talks to them a little
bit later, those people. Because they're coming back for
more miracles in another location. And he says, you know what? You
didn't come for the spiritual part. Verily, verily, I say unto you, You seek me not because you saw
the miracle. They didn't see the miracle.
They just saw a dog and pony show. They just saw magic or
something. He says, you seek me not because
you saw the miracle, the true spiritual miracle of what I did
as a picture of the bread of life. But because you did eat the loaves
and were filled, you just came for the physical thing and to
see the spectacle of it. You didn't come because you saw
the Son of God displaying His almighty power, feeding His flock. Because when He got all done
and He gave them that little bit of extra truth that we find
in John, well, no man can come to Me except the Father which
sent Me. Draw him, John 6.44 and John 6.37. All that the Father
giveth Me shall come to Me. They will come to Me, and him
that cometh to Me I'll in no wise cast out. He gave them those
kind of truths. And they said, well, I guess
we'll be going now. We don't want that. We just want
the physical part. And so we find these ones that
are standing there afar off. And you know what it tells us
in Ephesians 2, verse 13? It says, but now, after the almighty
working of God, but now, after His divine work and effectual
calling and giving us the new birth, but now in Christ Jesus,
you, who sometimes were far off, are made nigh by the blood of
Christ. That's how we all were before
He reveals His Son in us. We were far off. We didn't want
anything to do with God. And we're just like those people
that, well, we like the free bread, but nothing else. They
all with one accord, all these ten pleaded for mercy from Jesus,
it tells us in verse 13 of our study today in Luke 17. But again, we find the same word
from Jesus in fulfilling the law. Go and show yourself to
the priest because that's what the law prescribes. And this
is really an interesting turn here in the next little bit that
we're going to look at. And as they went in obedience,
it says they were cleansed. As they went, they were cleansed.
They came to Him in their condition. And He says, go show yourself
to the priest. And as they turned and went, to fulfill the law,
they were cleansed. But only one of them turned back.
One of them saw what happened to him. I could just imagine
the nine are saying, oh boy, we can come back to town. I can
go back to my shop. I can go back and be with my
family. I can do this. I can do that.
I'm free from all the being an outcast. can go back to my former life. And the one saw himself cleansed,
saw his healing, and he turned back. What a picture of repentance. What a picture. Nine went on to comply with the
law. They went back to the religion deal. They went back to complete
religious circumstances that the law required. And this one,
though, this one, I like what it says in Psalm 65, 4. It says,
Blessed is the man whom thou choosest and causes to approach
unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts. We shall be satisfied
with the goodness of the house, even of thy holy temple. But
it says, Blessed is the man whom thou causest to approach. It has to be that way. That's
the only way that that happens. He causes us. to come to Him. It has to be that the Father
draws them to His Son. And we always try to emphasize
how strong that word draw is from John 6.44. It's not just a, won't you come? It's a more strenuous, physical,
overpowering, The examples we have of it are
when the fishermen threw their net over the right side of the
boat that Jesus told them to and it was so full of fish they
couldn't draw it in. They were pulling with all their
might trying to draw that net in and they couldn't because
it was just too full of fish. Peter drew out his sword and
smote the ear off Malchus. He didn't say, oh, sword, I wish
you would come out of your scabbard and come out, and I want you
to come out. He yanked, he drew that sword
out. He yanked it out and went over
there and with the intent of cleaving that guy down the middle.
And the Lord prevented that and then he put his ear back on and
took care of all that. But I just wanted to emphasize
how powerful a word that word draw is when it says, no man
can, no man has the ability to come to me unless the father
yanks him. Unless the Father exerts almighty
power on him, that dunamis power, that word where we get dynamite
from, that's what it takes to overcome our old nature and our
old sinful condition. So anyway, blessed is the man
whom thou choosest and cause to approach. There's two elements
there, choosing and causing, and they're both very powerful.
So it's interesting that the nine go back to the priest as
a testimony. that God is with us, that God
was here and healed these nine guys. They come and say, yeah,
I remember me, I was here like three years ago, and you said,
get out. And then I was all deformed and everything. And now here
I am. I'm all good, clean. I'm healed. And they go through
the ritual with the birds and everything. for a testimony that
God is surely with us, because no man could do these miracles. And yet in Luke 22 says, now
the feast of unleavened bread drew nigh, which is called the
Passover. And the chief priests and the scribes thought how they
might kill him. That's Jesus they're talking
about. Not only did they not have a
testimony that they believed that they could see, he says,
lest a man be born again, can't see the kingdom of God. Well,
the kingdom of God was there in their midst. They didn't see
him. They couldn't see him. And not only were they not convinced
of it by a physical miracle, they wanted to be rid of him
so bad they wanted to kill him because he was disrupting their
chi, he was disrupting their situation, their religious hierarchy. So much for miracles, just the
same as those 5,000 that the Lord fed. Well, this is a hard saying,
who can bear it? And from that time, they walked
no more with him. And then he went to the twelve
and says, will you go also? And they said, no, you have the
words of life. We're sticking here. So the nine
went on, the one turned and came back. And it's interesting, the
sequence of events here. He said, one of them, when he
saw that he was healed, that word saw comes up again and again. When he saw that he was healed,
he turned back. Isn't that what the Bible tells
us what repentance is? Turning from where you were in
worshiping idols and self-righteousness and all that stuff and turn to
worship the true and the living God and give glory to Him? Well, that's just what this guy
did. Just what he did. He turned back. And with a loud voice, glorified
God. He gave God the credit for doing
what had happened. And the other nine went on and
says, I'm healed. They didn't say glory to God
in the highest and everything and give Him the credit. They
just went back and said, I'm healed, do the bird thing, and
then I can go back to business as usual. So true repentance
just demonstrated here in a glorious way. And interestingly enough,
the one who turned back and came back to Jesus and with a loud
voice glorified God, he was given new instructions. I didn't really pay any attention
to that until I got to kind of looking at it closely. But the
others were on their way back to religion, and he says, go
thy way. thy faith." And again, we always
like to point out to that word, faith just means nothing less
than total reliance on Christ for salvation. Total, total,
absolute, total reliance on Christ for salvation, not of works,
not of anything else. Thy faith hath made thee whole.
Thy total, you know, when you say it, when you just read that
like thy faith has made thee whole, well, because you believe
so much, because you exercise such great faith, because you
have so much faith that that's the cause of you being made whole.
But what it really means is your total reliance on Christ That's
what made you whole. He did it, not you. And so I
think it's important to bring that out. He was cleansed from
the leprosy of the flesh and given a new heart, free from
the leprosy of sin. And Pastor Norm declared at this
recent conference, he read from Ephesians chapter 2, For by grace
are you saved through that faith, that total reliance on Christ
for salvation, not of yourselves. It's not of yourselves. That
faith is not of yourselves. It's a gift of God. Not of works
lest any man should boast. He just focused right on that.
It's a gift of God. It's something that God provides
you. It's something He gives you. Not something that you come
up with on yourself or you can conjure up or you can manufacture. It's what He gives you. But where
are the nine? Where are the nine? So we'll stop there, and next
time we have another interaction with the Pharisees. You know, he says, they want
to know about the Kingdom of God. He says, you know what?
The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation. So we'll spend
some time there next time, Lord willing, and until the next time,
be free.