The Lord’s healings were acts of compassion demonstrating His divinity, and also pictures of spiritual healing. Here we see the losses incurred by soul-paralysis, compared with the benefits of obtaining healing and life for the soul. This is about having God’s forgiveness.
And behold, men brought in a bed, a man which was taken with a palsy, and they sought means to bring him in, and to lay him before him, before the Lord Jesus Christ.
And our subject is ‘ending the soul’s paralysis.’ Now if I may just go back to verse 17 in this narrative: ‘it came to pass on a certain day, as he was teaching, that there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every town of Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem.’ And the power of the Lord was present to heal them. Christ was teaching in Capernaum. This is recorded in three Gospels, not only in the Gospel of Luke. And he appears to have been invited into a rather fine house, to have the kind of roof it had, and to have had enough room for so many people to crowd into it. It was more of a Roman-style house than a Palestinian-style house.
Well, the word went round that he had come back from the desert where he had been, and he was now teaching publicly once again. And the crowds built up. And also the leaders of the Jews, the people who were against him and cynical about him, the scribes and the Pharisees and various chief officers came from the synagogues from the towns and cities throughout the region and from the capital, Jerusalem, possibly even Sanhedrin officers and spies. So they were sitting near to him, and sitting by, they had somehow claimed the best positions within the house, those who were against him and those who were cynical about him.
This is fairly early on in the ministry of Jesus Christ, but even at this stage he had worked enough mighty miracles for it to be evident that he was no mere man, and indeed not even just a prophet, but that he was divine, that he was God incarnate, that he was the promised Messiah. And many people grasped that and understood that. But the church of those days, the Jewish church, was led by people who by and large were spiritually dead, and they didn’t want this Messiah to come in the form that he came. And Christ preached about the necessity of repenting of sin and receiving forgiveness and life, and wherever he went he preached repentance and remission of sins. And they didn’t like that.
You May Be Also Interested in…
Sermon: What is Spiritual Paralysis?