Jesus Heals a Paralyzed Man Lowered Through the Roof

Good morning again, everyone! As you can see from the title here, I scaled it back quite a bit from the announcements and study questions that I sent out to you last night. About 9 o'clock, 8.30, somewhere long in there, I realized, hey, I'm just not going to be able to fit all of this in without keeping everybody here for three hours. And that would make me late going down to Colorado Springs. So I decided to scale it back and just cover what was manageable here in hour and hour and 15 minute time frame, something like that. So we will be studying today from our Harmony of the Gospels. We'll be covering page 22 from this, excuse me, page 20, which is the account about Jesus healing a paralyzed man who is lowered through the roof. And so we have a few visitors here with us today. And just by way of review, we've been for about two years now going through the Gospels line by line, verse by verse, using a harmony of the Gospels that was prepared and distributed to our members here. And going through this in quite a bit of detail. And I liken this to more or less an archaeological exploration. Because when we go through and understand the history and the culture of practices, beliefs, systems of that time, the first century, there's just whole new levels of meaning and understanding that open up to us there as a result of that. So that's what we've been doing here. And again, we'll be going through this one account here. This is fairly early in Christ's ministry. And by way of catching us up where we today will be, last time we talked about Jesus healing Peter's mother-in-law, who was sick with a fever right after leaving the synagogue there in Capernaum, where he had healed a possessed man. And then at sundown that evening, many, many people, perhaps hundreds of people, came out to him there in Capernaum to be healed. Then after that, we discussed how he traveled around Galilee, teaching in the synagogues and healing many people. And you may, I didn't mention this, forgot to mention it last time, but from time to time he may come across terms like Jesus' first missionary tour or first missionary tour of Galilee or something like that. And that's actually part of what we covered last time when Jesus traveled around Galilee, teaching in the synagogue and healing. We didn't spend a lot of time on it because there aren't a lot of details. He just mentioned that he traveled around Galilee teaching and in healing people in the synagogues there. And then we also covered how Jesus healed a man with a severe case of leprosy, rescuing him from his hopeless and helpless condition, and telling the healed leper to go to the priests in Jerusalem to be certified as clean so that he could be restored to his family and community. And we also saw last time that Jesus went out to deserted places to pray, to spend time and fellowship with God, to more or less recharge his spiritual batteries.

But he kept being interrupted by people coming to him, wanting to hear his teaching, wanting to be healed by him. And we also talked about the prevalence of serious illness and disease and crippling and things like that in that society where perhaps as many as one in five to one in ten people lived in a chronic situation of ill health or crippling disease or blindness or things like that. We also saw that Jesus' healing of the leper was such a dramatic miracle and created so much excitement that he had to lay low for a while, perhaps weeks, perhaps months, until the excitement died down. And he went out again into the uninhabited areas during that time and yet still people were coming out and trying to hunt him down. So that sets the stage where we'll continue the story today, which is when Jesus returns to Capernaum after going around, traveling around Galilee and doing the teaching and healing there in the synagogues. I want to mention in beginning here some themes that we see been beginning to develop and what we've covered so far. We've been focused so much on a lot of the details of the Gospels, which is why we're covering in a lot of detail here the way we are. But by focusing in sometimes so much on the detail, we can tend to lose sight of the overall picture of things. So I want to back off a little bit and talk about the bigger picture of what some of the Gospel writers are conveying. I mentioned one in one of the background messages before we started this series here about how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not recording events as we would today. We have lots of biographies of famous people. You can see them on the bookstore shelves all the time where they just start with the beginning of someone's life. It's chronological on up to the person's dies and then maybe the lasting impact of that person's life. Well, that's the way we write biographies today, but that is not how biographies were written back in the first century. And you can study this out yourself. If you're interested, go back and read some of the biographies of individuals like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. They do not put things in chronological order the way we would expect to see a biography written today. They would write them in such a way as to make specific points about the individual. And even the Gospel writers wrote, as we talked about earlier, two particular audiences, whether Greco-Roman or Pagan or Jewish audiences there. And they wrote to them in ways to make specific points to those audiences. But you do have to read the Gospels carefully to pick up on some of those points. And they also organized their material in particular ways. That's why you see the order of events listed in different ways depending on which Gospel you look at. Does that mean they're being inaccurate or that's an error? No, it just means they're organizing their material in particular ways to make particular points to the audiences that they're writing to. And again, they did not write biographies then the way we write biographies today in a strict chronological order. And we see this here in the Gospel of Luke, who is a very meticulous writer. But Luke also organizes the events in a specific order, starting in chapter four and continuing in chapter five. We will be reading today. And what we see is that Luke is building a theme of Jesus establishing and expanding his divine authority.

Luke is writing about Christ establishing and expanding his divine authority. And let's notice this, and I've just kind of summarized it here, and I'll go through it pretty quickly just to to give you an idea of where Luke is going in his story because it fits in with what we'll be covering today. So for instance, in Luke 4 verses 1 through 13, Jesus talks about, or Luke writes about Jesus being tempted by Satan the devil in the wilderness. We covered this many months ago. But the theme of that is Jesus establishes his authority over Satan, the adversary, in the episode of the Temptation of the Wilderness. So we see him first establishing his authority over Satan the devil. What does Luke talk about next? The following verses he talks about how Jesus claims messianic authority when he teaches at the synagogue in Nazareth and proclaims himself Messiah when he quotes prophecies from the book of Isaiah about the works that the Messiah would do. Again, I'm going to go through these fairly quickly here. Next, in Luke's account, the next few verses he talks about Jesus establishing his authority over demons by casting out the demon out of the man there at the synagogue in Capernaum. We talked about that more recently.

Next, he talks about Luke 4 verses 38 through 44, where Jesus establishes his authority to heal temporary diseases by the mass healings there in Capernaum after sundown when people brought to him people afflicted with all kinds of diseases. So he's talking about his authority to over to heal temporary diseases. Next, we find mentioned in Luke's Gospel, Luke 5 verses 1 through 11, Jesus establishes his authority over nature in the miraculous catch of fish when he describes how he told Peter to let down the net. They'd been out fishing all night long, Peter had, and Jesus tells him to let the net down on one particular side of the boat and comes up with so many fish in the net that the nets are about to break and the boats are about to swamp there. So Jesus has authority over nature. Then, last time we talked about Luke 5 verses 12 through 15, how Jesus establishes his authority over chronic terminal disease by healing the leper. We talked about that quite a bit last time, how the man who was described as being full of leprosy there, he had a chronic condition that was probably terminal. The man was dying of leprosy when Jesus intervened to heal him. So this is before he establishes authority over temporary disease, but now he's established it over chronic life-threatening diseases. Today we'll discuss another thing that Luke is continuing this theme of Jesus' divine authority. That is where Jesus establishes his authority to forgive sin with the healing of the paralyzed man that we'll talk about today. I just wanted to back off and cover that and show this as an example of some of the themes that gospel writers are introducing. You have to look carefully there because we're not used to thinking necessarily in those terms or those ways. But it's very clear that this is what Luke is doing continuously, just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, one after the other as he goes through these two chapters. This is what he is describing here. Why is he doing that? To establish for his readers that Jesus is, yes, the Son of God, the divine God who came to earth here. He's establishing and expanding his authority over everything. The physical world, nature, disease, even Satan the devil, and his demons, and so on. So that's where we'll pick it up today. We'll begin reading from Luke's account here, Luke 5, and verse 17. We'll notice a few things here. Now, it happened on a certain day, as he was teaching, that there were Pharisees and teachers of the law, Torah teachers sitting by, who had come out of every town of Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was present to heal them. So notice where these people, the Pharisees and Torah teachers, had come from. Not just from Capernaum. They've come from all over Galilee, Luke says here. And Judea. Judea is the area down around Jerusalem. Jerusalem is about 60-70 miles south, as the crow flies from up here at Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. So what's going on here? Why are these people coming there and showing up on the scene when Jesus is teaching? Well, word has definitely gotten around about this miracle working rabbi up here in Galilee. Not everyone is coming to him for healing or to learn from his teaching, however. Some do. But some come for other motives, other reasons, as we'll see here. And notice who it is that has come, Pharisees and teachers of the law. Again, they've come somehow from Jerusalem, 60-70 miles away, and they're coming to check him out.

Now, what happened last time? Last time we covered Jesus healing the leper. And after healing the leper, what did Jesus tell the leper to do? Anybody remember that? Told him to go to the priest to be certified as cleansed from leprosy. Why did he do that? Well, Jesus had healed the man, but until he was certified as free of leprosy by the priest, as dictated back in the book of Leviticus, the man was still considered unclean, could not have contact with his family members, wife, children, parents, any relatives, anyone. He could not be touched, he could not touch others. So the man needed to be certified as clean, so he could be restored as a member of the community and of the family there. So where did the man have to go to do that? Well, he had to go to Jerusalem to see the priests. And there was actually a particular portion of the temple that was set aside for lepers to come and be examined by a priest in a private area there, and to be certified as being leprosy free. There, we know that from Josephus. So where then did some of these Pharisees and teachers of the law come from? They come from Jerusalem, where Jesus had told his healed leper to go. So obviously what has happened there is word got around because it wasn't a situation where lepers got healed every day, particularly a man with a fatal life-threatening condition of leprosy there. So what has happened? Well, obviously what's happened is these Pharisees, teachers of the law, have heard about this healing by this teacher, this rabbi, Jesus there of Capernaum, and they decided they need to go check it out. So that's what sets the stage for these Pharisees and Torah teachers being in the audience on this particular day there in Capernaum. To put it bluntly, they've come to spy on it, come to check him out, see what he's up to. But notice this detail also that Luke adds here, that the power of the Lord was present to heal them. Not talking about healing the Pharisees and the Torah teachers, but to heal people who did come there for healing. So even though the motives of these individuals, the Pharisees and the Torah teachers, were wrong, that did not prevent God from being able to heal others who were there that day, as we'll see. And now I'd like to switch over to Mark's account because Mark adds more detail than Luke does, which is typical of what we've been reading here. So Mark 2 will read verses 1 through 12 and comment on it as we go through it. And Mark says, and again, he entered Capernaum after some days. The some days is the period when he was touring around Galilee, teaching in other synagogues, other towns, and healing here. This also indicates that a considerable time has probably passed after some days. He doesn't say after a few days, but after some days. So some time has passed. Again, weeks, possibly months have passed during which Jesus was traveling around and teaching. It's interesting, too, you can look across the page at Matthew 9 and verse 1, which now refers to Capernaum as, quote, his own city, which is again an indicator that Jesus has now settled in in Capernaum and is using that as his base of operations. And he will branch out and travel out from there. But this is where he lives. Now this is his own city.

So again, he entered into Capernaum after some days, and it was heard that he was in the house. Doesn't specify which house. Most commentators think this is probably referring to Peter's house that we talked about quite a bit last time. Verse 2, Immediately many gathered together, so that there was no longer room to receive them, not even near the door. And he preached the word to them. One of the study questions I sent out earlier was, What does the setting of the story of the healing of the paralyzed man lower through the roof tell us about Jesus' popularity?

Well, as we see right here, so many people had gathered around the house that you just couldn't get in to physically be in the same room with Jesus. People are packed, around the door, trying to listen in and hear him. And it's so packed and crowded that you can't even get near the door even to get in and hear him there.

So obviously, he has become very popular in his teaching and probably more specifically in his healing, because that's what really drew a lot of crowds to him there. Verse 3, Then they came to him, bringing a paralytic who was carried by four men. The next verse says that he was being carried on a bed. And some people get the idea from that. They think about our big wooden frame beds, 10 feet wide, 10 feet long, whatever, and has a very different connotation here. But what was a bed like in those days?

Well, a bed was very different. Yes, the very wealthy did have beds, more or less like we do today, with wooden frames and slats and fairly thick padding and so on to sleep on quite comfortably. But most people, only the very wealthy had beds like that. Most people slept on what would essentially be a mat, is what we would call it. Something like a throw rug, you know, something no more than a quarter inch thick, half inch thick maybe.

Or you might occasionally have a very thin mattress that might be stuffed with straw, something like that. What we would term it today would be a pallet that they would lay on. And during the daytime, they didn't have dedicated bedrooms in their houses. They would sleep on mats on the floor of the main living area and then they would roll those up at night, stick them in a corner, because you needed the space for other activities during the day.

So apparently, when they bring him on a bed, this is what it's talking about, some type of pallet or mat, not a big rigid frame bed, as we think of today. However, because this man is paralyzed and can't get around on his own, I think it is likely that he's probably being carried on something like a stretcher that we would refer to today, something that does have some long pieces to support him with something on which he can lay his mat and be carried around.

Again, the man's paralyzed. The only way he can get around is somebody to carry him. And apparently, he has these four friends who are carrying him like a stretcher there, one on each corner there. I think that makes a lot of sense. Now, we assume these four men are friends. The Gospels don't say their relationship. They might have been friends, might have been relatives. Just for the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to them as the man's friends, because obviously they are emotionally invested in the individual there and care for him quite a bit.

So I'll just refer to them as the man's friends. Verse 4, And when they, the men, could not come near Jesus because of the crowd, they uncovered the roof where he was. So what's happened? These men have come up to...they know Jesus is teaching there in this particular house that day, but the crowds are so packed around there, and the houses were quite small there for the most part. The rooms were quite small, and they just simply can't get near Jesus because of all the crush of people there around the doors listening in through the windows.

They can't get anywhere near. So let's take a look and understand some of the background, historical and archaeological background here. This is an artist's conception, based on archaeological evidence of what houses looked like in Capernaum. This is the setting for this particular illustration here. You can see the Sea of Galilee back in the background, the mountains of Moab over here in Jordan, the area around Tiberius over here, and the Sea of Galilee with various fishing and commercial boats on it. But this is how houses were constructed then. Notice their roofs. They all have flat roofs here. Let's talk about that just a little bit here.

What was one of the primary activities in Capernaum? Commercial fishing there in the Sea of Galilee. Notice this roof here in the foreground. You see this mat laying out here with 20-30 fish laying out to dry on it. See the same thing on this next roof and the one after that.

Well, they didn't have a way to refrigerate the fish that they would catch there, so what they would do is dry the fish. Before refrigeration became common in the last century, this is commonly the way meats were preserved. You would leave it out in the sun to dry, to desiccate there, because there's no other way to preserve it. So these flat roofs there in Capernaum would have been used for things like that. They would put mats up there and let fish or even vegetables, fruits, grapes to turn them into raisins and so on. It would be dried on the roofs of the houses this way. Notice also stairways going up to the roof. Notice this particular roof right here. You'll see a kind of a canopy up here with some other mats and some other objects. You can't make out in detail what this is, but the roofs would have been also the coolest place during the hot part of the season or the hot part of the day. So if you wanted to cool off, you wanted some natural air conditioning, well excuse me here, pardon that, rude interruption. But if you wanted to cool off during that hot part of the day or to sleep at night, what you do is go up and sleep or get up on your roof there with some awning for shade. And that's where you would catch the cooler afternoon breezes and the evening breezes coming in off the lake and so on. So roofs were very utilitarian in that day. They would use them fairly constantly. It was an integral part of the living area, the usable space for a home. So when it says they went up and uncovered the roof, as we read there in Mark's account, probably what that's talking about is they went up through these outside stairs up onto the roof and then removed whatever mats, rugs, tools, equipment, whatever might have been, you know, possibly drying fish up there, we don't know. It doesn't say what they uncovered, just if they uncovered the roof, they moved something out of the way to access the roof directly there.

And this is fairly typical, this architectural style, and quite typical too to have these stairs. Now not all houses had stairs like this. Some would have ladders. And let's see, I don't see any in this particular... well, yeah, actually I do. Here's a ladder right here going up to that. So if you know what you're looking for and you visit some excavated areas in Israel, you can actually see the remains of some of these outside stairways and so on. So we can understand how these houses were constructed and utilized in those days. Let's see. So continuing on here in verse 4. Excuse me. Got out of sequence here when that reset here. Yeah, here we go. Verse 4.

So again, and when they could not come near him because of the crowd, they uncovered the roof where he was. So when they had broken through, they let down the bed on which the paralytic was lying. Now Mark writes that when they had broken through, what does that mean? Let's look at how houses were constructed. Again, going into a little more detail here. We talked about the roof, but let's talk about houses themselves. Most houses in Israel, going back thousands of years, were made out of mud brick. And that's why if you ever go to Israel, and I know some of you have been there before, you see these foundations on the ground that are maybe six inches to a foot high. And that's made out of stone. And you can see the outline of the house and the rooms and the doorways and all that. But where'd the rest of it go? There's nothing above about a foot. Well, let's cause the houses were mostly made out of mud brick. And what's happened to the mud brick for the last 2,000 years? Well, it's now dirt and dust. It just simply doesn't exist anymore. So all you have is the foundation of the houses. However, in Galilee, there was really an abundance of rock. And particularly in Capernaum, there was an abundance of volcanic basalt, which made very good building material for walls. And you can actually see this. I've talked about it before. It's this real dark, blackish, brown, grayish stone that made very good building material. You see it reflected in these buildings here. And then it would also be plastered to help support it and also make the walls airtight and weatherproof. So that's the basic type of construction method being utilized there. They would use also a type of mortar, kind of a primitive form of concrete made out of pulverized limestone, which there's plenty of that there in the Holy Land as well. What about the roofs, though? How were the roofs constructed that they could break through the roof? And what's that being talked about? Here's a photo of a reconstructed first century type house. This is from the inside. And you can see the stone walls here, like this, just as an aside. We talked earlier about Jesus and Joseph, his stepfather, being called carpenters in the Bible. It's not a good translation. It means, the Greek word tekton means simply a builder. But they didn't have much wood to build with up in Galilee, so they used stone. A builder there would have been somebody who built out of stone. So Jesus and Joseph were actually stone masons, not carpenters, as we think about it. So how were the roofs made there?

Well, how were the houses made there in Galilee? Again, mostly with stone, because there's an abundance of stone to work with, and not very much wood, not very much straight wood used for beams like that. The only type of wood you would see that would be long and straight like that would be some pines, although not much, date palm trees. But you don't want to cut down your date palm trees, because that's a source of fruit. The other trees there are olive trees, which are very gnarled and twisted, what we would call a mountain oak or scrub oak here that's very gnarled and twisted. So just very little good wood for building there. So as a consequence of that, rooms are fairly small. Most of them are no more than six to eight feet across there, because they didn't have good material to use for roofing to span that distance there. So what they would do for building roofs, they wouldn't build an entire wooden roof, because there wasn't enough building material. So they would take beams like this and run them across, and then they would lay over the top of it a types of reeds or sticks, some type of straight material that was fairly flexible. As you can see here, these are actually split canes. You can see the ends of some of it here where they're overlapping a little bit. So they would lay down these canes and along the Sea of Galilee, there's a lot of marshes along the side where you can get building material like this. So they would lay this down on top of these wooden beams. And then on top of that, to make it weatherproof and waterproof, they would lay down basically layers of dirt. Again, here are our cross beams. And it's kind of hard to make out in the dark here, but you can see a little bit of these reeds and so on in here. And then they would lay down dirt on top of that. Clay, usually if clay was available. And sometimes it would mix it in with lime or crushed limestone to create kind of a primitive form of concrete.

Clay, we know from living out west, is quite a good building material. If you've ever been down to places in southern Colorado or Utah or New Mexico, you see a lot of adobe buildings. What's adobe made of? It's made out of clay that's mixed with water and formed into a material that's almost as good as concrete. You can build entire houses out of it there that will last for hundreds of years. So this is what they would use for the roofs there, kind of a primitive form of concrete or this mixture of clay that's been wet and packed down. And they've actually found some of these things that they finally concluded were rollers. This thing is about made out of stones, about yea big in diameter with a hole through the middle of it and probably three feet long, something like that. And took archaeologist a long time to figure out what these are. And they finally concluded that they are rollers that they would use to pack down, roll back and forth across the roofs there to pack and compact this clay and dirt mixture there to make the roofs more waterproof and hard there. So this is what is being done. And all in all, it was a very good method to build a secure and firm and watertight roof. And this sounds odd to us, but if you know anything about American history, how did the early settlers moving across and settling the western plains, what did they make their houses out of? Out of sod, out of dirt, whatever materials they had at hand. And this type of construction has actually been used there in Israel, Jordan, Syria, areas like that, on up until concrete became widely available in the last century. So this method was actually used for thousands of years there. If they don't have access to concrete, they would still be using this type of method here. So this is what is being described here when Mark and Luke are talking about this building that they break through the roof. So when Mark writes that when they had broken through, they let down the bed on which the paralytic was lying. What Mark is saying is that apparently these men took some sharp pointed sticks or hoses or the equivalent of shovels or picks or axes or something like that to break through this hard packed roof. And of course, you'd have to be careful where they broke through because you want to get it in between the beams so you don't damage the beams there. And then they would break through the layer of reeds there and then lowered the man down there in front of Jesus as he is teaching there in the room, as depicted in this illustration here. So you can just imagine the scene here that Jesus is here in this room teaching, preaching to a group of people there, and suddenly they hear this thump, thump, thump pounding up there on the roof. And suddenly dirt starts falling down on everybody. They look up and next thing you know, a little hole and light shines down into this dark room because the windows were very small. There wasn't a lot of light in those rooms. So this hole starts opening up and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then next thing you know, this stretcher appears and this man is lowered down right there where Jesus is teaching. I just love the amount of detail that they give here, particularly when we understand the construction methods and so on. It just makes the scene come so real to us here. I just love that picture on so many levels here. But let's notice something else here.

By the way, any questions about this before I go a little bit further? If you have any questions, feel free to raise your hand here, too. So continuing on, let's notice something with Luke's account here. Luke 5 and verse 19 says something slightly different here. It says, And when they could not find how they might bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the housetop and let him down with his bed through the tiling into the midst before Jesus. Why does Luke say, through the tiling, whereas Mark talks about them breaking through this hard-packed dirt roof? Is this a conflict? Is this a contradiction in what the accounts say?

Now, we do know that the Romans and the Romans occupied Judea and Galilee at that time. The Romans did use a lot of tiled roofs, same basic type of construction that we use today. You see it quite often in the west and the southwest. It's really an ingenious method. If you haven't looked closely at a tile roof, you just use these curved pieces that are about a foot long, maybe a big. Some are turned upside down and then they overlap them with pieces on the top. It rains and the water flows down on these that are curved up and runs off the edge of the house.

The edges you see here are covered by these other pieces on top of it. So, very effective, cheap building material. What are the tiles made of? They're made out of clay, of which there's quite a bit for building material there. We know the Romans used it a lot because the Roman legionnaires would actually stamp the Roman legion on there. As the clay was still wet and airing out to dry, they would stamp it with the symbol and the name of their legion. 10th legion, 16th legion, 3rd legion, whatever there, and whatever symbol, a lightning bolt or a lion or a boar or whatever was the symbol of that particular legion. They do find those. However, the Jewish people and in Capernaum itself, I've never seen any pieces, fragments of the tiles there in the Jewish areas. The tile roof seemed to be something that was unique to the Romans, where they settled and lived and their military bases and things like that there in Judea and Galilee. So is there a conflict between what Mark says about the flat roof there and what Luke says about the tiling? Well, actually there's not. There's just a translation problem here because Luke says that they let the man down through the tiling. This word tiling is the Greek word karamos, which means literally anything made out of clay. This word karamos, if you look at it carefully, you can see the root of our word ceramic in there. What is a ceramic? It's something that's made out of clay. So when Luke says they let the man down through the tiling, he says they let the man down through the karamos, anything made out of clay. What is the roof made out of? It's made out of clay. So really there's not a conflict at all. It's just the translators, when they translated Luke, there in the King James version, it's been picked up. And the mistake repeated by most translators since then are just assuming it's a clay-style roof, a ceramic tile roof, and not understanding that it is a packed clay roof there, which we now know from archaeology is that the roofs were done in that particular area there. So no conflict, just a misinterpretation of the meaning of this Greek word karamos there. So when both Mark and Luke write that they let down the bed on which the paralytic was lying, and again here's the type of roof this would have been talking about there. So I do think this supports the idea that he was probably on some kind of frame, like a stretcher. Because otherwise, when they lowered the man down, it would have been like lowering him down in a sack if he was just on a mallet on a pallet without some type of frame. And consider the man is paralyzed too. If they're just lowering him down on a pallet, it would have been like lowering him in a sack or something. The man, frankly, could have suffocated, not being able to move his limbs or whatever. So again, I think there's probably an indication here that he was on some type of frame there. And it's obvious, the key point though is the man is, we don't have all of the details, but it is obvious that the man's friends, whether they're friends or relatives or whatever, cared a great deal for him and are going to a great deal of effort to see that he has the opportunity to be healed here. Any questions on anything? Yes, Dave?

I'm just thinking about this as you were describing it. That was a pretty involved process that was moving that rope back. If the man was paralyzed and it was not a mat, could they have lowered him down, not laying flat? Standing up? I guess it's conceivable, but they would have had to have tied him pretty thoroughly to the frame to do that. There's no mention of that, and later we'll see Jesus tells the man, rise, take up your bed and walk. So it seems like somewhere in the process there would have been some indication he had been untied or unbound or something to do that. That certainly would make a much smaller hole to lower him down there, but the bottom line is we just don't know. That is an interesting possibility, though. I hadn't considered it that way. But yes, Connie. Here's the accountant's question. Who fixed the roof?

Who's liable for this damage? Good question, we're not told. But presumably, one nice thing about a roof like this is it would have been fairly easy to go back in and repair. What you would do is go back up afterwards. I mean, the raw materials are there available. You just go out in the fields and get your dirt and get your reeds from around there, the Sea of Galilee. So the materials are nice and cheap. But obviously, the men had to have damaged the roof of the property owner. The property owner is probably not too terribly thrilled about it, but understanding the circumstances. Since it is Jesus teaching in his house, he presumably cut them some slack there. So we can assume that the individuals who did the damage to the roof would have come back later and repaired it. It was something that wouldn't have been highly skilled or technical to do. But they could have probably made that repair in a few hours there with several of the men working on it. Yes, Vicki, you had a question.

Yes, Vicki's question, how high would the ceilings have been? Not terribly high. We tend to think of our roofs. I think most construction these days is eight to ten feet. People were considerably shorter than that. The average man was probably about five, seven, five, eight, something like that. Women, children shorter than that. I would guess most roofs were probably in the six to seven feet high there. And rooms are considerably smaller, too. You have to think about it. A large room is a liability there because, well, for one thing, like I mentioned about the roof beams there. And I've seen the ruins there in Capernaum. Some of you have, too. And most rooms are only six to eight feet wide. They're not very big at all. And they didn't have big things like living rooms, as we would think of it. They couldn't afford the luxury of that kind of space. So your average room is probably six to eight feet wide, maybe six to ten feet long, and probably six to seven feet high. And you didn't want them bigger than that because of wintertime. You had to heat those rooms, the rooms where people would be. And typically, the only heating in a house would be in the main living area. You would have typically a stove or hearth in the corner made out of clay where you would bake your bread, do your cooking, heat water, that sort of thing. And that was the source of heat for the entire house. And your fuel had to be wood, which you'd have to go out and gather. And again, wood is fairly scarce there in Galilee. So brush, thorns. The Bible refers to thorns being gathered up and tossed in the fire. That would have been a fuel source. Animal manure. That sounds gross to us, but you find a number of references to animal manure being used as fuel. And that, too, was done here among the early settlers here in the United States. The cattle dung, buffalo dung, sheep, goat, that sort of thing. You'd lay it out, let it dry out, and then burn it as fuel. It was a very common cooking fuel there. So yeah, you just didn't want to have to heat a large house or a large room. That's why they would basically heat the one room where people would cook and sleep in. And you wouldn't even try to heat the storerooms or other areas of the house, other areas where the animals were kept, and so on, because of this. So yeah, good question there.

Yes, Pat? Yeah, Pat's comment is, yeah, complete Jewish Bible. One marks as a stretcher, the other says a mattress. My guess, when you read something like that, it's probably both. It was probably a mattress on a stretcher. They're mattress and stretcher combined.

There are mattress laying on top of a stretcher because, again, the only way the man could be transported, you're not going to drag somebody around by a mattress. You would build a small frame of some sort to carry the man, even to a synagogue or things like that. The man has no means of being moved himself. He can't walk or go anywhere, so he has to have his friends or family take him there. So yeah, I think it was probably a mattress laying on a stretcher, or that's what we would call them today. They didn't necessarily have those terms then, but that's probably what is being talked about. Yeah, good question. Okay, let's see, no other questions? Okay, we'll move along. Let me see where we were. Okay, yes, continuing with our story. Now we get to some of the spiritual lessons of this, Mark 2, beginning in verse 5.

When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, paralytic simply means a paralyzed man, son, your sins are forgiven you. This is quite interesting on a number of different levels here. First of all, it says that Jesus saw their faith, not the man's faith, but their faith. Apparently, he's talking collectively about the four friends and the man there. All of them had considerable faith. They obviously had faith that Jesus could and would heal the man. Otherwise, why go to all of the effort that they do? They don't go to all of that effort of carrying their friend to the house, finding they can't get in. So they take him up on the roof through the steps, like we talked about earlier. They wouldn't have tried carrying a man up a ladder like that. It would have just been impossible because of the weight issues and so on. So they climb up on the roof. They have to somewhere get the tools needed to break through the roof and figure out where to lower the man down between the wooden beams there and then lower the man down before Jesus. So they obviously have faith, but not just faith because their faith is demonstrated by their works, as we see here. They didn't come and find this big crowd of people around the house and just say, oh well, we can't get in. Let's go home. Let's take our buddy back home. No, they didn't. They were determined to act on their faith. They didn't think about going back and just waiting and hoping, well, maybe Jesus will see him someday and he let them know. They knew this was their opportunity. Jesus is there. They know where he is. They know he's teaching. And they're not going to let anyone or anything stand in their way. They are determined to act on their faith. So this is a good lesson of faith in action and something that we need to keep in mind, too, because faith isn't...so sometimes it is, but a lot of times it isn't just sitting back and waiting for God to take care of everything. Sometimes action is required on our part. We have to do things, as we see from this example here. Now, why did Jesus then say to this man, son, your sins are forgiven you? Because what was the common perception among people there? The common perception is somebody who is suffering like this. We talked about this quite a bit with the man with leprosy last time, but we have a reminder. The common viewpoint is if somebody is suffering to this extent, or crippled, or blind, or whatever to this extent, that the person had to have committed some serious sin to be punished by God in this way. We see from another incident over in John chapter 9 and verse 2 that even Jesus' disciples believed that serious illness or a crippling condition like this was a result of somebody's sin. In John 9 and verse 2, this is regarding a blind man, a man who'd been blind from birth, and the disciples come up to Jesus and they ask him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind. In their mind, they just can't conceive that the individual is blind, not as a result of sin. Somebody had to sin. Either this man sinned or his parents sinned, and as a result of the parents sinned, they were punished with having a blind son. There, that's just the way they thought there. Now we realize that's not to say that some injury's illness disease can be caused by sin. Obviously there are. You might think of the connection between smoking and emphysema and lung cancer and heart disease and things like that, or venereal diseases that are the result of illicit sexual relationships or acts or so on.

But we can't say that something like this man's paralysis was punishment for his sins, because now we know there's all kinds of factors. There's genetic factors, inherited factors like that, environment, diet, any number of things that can play into illness and disease. However, they weren't aware of that type of factors. You say somebody's suffering. Somebody's ill. It's either God is punishing them or God is helping them to build character and grow stronger there. So it's one or the other. Pretty cut and dried here. But back to Mark 2 and verse 5 again.

Why did Jesus phrase it this way? Son, your sins are forgiven you.

Why didn't he say, son, I forgive you of your sins? Or God forgives you of your sins? There's a difference between passive and active voice. Let me mention this here a little bit to explain my point. An active voice would be something like God forgives you, where you have the subject and the verb, the noun and the verb, or I forgive you. That's called the active voice. Passive voice is when you don't necessarily have what is causing the action, where it says your sins are forgiven you. It doesn't say who is doing the forgiving. That's called the passive voice as opposed to active voice. Now what is unusual about this is you hardly ever see that in Hebrew, which we assume Jesus is speaking here. He's certainly not speaking Greek. So he says, son, your sins are forgiven you. But he doesn't say who is doing the forgiving. He doesn't say directly, I forgive your sins, or God the Father forgives your sins. Just that your sins are forgiven you. This sounds very odd in Hebrew. Very odd, this passive tone of voice here. So what's going on here? But Jesus uses it deliberately and his audience understands it. Now when we don't understand something, as I've covered in a sermon quite a while back, this is a Rimes. This is a Rimes here. It's actually a multiple Rimes. This is referring back to a number of verses from Leviticus chapter 4 and 5, which talks about the sacrifices that are to be performed by the priest. The person who has sinned is to take an animal to the priest, depending on the circumstances of the sin. And the animal is to be killed by the priest. And it gives actually seven different verses here, Leviticus 4, 26, 4, 31, 4, 35, 5, 10, 5, 13, 5, 16, and 5, 18. And every one of these verses ends with the same phrase, and it shall be forgiven him. Again, it's this passive voice. It doesn't say, and God will forgive him, and it shall be forgiven him once this sacrifice is offered on the person's behalf. Or in some cases, the group of people. One of these is actually talking about the nation's sins when they sin in ignorance there. So what is going on here?

Everyone there who heard Jesus use this unusual passive wording here, knew exactly what he was saying and what he was implying. That only God could declare sins forgiven. No human being can forgive sin. No priest can forgive sin. No minister or elder can forgive sin. Only God can forgive sin. And by declaring this man's sins forgiven, Jesus is declaring what? He's declaring that he is God. Because only God can declare sins forgiven.

Now, did the people who heard Jesus understand and catch the Rimes there? What is going on? Well, you bet they did! Notice what happens next. The very next verse of Mark. What happens? Verse 5, when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son, your sins are forgiven you. And verse 6, and some of the scribes were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, why does this man's bleak blasphemies like this? Who can forgive sins but God alone?

That didn't come out of the blue. They knew that Jesus, by saying the man's sins were forgiven, was claiming the divine authority. Again, one of the themes of Luke that we talked about in the introduction. He was declaring his divine authority to forgive sins. And the people caught that. They understood that immediately. And what do they do? They say Jesus is blasphemy. It's even more powerful there in Luke. You can read that, which we want for lack of time. So they understood that Jesus is claiming to be God by proclaiming or pronouncing the man's sins forgiven.

Let's see, I want to go into another discussion. Any, I'm going to go off into a side discussion, and any questions before I move into that side discussion here. I want to talk about the scribes because this is the first time we come across a confrontation between Jesus and the scribes. So who are the scribes? As it says here, some of the scribes. But who are the scribes? What are these people? We'll come across this a number of times in the Gospel this term. But who are they? Back in the introduction to this series, we talked about the Pharisees. We talked about the Sadducees and so on. But let's talk about the scribes. And let's notice, first of all, as it says here, we're talking about this packed room. People so packed they can't get around even the door there. But notice, some of the scribes were sitting there, verse 6, and reasoning in their hearts. They are sitting, as it says here, in the middle of this standing room only crowd. And Luke also mentions this, Luke 5 and verse 17. We won't turn there. And he describes this group as Pharisees and teachers of the law. So what we see as scribes and teachers of the law are synonymous terms. And I'll discuss this in just a minute here. But what is the fact that they are sitting here in this standing room only crowd, tell us? Well, it tells us these are respected people. They are sitting there as a sign of honor and respect. And this is true of the people of that day. The scribes, the Pharisees, the Torah teachers, or teachers of the law, were well respected as godly men, as godly individuals, particularly in this area of Galilee, as we've talked about earlier, that is populated by very religious devout Jews there. So the scribes, Pharisees, Torah teachers are respected as godly, righteous individuals. So who were this group of people called the scribes? I have a quote here from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. It's fairly long but gives us some of the background. It says, quote, The existence of law, this is talking about the biblical laws and the Torah, the five books of Moses, the existence of law leads necessarily to a profession whose business is the study and knowledge of the law. At any rate, if the law is extensive and complicated, and that's true, you study the laws given in the Torah, it is fairly extensive and complicated. At the time of Ezra, which is after the return from exile in Babylon, and probably for some time after, this was chiefly the business of the priests. Ezra was both priest and scholar. He was a priest, but he was also a teacher and interpreter, a scholar of the law. Continuing on, the priests were therefore also, in the first instance, the scholars and guardians of the law. But in the course of time, this was changed. It was changed from the priests in Ezra's time to a different group of people, is what is being said here. The more highly esteemed the law became in the eyes of the people, the more its study and interpretation became a life work by itself. And thus there developed a class of scholars who, though not priests, devoted themselves assiduously to the law. So he's talking about another class of people who are not priests who become scholars and experts in the law. This is beginning back after the time of Ezra.

However, there's a change in here, and this is what played into this. Continuing on, these became known as the scribes, that is, the professional students of the law. During the Hellenistic period, this is the period after Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East. We talked about Hellenism, that means adopting Greek culture and thought and patterns. During the Hellenistic period, when the area is ruled by the Greeks, the priests, especially those of the upper class, became tainted with the Hellenism of the age and frequently turned their attention to Paganistic culture. In other words, they adopted Greco-Roman worship and practice and so on. You find that archaeologically as well. The priesthood became corrupted, is what it's talking about, and became Greek in their thinking and teaching and religious beliefs, even adopting ideas like Heaven and Hell and so on, which are strictly Greek in their origins there. Continuing on, thus neglecting the law of their fathers, more or less, in arousing the scribes to opposition. Thus the scribes and not the priests were now the zealous defenders of the law, and hence were the true teachers of the people. At the time of Christ, this distinction was complete. The scribes formed a solid profession which held undisputed sway over the thought of the people. To summarize what is written here in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, the priests were originally the interpreters, the explainers, the scholars, the experts of the law. However, they became corrupted under the Greco-Roman influence there, and a new class of scholars or interpreters of the law rose up who were not priests, and those became known as the scribes. And that's the people that we're reading about here. That article I won't read any more of it, but goes on to explain how they're referred to by several terms in the Gospels, but they essentially are synonymous. You'll find terms like scribes, teachers of the law, scholars, doctors of the law, and lawyers. We may be thinking, why is Jesus hanging around with all these lawyers? Why are the lawyers always having arguments with Jesus? Well, it's not lawyers as we think of lawyers or attorneys today. No, these were people who were experts in the law, the law of God. It's not talking about the law of man, the general application of business law, or property law, or anything like that. It's talking about lawyers, experts in the law, the laws of God, the Torah there. So all these terms are synonymous. Torah teachers, teachers of the law, doctors of the law, lawyers, scribes. It's all talking about the same group of people there.

Now, they actually did all of these things. They were teachers of the law, they were scholars of the law, they were experts of the law, they were interpreters of the law. And why is this? Well, if you think it through, the laws that we have in the Bible, they're summarized, as you know, in the two great commandments, love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Then we have the Ten Commandments under that, which explain how to love God, how to love our fellow man. Then we have all the other laws, judgments, statues given in the Torah, which elaborate on those other greater laws. But even though there are a lot of laws there, there's 613 commandments in the Torah there. However, they don't cover every situation. So this class of scribes, lawyers, Torah teachers, rose up to interpret how you applied the law in every situation of life. Because you didn't want to get on God's bad side. You wanted to live by the law. You wanted to apply it correctly in every way. So their motives are good to understand how the law applies. And we do that today in the church, essentially, with different things there. So it's the same principle. So they made it their life's work to study, to see how to apply the law in these different situations than aren't covered, specifically in Scripture.

In the Gospels, they are nearly always mentioned. The scribes are alongside the Pharisees and or the chief priests. And this makes sense because, again, what are they? They are the students, the teachers, the scholars of the law. And they debated and made decisions on how the law applied in different circumstances. Earlier in this series, we've talked about some of the picky ways that they interpreted and applied laws regarding the Sabbath. And this is a classic example. What does the command say? Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. And don't work. You or your sons, your daughters, members of your household, your servants, any of that. Don't work on the Sabbath. But what does that mean? What is work? Well, this is where the scribes and the scholars went down and tried to define how exactly you keep the Sabbath in every circumstance of life. I've given some of these examples, but I'll give you a few new ones here. They defined a burden. You shouldn't carry a burden on the Sabbath. They defined a burden as anything that weighed more than two dried figs, which is no more than a couple of ounces, if even that. So you couldn't carry anything that weighed more than two dried figs on the Sabbath day. You couldn't spit on the ground on the Sabbath because that disturbed the soil. And that was the equivalent of plowing. So you couldn't spit on the ground. Not sure what you did. I haven't come across that yet. A tailor couldn't leave a pin or a needle in his garment on the Sabbath day. They didn't have pin cushions, so they'd stick the pins and needles in their garments. Well, you couldn't leave it in your garment on the Sabbath because I was carrying an unnecessary weight around on the Sabbath by having a pin or needle in your garment. You couldn't heal on the Sabbath. And this, as we see, is a lot of conflict between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees and priests and so on, because that was unnecessary work. It was okay to save a life on the Sabbath. It was a life-threatening situation, but if somebody just needed healing, you couldn't do that on the Sabbath. You'd have to wait to another day to do that. You could put a plain bandage on somebody's wound or sore on the Sabbath day, but you couldn't put on a bandage with ointment on it because that was healing. And they could wait to the next day to be healed. This is how they interpreted the laws. And this is where we see the conflict between Jesus and these people there because of all these nitpicky rules that they came up with about how to keep the Sabbath that made it a burden and not the kind of delight that God wanted it to be. One of my favorites there that I mentioned before, if your house was on fire on the Sabbath day, you couldn't grab up all your clothes and take it outside the house. But you could stand there and put on as many layers of clothing as you could wear and then walk out of the house looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Michelin Man or something like that. That was allowable, but you couldn't carry them out in your arms.

So you couldn't wear sandals. It had little metal nails. Some of us are old enough to remember when soles of our shoes were actually nailed together with tiny metal nails there. They're only made out of plastic these days. They're sewn together, but you couldn't wear sandals with tiny metal nails because that was carrying an unnecessary burden on the Sabbath day.

These are the kind of rulings that these scribes and Pharisees came up with regarding how you kept the Sabbath. This is also where Jesus had a lot of disputes with them over healing on the Sabbath in particular. The one we'll come to about them picking handfuls of grain going through the field on the Sabbath day. They weren't working on the Sabbath. I've picked up grains from heads of wheat and you just grab them and pop them in your mouth. It makes a good healthy snack there. That's what they're doing there, which is perfectly legal under the law. But they said that was harvesting on the Sabbath and they condemned Jesus and his disciples for that. So the bottom line is what is going on here in Capernaum that day? Well, what we see is that they are checking out Jesus to see what he is saying and whether it agrees or disagrees with their interpretation of how to keep the law.

And what we also see is that Jesus' interpretations and applications of the law are quite different from theirs. And they condemn him as a lawbreaker. He is a threat to their power and their positions. Here's an illustration to illustrate scribes, what they may have looked like there.

So we see this growing hostility. We see the scribes allied again with the Pharisees, with the Sadducees, with the priests, primarily from the Sadduceean sect there. And what we see is ultimately they are all allying with themselves. They're not natural allies, the scribes and Pharisees would be, but not with the Sadducees because they considered the priesthood corrupt, which they were. But they all unite together against Jesus because he is a threat to all of them. He's a threat to the priesthood, as we know when we covered the cleansing of the temple there, because they have turned the temple into a big money-making operation there. He's a threat to the scribes and the Pharisees because his interpretations of the law make much more sense to the people. They're not the kind of burden, as the scribes and the Pharisees were making the law. So Jesus is gaining a popular following that is coming from the people who would have been following and obeying the scribes and Pharisees. So the bottom line is he's a threat to the power of all of these people. And what do they do? They're going to silence him. And ultimately, they're going to silence him by killing him. But we do see this conflict starting to build up, even as far back as we see here. They all have their reasons for wanting him out of the picture, even if it means killing him. So notice also that, even though, getting back to the story here in Mark 2 and verse 8, notice that even though Jesus probably has a good idea of what they're up to, and why they're there, after all some of them have traveled all the way from Jerusalem, and it's not to hear his teaching. Well, actually it is, is trying to find ways to criticize him or disagree with him. But what does he do? He allows them still to sit in respected positions, as respected people there in the audience while he's teaching. He doesn't disrespect them. He doesn't insult them. Doesn't go out of his way to antagonize them. But he does seem to perceive what they're thinking, and so he uses this as a teaching moment, as we see here in verse 8. But immediately, when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they reasoned this way within themselves, he said to them, why do you reason about these things in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven you, or to say, arise, take up your bed, and walk. And now Jesus really puts his opponents in a dilemma. Because anybody could say your sins are forgiven.

What's the harm in that? Anybody could say that. I could say that. Any of you could say your sins are forgiven. But what's the point? Can you ever prove it one way or the other? No, obviously not. However, to say your sins are forgiven, now take up your bed and walk. That would prove right then and there whether he did have the authority to forgive sins. Because by their own definition, the man is paralyzed because he's a sinner. And he can't rise up and walk if he's still a sinner. So by their own definition, Jesus lays it in their laps. And says, by your own definition, this man can't get up and walk if he's a sinner. Therefore, his sins are forgiven when he stands up and walks. That will be proof that his sins are forgiven. So Jesus offers a test that they can demonstrate by their own standards whether his sins are forgiven or not. Verse 10, so he says, verse 10, But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, he said to the paralytic, I say to you, arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.

So Jesus has the power to do both, to forgive sins and to heal the man. And he does both. Now this word power we talked about, I didn't specifically go into it, it's the same word that's translated authority that we talked about when we covered Jesus' teaching with authority and having authority to cast out demons. The Hebrew concept of smeka, divine authority from God. It's the same exact word. It means interchangeably power and authority because you have authority to exercise power. You have power to exercise authority. It's essentially the same thing. Notice also here another remes, a pretty obvious one here where Jesus again makes the point, he's already used one remes, about your sins are forgiven you, a remes back to Leviticus, where we read those seven passages there, or how those seven passages end there. But here's another remes. This is when he refers to himself as the son of man. He doesn't say, I have the power to forgive sins, the son of man, referring to himself as the son of man. This is a remes back to Daniel chapter 7 verses 13 and 14. Here's Daniel's vision of God the Father giving the kingdom to the one who had become Jesus Christ. I was watching in the night visions and behold one like the son of man. This is the title that Jesus uses for himself constantly, the son of man. He takes taking it from right here. Coming with the clouds of heaven, he came to the ancient of days, God the Father, and they brought him near before him. Then to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom the one which shall not be destroyed. So here we see that Jesus twice in this one sentence claims to be divine or to be God. In addition to the time earlier with the earlier remes here, he doesn't come out and say it directly, but he says it in a very Jewish way, an oblique way, you might say. And as we see, the scribes and Pharisees got the message, which is why they accuse him of blasphemy.

We should also consider here if Jesus is forgiving sins, what is going on? We see what's going on in their minds when they see this. What is going on in Jesus's mind when he says your sins are forgiven, because how are sins forgiven? What is required for sins to be forgiven? Were they forgiven by the sacrifice of the animals at the temple? No, they were not. They were forgiven only one way.

So what did Jesus mean? What was in his mind when he said your sins are forgiven? What went through his mind at that point? What had to go through his mind, at least in part, is how those sins would be forgiven. They would be forgiven at price, the price of his life.

See that in Hebrews 10 verses 11 through 14. And here it tells us, And every priest stands ministering or serving daily, and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices is talking about the temple, worship the temple sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But this man, Jesus Christ, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, talking about the sacrifice of his own life, sat down at the right hand of God, from that time waiting till his enemies were made his footstool. For by one offering, the offering of his life, he has perfected forever those who are being sanctified are made holy, which is talking about us. So the only way that that paralyzed man's sins would be forgiven is the same way that our sins are forgiven, by the sacrifice of Jesus, the Messiah, for us. Jesus knows how this is going to end. Those sins are not paid for yet. Those sins are not washed away. Those sins are not forgiven. Well, in a sense they are because God's plan was in place from before the foundation of the world, but the sacrifice hasn't taken place yet.

Jesus has to, when he pronounces the man's sins forgiven, look forward and think forward to what's going to happen in another couple of years and how it's going to end and how those sins are going to be forgiven and how that price is going to be paid. It's something that we cover every year at the Passover and we'll be covering that in a few months. Forgiveness is God's free gift to us, but that doesn't mean it comes without a cost. It comes with the greatest cost imaginable, which is the life of the Creator of the entire universe and the Creator of us.

Returning back to Mark 2 verse 10, but that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins. He said to the paralytic, I say to you, arise, take up your bed and go to your house.

And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went out in the presence of them all, so that all were amazed and glorified God, saying, we never saw anything like this.

And again, this is just an amazing story on so many levels. You can just picture it so well, what is taking place here. You can just imagine these people standing there, dumbfounded with their jaws, dropped down on their chest, saying, we never saw anything like this before. But what was it that they had never seen anything like before? I said that I was a study question last night. They had seen healings before. They're in Capernaum. As we talked about earlier, with all the people who came out after sundown, that Sabbath, and Jesus healed many people, many, many people there, sick with all kinds of diseases. So why are they never saying, we never saw anything like this? What had they never seen anything like? Well, it's obviously not the healings because they've seen the healings before. What was different is that now Jesus is proclaiming the authority to forgive sin.

No human being had ever done that before. Nobody in the flesh had ever done that before. That is what is very different. Excuse me here. My laptop is turned psychedelic on us. Okay, thanks. Thanks for pointing. I was wondering what those guys were waving and pointing at me. Okay, thanks. I have a bulky adapter here. So that is what is going on. They have never heard anyone proclaim authority to forgive sin before. I like the way Luke summarizes it here. Luke 5 and verse 26. And they were all amazed and they glorified God or praised is what this means, as a number of versions translated. They praised God and were filled with fear.

Dumbfounded, you might say. It doesn't mean they were literally afraid, but they were just dumbstruck there saying, We have seen strange things today. Amazing things. Incredible, unbelievable things. And they had indeed. And they would see many other strange and amazing things to follow there. So we'll start there and pick it up next time. But before we wrap up, I want to ask a few more questions for us to think about. As I mentioned before, there are several key questions we need to ask ourselves as we study God's Word, as we read through these passages here. And those four questions... Actually, I've changed these around a little bit from some I gave before. But first of all, what does this teach us about the nature and character of God the Father and Jesus Christ? Another question to ask as we study, what does this teach us about the way God the Father and Jesus Christ interact with their people and with mankind? Another, what does this mean for your relationship with God the Father and Jesus Christ? And another one, what does this teach us about how we should think, act, and live? We ought to be asking ourselves these four questions. Every time we're reading God's Word, and particularly as we read through the Gospels, because what are we reading about? We're reading about God in the flesh, God's mind, God's power, God's personality, God's character, personified in the flesh for us.

So what are some of these? I jotted down some thoughts for each of these four questions. You can go back and think about it yourself. First question, what does this teach us about the nature and character of God the Father and Jesus Christ? I've jotted down two points for each of these to keep it consistent and short. First of all, God is incredibly merciful. He's incredibly merciful. He can forgive a person who is not even expecting to be forgiven. Why did the paralyzed man and his friends come there that day? Did they come to get their sins forgiven? No, to be blunt. They came for healing, not for forgiveness, but they got more. And that leads to the second point, which is that God can and does at times give more than we ask. They came for healing and they got a bonus. They got forgiveness of the man's sins being set right with God. We see that both of these illustrated in this example of the paralyzed man. He didn't come for forgiveness. He might not have even known that he needed forgiveness, but he received it anyway. He came for an outer healing, and you might say he received an inner healing, the healing of the forgiveness from Jesus Christ.

Another key question, what does this teach us about the way God the Father and Jesus Christ interact with their people and with mankind as a whole? Wrap your mind around this. We start out humanly before our calling in a state of spiritual paralysis, like the paralyzed man.

We're spiritually paralyzed. We can't do anything on our own, but God acts. And God's rescuing us from that state and restoring us to a right relationship with him begins with what? What was the first thing Jesus told the man? Son, your sins are forgiven. And our restoration to a right relationship with God starts with the same thing, God's forgiveness. Spiritually, we are like the paralyzed man. When God first calls us and starts working with us, we're unable to move. Spiritually, we're unable to do anything spiritually. We're helpless because our sins have cut us off from God as we read back in Isaiah. So we have to be rescued. Last time we talked a lot about rescuing, Jesus rescuing the leper there. And that's a meaning of one of the meanings of his name, Yeshua, God saves. But it also means God rescues. And God has to rescue us from a spiritually paralyzed state as well. And again, that begins with God's sacrifice, or God's forgiveness through Jesus Christ's sacrifice, which we see every year at the Passover. Another point for what does this teach us about the way God the Father and Jesus Christ interact is that God's work with us starts with rescue. Starts with rescue, and then leads to restoration. And essentially, the same comments here. God steps in to rescue us first from our state of being cut off from him. Then he begins working with us. And if we allow that to happen, if we follow the leading of God, obey him, submit to his leading, become baptized, receive his Holy Spirit, then that leads to a relationship with him, the restoration of that relationship. And ultimately, to salvation and becoming his children and his eternal family and kingdom. Next question here for us, what does this mean for your relationship with God the Father and Jesus Christ? You could repeat the same two points because they apply equally well here. But I'd like to add another couple more. One that I talked about a bit here. Faith isn't always just sitting back and letting God take care of everything and thinking we don't have to do anything. At times, faith requires action. Yes, there are times to commit to God and leave it in his hands. We always do that, but that doesn't mean that we can just sit back and expect him to do everything. At times, action is required. As James tells us, faith without works is dead. We have to demonstrate our faith by our actions. Would the paralyzed man have been healed if they all took the approach of, let's sit back and let God do everything? What would have happened? The man's paralyzed. He can't even leave his house without help. In his condition, it would have been long odds for him to ever encounter Jesus. There, if he's locked up, shut up in his room. He can't even get out. His friends had the faith, and he had the faith to take action, to go out and seek out Jesus Christ, to go to the effort of taking the man up on the roof, digging through the roof, letting them down. They had faith, but they knew they needed to act. If they had not acted, what would have happened? The man would have probably lived out his days as a paralytic and died there in Capernaum. It would have been sheer chance if Jesus had ever encountered him. But the friends knew this and were determined to do whatever it took to see their friend healed. They could have had all the faith in the world, but if they sat back and just waited for things to happen, their friend would have died in his paralyzed state there. Another point is that are we glorifying or praising God for what He has done for us?

Luke 5 and verse 25 we just read there. I won't show it again, but it says, The paralyzed man departed to his own house, glorifying or praising God. And the next verse, as well as Mark's account, says that all the people who witnessed this glorified or praised God for this miracle, what He had done, do we give credit where credit is due for what God has done for us? That's a lesson we should learn from their action here. Another point is what does this teach us about how we should think, act, and live? Again, you could copy these same items we just talked about here as well. These are things we should do, too. We have to act on our faith. We should be glorifying, praising God, giving credit where credit is due. But two other things I'll give you two others here to think about. First of all, what kind of friend are you to those with disabilities?

How do we react around people like that? Think again about the example of the friends of this paralyzed man. They really went above and beyond in helping their friend who wasn't in a position to do anything for them in return. They obviously did it out of the proverbial goodness of their hearts. The paralyzed man can't do anything to help them. But they can make a world of difference for the man in this situation there. They truly showed love and concern for their friend. And we should do the same. And a final point here. Sometimes we carry our friends, and sometimes our friends carry us. Friendship should be a two-way street with both parties helping the other. At times, even the equivalent of carrying each other as they did with that paralyzed man there. Because that's what friends are for, to be there, knowing that you can rely on one another no matter what. And we see a great example of that with the story here of the paralyzed man that we've talked about today. So, any questions about anything we've covered here?

Okay. Oh, yes, yes. Tina. Yeah, sorry. I didn't see your hand there.

Yes. Right. Right. Good point. Yeah, I didn't think about it. Right.

Come back, get your bed after. Yeah, right. Yeah, good point.

And I'm speaking. I think that they were amazing at once, that nobody would have had to know people were not identity-athroning of the law. Not only did people want to be a victim of the counter-war, but they silenced them. So that was amazing for the people who were the most amazing people I could think of. Right. Right. Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Excellent point. I appreciate you bringing that up, Tina. Her points were, for the benefit of the recording, what did Jesus tell the man to do to take up his bed and walk? Which was one of the things that was forbidden on the Sabbath to carry a burden that way. And then the second point is that, yeah, Jesus, in that culture, nobody would stand up to the authorities, to the scribes, to the Pharisees that way. But Jesus did. And I love the way He did it there, because He sets up this scenario where He puts it in their lap. You know, rise, take up your bed, and walk. And, well, first, as I explained, yeah, He says, your sins are forgiven. Well, nobody could prove that. But, yes, if He rises up and walks, this paralyzed man, that's obviously proof that his sins are forgiven. They can't argue against that. I just love the psychology, the way Jesus approaches some of these things, puts them in a trap. Yeah, there's no way they can argue with that. This healing that takes place right there. And this man has been paralyzed, apparently, from birth. I don't recall whether he specifically says that or not. But, yeah, this is in Capernaum. These people know Him. Everybody there knows Him. Those guys who come in from Jerusalem or Judea don't necessarily know that. But, yeah, they can't. How do you argue with a miracle? Yeah. Dave, you had a question? Nor in the same example does it say it's the Sabbath. I wonder if it truly is.

Back in Luke 5 and verse 17, it gives kind of these elusive words, now it happened on a certain day. If that makes it kind of ambiguous, but why would that be stated? I don't know. I'd have to go back and look. Yeah, Dave's comment is he's wondering whether this was on a Sabbath day. He doesn't specifically say that. But Luke says on a certain day. So that could be. I'd have to dig back into the Greek and see if that's an indication there. But, yeah, if so, that makes the story all that more profound. Because, yeah, not only is Jesus healing on the Sabbath, which is a violation of their laws, but also these men carrying the burden of the paralyzed man and digging the hole through the roof. Jesus telling the man to pick up his paladin and walk. Yeah, there's multiple, multiple violations of the Sabbath as they would view it. So, yeah, it's an intriguing thought there. I'd have to look into that and see. Yes, Brian?

Brian's observation is, yeah, what would have inspired them to go up on the roof, as opposed to just waiting for the crowd to disperse and bringing the man in that way.

Good observation. It was typical for a rabbi, as Jesus was in that day, to basically teach as long as there's an audience, as long as people are there willing to listen. So, this could have gone on literally all day with Jesus teaching. And they would have known that. That's not spelled out in the Gospels, but they would have known that. They would have understood.

Basically, Jesus is going to teach until dinner time and everybody leaves, or until dark, and everybody returns to their homes or something. That was just the way rabbis taught. We see that in Jesus' teaching. He teaches all day long, and people are getting hungry and thirsty, and he multiplies food for them at times, even miracles like that. But, yeah, generally the only way the crowds disperse is when it gets dark and they've got to head home for the day there. So, yeah, I think they're looking at it from a practical standpoint. Maybe it's 10 o'clock in the morning when Jesus starts teaching, and they come there, and they realize it's going to be another seven or eight hours until our friend can tell the crowds will disperse. So, they take matters into their own hand and break through. That's the way I would read what is going on there.

Pat? Yeah, that's David Stern's Jewish Bible. Yeah, it says one day when he was teaching. I'll go back and look into that and share if I find anything significant in there about the wording there. So, yeah, lost track of the time here. So, I'll go ahead and wrap it up. We'll have another hymn, and we'll pick this up again in a few weeks.