Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. A play has many scenes and acts, and in Matthew chapter 8, Pastor Paul brings out a viewpoint regarding not only the supernatural acts performed by Jesus, but also his command over nature, which the disciples were given a front row seat to. It gave them a definitive understanding of who Jesus was, but Pastor Paul doesn’t stop there. Listen closely. Matthew chapter 8, The Mystery Guest. And now, back to our regular scheduled programming.

Back when there were only three choices of what to watch on TV, we did so on small black and white screens with rabbit ears positioned just right so you could make out the picture. One of the most popular shows then was called What’s My Line. It was an early game show. It had a long run from 1950 clear through 1967. On the show, a blindfolded three-person panel had to figure out who a mystery guest was by simply asking yes or no questions. It was a great concept for a game show.

It’d work in any era, I think. They got famous people at the time to come on as mystery guests, people as different as John Wayne and Eleanor Roosevelt and Frank Lloyd Wright. With enough clues, usually the panelists could figure out who the mystery guest was. Sometimes they ran out of time. The buzzer sounded. They lifted their masks and were often surprised they had not put the puzzle pieces together for someone very well known and important.

In our introduction to Matthew’s Gospel, Margie emphasized the first intended audience of his writing was the Jewish people, and its purpose was to convince them that Jesus was in fact their long-awaited Messiah. Rabbis in Jesus’ time expected the Messiah to be a human, political, and military leader, directly descended from King David, Israel’s greatest historical ruler, someone who would restore the nation and overthrow its oppressors and establish a new era of peace and justice. The Messiah would be, in effect, a greater David in their view, who would welcome home all the exiled Jews from the lands that they had been driven, and restore the nation politically, economically, and spiritually. He would bring about the kingdom of God on earth. These expectations were the result of compiling many Old Testament prophecies.

Let me quote you from one of those prophecy messages from the great prophet Isaiah. This is chapter 35. The rabbis in Jesus’ time and Orthodox rabbis today understand this scripture as a poetic description of the coming Messianic era. Listen to these excerpts. The desert and the barren land will be glad then. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom.

Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom. It will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon. They will see the glory of the Lord, the splendor of our God. Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way. Say to those fearful hearts, Be strong, do not fear.

Your God will come. He will come with vengeance, with divine retribution, and He will come and save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like deer and mute tongues shout for joy. And a highway will be there. It will be called the Way of Holiness.

It will be for those who walk in God’s ways. The unclean will not journey on it. Wicked fools will not go about on it, but only the redeemed will walk there. Those the Lord has rescued will return. They will return to Zion with singing. Everlasting joy will crown their heads.

Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away. So it was from Old Testament prophetic passages like that that the Jews expected that when the Messiah came, the physical land of Israel would blossom again, become blessed, rich, fertile. God would use the Messiah to bring their enemies to their knees. Then the exiles of Israel would joyfully return to the land with all their troubles now in the past. And for our purposes today, did you notice the prophet described an outbreak of physical healings at that time, unheard of things like blind people being able to see again, deaf people being able to hear again, lame people being able to walk again, and so on. When we come to chapter 8 in Matthew, he starts describing such supernatural things he witnessed while he was with Jesus, one after another.

Why? Not just because he was blown away by the things he was seeing, although he and others certainly were, but because he is writing to make the case for what he came to believe, and that is that Jesus is the Messiah. Immediately after descending from the mountainside and speaking the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew remembers they were encountered by a man with leprosy. He could not have mixed with a crowd there because lepers could not do that. He could not have been on the mountain to have heard Jesus. They could not even be with their own families.

People with that disease were seen as physically and spiritually unclean, not just sick, but under God’s judgment. They were unmistakable because they were required by the law of Moses to wear torn up clothing, not cut or groom their hair, and veil their faces whenever they spoke. And they had to call out, Unclean, unclean, whenever anyone approached them, all to make sure no one came into accidental contact with them. This disease was incurable at the time. It was a death sentence. So when this man approached Jesus, you can imagine those around him moving back, keeping a safe distance.

He knelt and beseeched, Lord, if you’re willing, you could make me clean. Far from withdrawing, Jesus came closer to the man, reached out and touched him. Can you hear the gasp from the onlookers? And then simply said, I am willing. Be clean. And immediately the sores and the puffiness and the pain from that disease, all that it had afflicted upon that poor man, were gone.

Completely gone. Matthew saw that happen. He remembered Jesus telling the man, Now go show yourself to the priests and make the offering prescribed in the law of Moses. The priests under the Old Testament law were the ones who could examine and allow a person who had been suspected of leprosy to reenter society. Realize people were isolated whenever this incurable disease was even suspected. Many times it was a false alarm.

Some other things that presented similar symptoms, say psoriasis or something, could have caused that alarm. But if it cleared up in time, the priest could give the person a clean bill of health and they could reenter society. So Jesus instructed this man to do what the law required, since he was leprous no longer, not only for his sake, but also as a testimony to those local religious leaders, I think. But he also told the healed leper, Don’t tell anyone else what I have done for you. That might sound odd to you, but Jesus often did that. He did not understand his primary mission to be a healer.

He healed people out of compassion, as here in this case, and importantly, to prove he was the Messiah, which is Matthew’s main purpose in telling us about this. But he really did not want to be mobbed with people with all kinds of physical problems 24/7. They could become overwhelming and, in fact, prevent him from focusing on his primary mission of preaching and teaching and training his disciples. So he told the healed man, Go show yourself to the priest, as the law requires of you to get your life back again, but don’t tell anybody that I’ve done this for you. Do you think he listened? Of course not.

He could not help but tell everybody. You won’t believe what happened! And the response caused Jesus to leave that area and go out into the wilderness for a while till things calmed down. We learned that from the parallel telling of this incident in Mark’s Gospel. Scene number two. When Jesus reemerged, he was back in the seaside village of Capernaum.

You’ll remember, if you’ve listened to our other Gospel accounts, that this place became headquarters for Jesus and his team during the public ministry years. In Capernaum, he was soon approached by a Roman officer, probably the man in charge of keeping the peace in the whole of Galilee. Matthew identifies him as a centurion, which was an officer over 100 men. Capernaum was where Matthew had worked as a revenue collector for the Romans before he became a disciple of Jesus, so he may well have known this man, and perhaps that’s one reason he tells about his unusual healing. The Roman officer told Jesus he had a young servant at his home who was paralyzed and was suffering intensely. Sounds to me like either Guillain-Barré syndrome or else transverse myelitis.

But hard to know for sure without a personal exam. Jesus agreed to come with him and heal the young man, but surprisingly, the centurion said, I’m not asking you to do that. I’m not worthy of you coming to my home. If you only say the word, I know he’ll be healed. He realized Jesus had the authority in the spiritual realm to do just that, just like he did in the military sphere. In his sphere, he said, I issue order to my soldiers, and they do what I say.

I know you have the same kind of authority in your sphere. Wow. Jesus had yet to encounter anyone in Israel with so clearly recognizing his authority, who had the faith to believe he could do such a thing. He turned to Matthew and the others nearby and then made this very significant comment. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I’m sure upon reflection, Matthew and the others who witnessed this encounter between Jesus and the Roman officer were struck by that as much as by the healing that occurred. That comment, after the centurion expressed his faith in Jesus, what Jesus said in response, contradicted the accepted belief that the Messiah’s kingdom would be only for the Jews, God’s chosen people. Jesus contradicted that, revealing that many others, people from all over who, like the centurion, had faith in him, would be a welcome part of his kingdom. But maybe more surprisingly, he added that many Jews, in fact, would not be. Many of them, he said, would find themselves thrown out into the place of outer darkness, the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, a way Jesus more than once described hell. Wow.

Scene number three. Later, when they arrived at Simon Peter’s house, who was also a native of Capernaum, they found Peter’s wife’s mother sick in bed with a fever. Dr. Paul won’t speculate from what. Lots of things can cause fevers, but Jesus merely touched her and the fever left her. By evening, word had spread around Capernaum—it was a small town estimated to have maybe 12 to 1,500 inhabitants at the time—that Jesus was back, and people began arriving at Peter’s house, bringing their sick and afflicted friends and loved ones with them.

And Jesus, Matthew remembered, healed all of them. I wonder how long that went on, probably for hours and hours. But don’t lose sight of why Matthew is showing us all these scenes. No one before or since has ever demonstrated the kind of authority Jesus had. He could heal anyone of anything. That kind of extraordinary—more than extraordinary—that kind of unique healing authority was part of what should have positively identified him as Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, because the prophets said this is what the Messiah would do.

To Matthew and the other disciples who witnessed these miracles, this became definitive for them. That’s why he quotes at verse 17, This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: He took up our infirmities and bore our diseases. This was to fulfill. Matthew doesn’t want his readers to miss that point. All these remarkable healings, they fulfilled what the prophets had written about the Messiah throughout Israel’s history. This particular quote from Isaiah 53, an important prophetic section of the Old Testament.

Written about the Messiah 700 years before Jesus’ birth. There are two more significant scenes in this chapter, and they are even more telling. Scene number four. Keenly feeling the need for rest and to escape the constant demands on him, Jesus asked his disciples, several of whom had been fishermen working out of Capernaum, to ready a boat so they could go to the other side of the lake, a quieter, less inhabited area where he was as yet not as well known. And so they did. And as they rowed out onto the lake heading east, put their sail up hoping to catch some breeze, Jesus quickly fell asleep.

He was both physically and emotionally exhausted. As they got out into the middle of the lake, this crossing was about eight miles, suddenly a storm swept over them that turned ugly, and their boat started getting tossed by the swirling winds pretty good. Listen to Matthew’s recollections about this beginning at verse 27. Suddenly, he writes, a furious storm came up on that lake, and the waves were sweeping over the sides of our boat. Jesus was still sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, Lord, save us!

We’re going to drown! Once aroused, he replied, You of little faith, why were you so afraid? Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm again. The disciples were amazed and asked each other, What kind of man is this, that even the winds and waves have to obey him? How tired and drained did Jesus have to be to be sleeping through that? The storm had grown dangerous, serious enough to shake experienced watermen like those in the boat that night.

Some at least were in fear for their lives, yet when awakened, Jesus sounds almost perturbed with them, like, You woke me up for this? I think he sounded like that when he was dead asleep, badly needing rest, sort of like one of my kids when they woke me up and said, Dad, Dad, the internet’s out again. Jesus rebuked the sea as if it was a rambunctious child, Matthew remembers, and it obeyed him immediately. From raging storm to absolute calm, immediately, astounding even his disciples who had seen a number of miraculous things by now. What kind of man is this? they asked each other, wide-eyed.

Good question. So here’s a noteworthy difference from the prior scenes. I’m quoting myself now from earlier when I was quoting Jewish sources. Rabbis in Jesus’ time expected a Messiah to be a human political and military leader directly descended from King David, Israel’s greatest historical king. He would restore the nation, overthrow its oppressors, and establish a new era of peace and justice. Those are the ideas they had gleaned from various Old Testament prophets, which had formed the popular notion of the Messiah Israel was looking for.

But listen to these lines from Psalm 65. You answer us with awesome deeds, great God our Savior, who formed the mountains by your power, who stills the roaring seas and the roaring waves. Or Psalm 89, verses 8 and 9. Who is like you, Lord God Almighty? You, Lord, are mighty, and your faithfulness surrounds you. You rule over the surging sea, and when its waves mount up, you still them.

Who rules the sea? Who calms the waves? Who alone can command nature? The Hebrew words Yahweh, Eloah, El Shaddai, the Lord God Almighty. Those astonished guys in the boat with him were realizing Jesus was more than an unusually gifted man, even more than the promised Messiah they were becoming convinced he must be. He was more than that.

Jesus controlled the forces of nature when he chose to by a single command. What kind of man could do that? No man does that. Nothing in their scriptures ever suggested even the Messiah would have such power, such absolute authority. It’s very interesting and certainly theologically significant that within the span of only a few moments, those disciples in the boat saw the humanity of Jesus, a man so utterly exhausted he was virtually unconscious through a raging storm, and then moments later witnessed from him an awesome display of deity. He commanded the forces of nature and they had to obey him.

Whether they could fully wrap their minds around it yet or not, his shaken disciples saw Jesus for who he was right then, truly God while yet truly man, both at once. The final crazy scene described in this chapter, beginning at verse 28, we covered in detail in episode number 145 when we were in Mark chapter 5. It describes an encounter with a demon-possessed man after they finally reached the other side of the lake at a place called Gadara. For Matthew, what he witnessed there further drove home his conviction and what he wants his readers to come to believe too: Jesus was proving himself to be the Messiah, yes, by doing supernatural things the prophets said the Messiah would do, but somehow, somehow, even more than that, he was doing things no one in their wildest imaginations expected, even of the Messiah when he appeared.

Nothing in the Old Testament prophets described the Messiah commanding the forces of nature. Neither did any of the prophets say he could command demons, show authority over the forces of hell. But Jesus did that. He did that here, and he did that repeatedly. Demons, even legions of them, as encountered on this occasion at Gadara, were no match for him. Speaking out of that scary, possessed man they encountered when they landed on the east side of the lake, the demon entities begged Jesus not to torture them before the time.

They recognized who he was. Demons, remember, are former angels, fallen angels. They recognized Jesus. They called him the Son of God and knew he had authority over them. For more of this wild encounter, listen to episode 145 if you haven’t. It’s titled Greatest Testimony Ever.

This chapter, though, is about recognizing who Jesus really was. The disciples, including Matthew, were seeing and experiencing mind-bending things. The clues were piling up. They were putting the pieces together, being led to conclusions about him that went beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Yeah, he had to be the promised Messiah. But the popular understanding of Messiah, that was not enough to contain the things they were witnessing.

He was clearly more than that. He had to be the Lord God Almighty somehow among them in human form, the God-man. They were realizing that the frightened demons from hell, what they already knew, that Jesus was the unique Son of God come down out of heaven, the one we call the second person of the Trinity. The disciples’ wide-eyed question, What kind of man is this? after seeing Jesus handle and cleanse lepers. He’ll paralyze us from afar and just for a favor to a Roman centurion.

After witnessing him subdue a violent storm and the waves of the sea with a hush, like he was scolding a little child, I mean a legion of frightened demons kowtowing before him. For them, the identity of this mystery guest was becoming unavoidable, hard to believe as it was. Their question in the midst of that process of understanding is of the utmost importance. Who do you think Jesus really was? Once you settle that, what in the world was he doing here? Matthew is drawing us into this, the greatest story ever told.

Stay with us as we follow his amazing story. This is Paul for Share the Word. Absolutely incredible, Paul. The Jews were expecting the Messiah, which by definition was to be the promised deliverer of the Jewish nation, prophesied in the Hebrew Bible. But what astonished me in this episode was the fact that Pastor Paul brought up some things that Jesus did that really weren’t part of the prophetic scriptures written about the Messiah almost 700 years before the birth of Jesus. What Jesus was able to do had to be profound to these men.

To them, he was a man who was performing acts of divine nature. He was a man and God in one, which had to be extraordinary and incomprehensible. But you and I have been given an amazing gift to be able to hold God’s Word and truth in our hands and ask the Holy Spirit to reveal a greater understanding. There’s an enormous amount of work still to be done in this Great Commission project, and we need your help and support. Please go to sharetheword.org and click on Give.