Characteristics of True Faith

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

Mark’s Thesis: Christ’s Divine Identity and the Crisis of Faith

We're returning now to the Gospel of Matthew, beginning now in Chapter 2. I hope you enjoyed the two weeks off that we had, more or less. I guess two real weeks, one week away from preaching through this text.

If you recall anything from before the break, you'll remember that up until now, Mark the Evangelist in this Gospel has been using his action-packed narrative to demonstrate and to declare Christ's divine identity, Christ's great authority, and with a special emphasis on the cost of following Christ.

In Mark Chapter 1, Mark accomplishes all of this by giving us accounts of Christ's forerunner in John the Baptist, of Christ's baptism, of Christ's temptations, of this host of miracles that he performs.

And all of this, all that Mark has told us up to the end of Chapter 1, is to serve to prove the thesis statement that Mark gave us in Mark Chapter 1 and Verse 1, that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God.

And now this week, we're turning our attention to Chapter 2. And what we're going to find is that Mark is going to continue to build this case. And I have to admit, at the onset, it's for the brothers even that were in the preaching course last week, it's hard because Mark is just singing the same tune again and again.

And so, I come to the text and I have to find what do I say again as Christ flexes again to show his authority. But as he does, at least in our text for today in Verses 1 -17, Mark is going to show us, he's going to demonstrate to us the importance of faith.

The importance of faith as the only right response to Christ and to his authority as God incarnate. And this is important, I believe, for us to study, even for us as believers. And as I look around this room, I know that many of us, I would count you as mature believers.

It seems I always get the elementary texts, the elementary topics when the most mature people are in the room. But this is important for us to study, this concept of faith, because in the popular Christian world, at least in the West, we are in the midst of a faith crisis.

A crisis of real, genuine Christian faith. And I don't say this because there are mass numbers of professing Christians who are walking away from the Church, at least, again, in the West. It would appear that that's true, that there are many that are leaving.

But that's not what I'm talking about. Nor, when I say a crisis of faith, do I mean that many professing Christians do not know the Scriptures and hold to worldviews and values that are antithetical to the Christian faith?

That is true as well. But these are mere symptoms of a greater crisis. And I say that there's a faith crisis in our day because a great many professing Christians, especially in our post-Christian culture, do not know what true, saving faith actually is.

Many professing Christians around us do not actually know the most basic and fundamental aspects of what it means to be a Christian. Namely, to place one's faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And allow me to demonstrate.

Maybe you already agree with me as I look around, but allow me to demonstrate. I once heard an account from Paul Washer when he had become a new believer. One of the first things that he did was he went back to his hometown.

And when he got back to his hometown, he went around to all of the neighborhoods in his town and knocked on every single door. And his message was this. I was once lost. The Paul Washer that you knew, he is gone.

Christ has saved me. And because Christ has saved me, he can save a wretch like you too. And so he went around every single house preaching the gospel. And when he had finished up, one of the things that he found most disturbed him was this.

That every door that he knocked on, he found that after a while, the whole town was Christians. Every person that he knocked on when he came to discuss the gospel claimed that they too had faith in Jesus Christ.

Praise God, they're all Christians. But he knew better than that. He knew the people. He knew that these people, that they loved the world. That they thought like the world. That they lived like the world.

That as we heard Mac talk about last week, I believe he had spoken about it, that they were friends with the world. That there had been no true transformation. And so they were self-deceived. Most of these Christians, these supposed Christians, didn't know the first thing about what it meant to be a Christian.

And sadly, that is still true today. And I'll ask you, maybe give me a nod. How many people have you met when they say, Oh, I'm a Christian, I'm a believer, I go to church, I'm this, I am that. You get excited and you begin to talk with them.

And after a moment or two or three, you realize this person doesn't know the first thing about what it means to be a Christian. We are in a crisis of faith. Now, for us in this room, and again, looking around, trusting that many of you are believers in Christ, I still believe that this text has something to offer us.

Regardless of where you are, whether you're trying to help the lost, or even to humbly consider if you are lost yourself, our text offers us some help for today. So the big idea of Mark 2, verses 1 -17 is this, that here is Mark continues to show us Christ's great authority.

He's singing the same tune. He also offers us some examples of genuine saving faith. We're going to get two accounts of genuine saving faith. And we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to overlap them and look at them together.

And as we do, what we're going to find is this. Here Mark shows us some of the characteristics of true faith. What does true faith look like? If you're a Christian and you're trying to evaluate the lives of your children, which is a very relevant topic, what does true faith look like?

If you're speaking with a co-worker, what does true faith look like? Or perhaps, if you don't know if you're a believer, or you know you're not a believer, but you don't know how to be a believer, Mark shows us the characteristics of true faith.

And so let's look at the text together. We're going to be very expositional. And a quick note that I'm going to mention at the onset is that we're going to do, and I apologize for the imbalance in this, but we're going to do a lot of the heavy lifting early in the sermon.

We're going to look at a lot of the expositional aspects. We're going to be shovels in dirt for the first half of that sermon. And so pay attention. I trust it will bear fruit as we get into the second half.

True Faith Acts by Bringing Others to Christ

So we'll look beginning at Mark 2, verse 1. And when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. And many were gathered together so that there was no more room, not even at the door.

And he was preaching the word to them. And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him. And when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay.

And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son, your sins are forgiven. The very first thing that we learn about faith in our text is this. True faith acts. True faith accompanies or is accompanied by activity.

And this is what we see.

So in verse 1, after Christ's ministry, you'll remember in chapter 1, he went on a ministry tour and then had gone into the desolate places. And after this, he returns to Capernaum. Mark 4, verse 13 tells us that Jesus moved from Nazareth to Capernaum at the commencement of his ministry.

And that place, Capernaum, means the house of Nahum. And it was a commercial center for fishing and also a location where there's a prominent Roman taxing station, a station where Roman taxes were collected.

That's going to be an important detail later. And it was here that Christ set up his home base. And at the end of verse 1, we're told that Christ returned home. Now, most commentators, almost every commentator that I read, believes that this was Peter's home, the same house that we read about in Mark 1, verse 12.

So likely in Peter's house where he had his home base in Capernaum. And what we see is anytime the crowds hear about Christ and his whereabouts, the crowds immediately flock to wherever Jesus is. And as we read the Gospel of Mark, I want you to pay attention to the number of times that we encounter these crowds.

At least by the research that I did, these crowds, the word crowds, is going to appear some 40 times, even before Mark chapter 10. There just are always crowds in Mark's Gospel. And the interesting thing that we see about these crowds is that no matter how often they're listed, the crowds are always in the way.

Start to think about the Bible stories where the bleeding woman in faith, she's in the crowd, we're going to see it again in our passages, the crowds are always in the way. They're there, they're listening to Christ's teaching, but they're never responding with repentance and faith.

It's like they're the extras in a cast that just move about where Christ is. They accomplish no purpose except simply to be there. And in my experience, especially when we do street ministry, it's never the crowds that respond.

And I think at least, it's just a promising application early on, we should never rarely anticipate that the crowds will respond. What we see over and over again in these passages is that it's the individuals within the crowds that respond to Christ.

And this story is no different. In chapter 2 and verse 4, what we find is that Christ is here at home and there's this innumerable crowd. But in the midst of this innumerable crowd, there are four men with their paralyzed friend.

And because this paralyzed man was carried on a mat, we have good reason to believe it's very likely that he had a severe disability. He was probably, likely a quadriplegic, had no use of his arms or legs.

And these friends, moved by faith, carried this paralytic, believing that Christ could fully heal their friend if they could only bring their friend to Jesus. But because of the crowds, again, the crowds get in the way, these men had to get creative.

Instead of passing through the door, they climbed onto the roof of what we think is Peter's home. And when we think about this in our context, it would be very difficult if Christ, if you've been to my house, if Christ was in my living room, to carry someone onto the roof of my house and then somehow get him to the living room below.

But because in that time, in ancient Palestine, the rooftops were multi-purpose, it would have been very easy, or at least a little bit easier, for these men to get this quadriplegic, this paralyzed man, onto the roof.

Oftentimes, the roof was used as a place to get fresh air, to cool off in the heat of the day, or even to sleep on a hot night. And so there would be external stairs that would go around the house and up onto the top.

And on the top, there would be slabs of baked clay with thatch. And so these men, in faith, carried their friend up, up the stairs, onto this clay and thatch roof, and then likely would have had to dig and remove the slabs to get their friend.

And so, with these crowds in the way, these men bring their friend onto the roof, they pull apart the ceiling, and they lowered their lame friend, still on his mat, into Christ's presence. And you can almost picture this, as the dust and the bits of clay showered on the heads of the houseguests, some of these scribes who were experts in the law and were lawyers, as the bits of clay and dust showered on their heads, we find that Christ is not worried.

Maybe Peter was. We don't get an account of what Peter's thoughts were of someone destroying his roof. But Christ was not perturbed by this. He was not offended by this. But what we read instead is this.

Christ's only reaction in chapter 2 and verse 5 is,. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son, your sins are forgiven. I want us to see this. Oftentimes, when we think of faith, we think of it as being this invisible, this intangible thing.

But here, Jesus, we're told, saw their faith. Have you ever thought that faith can be seen and not just felt? Jesus saw their faith. It was visible by their actions. I remember it made me think of a time when I watched, if anyone's taken an Alpha series course or something like that, I remember I was watching YouTube, and I discovered that there was actually a very famous celebrity who was promoting Alpha.

And so it was definitely clickbait. It worked. Alpha paid, I'm sure, good money to have this man represent their organization. So I clicked on the link. And one of the things that I found as I watched this brief video is that this man seemed almost apologetic for his Christian faith.

I think he said it two or three times. He said, you know, my faith is very private. I don't like to talk about my faith. It's very personal to me, and so I don't share it in the course of my work. But what we see here is that in reality, our faith does the talking for us.

Faith speaks for itself. In a crowd of innumerable people, there were few people who were willing to do more than just stand there idly. But here we see in these four men and their paralytic friend, a faith that was met with action.

We see that true faith acts. True faith acts. We're going to talk about it a bit more, but I'm going to fast forward us to chapter 2 and verse 13. We're going to see this same faith in action in verses 13 and 14.

It says there that Christ went out again beside the sea, and all the crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them. Notice that again. Preaching in the first account. Teaching in the second account.

And as he passed by, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, follow me. And he rose and followed him. So again, what do we find here in chapter, verse 13, but the crowds.

The crowds are back at Christ now as he passes along the sea, and Christ again is teaching. He's teaching. It was central to Christ's ministry. We'll see that again and again, and it must be central to ours.

But again, in the midst of this crowd, we find Christ, and it was not long before he sovereignly fixed his gaze on one man who sat at his tax booth. Mark tells us that this man's name was Levi, but if we were to go over to Matthew chapter 9 and verse 9, likely a gospel account that was written by Matthew himself, Matthew confesses this was Matthew, one of the 12 disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And it was this Matthew, and it may have been, too, at this prominent taxing station in the midst of Capernaum that would have collected taxes from the fishermen. It was this Matthew that Christ set his gaze on.

And let me tell you that if we were in that crowd, walking with Jesus as he approached that tax booth, if we were just the typical religious person, we would all be very surprised by Christ's choice to look to Levi, to look to Matthew, and to say, come, follow me.

Tax collectors, if you don't know anything about them, tax collectors were essentially Jews who purchased a franchise from the Roman government that gave them the ability and the right to collect taxes from their fellow citizens.

And the way that it worked was that anything that was collected above Rome's base tax rate could be kept as profit by the tax collector. And so there was great incentive to always be ripping people off and to be taking more than what was due because that was how you gained profit.

And so it was a system that created tremendous greed and also tremendous wealth for the tax collector. And so for this reason, tax collectors were despised and they were hated because, after all, it was they that got rich from exploiting their fellow Jews.

And so they were despised by their countrymen as Roman sympathizers and traitors. And if you were to read the Mishnah, the Mishnah is a Jewish, it's now a writing of the Jewish oral tradition, the Jewish oral stories that were told.

If you were to read the Mishnah about tax collectors, we would see that it says this about them. Tax collectors were always making their daily rounds, exacting payment of men with or without their consent.

And the Mishnah poured out scathing judgments, scathing judgments on these tax collectors. So imagine this, if you were a tax collector, if you were Levi sitting at that booth, if you were Matthew, the Mishnah said that you were to be considered on par with a thief or a murderer.

There's a thief, there's a murderer, there's a tax collector. Tax collectors were disqualified, not only from serving as judges, but of being witnesses in court. They could not be trusted to give a sound testimony.

Tax collectors were expelled from the synagogue. If you tried to attend the synagogue as a tax collector, you would be put out, excommunicated. And even if you were to lay your finger on a home, on someone's home, or knock on their door, the touch of a tax collector would render the entire home ceremonially unclean.

And so to be a tax collector, you were not only a shame to your family, but you were a shame to your family name. So that it would say even Levi, the son of Alpheus, speaks to the reputation of Alpheus.

His son, you see Alpheus over there? His son's a tax collector. And so this is Levi sitting in his tax booth. But as Christ often does, he set his gaze on the most despised. He set his gaze on the unclean, and he calls Levi, he calls Matthew, to follow him.

And in doing that, when he says, follow me, he uses a term that's only ever used when he calls his disciples. And so it's likely that Levi had previously sat in his tax booth. He had listened to Christ's teaching.

He had heard the claims about Christ and of his authority and of his miracles. And there, as Christ called him, picture this, brothers and sisters, as Christ called him, Levi is sitting there in that tax booth and he has a decision to make.

He can remain a worthless but wealthy tax collector. He can continue to accrue large sums of money from his peers, ripping the fishermen off as they come past the tax booth. He can continue to... Where am I here?

He can continue to be with the crowds, even to fade into the crowd as it passes by. Or he can believe all that he has heard about Christ, all that he has heard from Christ, and he can leave it all to follow him.

Here you see two pictures of faith or the opportunity for faith. You have the four men and their paralyzed friend coming to Christ in faith, getting on the roof, getting through the ceiling, and Christ saw their faith.

Here again you have a man who is faced with a decision. And one commentator says this, Christ's invitation to follow, that word follow, is a load-bearing term that describes the proper response of faith.

And it is indeed practically synonymous with faith. Following is an act that involves risk and cost. It is something that one does, not simply what one thinks or believes. So here Mark records no dialogue in the call.

Like the four fishermen, Levi must respond solely to the authority of Jesus and his call. And what we're told is that Levi, Matthew, one of the twelve disciples, left everything. He left it all and followed Christ.

He followed, it says, Rose, and followed him. And what we see here, brothers and sisters, I'm going to make this one brief, we're going to build on it as we go, but here we see that true faith acts. This is a question of the quality of faith.

A faith of real quality, of high quality, is a faith that moves. It's not passive. A saving faith is not an idle faith. The defining mark of genuine Christian faith is that those who believe in Christ respond, they rise, they come to him.

They come to him on his terms. They come to him by repentance. They come to him in faith and they continue to come to him. To have true faith. Picture again, Paul Washer going to the city. Every person in that crowd said, I'm a Christian.

I'm a Christian. Of course I'm a Christian. Everybody in this town's a Christian. But genuine Christian faith, the genuine believer, is not content to stand in the crowd. They're not content to stand outside the doorway, beyond the wicked gate, to watch from afar.

The man or the woman who has true faith in Christ pushes through the throngs of the gawkers and the critics and the onlookers. They scale the roof. They lower themselves in through the ceiling.

They get up.

They leave everything. Every fleeting pleasure of sin, they throw it all away for the privilege of following Christ. Friends, what is the quality of your faith? Do you have the kind of faith that acts?

Or do you have the kind of faith that merely professes? That is but a word. But your life is not in it. Your life is not in Christ. Hebrews 11, verse 1, tells us about the genuineness, or maybe a description of genuine faith.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. It's an assurance. It's a conviction. Children, I want to ask you guys briefly about faith. If you were in a plane, and the plane was swirling down, I'm not sure if I'm able to compete with the coloring, but the plane is falling to the ground, and the captain says,.

We're going down.

We're not going to land this plane, but there's a parachute under your seat. Your parents might be putting their parachutes on, but your parents' parachute is not going to save you. You need to put on your own parachute.

You must act. You must trust that that parachute is going to save you. So often I talk to people on the street, and we talk about what it means to have faith. It is to trust in Christ. It's not merely to admire the parachute as we trend toward the ground, but it's to put it on.

It's to act. It's to move. It's to have assurance. It's to have the conviction that this alone will save me. And we see countless biblical illustrations, and I'm not going to go through all of them, but we can look in Hebrews chapter 11 and see them.

I encourage you. I suppose Matt gave us a homework lesson last week. Go back and read Titus. Go back this week and read Hebrews chapter 11 and look at all the illustrations of faith in there. By faith, Abel made a better sacrifice, a better offering to God.

By faith, Noah built the ark. Faith compelled Abram to go to Canaan. By faith, Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God. By faith, people conquered kingdoms, closed the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire.

Others were mocked, flogged, stoned. Some were sawn in two. By faith, because of faith, a faith that acted. In the face of this kind of faith, in Hebrews chapter 11, many people's faith, I say with great concern, many people's faith today is shown to be a farce.

Is that your quality of faith? Dear ones, is it true of you that you have that kind of faith? Is your faith more than mere words? When Jesus looks at you as he looked at the paralytic, as he looked at his four friends, does he see faith?

That's a question you should take home and answer. Now what becomes then of a man or a woman when Christ sees that they have placed their faith in him? We're going to speed it up a little bit now. Beginning in chapter 5, or verse 5, I want to say chapter, verse 5, and when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son, your sins are forgiven.

Now some of the scribes that were sitting there questioned in their hearts, why does this man speak like this? He is blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone? And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, Why do you question these things in your hearts?

Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven, or to say, Rise, take up your bed and walk, but that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. He said to the paralytic, I say to you, pick up your bed and go home.

True Faith Saves and Receives Forgiveness

A true faith acts. The second point I want to make is a true faith saves. It's interesting, when Christ addresses the paralytic, I don't know if anyone's noticed this before, I picked apart that red letter saying in verse 5, Son, your sins are forgiven.

The first thing that Christ calls the paralytic is son. If you like hearing about the Greek words, it's the Greek word technon, and it's a term that's used of great endearment, of affection, but it's also a term that's used to convey authority and benevolence on the part of the speaker.

Here you have someone with the authority of the Father referring to this man as Son and doing so lovingly, mercifully, graciously. And in this one word, what Christ does, what Mark intends to convey, is that Christ has this great supremacy.

He's marked by great supremacy and great mercy.

Son.

And then he follows it up with these words. He says, probably the sweetest words, Brother, Sister, if you were there and you were in that man's place, they would be the sweetest words that you have or will ever hear in your life.

Son, your sins are forgiven. And what Christ does here, again, to pick apart that sentence is Christ uses the most forceful imagery here that he can at least use, or that Mark uses now, in the Greek text.

This man's forgiveness is not just vague and undefined, it's targeted and specific. Christ says, Son, your sins. Your sins specifically. Your sins fully. And then he says, your sins are forgiven. And again, the word that he uses here denotes the driving away of something.

The pushing away. The sending away. Not only is this man no longer held guilty for his sin, but Jesus Christ himself has sent all of this man's sin from him. He has put it away out of God's sight. Now perhaps Christ had in mind Psalm 103 verse 12, as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

But he put his sin away. Now I'm not sure if you've asked this question yet, but that's not why the paralyzed man came to Christ, was it? To have his sins forgiven. He came to be healed. At least that's the way that we would think in our modern western minds.

We might ask ourselves, he's not giving him what he asked for. Some people might even say he's giving him something subpar. Maybe that's the kind of person that criticizes us on White Avenue as we share the gospel instead of money.

But here Christ forgives his sins. And what we need to understand is that this is at least for two good reasons. Firstly, amongst many of the Jews in that particular day, they felt that any kind of physical ailment, if you were afflicted with some kind of disease, you deserved it.

That was a result of your sin. It was almost an immediate form of karma. You reap what you sow. Think Job's friends. There must be a reason why you're suffering. When a person had a severe physical defect or disease, it was considered to be a symptom of their sinfulness.

And that's why if we look back in the Gospels, John 9, verse 2, people came to Christ and said, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? That's just the way they thought. And so here Christ deals with that concern.

He deals with the root issue, at least in the Jewish mindset. He deals with what the culture felt was the cause of this paralysis, namely sin. But secondly, and truly, Christ deals with this man's greatest, deepest, and most real of needs.

More than his physical health, this man needed his sins dealt with. What would it profit this man if he gained all of his mobility? If he did, if he picked up his mat and went home and then forfeited his soul, died in his sins, and went to hell?

So Christ here, with his endless stores of grace, gives him something better than what he's asking for. He deals with both the physical ailment and he deals with the spiritual ailment. And this was much to the disdain of the authorities.

We see that, the scribes, these religious experts, and silently in their hearts, as if I'm in the room and everyone here in their hearts, quietly, they accuse Christ of blasphemy. They sat there silently on the outside, but inside they were gnashing their teeth and they're saying, who can forgive sins but God alone?

This is a blasphemer. And if you're familiar with passages like, I believe it's Exodus, oh goodness, I didn't write it down. I think it's Exodus 24, maybe Leviticus 24. But blasphemers were deserving of death.

They were to be stoned. And so already there's this murderous attitude in these men's hearts. And the heart attitudes were all wrong. But we have to give them at least one credit, I suppose. And that's that their theology was on point.

For a man to claim to absolve sins of any other person, they were guilty of the most egregious kind of heresy. It was widely and it was correctly understood that only God, only God could forgive sins.

No man was ever authorized to forgive another man's transgressions. No priest could make that kind of pronouncement and go around town and say, your sins are forgiven. Even the high priest did not possess the kind of authority that Christ is laying claim to in this passage.

And the Jews, I'm not going to read them all just for the sake of time, but Jews, they were well acquainted with texts like Psalm 103, verses 2 and 3. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases.

It's God, it was Yahweh alone who could forgive sin and heal disease. Micah 7, verse 18. Who is a God like you? Who is a God like you? It's God, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression. Or Isaiah 43, verse 11, this is the last one I'll mention.

I am the Lord, I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no Savior. And then fast forwarding a bit to verse 25. I am he who blots out your transgression for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.

The scribes rightly understood that it was God alone, it is God alone who can forgive sins. And so these scribes bitterly questioned Christ's words in their hearts. Oh, there it is, Leviticus 24, 16, in terms of blasphemy, deserving death.

But what we see here is that Christ, being in human flesh, He already knew, being God in human flesh, already knew the inner meditations of their hearts. And so in healing this sinful, paralyzed man right then and there, Christ displays again His authority as Lord God, as Yahweh Himself.

And He does what only God can do. He forgives the man's sins, and He heals him instantly. And again, Christ shows us, shows Himself, excuse me, as powerful and authoritative. Now really briefly, we're going to look again at the parallel passage in chapter, verse 15.

And as He reclined at the table, this is now with Levi and the tax collectors, reclined at the table in His house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and His disciples, for there were many who followed Him.

And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that He was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to His disciples, Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners? And when Jesus heard it, He said to them, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. So again, we see Christ's heart towards sinful men and women. I'm going to fast forward us a little bit. Just a quote from a commentator on this passage.

The story illustrates, this commentator says, the same truths that we read about in Mark 2, verses 1 -12. There Jesus pronounced forgiveness of sins. Here He forgives sinners, entering their houses in fellowship.

The basis of table fellowship is the forgiveness Jesus offers as Messiah. And it anticipates, notice this, it anticipates the messianic banquet at the end of days. Jesus' fellowship with tax collectors and sinners illustrates the radical nature of grace.

The grace of God that extends to and overcomes the worst forms of human depravity. I won't pull it apart much more than that. But what we see here is, again, the truth that not only is saving, is true faith active, but true faith saves.

It is the means. It is the road. It is the medium through which God saves sinners, through which God forgives sin. This is a living representation of what Paul wrote later in Romans 9, in verse 30. He says, what shall we say then?

Think of this, it describes it perfectly, that Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it. That is a righteousness that is by faith. But that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law.

Why?

You've got the righteous and the unrighteous.

Why?

Because they did not pursue it by faith as if it were based on works. And so this passage is a double-barrel approach. You've got two stories, double-barrel approach to teaching the doctrine of justification by faith alone.