Cleansing of the Leper — Harry Ironside

Matthew 8 and the Healing of the Leper

I'm going to ask your attention tonight to a few verses in the eighth chapter of Matthew's Gospel. The Gospel of Matthew, chapter eight, and the first four verses. We lift our hearts again to thee, and we pray that thou wilt do for us what our blessed Lord did for those disciples on the resurrection evening, when he opened to them the scriptures, and opened their understanding, and opened their hearts, and opened their eyes, and opened their ears.

Wilt thou do all this for us, and give us to receive thy truth in good and honest time, as the very word of the living God undertakes for us as we seek to minister in the presence of the Father, and in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Matthew eight, and when he was come down from the mountain, a great multitude followed him, and there came a leper unto him, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt thou canst make me free.

And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will be thou free. And immediately he was cleansed, and Jesus said unto him, Be thou tell no man, unto the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded for a testimony to them.

Leprosy as a Picture of Sin

Those of you who are familiar with your Bibles, and I hope you all are, will remember that in the book of Leviticus, which was the priest's guidebook under the old dispensation, there are two chapters devoted to the detection, and sure cleansing of leprosy.

Chapter thirteen, you'll remember that in chapter thirteen, was to be, if a man or a woman had in the skin of their leg a rising, or a bright spot that was giving them some trouble, they were to be brought unto the priest, and the priest was to examine them carefully, and if he discerned certain symptoms as indicated in that chapter, then he was pronounced this person, or person, and we read, The man in whom the leprosy is, his head shall be bare, his clothes shall be red, he shall have a covering on his upper lip, and he shall cry unclean, unclean, and without the cap shall his habitation be.

It was a terrible affliction. Leprosy, you see, is the awful picture of sin. Leprosy was the most filthy, the most horrible disease that was known in ancient times, and sin, though we so often treat it lightly, is the filthiest, the vilest thing that has ever intruded into God's universe.

We're told that fools make a mock at sin, so whenever you find anybody who speaks scornfully of what God's word has to say regarding sin, you know exactly what he is. God says he's a fool. Now, we are not authorized to call people fools ourselves, but when God calls a man a fool, then we need not hesitate to apply that epithet to him.

I remember once some years ago, a group of us were going night after night from Oakland to San Francisco on the ferry boat, the whole meetings over in San Francisco, and we had with us a delightful Irish brother who played a concert leader, and was a very good tenor singer, and as we went back and forth in the ferry boat, we'd get off to one corner on the deck, and this good brother would lead us in the singing of thoughtful hymns, and I remember one night as we were singing, a man who was reading a newspaper near us, shot up with great indignation, and just as we finished, he said, who are you people anyway?

A pack of fools intruding the religion of a pope who have no interest in it. My Irish friend said, yes, you know, sir, we are fools for Christ's sake, who's fool are you? And the man turned and fled. He was away down at the other end of the boat in a minute or two.

Well, you know, it's a terrible thing to be one of the devil's fools. Fools make a mock at sin. Sin is a fearful affliction. One might as well make a mock at a terrible disease like leprosy. You see, leprosy, like sin, was a constitutional disease.

Sin Works from Within

A man wasn't a leper because he happened to have an incurable sore here upon his hand, or his arm, or some other part of his body, or it might be on his head. So we read that if a man had a rising or a bright spot on his forehead or on his bald head, this, this, this becoming way of wearing the hair was common in Israel thousands of years ago.

And if a man had a sore, one of these horrible sores in his head, well it was leprosy then. On the body it was called leprosy of the flesh, and you see it just indicates the two different kinds of sin.

We read of the lusts of the flesh and the lusts of the mind. The lusts of the flesh, of course, include all kinds of fleshly appetites, breaking over from God's host's objection to God's holy law, drunkenness, and lasciviousness, and life anxiousness, and other terrible sins.

And a great many people, respectable people, look with utter disgust on folks who are given to these sins, but they forget that leprosy of the head was just as terrible as leprosy of the flesh, and that the lusts of the mind are just as wicked in God's sight as the lusts of the flesh.

Pride, and arrogance, and conceit, and unbelief, these things are just as hateful to God as drunkenness, and adultery, and the gluttony, and other styles, being the ones you look at thinner. But I started to say a man was not a leper because he happened to have some of these thorns here or there upon the body or the head.

They were there because he was a leper. The leprosy wrought from within out. It was a constitutional disease, and a man might be a leper for some time, and quite unconscious of it, until at last these outward evidences appeared.

And so, a man is not a sinner because he gets drunk, or because he tells lies, or because he's guilty of some vile form of immorality, or because he's sane and conceited. He's not a sinner because of these things.

He is a thief because, out of the heart, the Lord Jesus tells us, proceeds the fornication, and adultery, and all these other unholy things that make manifest the fact that one is a sinner. And, you know, leprosy was an absolutely insurable disease.

The Incurable Condition of Sin

In our day, physicians have discovered a remedy that seems compact, at least in some instances, to bring about the cure it used in time. But, in Bible times, there was no known cure for leprosy. The man who became a leper was accounted a curse of God, and there was absolutely no help for it.

You remember, it was said of King Uzziah that, because of his pride in attempting to assert the priesthood, and enter the holy place in the temple with a censer in his hand, when the high priest sought to hold him back, that suddenly the leprosy came out on his forehead.

You see, that was leprosy of the head, indicating the pride that dominated him. And we're told he dwelt in a several house for the day of his death. What, mixing with leprosy, there was no cure. Dear friends, there's absolutely no cure so far as man.

No man can his brother, nor give to God a ransom for it, nor can any man deliver himself from the power of leprosy. So, leprosy is an incurable disease. I'll never forget years ago, when they were holding the first World's Fair in Chicago, that they put on what they called there a Parliament of Religion, and they invited the representatives of all the great religious systems of the world to come together to explain their beliefs, to make clear to the people what their creeds were, and so on, and give folk an opportunity to choose between them if they wish.

Well, they came from all over the world. There were Hindus, Swamis in their yellow robes. There were the Chinese followers of Lao-Tzu in their priestly garb. There were the representatives of the Persian Apartheid, Zend-e-Vestas, their sacred scriptures.

There were Mohammedan Mullahs in their robes, representatives of all the religions under heaven. And there were representatives of the various branches of the Catholic Church, Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox, and Roman Catholics, and Jacobite Catholics, and Monopoliste Catholics, and Coptic Catholics.

You know, some people imagine the Catholics are all one. It's only us. We poor Protestants are divided up, but blessed are the dozens of fifteen different Catholic churches are all claiming to come right down from Christ and the Apostles, and they were all there.

And here and there could be seen among the multitude representatives of Protestant Christianity, and among these was Joseph Cook, the celebrated congregational preacher and lecturer of Boston, Massachusetts.

Joseph Cook and the Question of Cleansing Guilt

When it came his turn to speak, oh, what a message he gave! This was before that great audience of thousands of people, and he said to them, my friends, I come to you today taking my text from Shakespeare's death.

I draw your attention to the scene where Lady Macbeth, after the murder of Duncan, is trying to wash the blood of the murdered king from her hands, and Shakespeare says, how she washed that hand. That was the red, that red right hand.

It was the multitudinous deed incarnate, making the green one red. And her husband, Macbeth, crying out, oh, damn, will that hand, nails of Arabia, could not weaken that little hand. Dr. Cook said, I've listened to the representatives of all the religious systems who are gathered here from the east and the west, and the north and the south, and I come to you today, and I place Lady Macbeth on my right arm, and her husband on my left, and I walk down the aisle of this grand congress of religion, and I've only one question to put to the representatives of every system here, and my question is this, who will cleanse our red right hand?

Who will wash away the guilt of our sins? He said, I listened to all the different addresses here, and I find different ones telling us how we ought to live in the future, and how we should reform our lives and teach to behave better, but I've yet to hear one who can tell us how the sin of our lives is to be cleansed.

Who will cleanse our red right hand? Ah, he said, at last I turned back to the one of whom I learned that my mother is mean, and I look up into his face and say, who can cleanse our red right hand? And the answer comes back, God's son cleanses us.

But that's the only cure, that's the only way that guilty sinners can be cleansed and made fit for heaven. Well, the 13th chapter of Leviticus, I repeat, tells us how to diagnose cases of leprosy, and because the priest has a responsibility of doing, I'm certain that every priest in Israel who associated at the temple must have read that chapter over and over and over, so as to get all the details of it clearly in his mind.

Leviticus 14 and the Cleansing of the Leper

But the 14th chapter told the priest what he was to do when a man was cleansed from the leprosy. You know, I've often wondered whether any priest in Israel ever took the trouble to read that chapter through twice.

Undoubtedly, at least at once. But I fancy if he read it, he'd say to himself, well, I don't know why this is in my Bible. Why, it says here that when a man has been cleansed from his leprosy, then the priest is to do such a thing for him.

And I've never heard of a man who's cleansed from his leprosy. Lepers are never cleansed. Do you know that you can go through your Bible from the chapter that tells us of the healing of Miriam in the wilderness, to where this passage is not yet coming to you, right on down to the very beginning of the New Testament, and you never read of a leper being cleansed in Israel.

Not once. The Lord Jesus said many lepers were in Israel in the days of the life of the prophet, but to none of them was a life of thanks but to Naaman the Syrian. And he was a saint, and this chapter wouldn't apply to him.

But we never have any record of any leper ever being cleansed in 1500 long years. Why on earth did God put that chapter in the Bible? A chapter that manifestly nobody could ever act on, so far as people could see.

A chapter that gave instruction which no priest could ever carry out, as far as anyone did. And yet there it was in the book. A dead letter, they might say, but it was part of God's work. And you know, one day a priest was officiating, I fancy, at the temple.

Jesus Fulfills the Law’s Provision for Cleansing

I have to draw a little bit of my imagination here, but I'm sure I'm not going outside of Scripture record. A priest was officiating at the temple, and a man came to him and said, look, could you come outside?

There's a man out here who says he's been cleansed from his leprosy, and he's come to offer the sacrifices of Moses to man. Can I fancy that priest will say whatever you talk about? Why, I've been a priest here for years.

I never heard of a man being cleansed. My father was a priest before me, and he never knew of a man being cleansed from leprosy. As far as we can go back into the record, no one has ever heard of a man in Israel being cleansed from leprosy.

And you mean to tell me that there's a leper who has been healed outside the gates of the temple? Yes, he's there, and he wants you to come and look at him. And I fancy, you know, almost unwillingly that priest will go out.

Where is this man who says he was cleansed from leprosy? You're the man, so let's have a look at him. And he will examine according to the 13th chapter of Leviticus, which tells us a new way. And he has to say, well, I don't see any evidence of leprosy here.

But are you sure you ever were a leper? Well, if I wasn't, somebody made a terrible mistake, and I've suffered awfully from it through the years. I came to this very temple years ago, and I was carefully examined by the priest who pronounced me to be a leper.

And because of that, I've had to dwell in the wilderness apart from my family all these years. I haven't been permitted to visit my loved ones. I haven't been able to come close enough to my wife or my children even to touch their hands.

But if they brought their food to me, they placed it on a rock, and then they threw them far off as I came over and picked it up, and in order to feed upon it. And if anybody drew near, I had to cry out, I'm free!

I'm free! I'm free! And oh, how I've suffered in my body. I've seen as though my very fingers and toes and my feet and my hands were just literally rotting away. And my face has been a mass of horrid flames and sores.

My whole body has been reaping with this filthy disease. Well, I don't understand it. There's no evidence of it now. How were you cured? What doctor did you find? What medicine did you take? You ought to make it known to everybody.

If you found a cure for that person, everyone ought to know it. The Jerusalem Medical Association ought to have all the details so that they can publish it abroad and give everybody the opportunity of getting the remedy.

How were you cured? And I think the man would reply, well, I was up there in Galilee, and I was out for the wayside in the wilderness, and I saw crowds coming down the highway just the other day. And I wondered what it was all about, and I got as near as I felt I dared, and I shouted out, what's this excitement?

What's going on? Somebody answered back, Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth, is coming this way. And I said, Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth? Oh, I've heard great things about him. He's the one, I'm told, who makes the tongue of the dumb to sing.

He's the one who opens the ears of the deaf. He's the one who opens the eyes of the blind. He's the one who makes the lame man to the heart. He's the man who, they tell me, heals all manner of diseases.

Surely he could do something for me. Surely my case is not too bad for him. And I could say, Jesus, oh, sir, I forgot all the prohibitions, you know, and I ran, and I saw in the midst of the crowd, and I fell down at his feet, and I said, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make, and he put forth his hand and touched me.

Touched you? Well, then he became untrue. Any man who touches a leper is untrue. Either it didn't work that way. He touched me and said, I will, be thou clean. And in a moment, I felt in my body that I was healed of that awful plague.

And the next instance, I looked at my own hands. I could hardly believe it. Why, they were just as you see them now, not a sign of disease upon them. And I knew that I was no longer a leper. And he said to me, now don't go to register fraud, but go to the temple, show yourself to the priest, and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded.

So here I am, and I want you to offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded. And I think that priest dragged his head and said to him, what am I to do? Hey, go and get me my Bible, will you? I don't know what to do for this man.

And away they go, and get him the book of Leviticus. And for the first time, he'd read that 14th chapter with real interest. Now he had found the case where he was to carry out what was written in it.

And you know, from that time on, for three and a half wonderful years, there was perhaps gently a week that went by that somebody didn't come to the temple in the same evidence. Someone calling for the priest to examine him because he'd been claimed from his leprosy.

And one time there were nine of them came at one time, all together, nine of them. And I found there's a priest came for us to look at, and he said, you need to tell me that you were all lepers. Yes, we were all lepers.

And in fact, there were ten of us. But the other one, well, he was a Samaritan, and he wasn't interested in our temple. He was far more interested in the man that healed him. We were all together, and we came to Jesus, and we asked him to heal us.

And he said, go show yourself to the priest. And as we went, we were healed. The power in his words to heal and save. And the priest would have to again carry out all that was written in the 14th of Leviticus.

The Priests and the Evidence of Faith

Are you surprised that when you turn over to the book of Acts, and a few years, and read of what happened a few years later, after the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, we're told, and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.

Why you see, they've had so many wonderful testimonies to the power of Jesus. Well, what were they to do? Well, you have to turn back to that passage in Leviticus. I'd like to read it to you, but my eyes are closed in.

I'd only hold things up a bit, trying to follow it, so I have to defend the memory. But, you know, we're told that when a man was cleansed, and the leper, and he was supposed to be, and the priest was to come forth and look upon him, and if he found that he was actually clean, then it says, the priest will take two birds, alive and clean, and cedar wood, and scarlet wool, and the hyssop, and he shall kill the living bird in an earthen vessel over living water, and he shall, then he shall take the living, the other bird, and he shall dip it in the blood of the dead bird, and let them shall sprinkle the blood of the dead bird upon the leper, and let the living bird loose into the open field, and the leper shall be counted as clean.

That was his judicial cleansing. So, fit him to come back again among the people of God, to go back to his home, and dwell with his family too. And what it is, seems to me, is God's beautiful picture of the death and resurrection of his beloved son.

The Two Birds and Christ’s Death and Resurrection

Two birds, one of them that had to die, the other soared up and up into the air, bearing upon it, through me, the blood of the bird that died. You see, they were identified as it were, one with the other.

It took two birds to illustrate Christ's resurrection. He was delivered for our effect. Coming down in, you know what the earthen vessel, in the gospel, says, we have this treasure in person, the excellent, the earthen vessel, as he refers to our poor, frail humanity.

And so the little bird in the earthen vessel spoke of the heavenly one, the blessed, eternal son, taking our humanity apart from its place. In other words, becoming a man. What for? Ah, the bird would, and the Lord sees, to die for you, dear, for you, that you might not perish, that you might be saved eternally.

And have you ever thanked heaven, heard in the earth? You remember the apostle Peter, when he's speaking of the proper relation of Christian husbands and wives, he says to the husband, giving honor unto the wife, who is the wife.

I remember some years ago, the Bible conference of the good Lord. There was one brother there who was tall, but he was one of these hard. He was so hard in his family, so stern with his wife and his brothers, very prominent.

So he was on that passage, and he looked up and he said, brother, what do you understand about that? Giving honor to the wife is on the wheeler there. But I said, brother, I think it means you're a very good kid, and when you come home at night, you've got a bad headache, and you think that's what it means?

I said, exactly what it means. I never thought it was anything like that. It was fine, it was fine, you know? But, you see, the body of the wife is spoken of as the wheeler there, and so the Lord and he took no exact picture.

The Risen Christ and the Hope of Salvation

The priest was to kill the little bird in the early morning water, and it was in the power of Thomas was so unbelieving, the Lord Jesus looked upon him whom they feared, and when he appeared to Israel, they'll behold his pierced hands, and they'll say, Lord, what are those wounds that I was wounded in the house of my father?

He'll tear them forever. He wants forever to all whom he has received in order to be pronounced. He took good care to look all next to him, but did you look yonder to the throne of God? There's a one who wants to give all, just acknowledge, unless God can do something for everything that needs to be done.

He's given his son to die for him, and now, if you'll just put your trust in thy mouth, the Lord, for with the heart man believeth, you can take it all on the fingers of one hand. It begins with in, and that's uncertain.

It ends with say, and then there are three shouts in between. If thou shalt confess with thy mouth that Jesus is Lord, and shalt believe in thine heart that God has raised him from the dead, you say, you say, but don't I have to pray until I feel that God has accepted me?

Dear friend, it's a question of feeling. Do you know how often the word feeling is found in a newspaper? You know, just underneath. I've not, in the one place, seen high priests who have been touched with the feeling of our infirmity.

In the other place, it speaks of a healer who has been offered the word feeling, and that's in a sense where all it says, God is not far from any one of us, if happily we might be men who don't have a mind, who don't know anything about the Lord, but might groan after God, after God, like an infant crying in the night, an infant crying for the light.