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Pastor David Mitchell
All righty, I think Russell was correct with his announcement, it was Luke chapter 5, I think verse 12, let me see, yes, verse 12,
Luke chapter 5, verse 12, we've made our way that far through the book of Luke, we won't get much further today though, just a few verses, because within these few verses today we have a rabbit trail, but it's one that I want to take you on, it's an important one.
Is this everybody Charlotte, as far as you know, okay, well let's pray and we'll get started.
Father, thank you so much for ordaining the assembly of ourselves together, we thank you for the strength that we draw from one another, but most of all from your presence, your
Holy Spirit as he teaches us, the sense of your words, Lord may we keep these in our hearts and in our minds, may you use them as you work in us in this world, and give us a special understanding today as we study these passages, for Jesus' sake, amen.
We're in Luke chapter 5, starting with verse 12, and we'll go through verse 16.
And it came to pass when he was in a certain city, behold a man full of leprosy, who seeing
Jesus fell on his face and besought him, did you punch that button Russell, okay, well that's on the tape too, alrighty then.
Verse 13, and put forth his hand and touched him saying, I will, I'm going to start over, verse 12, and it came to pass when he was in a certain city, behold a man full of leprosy, who seeing
Jesus fell on his face and besought him saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean, and he put forth his hand and touched him saying,
I will, be thou clean, and immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he charged him to tell no man, but go and show thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing, according as Moses commanded for a testimony unto them, but so much the more went there a fame abroad of him, and great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed by him of their infirmities, and he withdrew himself into the wilderness and prayed.
Well let's start there with verse 12, and it came to pass when he was in a certain city, behold a man full of leprosy, who seeing the
Lord fell on his face and besought him, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean, leprosy in the
Bible is symbolic throughout the Bible of sin, but really to be more accurate, it's really more symbolic of the death that comes because of sin.
It pictures the death, now death we know means separation, physical death means separation of the spirit and soul from the body, did
I say physical, okay, spiritual death means the separation of the spirit and soul from God, so death means separation, and really leprosy pictures the death.
When you go into the Old Testament and you study in different passages all through Leviticus but other places as well, the ceremonies that they went through when the leper was healed,
Jesus referred to that down here in chapter 14, I mean verse 14 which we'll see in a moment, but when you go through and you read that, you get some very vivid symbolism just like you do if you talk about the sacrifices.
Just as the sacrifices picture what Jesus did on the cross, the leper and what he went through to be cleansed and restored to fellowship pictures what happens to us because before our salvation we were dead in our sins, and the leper pictured a walking dead man because leprosy normally eats away at you slowly for years and years and years and years and then it kills you eventually, and it's a vivid picture of how sin upon sin upon sin over the lifetime of a human being brings him to death unless he is saved, unless he becomes in Christ.
So the leper pictures all this. When you go into their ceremonial cleansings in Leviticus 13 and other places, it's really full of specific detail.
First of all, it has to do with the readmission of the sufferer who had been counted as dead.
In Leviticus 14, 1 through 9, you see that very clearly if you think about it.
It's all about the fact that he is counted as dead, but he has been miraculously saved and he's going to be readmitted into the congregation and into fellowship.
There's a preparation for his return to fellowship with the covenant people, and then there's a ceremony which takes place, and the interesting thing is it takes place outside the camp, not in the place where Israel is, but outside the camp.
And that pictures the fact that when you, it pictures this fact, you were lost when you got saved.
Now think about that for a minute. That sounds pretty simple. You were lost when you got saved.
You were outside the camp when you got saved, but if you really think about that statement, it proves very clearly that you did not save yourselves.
God saved us because we're in a state where we are walking dead men.
We're blind to truth. We're deaf to his word. Our hands cannot serve him.
Our feet cannot follow him. The Bible says we're spiritually dead. We are full of dead men's bones.
We're like whited sepulchers. All of these things are the way we were before we were saved.
In fact, the ceremony that takes place happens outside the camp. The truth is at the moment of your salvation, you were lost right before that happened and you were not seeking
God. The Bible says there's none that seeks God. God was seeking you. That's the order it worked in.
God was loving you. He was wooing you. He was pursuing you. Just like Paul, his salvation is such a beautiful picture of how salvation truly is for all of us.
He was on the road going about killing Christians and fighting God, and all of a sudden God just reached down and saved him.
It's God that has to initiate salvation. Man can't do it because he's a leper. He's dead. Even the ceremony that takes place to get him back into camp happens outside the camp.
And so all of a sudden you wake up and you're in the camp, but you didn't put yourself there.
God did. And salvation is of the Lord. The Bible says that through and through and through and through, but nowadays we have a gospel that's being taught that teaches that you save yourself.
And another interesting thing about this ceremony is it includes two birds, one that is killed and one that's dipped in the water and the blood and let to fly free.
It almost reminds us of the scapegoat and the other goat. And so you have all this symbolism.
Now they take the blood that's mixed with the water because the bird that's killed is killed over running water so that the blood mingles with running water like water of a spring, a spring rising up and flowing.
And they dip this blood in the water and they place it on the, listen to this, the ear and the hand and the foot of the leper.
Isn't that amazing? It anoints his ear so that now he can hear
God. He's not deaf any longer, places it on his hand, now he can serve
God, places it on his feet, now he can follow the Lord. And then later they anoint him seven times with oil and then pour the remainder of the oil over his head.
Now this anointing of oil is a beautiful picture of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
If you go into Ephesians 1 .13 and Acts chapter 10 verse 44, you will see that the
Bible teaches clearly that in the church age, which is where we live now, that this happens at the moment of your salvation.
It is not something you do, it's not something you ask for later, it's not something you get later, it happens at the moment of salvation, it is not something you can do to yourself.
It is passive in the grammar. It's something that God does to you. He baptizes you into the body of Jesus Christ at the moment of salvation.
There are whole groups out there today that base their theology on thinking that you go out and you get what they call a second blessing and they call that the baptism of the
Holy Spirit. But you check it out, look up anywhere you find in your Bible where it uses the phrase baptize and Holy Spirit in the same passage and you're going to find out that that happens at the moment of salvation.
There's no place that says it happens later, that you get saved first and later you go get baptized with the Spirit. That is not in the
Bible. And it's pictured here with the leper. He is the dead man.
He's the walking dead man who is outside the camp and all of a sudden he is miraculously healed by God.
No man can do it. He's healed by God. And then the blood is placed on his on his hands, on his feet, on his ear, and then he's anointed with oil.
He is totally, you know, if you pour that oil here, it totally baptizes you because the word baptize means to be surrounded by something that have to be water.
It just the word baptize means immersed in. So he is has experiences the baptism of the
Holy Spirit at the moment of his coming to life, it's all pictured right here, and there are whole denominations that are off on that and they don't understand the type of the leper that's given here in the
Old Testament. So he is restored and admitted to communion and the altar and Israel.
But look what it says. It says that this leper were back in verse 12. Now, this leper seeing
Jesus fell on his face and besought him, this word besought is the same word we would use to beg, but in the
Greek language, it carries a connotation of being bound to someone. So he went up and connected himself to Jesus.
It's as if he grabbed him. I don't know how. I don't know if he grabbed his arm or if he grabbed his his robe or his foot or his leg.
But he attached himself to Jesus in some way as he begged for him to heal him.
And here again, this is a beautiful picture of the fact that the only healing is if we're if we're in Christ.
And then it says, Lord, if thou wilt, you can make me clean. This leper knew some theology somehow.
If thou wilt, that is a fascinating word, because the word will in the Greek language here is
Thalo, which means something that is determined. So it has to do with the sovereignty of God.
It has to do with the determination of God. It's as if he says,
Lord, if thou hast determined to heal me, then thou can't heal me.
And this man is saying, I know that you can do whatever you will to do.
And he asks him to do so. Isn't that a beautiful picture of the fact that even though God is sovereign, we're still supposed to pray.
Our prayers are important. There are a lot of people that have a problem with the sovereignty of God and and the responsibility of man.
But they're really just two viewpoints, like we talked about in the sermon this morning. David viewed forgiveness from the divine viewpoint.
He looked at it as God would look at it, and that's why he understood it better than those who wrote about it on the human level, because on the human level, all they could see was it was covered and rolled over to the next year.
But from the divine viewpoint, David said it's taken away. There's no way he could have known that from man's viewpoint. So it is best to study from God's viewpoint.
And here he says, Jesus, whatever you determine to do,
I know you can do it, but I beg you to do this. Beg is used as the word pray. The word pray means to ask.
I'm begging. I'm asking. I'm beseeching you to heal me. I know you can do it if you choose to do it.
So because the person who is afraid that because God's in control, that my prayers don't mean anything, hasn't read that verse.
Our what we have to understand, yes, God has determined everything that will happen, but he's also determined the means by which it happens.
He does very little in this earth without prayers going up from somewhere, and he directs that to he when's the last time you saw it written in the sky where God wrote letters?
I'll save you through my son, Jesus. He doesn't sky write a lot. He did write on the wall once, not that wall, brother, brother
Roger, but he did write on the wall once. But normally what he does is he works in us.
He'll work in humans, the humans who penned the scripture.
And notice I didn't say they authored it because God's the author. But they had secretaries and they were people who penned it.
The human who perhaps witnessed to you, the person you heard preach, the person you had teach the scriptures, your own mom, your dad, whoever.
He works in us and yet everything that he's determined that will happen is going to happen.
Jesus himself said of all that thou has given me, I shall lose none.
Isn't it amazing that God is powerful enough where he can use human means and we're frail. We talked about sin this morning, the perversity of it, the rebellion of it, the missing the mark of it.
He uses us and still accomplishes 100 % of his will. It's amazing how all that works.
But this man understands that Jesus is sovereign. He will only heal who he determines should be healed.
But he still asked him to heal him. That's the prayer. That's the human side is we still ask.
But notice that he prayed in God's will. He didn't presumptuously treat God like a genie in a bottle that he could rub and have him come out and say, do this, do that, do that.
Go here and direct God. And there are whole groups that do that nowadays. And I'm not saying everybody in the group believes that way because they don't.
I've talked to I've had friends that are Pentecostal people. I said, I don't believe all that stuff you hear on TV. These guys do.
But there are those who do believe that you can just direct God with a word. You can speak it and claim it.
It's never been that way. What you can do is you can beseech the Lord. It carries a connotation of begging, pleading, asking.
And then when even when we do that, we put on the end of it, if it's your will, we know you can do this if you determine to do it, if you have already determined to do it.
Either viewpoint, you want to look at it, then we know you can do this. This man had a lot of theology in his prayer.
It's amazing. Now, he goes on and he says.
I know you can't do this, the word can is interesting in the
Greek, it's the word do do to make he and there's a similar word in the
Greek language, Dunamis, which means power. It's it's miraculous power that's used on on the earth as God uses it in us from time to time, or he'll sometimes do it on his own.
But this word, this word that takes the idea of power that comes down from God, he this man was telling
Jesus, I know that you have the power from God, the dunamis from God to heal me in a miraculous way if you determine to do it.
That is such fantastic theology. You see, it can solve a lot of the problems of our friends who are in the
Pentecostal and charismatic movements where they think they can just direct God and anybody you just come up,
I'll touch you and you will be healed. And God wants everybody well and God wants everybody rich. And it's
God's will for everybody to never die. You might as well say that. I'm not saying they say that, but if you just carry it out, you might as well say that.
But we know those things are not true. But this man knew it how it was. He said,
I know you can heal me. He didn't say, I know that you owe it to me to heal me. He didn't say,
I know that if I'm right with God, I'll be well. What he said is, I know you can heal me if you have determined that you will heal me.
Beautiful theology. And the fact that he believed in the sovereignty of God, some man might call this person a
Calvinist, you know, it didn't keep him from understanding the responsibility to pray.
It all fits together if we just read the scriptures as they are, I think as we cross the age of 40 years old, perhaps we get to the place where we're mature enough to take all of the little theological boxes that everyone in our life put
God in as we grew up and get rid of the box and just go to the word and read it like it is and see what
God says. You would be surprised how many little catchphrases you've heard preached that are not even true when you study it in the context of the passage, when you use all the other scripture to interpret that scripture and you use the right method of interpretation, it won't even say what you've heard it said.
Now, most of the time, the great major things you're not going to find if you grew up in the word, you're probably most of them are going to be still the same.
But some of these little peripheral things that you may have heard because of whatever group you were in, the Bible may not even say it.
That's why we're supposed to study on our own. We're not supposed to take a man's word for it.
Yes, there are teachers that God gave. And yes, they can help us and save time and help us find things quicker than we would have found them on a desert island by ourselves.
And yes, there are great books like Unger's Bible Dictionary. There are verses in the
Bible you can't even interpret without those books, verses that name cities that you don't know anything about unless you went to a
Bible dictionary and read. You have to have other men sometimes. You see, but if you do all of this and you interpret it and you want to know what
God says, you'll come closer to getting the truth. And if you just keep that old box you grew up with.
So we're responsible to study this man, understood the responsibility of man to pray, but he understood the sovereignty of God, that God would do what he will to do.
What a beautiful verse. Let's go to verse 13. And he put forth his hand and touched him, saying,
I will. Isn't that beautiful? Now, you see, from the human viewpoint,
God just answered this man's prayer. After the man asked from the divine viewpoint,
God had already determined this was going to happen. That's why the man was smart enough to say, if you determine
I know you can heal me. But Jesus said, Jesus said, look, I will.
You prayed, here I am, I will. That's the human viewpoint. When we're in our prayer lives, we can understand the sovereignty of God, we can understand that he's foreordained everything that's going to happen, even the details of the blades of grass blowing.
Everything is in his hand. The Bible says Jesus not only created all things for himself, but it says of him all things consist.
In the Greek language, that means he holds it all together. The molecules and the atoms will just blow apart if he didn't continually do a work.
Right now, present tense work from our viewpoint in time, a work of holding it all together, the whole physical created universe.
So don't think for a minute that anything just that he wound it up and God just sitting back there watching it run. That's what you'll hear taught in most theology today.
God is not like that. He's in everything. He's involved in every bit of it. His dunamis, his power is what makes all of it hold together and keep going.
And Jesus' hand is on it all. This man was wise when he said, if you will, you can heal me because he knew nothing's going to happen if you don't do it.
That's the sovereignty of God. The prayer itself was the viewpoint of man, the responsibility of man in time to pray.
And somehow God works it all together at one time. I do not know how he does that. I don't know that we'll know even when we get to heaven how he does that.
But he does do it. So he put forth his hand and this is beautiful. The man, the man here is using
Calvinistic theology. He's saying, if you predict, you know, if you determine, I know you can do this. And Jesus uses the human viewpoint.
He says, I will. You ask me, I will. Now, you think about that. When you're praying, don't get so far out there on on the
Calvinistic sovereignty of God's side that you don't understand that when God chooses to come in time where we are, which he did with Jesus when he was here in his ministry and he does now through his spirit, which is here in your body in time, don't get so far out there that you don't understand you can come to him as a little child and ask him for something.
Because you are disobeying if you don't ask him, that's what he had determined is supposed to happen.
It's part of the whole thing. And Jesus didn't come back and say, well, in the sovereignty of God, you know,
I have predetermined that I'm going to answer this prayer. The only reason I'm doing it now, he just said, because he implies here.
Because you asked, I will. Isn't that beautiful? That's so we can live, we can live with that.
We don't have to understand the mechanisms behind how God does all this at once.
We can live here where this man was. Put forth his hand.
Touched him saying, I will be there clean and immediately that word immediately in the
Greek is very strong. I mean, just like that, the leprosy departed from him.
Now, this word departed. Is an interesting word in the
Greek language, it means to go off of or to go aside, in other words, to be separated from or to go behind.
You remember what we're picturing here, we're picturing sin and its result, which is death.
And when Jesus said, I will be there clean, that sin and that death was removed from the person and was not part of him anymore.
It was gone just as our sin is totally removed, it's not just covered over now, it's not just rolled over for another year, it is gone in this word, depart in the
Greek language means that it says, you know, when he spoke, when
God spoke immediately, the leprosy, which pictures sin and death, it departed from this man.
This man was no longer a walking dead man, he was a walking live man. Did you know that everyone in this room today, if you're in Christ, if you're born again, if you've asked him to be your personal
Lord and savior and he's in your heart that you don't have to wait to die to live eternal life, you are already living it.
You're in the midst of it now. Because sin and death have departed from you and you're alive, you're eternal.
I would dare say that death would be no worse than what my mom went through, even though she's here.
If she died, it wouldn't have been any worse. She went through all the pain and suffering. It's just he left her here.
Death is not what we feared it is. Because Jesus said, whosoever liveth and believeth shall never die.
Then he said, believe us now this because he knows on the human side, it's hard for us to believe that we fear death so much.
Satan puts that in our minds. Satan makes us fear death for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our children.
Oh, we just fear death a lot. And here Jesus is saying death is not even a part of you anymore.
I've already commanded it to depart from you. And not only have you asked, but I will,
I determine I will and I have spoken and I have said, be thou clean and immediately the leprosy departed from him.
So we stand in a good position in Christ, don't we? We're alive. We're living eternal life.
And the trick is to enjoy it each moment and not allow the old flesh and the world and the devil to talk to us and cause us to lack faith for a few moments, because when we get into that area is when we do sin.
That's when we do lose our joy. That's when we do fear things. Fears start to come in when we get back in Christ.
We're filled with the spirit. We can live the joy of eternal life, just like we'll be living it together on the other side someday.
We can do that right here. That's why church is a little bit of heaven when we're together. But you can have that in your closet by yourself, too.
If you just understand that he's already spoken and the leprosy is gone from us, it is gone.
There is none. We're alive. Let's stand and have prayer together. Father, we thank you for your word.
We thank you for how even in a passage that seems to be a simple historical little passage about a man, you give us jewels of truth to find and to contemplate and think about enough for a whole week.
If it's all we had for this week, enough to rejoice in that we have had the leprosy of death removed from us and departed from us and it's past tense and we're already alive.
We're living in Christ. Unto you help us to reckon that to be true and live as if it is this week and we ask it in Jesus name.