[unedited transcript generated by Substack AI]
If you want to take your Bibles and turn, we're going to be back in Mark Chapter 2.
I shouldn't say back in Mark Chapter 2, proceeding into Mark Chapter 2.
When you're sick, you've got two basic needs.
Number one, you need a good diagnosis.
If you don't have a good diagnosis, you're never going to get well.
I mean, I'm sure either you've experienced or you've known somebody who's experienced like this process of going from doctor to doctor trying to figure out what's wrong.
And until the diagnosis is actually accurate, treatment can't proceed in any way that's really helpful.
But the second thing you need once you have that accurate diagnosis is competent care.
You need the right doctor or the right physician.
You need somebody with the right experience, training, the right set of skills in order to help address your situation.
So if you've got cancer, you want a good oncologist or if you've got a
Problem with your foot?
You want a good podiatrist?
You want to find the person who's right for the job.
And in our text this morning in Mark chapter 2, we're going to meet a man who goes to Jesus because he knows that Jesus can heal his problem, that Jesus can address his need.
But he's going to find out that his need is different than he thought it was.
There's an underlying condition that Jesus is able to address as well.
So Mark chapter two, beginning in verse one says, and when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home.
Now, if we remember back in chapter one, Jesus had left Capernaum.
So he, in that one Sabbath day that covers verses 21,
through 34.
He'd gone into the synagogue and was teaching there.
He'd cast out a demon and people are shocked at the power of his teaching.
And then as the Sabbath officially closes, the sun goes down.
Then the people start streaming to the house where he is staying so that he can heal the sick and he can cast out demons.
And so the whole city is crowding to the door so that he can do this miracle work.
And the next morning he gets up early and takes off to pray.
And when Peter finds him, he says, Lord, the people are crowding back.
Everyone is looking for you.
But Jesus, who has been so bombarded with these requests, doesn't say, OK, let's go back to them.
He withdraws from there and says, no, I have not come out to do healing ministry.
I've come out to preach.
So let us go to the next towns that I may preach there also.
And so he starts this tour of Galilee
where he's preaching from town to town but then the same thing happens in each of those places where he heals people and so the crowds swarm to him and he has to go on to the next town and then by the time we get to the end of chapter 1 in verse 45 he can't go into any town openly because the same thing's going to happen he's just going to get bombarded and he's not going to be able to effectively teach the people and so
Some days have passed, chapter 2, verse 1 says, things have cooled down enough where he's apparently able to at least get into town.
And he goes back to, it says here in the ESV, it's translated that he was at home.
Literally, it's just that word oikos can mean home or house.
He's probably back in the same house he was in in verse 29.
He probably went back to the home of Simon and Andrew.
And as he goes into their house, verse two, many gather again.
And so the houses in this part of Galilee would not have had very big rooms.
I mean, the room size was limited by how long of a piece of timber they could get from the trees they had available.
And most of the homes they've excavated from that region don't have any rooms bigger than about 15 feet across.
And so you've got to imagine like this one story house with these little 15 foot max square rooms, and then
All these people are crowding into this room and then probably the streets are starting to fill up with people trying to poke their heads in the windows or get close enough to the door that they can hear Jesus speaking.
And then these homes would have had, and this is going to be relevant in a minute, these flat roofs on top.
So there would have been a one-story house with a flat roof and then there would have been a staircase outside in the back up to the roof.
And that roof was living space as well.
The Healing You Need
And he's preaching the word to them.
This is why he's come.
He's preaching the good news of the kingdom.
Repent.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent and believe the gospel.
Repent.
Trust in the king who has come.
And he's teaching them.
But then there are these men who have a problem.
Verse 3, they came bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men.
So this man, we don't know the nature of his paralysis, but obviously it's such that he has to be carried.
He doesn't have any ability to be mobile on his own.
But verse four says, and they could not get near him because of the crowd.
You know, so if it's all packed in so that people can't even fit into the house and they're having to pile out into the streets, there's no way in these little tiny rooms.
I was standing in my office yesterday.
up at the shop.
And I think it's about 13 feet across at the wider point.
And I'm just trying to imagine, I mean, packing, we get four guys around the desk.
That's pretty tight in there.
And if you try to put, even if you take all the stuff out, 20 or 25 people would be like sardines in there.
And so just imagine this whole town coming out to Jesus and they're packed in tight.
There's no way they're getting a man on a stretcher into him.
These guys have some ingenuity.
They decide to go up onto the roof, and it says here that they removed the roof above him.
And literally that phrase in Greek is, they unroofed the roof.
And if you think, a 15-foot room, they ripped out enough of the ceiling to get a guy on a stretcher through.
That's at least half the ceiling in that room probably that they excavated while they're sitting in there so that they could drop this guy down to Jesus.
It's really a hilarious scene when you think about it, like, did Jesus keep teaching while all this stuff is falling around him?
What's going on?
And Peter and Andrew are probably like stuck in this room shoulder to shoulder with people like, stop!
Stop!
You're ripping apart my house!
What are you doing?
And Mark's just like, yeah, they unroofed the roof and he keeps going with the story.
They removed the roof above him and when they'd made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic
So these guys, they know their friend has a problem.
He's paralyzed, he can't move himself.
So they bring him to Jesus because they've seen Jesus do all this healing when he was in town before.
Messages are probably coming back of what he's done throughout the rest of Galilee.
Jesus obviously is the man for this job.
In verse 5, when Jesus saw their faith, he doesn't do what they expect.
Because he says to the paralytic,
Son, your sins are forgiven.
You're waiting for Jesus to say, your faith has made you well.
You are healed.
Get up, take your bed and go home.
When he gets to that part later on, there are a lot of commentators who are skeptical of the authorship of Mark and they want to say, well, all the rest of this stuff in between must have been inserted because that's what Jesus is supposed to say next.
He's supposed to say, you're healed.
But that's not what Jesus says.
Jesus says your sins are forgiven.
Why does Jesus
See this man whose friends have been so dedicated wanting to get him to Jesus that they ripped the roof of a house, damaged someone else's property.
Why is the first thing that Jesus says to him, your sins are forgiven?
Jesus knows that this man has a condition that's far worse than paralysis.
And if he could heal him,
But if the fundamental issue is not addressed, that healing does absolutely no good.
No lasting good.
And we have exactly the same condition as that man.
I wonder what you think is your most pressing problem this morning.
What's the paralysis in your life?
Is it a paralysis of finances where things are
Building up and you don't know how you're going to pay the rent or pay the mortgage or you don't know how you're going to pay for your kid's college or for your retirement as the economy does this thing, like you worry about the future.
Or is it a paralysis of like, is it some kind of physical problem, your own physical problem where you go, man, if I could just get rid of this pain, my life would be so much better.
Or the pain of someone that you love, like,
I wish I could strap that person to a stretcher.
I don't even need three other people.
I'd carry him myself if I could get him to Jesus and he would make them well.
Or is it a paralysis of a relationship?
Like, I wish I could make my son or my daughter figure out life or turn to the Lord.
Or I wish my marriage were better.
Or I wish I could fix this thing with my parent or my friend.
And these are real issues, right?
Like we talked about last week.
Even if it's not cosmic in scale, we take these things to the Lord in prayer because He cares about them.
These are important things.
They're not small.
Having enough financially is an important thing.
Having your relationships right is an important thing.
Having our health is not a small thing.
These are all important.
But if we allow those things to blind us to our central need, then they can take us away from God.
And our fundamental need is no different than this man's.
Our fundamental need is to have our sins forgiven.
Because a broken relationship with another human being does not send you to hell.
Something wrong with your body doesn't send you to hell.
Not having enough money to pay your bills doesn't send you to hell.
But your sins will.
Your sins make it impossible for you to have a relationship with God unless those sins are addressed.
And so, our fundamental need is the exact same as this man's.
Son, your sins are forgiven.
In the Old Testament, it's very common for suffering, physical suffering,
The Healing You Need
It's not necessarily right to, every time you have something go wrong, to say, what did I do to bring that upon me?
Jesus says in John 9 that that is not always the case.
The book of Job makes it very clear that that's not always the case.
But Jesus sees that this man needs his sins forgiven.
And so when this man comes to him in faith, Jesus says, son, your sins are forgiven.
And it brings about a bad response.
Not in that man, but in some of the people who are sitting there.
Things haven't gotten real antagonistic between Jesus and the Pharisees yet.
That's going to build over the course of chapters two and three.
So chapter two, verse one through chapter three, verse six is a series of five conflict stories.
This is the first of them.
And by the end of it, they're going to start plotting how to get rid of Jesus.
This is the first of the real conflicts that we see here.
And verse six, some of the scribes,
We're sitting there questioning in their hearts.
This isn't something that's being whispered back and forth.
This is not something that they're looking at each other.
He's seeing into them.
They're questioning in their hearts.
Why does this man speak like that?
He is blaspheming.
Who can forgive sins but God alone?
Now, the last part of what they said is exactly right.
They are right in their assumption that no one but God has the authority to forgive sins.
In the Old Testament, there are those who can proclaim God's authority, with God's authority, the forgiveness of sins.
So the priests, after you've gone through the process of offering the sacrifices that are prescribed, you can go through the cleansing ritual and they can say, God has forgiven your sins.
or like the prophet Nathan goes to David after the sin with Bathsheba and David has repented of his sin and Nathan declares on God's behalf, your sins are forgiven.
But the priest can't forgive sins.
Nathan couldn't forgive David's sin.
No human being can forgive sins.
And so they're right to say, who can do this but God alone?
Psalm 32, David is rejoicing there in the blessing of forgiveness.
And in Psalm 32 verse 5, he says, I acknowledge my sin to you.
I did not cover my iniquity.
I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
So God sees David as, rather the other way around, David sees God as the one who forgives sin.
And in Isaiah chapter 43,
Isaiah 43 verse 25, God says, I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.
The Pharisees, the scribes here, they're right in saying nobody has this authority except for God.
And so they're right to interpret what Jesus said as a claim to divine authority.
Because again, Jesus isn't just announcing that this man's sins are forgiven.
He is forgiving him.
That phrase there, or that word in verse 5, Son, your sins are forgiven.
Only one other time does Jesus use that word in the Gospel of Mark and he's referring to the disciples and it's a technique, it's like a child.
It's a very personal, intimate way of speaking.
He says, Son, I am forgiving you of your sins.
No different than when he says, I am healing you.
He says, I forgive you
of Jesus Christ.
Why do you question?
And we read this last night, and Laurel and I pointed out, well, shouldn't that have made them question that Jesus knew what was going on inside of them?
Shouldn't they think, hmm, how did he know I was thinking that?
1 Samuel 16, rather, God says that man looks on the outward appearance
But the Lord is the one who looks on the heart.
Jeremiah 11 and verse 20 says that the Lord tests hearts.
The Lord tests minds.
He's the one who knows what's going on inside of you all the time.
I mean, just as an aside, that's part of why we should never feel embarrassed to pray to God about things.
Like, there are things that we think and things that are going on in our lives that if you put it in just a human relationship, it could be really embarrassing to go talk to somebody about.
But you don't have to be embarrassed to talk to God about it.
Not because it's not embarrassing, but because He already knows.
So you may as well talk to Him about it.
He knows everything that's going on inside of you.
And He knows what's going on inside of these guys.
Then He makes an argument.
He says, verse 9, Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, Your sins are forgiven, or to say, Rise, take up your bed, and walk?
That's a good question.
And if you read commentaries on this passage, you will get different answers.
Which one is easier?
I think the point is, neither of them are really possible for a mere human to say with any authority.
No human being has the authority to say, your sins are forgiven.
And no human, mere human, has the ability to say,
Here, you're healed.
Rise, take up and walk.
Now, I think it's easier for a person to say, your sins are forgiven, because there's no way to test it, right?
If I say, your sins are forgiven, well, where are you going to go?
Everybody sitting here could say, yes, that's true, or no way, how's that possible?
But we can't prove it, right?
We're not sitting before God's throne right now with the answer.
But if I say to a person laying in the hospital bed,
Rise, take up your bed, and walk.
Well, we can all see whether that's true or not.
So Jesus has already told him that his sins are forgiven, but now to demonstrate his authority, that you may know, verse 10, that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.
He says to the paralytic, I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.
And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all.
so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, We never saw anything like this.
Jesus says, I've got the power to do both, and I will show you that I have the power and the authority to forgive sins by healing his body.
And it's interesting, often in Mark's gospel, Jesus is telling people to be quiet about healing, you know, shh, don't tell anybody I healed you from
Leprosy, just go present yourself to the priest so you can go through the cleansing, right?
He silences the demons.
He won't let them speak as they identify him as the Holy One of God.
But yet here, Jesus is making a very public point.
I have the authority to forgive sins.
Watch me heal this guy.
The healing is almost, it seems like almost an afterthought in the story, but it's there to prove the point that he has the authority to heal his deeper need, his need for forgiveness.
But it's interesting, he doesn't do that saying, I am the Messiah, I am the Son of David, I am the Son of God.
I mean, he's all of those things.
But he calls himself here the Son of Man.
And very often we think of Jesus referring to himself as the Son of Man.
That's the most popular title that Jesus uses for himself.
He uses it more frequently to refer to himself than anything else he calls himself.
And very often in our minds we hear Son of Man and we think like, okay, he's the Son of God, truly God, and he's the Son of Man, truly man.
Which is how Son of Man is sometimes used in the Bible.
So like, in Ezekiel 3 we just read, God calls Ezekiel the Son of Man, or a Son of Man.
He's just calling him a human, like you human.
But Jesus, in Mark's Gospel, it's only used twice here early on in the Gospel, the first eight chapters it's used twice.
But after
Chapter 8, verse 31.
It's used 12 more times in Mark's Gospel, always with reference to and with kind of the backstory of Daniel chapter 7 in verse 13 and 14, where the Ancient of Days, God the Father, hands to the Son of Man, one like a Son of Man, power and authority.
I know I've referenced this a bunch of times before.
I think it's really important for understanding who Jesus is in the mind of the Gospel writers.
I saw in the night visions and behold with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man and he came to the ancient of days and was presented before him and to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all peoples and nations and languages should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
And so clearly there in Daniel 7 you have like this eternal divine figure handed
All Power and Authority by God the Father.
Jesus takes this as his preferred self-designation.
I think in part because all of the more common ways of thinking about the Messiah had with them all of these expectations that weren't correct.
Like they were waiting, the Jewish people were waiting for the Messiah to come get rid of the Romans, to come free them from this earthly oppression.
And that's not what Jesus had come to do in his first coming.
And so he takes on another Old Testament title that isn't in common use at that time, as they thought about the Messiah, and he starts filling it with accurate information.
What has he come to do?
He's come to preach the gospel.
He's come to die for sinners.
He's come to forgive sins.
That's why he came in his first coming.
And so he comes and he shows, I have all authority, and here's how I'm going to use it.
I'm going to use it to forgive this man's sin.
How do we approach this son of man who has all the authority that we need to deal with our deepest need?
If Jesus has the ability to forgive sins and he has the authority given to him by God to make these declarations, how do we go to him and get those things?
How do we receive forgiveness of sins?
And the answer is there in verse 5.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son, your sins are forgiven.
The answer for us is the same as it was for them.
It is faith.
One of the study Bibles I was reading, they referred to the faith of these men.
and their whole process of carrying their friend to Jesus, digging through the roof, dropping him down.
They called it the kind of active faith that God loves.
Faith in the scriptures is not just an intellectual, I believe a certain set of facts.
I checked off the right thing on the list of the who is Jesus quiz.
Faith is an active trust in God.
It's a belief that goes to work.
It's not works.
The works don't save you.
But if you trust in Jesus, it means you're going to do something about it.
You're going to place all of your hope on Him.
If these men said, we believe, they've been sitting at this guy's house, at the paralytics house, and said, we believe that Jesus can heal you, and just sat there with that,
Mark 21-12
I think this is part of what the Apostle Paul is talking about in Philippians 2 where he says, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
The thing that saves us is Christ's work, but we are responsible to have faith, and that faith keeps pressing into Jesus all the time.
We don't turn away from him.
We don't look away to other things to save us or to heal us or to bring us what we need.
We keep going back to the well.
We keep going back to the one who has living water.
And sometimes we feel like, yeah, that believing in Jesus, that's kind of like, that's the basic stuff and we can move past that.
You don't ever get past needing Jesus.
You don't ever get past needing His forgiveness.
And we think of a passage like 1 John 1-9 where it says, He is, if we confess our sins, He's faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
He's writing that to believers, right?
Like,
When we trust in Christ initially, like we become Christians, all of our sins are paid for.
And yet we keep going back to him over and over as we continue to sin, because we're still fallen.
We keep going back to him and receiving that continual cleansing, washing, forgiving.
And as we do that, that helps us see all of our other problems, not as not problems, but we see them in the proper light.
So that when we experience troubles in relationships, or when we experience financial troubles, or when we experience health problems, we don't say, oh, if I know Jesus, those things don't matter.
But we say, even in these things, we can walk through them having joy because we know we are saved.
We know we are saved through him.
And that's what enables the Apostle Paul in a passage like Romans 8,
Verse 31, to say, What then shall we say to these things?
If God is for us, who can be against us?
He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?
Who shall bring any charge against God's elect?
It is God who justifies.
Who is to condemn Christ Jesus as the one who died, more than that who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us?
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword, as it is written, for your sake we are being killed all the day long.
We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things
Present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And so if we've come to Christ and we've received forgiveness, then all of those problems are relativized.
They're put in their proper place.
And we can go to God and ask for his help with them, but know that whatever he does is going to be for our good.
Because if he's forgiven us, then our deepest need, our deepest sickness is cured.
And we have received the gift of true life.
And then we can, with the people here in Mark 2, rejoice.
When they saw the man pick up his bed and walk out, it says they were amazed and glorified God saying, we never saw anything like this.
I wonder if we were consistently looking at our lives and praying about our issues and confessing our sins and receiving forgiveness and walking in the joy that comes from being forgiven, how would that shape us to where the world looked at Christians and said, we never saw anything like this.
We never saw anything like these forgiven people, these people who know Jesus.
I think that's what God wants to do with the church, is to, in forgiving us and giving us that freedom, make the world stand back and say, we never saw anything like this.
That's 1 Peter 2, where you shine as lights in the world.
Let's pray.
Father God, would you help us to trust that you really are able to
Do everything that we need, over and above what we need.
Ephesians says you're able to do beyond what we could ask or think.
Well, help us to ask and think a lot, Lord, and trust that you can do more than that.
Lord, we thank you that you have paid for our sins through what your son did on the cross and have gladly given that.
to All Who Will Trust in Him.
We thank you for that, in Jesus' name, Amen.
