Only God Can Do That

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I ran across a video this week, an old news report from a few years ago, of some thieves who found a novel way to break into a loaves. And I wouldn’t want to steal from Lowe’s, but part of me thinks this would solve my other problem of I would just like to go to the store when it’s not packed to the gills with people. I was reminded yesterday I have an issue with crowds, and sometimes it’s aggravated by places like Walmart and Lowe’s.

But these thieves, in the middle of the night, got up on the roof of Lowe’s and cut a giant hole four by four and somehow had a big ladder. I don’t know how they got this ladder on the roof. That’s equally as impressive.

But they had this gigantic ladder that they lowered down through the ceiling of the Lowe’s and got in there and made off with all kinds of copper pipe. They were interviewing people. They were interviewing shoppers at Lowe’s.

They were interviewing staff at Lowe’s about this. And nobody thought the theft was okay, but everybody was honestly a little impressed at the ingenuity and just the commitment. These were some people that were desperate to find a way into Lowe’s when nobody was there and nobody would see them from the street.

And that gives you a little bit of an insight into the degree of desperation of some people that we’re going to look at today. It’s probably a familiar story for a lot of you. But when a group of people cut a hole in somebody’s roof because they were desperate to get their friend to Jesus, just like these thieves looked around and said, well, okay, that door is alarmed, there’s cameras there, we can’t do that.

They were desperate to find a way into Lowe’s, and so they went in through the roof. These people were desperate to get to Jesus and said, the roof is the only way we can accomplish this. So as we continue our study through the book of Luke, and we’re plugging right along through Luke chapter 5, we come to a story where people did that.

So if you’ll turn with me this morning to Luke chapter 5, if you haven’t already. We’re going to look this morning at verses 17 through 21, just what these people did. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, and it’ll be on the screen if you don’t have it or can’t find Luke chapter 5.

But here’s what God’s Word says. One day he was teaching, and there were some Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting there who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem, and the power of the Lord was present for him to perform healing. And some men were carrying on a.

. . Excuse me, let me start that verse over.

And some men were carrying on a bed a man who was paralyzed, and they were trying to bring him in and to set him down in front of him, in front of Jesus. But not finding any way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down through the tiles with his stretcher into the middle of the crowd in front of Jesus. Seeing their faith, he said, Friend, your sins are forgiven you.

The scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, Who is this man that speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone? But Jesus, aware of their reasonings, answered and said to them, Why are you reasoning in your hearts?

Which is easier, to say your sins have been forgiven you, or to say get up and walk? But, so 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, get up and pick up your stretcher and go home.

Immediately he got up before them and picked up what he had been lying on and went home glorifying God. They were all struck with astonishment and began glorifying God and they were filled with fear saying we have seen remarkable things today. And you may be seated.

So a lot of times when we look at this story, when we teach on this story, we are focused on the people that brought this man to Jesus. We’re focused on how Jesus answered their prayer. Maybe we’re focused on the man who was brought to Jesus and how his life was changed.

And I think this passage does present us with some things that are an example to us, that I think each of the people that interacts with Jesus in this give us some example of what to do or what not to do. The friends are an example for us. The paralyzed man is an example for us.

Even the Pharisees and scribes are an example of don’t do this. All of that’s true. But I think the focus here rightly belongs on Jesus, because I think Luke is using this as we look in the context of the stories around it and what we read last week with him healing the leper.

And as we look at what’s going to happen next with him calling Matthew to follow him, Luke here is writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and making a case about Jesus and who Jesus is. And he’s using this story to help the reader understand something about who Jesus is. And so I think it’s completely fine to look at their examples and see what we can learn from that.

But we cannot get so focused on the other people and making them the hero of the story that we forget about what this tells us about Jesus. And we see throughout this passage, all throughout Luke, all throughout the Gospels, and all throughout the New Testament, this is no exception, we see that Jesus is portrayed as God. We see that each of these writers is making the case that Jesus Christ is God.

And as happens so many other times in these stories in the Gospels, the people around him, some of them at least, missed that. And starting out here, we see that Jesus’ critics mistook him for an ordinary man. They just mistook him for a regular person like you and me.

And maybe they thought there were some extraordinary things about him, he was clearly a gifted teacher he clearly had some miraculous powers as far as they were concerned but they figured he was a person like we are no different and that’s what’s going on in the beginning of this uh I’m sorry in the middle of this story as they’ve come and they’re they’re they’re kind of criticizing and they’re they’re kind of fact finding you see jesus’s activities were noticed by everybody not just the people on the street but word had gotten back to the religious authorities as far away as Jerusalem. And now people have come from every part of Judea and Galilee and Jerusalem, and they’re now up there to check it out and see what’s going on. The reason for this is because Jesus keeps telling everybody, don’t say anything about this miracle.

Don’t tell anybody. And their response is, okay, tell everybody. They just go spread the word when He told him not to.

And it’s because Jesus, I’ve explained this before, Jesus is doing what I call threading the needle. He’s walking a fine line here that He needs to slowly reveal who He is as He’s going to the cross. And all of this needs to be timed perfectly according to God’s plans and everything in the end works out according to God’s plans.

But if Jesus comes out and immediately just reveals everything that he claims to be, the people were going to try to stone him. Already we’ve seen they were ready to throw him off the cliff in Nazareth. But they were going to try to stone him in Galilee.

That wasn’t what the Father sent him to do. The Father sent him to die on a cross in Jerusalem. And so Jesus is walking this very narrow road that the Father has laid out for him of slowly revealing who He is, but not revealing too much or too little, too early or too late, so that His road leads directly to the cross and not either being swept into power like the crowds were ready to do at the triumphal entry and not stoning Him in some village in Galilee.

Jesus is here fulfilling the Father’s plans and doing it perfectly. That’s why He keeps telling people don’t spread this around. Nevertheless, the word got out and people came to see what was going on.

The Jewish leaders came to investigate. So while he was teaching, there’s this group of Pharisees and teachers who’d assembled all over the country to hear him, as verse 17 tells. He was in the middle of teaching and they came and kind of sat down and said, we’re going to hear what this guy has to say.

They’re out already to try to figure out how big of a problem he’s going to be and see if there’s something they can do to solve their problem. So he was teaching and he was drawing crowds in a way that they never could. That certainly bothered them, especially the fact that he wasn’t one of them.

If he’d been part of the club, they’d have probably been fine with it. But he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t do things their way.

He didn’t add to God’s word the way they did. And he didn’t put up with them doing it either. And so because he was not one of them, he was a threat to them because he was able to draw these crowds.

They came trying to find fault. And so they’re looking at him as just a mere man that they could accuse and get rid of. But it says in verse 17 there at the end, but the power of the Lord was present for him to perform healing.

And if you just look at this little part of the verse by itself, it almost sounds like sometimes he had the power to heal and sometimes he didn’t. That’s not what it’s saying. Just like how in Nazareth he didn’t do much healing.

It’s because he didn’t take the opportunity because they weren’t open to the message anyway. He was working where people were receptive. Well, people think the same thing.

This power comes and goes. That’s not what it’s saying. When it says the full verse, verse 17, says he was teaching and there were some Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting there who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem.

So it’s saying all these people were there to try to entrap him and try to find fault. And then the end of the verse says, and the power of God was there. So it’s saying they were there trying to find fault with him, but guess what?

The power of God was also there. Not that it ever wasn’t there. But in that moment where they’ve come to try to accuse him, try to trap him, try to get rid of him, they were not going to be successful because they were coming up against the power of God that was on full display wherever Jesus was.

So it’s not that the power to perform healing came and went. And these people quickly learned something. Well, I say they quickly learned something.

They were slow learners.

that’s a better way to say it they were slow learners because they had to be taught this over and over but they they quickly were shown that’s I think that’s how I want to say they were quickly shown the lesson that it is always a mistake to underestimate Jesus it is always a mistake to treat Jesus as less than he is that’s true for the Pharisees that’s true for us in our lives if we want to treat him as though he’s he’s an addition to our lives that we can pick and choose what we want to do of what he says, if we treat him like he’s just a good moral teacher, and I’ll listen to some of it, but not all of it, if we treat him as anything less than Lord and Savior, if we treat him as anything less than God the Son who came in flesh to be our all-sufficient sacrifice, if we treat him as anything less than what he claimed to be, it is always a mistake, and it doesn’t lead anywhere we want to be.

So they mistook him for an ordinary man, but Jesus’ godhood was on full display. If they were paying attention, his godhood was on full display when he did things that only God can. And that’s why I say it’s important we know the example that all these other people set, but Jesus is really the hero of the story here because all throughout this story, he’s doing things that only God can.

He doesn’t come out yet and openly say, I’m God, but it’s there for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. As the people flocked to see Jesus because of the spectacle of the miracles and the spectacle of the public teaching, they wanted to hear what new thing he was going to say. New to them anyway.

He didn’t come making up new teachings. He came correcting the Pharisees’ teachings and bringing them back to what God’s Word meant initially. But they wanted to hear these things that were new to them.

They wanted to see what he was going to do, what kind of healings and miracles there were going to be. Some even came believing that he was going to heal them. Every one of those people, though, when they came to just to see what Jesus was going to do, they saw more than they anticipated.

And that’s where we come to the actions of this man’s friends. They come, there’s a crowd around this house. We don’t know how big the house is.

Probably a normal sized house. I think as a kid, I always thought it was like a little hut, but they didn’t live in huts like in the jungle. They would have houses built out of clay or bricks or things like that, and they would usually be two-story in that time and place.

They would usually be two-story. And the second story was just an open roof. Maybe had something up there for shade, but it was kind of an open-air place on the roof, and there would be stairs up around the outside where they could get to it.

And so they see all these people crowded into this dwelling and realize we have no hope of getting to Jesus. Now, in situations like that, I panic and go home. Either that or in crowds like yesterday or when we go to the convention, one of my kids will help me figure out where there’s a pocket of people that we can get through and not be pressed in.

These people did not panic and go home the way I would. These people said, we still have got to get to Jesus. And so they went up the stairs around the house, they go up on the roof, They’ve come up with this ingenious idea.

They began to bust through the ceramic roof. Some translations say tiles. I think I read one that said thatch.

There’s really not a word. We don’t really have a word in English that fully describes. Anyway, it’s something we don’t have.

Something we don’t really do on our houses. So this basically ceramic roof, they began to bust through it. and they began to tear a hole in the roof while Jesus is in their teaching.

And I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be in that room. You’re sitting there listening to Jesus. All of a sudden you start hearing banging up on the roof and you look up and you start to see daylight and maybe you’re getting dust in your eyes.

And did Jesus stop? Did Jesus keep going like it wasn’t even happening? We don’t know.

But this was not a normal circumstance. They bust a hole in the roof because they were desperate to get the man to Jesus. And they were going to do it any way they could.

And so they lowered the man down through the roof. He was on what we would call a pallet, a makeshift bed, and probably took the four corners, tied ropes or something to it, if they didn’t already have them attached, and began to lower him through the hole, which would have been nerve-wracking for them and probably for him too, because you don’t want anybody to lower him too fast or too slow and drop him. There are, if you look at this, there are any number of things that could have gone wrong here.

Any number of reasons why you wouldn’t have wanted to try this, or as the man you wouldn’t have wanted this done to you, I guarantee you nothing about this was OSHA compliant, okay? All kinds of safety red flags flying everywhere. But that’s how desperate they were to get to Jesus.

And when what happened next, once they lowered the man down into the presence of Jesus, that’s when they got to see not just that he healed him, but the way he healed him, the way all of this was handled. Jesus was putting his Godhood on display for those who were paying attention and those who were receptive enough to see it. And I’ve outlined about four ways that that happened in just this passage.

First was that he forgave people’s sins. It says in verse 20, seeing their faith, he said, friend, your sins are forgiven you. This has puzzled me for years.

It’s something I very distinctly remember teaching a lesson on this to a group of elementary kids at camp one year, and just trying to sidestep this issue because I didn’t have an answer for it. And, you know, sometimes you don’t have to go into all the details with the kids, but why in the world would their faith have saved him? What did their faith have to do with his sins?

And then I realized there are five people who have participated in this, assuming there are four that are holding the corners of the bed. There are five who participated because the man in the bed had to go along with this. He doesn’t seem to be screaming and fighting.

When they said, we’ve got to get you to Jesus one way or another, I’m assuming he said, yeah, I’m going to. There’s no reason to think that the they and their faith doesn’t include this man. Where in my mind, I’d always separated it out and say, Oh, they, he’s talking about the friends.

But seeing their faith, seeing how desperate this man, like his friends, how desperate he was to get to Jesus, Jesus looks at him and said, your sins are forgiven. Now that’s a bold claim that no person in their right mind honestly makes if they’re just a regular person. If I tell you your sins are forgiven because I said so, there’s either something wrong with my head where I think I have that power or there’s something wrong with my heart where I’m trying to deceive you because I know I don’t.

But Jesus looks at the man and says, your sins are forgiven. And in this case, the Pharisees are actually right for once, not in their whole reaction. But in one of the questions they ask, they’re actually right.

That saying about a broken clock being right twice a day, that applies here. They ask the right question, who can forgive sins but God alone? Exactly.

Nobody can. And so when Jesus said, I’m forgiving your sins, what is he claiming to be? he’s claiming to be God.

Absolutely. He was claiming here the power to forgive sins. He was claiming power over things like mercy and judgment that belong to God alone.

And so if people were paying attention, they would see this as a claim to be God, which he proves later on. We go ahead to verses 21 and 22, when it says the scribes and Pharisees began to reason, saying, who is this man who speaks blasphemies. Who can forgive sins but God alone?

It says, Jesus, aware of their reasonings, answered and said to them, why are you reasoning in your hearts? Okay, it doesn’t say they said these things. It said they reasoned them, and he asked them, and it says he was aware of their reasonings.

That’s a weird thing to say if they had said it out loud. Of course he’s aware of their reasonings. The only reason to point it out is because they didn’t say it out loud, and then Jesus even says, why are you reasoning these things in your hearts?

He’s reading their thoughts. He knows their unexpressed thoughts. Occasionally we can do that with each other.

Yesterday at the conference they announced another thing they’re going to be doing and I looked down the row at my son. He looked at me and I knew immediately he wanted to go to that. And he got up a few minutes later and said, I’d like to go to that.

I said, I know, I knew what that look meant. All right, we can do that sometimes. other times I have no idea what other people are thinking.

Even looking out at a crowd like this, I have no idea if you’re saying, wow, this is really interesting, or can we get to lunch already? I have no idea. Jesus knew their thoughts without those thoughts being expressed.

You know who’s able to do that? God. And as they watched and listened, they began to object internally to Jesus, but He knew their thoughts without those being expressed, and that demonstrates It’s his omniscience, his all-knowing nature that only God has.

Then we come to the third thing he did. He healed people’s physical ailments. He healed this man just like he’d healed the leper, just like he’d healed others.

When he asks him, why are you reasoning these things in your heart? He comes to the proof not only of him being able to heal, but the proof of him being able to say your sins are forgiven. Because anybody can claim that, but not everybody can do it.

He says, which is easier, to say your sins have been forgiven, or to say, get up and walk. Now, the answer is it’s easier to say your sins have been forgiven. Why is that easier?

Because I can tell you that and nobody can, by looking at you, nobody can tell whether it’s happened or not. There’s not a light switch on the back of your head, a bulb that changes colors based on whether you’re forgiven or not. I could tell you all day, you’re forgiven because I said so, and nobody’s the wiser.

But if I said, you can’t walk, but now you’re healed, everybody’s going to know whether that worked or not. So that’s a harder claim to make, at least as far as proving it. And Jesus said, which one’s harder?

They knew which one was harder. And Jesus said, to show you that I have the power to do the first one, I’m going to do the second one. And he healed the man’s physical ailment.

Just at Jesus’ word, he gets up and walks. Not only that, he picks up his bed that he’d been laying on, and he skedaddles, he goes home. He got what he came for.

Now, that doesn’t mean he’s turned his back on Jesus, but he’s excited. He’s going home. Everything that he came for has been fulfilled.

Jesus healed this man. The Pharisees couldn’t do that. The scribes couldn’t do that.

Only God could do that. And then this one is equally as impressive, I think. He drew people’s attention to God.

Because the tendency we have as human beings is to want to draw the attention to ourselves. Look what I did. Look at what I accomplished.

And Jesus, being God in human flesh, is entirely entitled to do that. But look at the response of the people around him in verses 23 and 24. I’m sorry, verses 24 and 25, 26.

Immediately he got up before them and picked up what he had been lying on and went home doing what? Glorifying God. Everybody watching was struck with astonishment and began glorifying God.

And they were filled with fear, saying, We have seen remarkable things today. The reason they were giving God the credit is because God is the one who did it. They may not understand at this point in the story that Jesus is God, but they certainly understand there’s a connection he has with God that they don’t have and don’t comprehend.

They recognize that what Jesus did, God did it. So all the things that Jesus does in this story, Luke includes those details because they point to him being God. His Godhood was on full display.

And as we prepare to close this out, I think it’s worth pointing out, worth going back to what he said to the man initially, that your sins are forgiven you. The most important thing that Jesus does here, that only God does, is reconcile us to himself. Only God can reconcile us to himself.

As human beings, we are sinners by nature. Now, we hear that and get offended. Listen, it doesn’t mean you’re as bad as you could be in every area of life.

We’re not all Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot. I mean, we could all be worse, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are sinners who’ve fallen short of the standards of an infinitely holy God. And our sin separates us from Him.

You and I can never do anything to bridge that gap. We cannot reconcile ourselves to God. We cannot do enough good to make ourselves right with God.

If we go to God and say, well, I’ve kept all these commandments, that’s just what we’re supposed to do. We don’t get extra credit for that. It doesn’t erase the wrong that we’ve already done.

The Pharisees were, again, right about one thing. Jesus claimed to do something that no mere person could do, and that was to forgive sins. Jesus not only forgave the sins, but he told the man what the criteria was, or he tells us what the criteria was for our sins to be forgiven.

It says Jesus saw their faith. Jesus saw the faith of the man and his friends and because of that faith the sin was forgiven his whole purpose in coming where he’s where he’s eventually headed is to the cross and his whole purpose in coming was to open the door for us to be forgiven and to be restored to a right relationship with God and what he calls us to do to have that reconciliation is the same thing that happened with the paralytic which is to look at him with faith that he can do what he promised for us the answer is to recognize that we’ve sinned against a holy God, to recognize that there is something not right between us and Him, and that the only way for it to be made right is to believe that Jesus is who He says He is and that He did what He said He would do.

That God’s Son came to earth and lived a perfect sinless life, had no sin of His own, and instead took responsibility for my sin and yours. And He was nailed to the cross in our place and shed His blood as a perfect, sufficient payment for that sin. so that our slate could be wiped clean, our sin could be forgiven in full.

And then he rose again three days later to prove it. And if you believe he is that and that he did that, and you believe that and in faith, ask him for that forgiveness and you’ll have it.

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