Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 5:17-26, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 8
- Date: Sunday, March 2, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Desperate to Get to Jesus
I ran across an old news report this week about some thieves who found a novel way to break into a Lowe’s. I would not want to steal from Lowe’s, but part of me thought this would solve my other problem of wanting to go to the store when it is not packed with people. I was reminded yesterday that I have an issue with crowds, and sometimes it is aggravated by places like Walmart and Lowe’s.
In the middle of the night, these thieves climbed onto the roof of Lowe’s and cut a four-by-four-foot hole. Somehow, they also managed to get a large ladder onto the roof. I do not know how they got this ladder on the roof. That was almost equally impressive. They lowered the ladder through the ceiling, climbed inside, and made off with all kinds of copper pipe.
The news report included interviews with shoppers and employees. Nobody thought the theft was acceptable, but everyone seemed a little impressed by the ingenuity and determination. These people were desperate to find a way into Lowe’s when nobody was there and no one would see them from the street.
That gives us some insight into the degree of desperation displayed by the people we are going to look at today. It is probably a familiar story for a lot of you. A group of men cut a hole in someone’s roof because they were desperate to get their friend to Jesus. Just as those thieves looked around and said, “That door is alarmed, and there are cameras there. We cannot go in that way,” these men looked for another way to reach Jesus. These people were desperate to get to Jesus and said, “The roof is the only way we can accomplish this.”
As we continue our study through the book of Luke, and we are plugging right along through Luke chapter 5, we come to a story where people did that. So this morning, we are going to look at verses 17 through 26 and what these people did.
The Man Lowered Through the Roof
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. Some men were carrying a paralyzed man on a bed, and they were trying to bring him in and set him down 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 who 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.”
Often, when we look at or teach this story, we focus on the people who brought the man to Jesus. We are focused on how Jesus answered their prayer. Maybe we are focused on the man who was brought to Jesus and how his life was changed. This passage does give us examples to follow. Each of the people who interacts with Jesus in this passage gives 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 what not to do. All of that is true. But the focus rightly belongs on Jesus. In the context of the surrounding stories—His healing of the leper before this and His calling of Matthew afterward—Luke is writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to make a case about who Jesus is. He is using this story to help the reader understand something about who Jesus is.
So I think it is completely fine to look at their examples and see what we can learn from that. But we cannot become so focused on the other people that we make them the heroes of the story and forget what this passage tells us about Jesus. We see throughout this passage, all throughout Luke, all throughout the Gospels, and all throughout the New Testament, that Jesus is portrayed as God. We see that each of these writers is making the case that Jesus Christ is God.
Mistaking Jesus for an Ordinary Man
As happens so many other times in these stories in the Gospels, the people around Him, some of them at least, missed that. Starting out here, we see that Jesus’ critics mistook Him for an ordinary man. They mistook Him for an ordinary person like you and me. 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.
That is what is happening in the middle of this story as they arrive to criticize and investigate. Jesus’ activities were noticed by everyone. Word had reached not only the people in the streets but also the religious authorities as far away as Jerusalem. People had come from every part of Galilee and Judea, including Jerusalem, to investigate what was happening.
The reason for this is that Jesus keeps telling everybody, “Do not say anything about this miracle. Do not tell anybody.” Their response seemed to be, “Tell everybody.” They spread the word even when He told them not to.
I have explained this before, but Jesus was doing what I call threading the needle. He is walking a fine line here. He needs to slowly reveal who He is as He is going to the cross. All of this had to unfold according to God’s perfect timing, and in the end, everything did.
But if Jesus had immediately revealed everything He claimed to be, the people would have tried to stone Him. Already we have seen they were ready to throw Him off the cliff in Nazareth. But they were going to try to stone Him in Galilee. That was not what the Father sent Him to do. The Father sent Him to die on a cross in Jerusalem.
Jesus was walking the narrow road the Father had laid out for Him, revealing who He was neither too quickly nor too slowly, so that His path led directly to the cross—not to being swept into political power by the crowds or stoned in some village in Galilee. Jesus is here fulfilling the Father’s plans and doing it perfectly. That is why He keeps telling people not to 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, this group of Pharisees and teachers had assembled from all over the country to hear Him, as verse 17 tells us. He was teaching when they arrived and sat down, as if to say, “We are going to hear what this man has to say.” They were already trying to determine how serious a problem He might become and whether they could do something about Him.
He was teaching and drawing crowds in a way that they never could. That certainly bothered them, especially the fact that He was not one of them. If He had been part of the club, they probably would have been fine with it. But He was not one of them. He did not do things their way. He did not add to God’s Word the way they did, and He did not put up with them doing it either.
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. So they are looking at Him as just a mere man that they could accuse and get rid of. But it says in verse 17, at the end, “But the power of the Lord was present for Him to perform healing.”
The Power of God on Display
If you isolate this part of the verse, it can sound as though Jesus sometimes had the power to heal and sometimes did not. That is not what it is saying. Just as in Nazareth, He did not perform many healings there because the people were not receptive to His message. He was working where people were receptive.
Some people read this passage as though His power came and went. That is not what it is saying. The full verse 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. The verse is saying that all these people were present to entrap Him and find fault.
Then the verse ends by saying that the power of God was also present. They were there trying to find fault with Him, but they were confronting the power of God. Not that it ever was not there. But in that moment when they had come to try to accuse Him, trap Him, and 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 is not that the power to perform healing came and went. These people were quickly shown a lesson, even if they were slow to learn it. That is a better way to say it. 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 is true for the Pharisees. That is true for us in our lives. If we want to treat Him as though He is 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 is just a good moral teacher and we will 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. That path does not lead anywhere we want to go.
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 do. That is why, although the examples of the other people matter, Jesus is the true focus of the story. Throughout the passage, He does things only God can do.
He does not yet openly declare, “I am God,” but the truth is evident to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. As people flocked to see Jesus because of His miracles and public teaching, they wanted to hear what new thing He would say—new to them, at least. He did not come making up new teachings. He came correcting the Pharisees’ teachings and bringing them back to what God’s Word meant initially.
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. Everyone who came merely to see what Jesus would do witnessed more than they expected.
The Faith That Would Not Be Stopped
That is where we come to the actions of this man’s friends. They come, and there is a crowd around this house. We do not know how large the house was, but it was probably an ordinary home. As a child, I pictured a small hut, but that was not the kind of house they lived in. 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.
The upper level included a flat, open roof. There may have been some kind of shade covering, and exterior stairs provided access. So they see all these people crowded into this dwelling and realize, “We have no hope of getting to Jesus.”
In situations like that, I tend to panic and leave. Or, in crowds like the one yesterday or at the convention, one of my children helps me find an opening where we can move through without being pressed in. These people did not panic and go home the way I would. These people said, “We still have to get to Jesus.”
So they went up the stairs around the house. They go up on the roof. They came up with an ingenious idea. They began breaking through the ceramic roof. Some translations say tiles. I think I read one that said thatch. There is no exact English word that fully describes it. It was unlike the roofs on our houses today.
So they began to bust through this basically ceramic roof. They began to tear a hole in the roof while Jesus is in there teaching. I have often wondered what it would be like to be in that room. You are sitting there listening to Jesus. Suddenly, you hear banging overhead, look up, and begin to see daylight. Perhaps dust begins falling into your eyes. Did Jesus stop? Did Jesus keep going like it was not even happening? We do not know.
But this was not a normal circumstance. They broke through the roof because they were desperate to get the man to Jesus. They were going to do it any way they could. So they lowered the man down through the roof. He was lying on what we might call a pallet or makeshift bed. They probably attached ropes to its four corners and lowered him through the opening.
That must have been nerve-racking for them and for him, because one mistake could have caused them to drop him. If you look at this, there are any number of things that could have gone wrong here. There are any number of reasons why you would not have wanted to try this, or as the man, you would not have wanted this done to you. I guarantee you, nothing about this was OSHA compliant. There were all kinds of safety red flags flying everywhere. But that is how desperate they were to get to Jesus.
What happened next, once they lowered the man down into the presence of Jesus, is where they got to see not just that He healed him, but the way He healed him and 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. This passage shows at least four ways that happened.
Only God Can Forgive Sins
First, He forgave people’s sins. It says in verse 20, “Seeing their faith, He said, ‘Friend, your sins are forgiven you.'” This puzzled me for years. I distinctly remember teaching this passage to a group of elementary children at camp and sidestepping the issue because I did not yet have an answer. Sometimes you do not 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?
Then I realized there are five people who have participated in this, assuming there are four who are holding the corners of the bed. There were five participants because the man on the bed had to cooperate with the plan. He does not appear to have resisted. When they said, “We have got to get you to Jesus one way or another,” I am assuming he said, “Yes, I am going to.” There is no reason to think that “their faith” excludes the man himself.
In my mind, I had always separated it out and said, “Oh, He is talking about the friends.” But seeing their faith, seeing how desperate this man, like his friends, was to get to Jesus, Jesus looks at him and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” That is a bold claim no ordinary person could rightly make. If I tell you that your sins are forgiven simply because I said so, then either I am deluded enough to think I have that power or dishonest enough to claim a power I know I do not possess.
But Jesus looks at the man and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” In this case, the Pharisees were right about one thing—not in their entire reaction, but in one question they asked. They are actually right. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
They ask the right question: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Exactly—no one can. So when Jesus said, “I am forgiving your sins,” what is He claiming to be? He is 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. If people were paying attention, they would see this as a claim to be God, which He proves later on.
Only God Knows the Heart
We go ahead to verses 21 and 22. 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?'”
It does not say they said these things. It said they reasoned them, and it says He was aware of their reasonings. That would be an odd thing to emphasize if they had spoken aloud. Of course He is aware of their reasonings. The only reason to point it out is because they did not say it out loud. Then Jesus even says, “Why are you reasoning these things in your hearts?” He is reading their thoughts. He knows their unexpressed thoughts.
Occasionally, we can infer one another’s thoughts. Yesterday at the conference, they announced another thing they are 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. He got up a few minutes later and said, “I would like to go to that.” I said, “I know. I knew what that look meant.” We can do that sometimes.
At other times, I have no idea what people are thinking. Even looking out at a crowd like this, I have no idea whether you are thinking, “This is really interesting,” or, “Can we get to lunch already?” I have no idea. Jesus knew their thoughts without those thoughts being expressed. God alone can do that perfectly. As they watched and listened, they began to object internally to Jesus, but He knew their thoughts without those being expressed, and that demonstrates His omniscience, His all-knowing nature that only God has.
Only God Can Heal by His Word
Then we come to the third thing He did. He healed people’s physical ailments. He healed this man just like He had healed the leper, just like He had healed others. When He asks them, “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.”
Anyone can make that claim, but not everyone can prove it. He says, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins have been forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?” Now, the answer is that it is easier to say, “Your sins have been forgiven.” Why is that easier? Because I can tell you that, and nobody can tell by looking at you whether it happened or not. There is no visible indicator that changes color to show whether your sins have been forgiven.
I could tell you all day, “You are forgiven because I said so,” and no one could verify it by looking at you. But if I said, “You cannot walk, but now you are healed,” everybody is going to know whether that worked or not. So that is a harder claim to make, at least as far as proving it. Jesus said, “Which one is harder?” They knew which one was harder. Jesus said, “To show you that I have the power to do the first one, I am going to do the second one.”
He healed the man’s physical ailment. Just at Jesus’ word, he gets up and walks. Not only that, he picked up the bed on which he had been lying and went home. He goes home. He received what he had come for. That does not mean he turned his back on Jesus. He was simply excited to go home. Everything that he came for has been fulfilled.
Jesus healed this man. The Pharisees could not do that. The scribes could not do that. Only God could do that.
Only God Deserves the Glory
The fourth sign is equally impressive. He drew people’s attention to God. As human beings, we tend to draw attention to ourselves. “Look what I did. Look what I accomplished.” Jesus, being God in human flesh, is entirely entitled to do that.
But look at the response of the people around Him in verses 24, 25, and 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. 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. At this point, they may not yet understand that Jesus is God, but they certainly recognize that He has a relationship with God unlike anything they have known. They recognize that what Jesus did, God did.
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.
Only God Can Reconcile Us to Himself
As we draw toward the conclusion, it is worth returning to what Jesus first said to the man: “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. We hear that and get offended. That does not mean you are as bad as you could possibly be in every area of life. We are not all Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot. We could all be worse. But it does not change the fact that we are sinners who have fallen short of the standards of an infinitely holy God.
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, “I have kept all these commandments,” we are only describing what we were already obligated to do. We do not get extra credit for that. It does not erase the wrong that we have already done.
Again, the Pharisees were 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 man’s sins, but 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 He forgave the man’s sins.
His whole purpose in coming, where He is eventually headed, is to the cross. 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. What He calls us to do in order to be reconciled is what the paralytic and his friends did: look to Him in faith, trusting that He can do what He has promised.
The answer is to recognize that we have 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. 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. 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 and our sin could be forgiven in full.
Then He rose again three days later to prove it. If you believe that He is who He says He is and that He did what He said He would do, ask Him for that forgiveness in faith, and you will have it.
