Spiritual Sickness
Matthew 8:1–17
He took our illnesses and bore our diseases. Matthew 8:17

We need to look at the miracle stories not as simple stories about Jesus’s ability to make sick people well, but for what they teach us about sin and its cure. When we do this, we find four unmistakable lessons.

1. We are spiritually sick. Even worse, we are dying because of sin. This is why Matthew begins with the leper’s healing; lepers were considered as good as dead. Yet the same point is made in the other stories. The centurion’s servant was dying, and as far as Peter’s mother-in-law is concerned, we should remember that in ancient times, before antibiotics and aspirin, more people died from fever than from any other single cause. The point is that we are all perishing in sin, and there is no human remedy that will save us. Without God and the power God alone has to heal us, we will perish eternally.

2. We need a Savior. And Jesus is that Savior. Matthew summarizes his account of the first three healings by citing Isaiah 53:4. That verse expresses a link between the healing of disease and the healing of sin’s sickness, but it also comes from a passage that prophesies the coming messianic Savior. Jesus is that Savior, and his authority both to heal and to forgive human sin is proof of it. There is no other Savior, because no other speaks or heals with such power.

3. Faith is necessary. Faith is the channel by which the salvation of God comes to us. Did the leper have faith? He did. He believed that Jesus could heal him. The only question was whether Jesus would choose to do so. As for the Roman centurion, he understood that Jesus spoke with the authority and power of God. This is what you and I need too, if we are to be saved from sin. Our condition is desperate. Jesus is the physician who alone can save us, but we must have faith in him. Do you? Faith is the one thing we need, the one thing that really matters.

4. The stakes are life or death. This is the most important matter you will ever be asked to consider, for at stake is your life or your death: the life of God to be enjoyed in part now, though more fully later and forever, or the way of death that is bad enough now but will become indescribably tragic and inescapable when you pass from this phase of your existence to eternity. Jesus describes spiritual death as being “thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12). Those are frightening words, but I think Jesus knew what he was talking about. Don’t you?

If you do, why don’t you turn from your sin and believe on him now as your Savior?

Taken from Come to the Waters by James Boice ISBN 9798887790954 used with permission from P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg NJ 08865

Scripture quotations are from the ESV (the Holy Bible English Standard Version) copyright 2001 by Crossway a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.