MIRACLES
HEALING OF THE LEPERS
DR. JIM DIXON
LUKE 5:12-16, LUKE 17:11-19
JUNE 26, 1983
It was hideous. It began with a strange general feeling of weakness. Then there would begin to be small spots of discoloration on the skin, and these small spots of discoloration would form nodules and the skin would thicken. The body of the victim would begin to experience ulcerations as the nodules began to ulcerate and ooze. The person would actually begin to stink. The body was such a mass of ulcerations that even the vocal cords would begin to be ulcerated and the person couldn’t speak clearly. He could not breathe well. Eventually there was mental deterioration and coma, and after a period of about 10 years, there was death. It was called tubercular leprosy. It was very common in the Biblical world. It was a tragic disease.
Also, in the biblical world there was another form of leprosy called anesthetic leprosy. It begins similarly but it attacked the central nervous system and there was a growing loss of sensation, a loss of feeling in the limbs and in the body. The muscles would begin to degenerate, begin to shrink. The tendons of the body would begin to contract. In this form of leprosy, the leper’s hands and feet would actually become like claws. Over a period of years, the hands and feet could actually fall off of the victim. A very tragic disease, that form of anesthetic leprosy. It lasted as long as 30 years and then the person was relieved of his pain through death. Most biblical cases of leprosy were combinations of anesthetic and tubercular forms. A very tragic disease.
It is not possible for those of us living in the world today to begin to imagine the suffering of a leper. They lived in total isolation from men and women. Some of them lived in leper colonies. You saw the movie “Ben Hur.” You remember how, at the close of that movie, I think it was Ari Ben Canaan who searched for his mother and his sister who were afflicted by leprosy and living in a leper colony, living in caves where people lived together and literally rotted together through the days and weeks and months and years. Food was brought to them and set at a distance so that the people could eat. Other lepers simply roamed the wilderness of Palestine. Bands of people just wandering aimlessly. They were not allowed to come near people. If they came within a hundred yards of a normal human being, they had to shout “Unclean! Unclean!”
Our Lord Jesus encountered lepers such as that and he had compassion upon them. He had power to heal them as He has power over all things. There are those few passages in the scriptures where we are told of how Jesus encountered lepers. From those passages and from the healings that took place, I have two messages for you this morning. The first message is this. Jesus Christ offers to cleanse us. Jesus Christ offers to cleanse us of our disease.
You will recall how He was in one of the villages and a leper came to Him. He was desperate. He had no right to come close to any human being. He had no right to come close of Jesus Christ, but he was desperate, and he came, and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet. He was full of leprosy, his. body ulcerated. He said “Lord, if You will, You can make me clean.” We are told in the Bible that Jesus stretched forth His hand and He touched that leper. He touched the untouchable and He said, “Thy will set thee clean.” Power went forth and that leper was immediately healed of his disease, and he was made clean. He was made whole, and that same power for cleansing is available today.
As Christians, we are those who have come to the awareness of the fact that in all humility, we need cleansing. The truth is that everyone in this world is a leper before God. We have all sinned. The Bible says we’ve fallen short of God’s Glory. Our souls and our spirits are blemished. They have nodules. They have spots of discoloration. They are ulcerated. They are diseased and we are in desperate need of inward cleansing. Jesus said, “But our righteousness is like filthy rags when compared to the righteousness of God.” We need His cleansing, and as Christians we are aware of that, so we have come to Jesus Christ. We have said “Lord Jesus come into my life. Be My Lord and be My Savior.” We have confessed our sin. We’ve asked Him to forgive us and to cleanse us within. We have come to Him, and we have said “Lord if You will, You can make me whole” and He has touched us and He said “I will. Be whole.” So, there’s this offer of cleansing through our Lord Jesus Christ.
In 1889 a man named Alexander Gustav Eiffel designed and built a structure in Paris that today we call the Eiffel Tower. A very light structure that was meant to be strong and it is strong. It can hold 10,000 people at one time. When it was built it had four restaurants. It had a luxurious apartment for Eiffel himself. Nine hundred and eighty-six feet high, it was the tallest structure in the world until the Empire State Building was built in 1930, The Eiffel Tower had hydraulic lifts so that in case any one of the four legs broke or began to sink, those hydraulic lifts would correct the imbalance that would take place. Of course, the legs have never broken. It was built from 15,000 prefab parts. A beautiful structure.
In 1972 Barb and I were there in Paris at the Eiffel Tower. Barb took a picture of me standing in front of the tower. I weighed 240 pounds, and I was eating an ice cream cone. It was hard to tell which structure was larger! But through the years and through the decades, the Eiffel Tower has begun to erode. As the years and the decades have passed, its accumulated rust and its accumulated dirt. They knew that it was too massive a task to clean that structure and so periodically, every few years, they would try to hide the erosion and they would paint it. Six thousand gallons of paint it takes every time they paint it, and they’ve done that through the years. But finally in recent years, they’ve realized that they had to clean it and so they did. An incredible task, but they scraped that tower clean. They found 1 ,000 tons of rust, dirt and dried paint on that tower but they cleaned it. Each and every one of us, apart from Christ, are in the same condition. Through the years we’ve accumulated the rust and the dirt of sin. We need desperately to be cleansed. We need to be clean. We try to paint ourselves to hide our sin, to hide our rust, our erosion. We dress up well. We wear good clothing. We groom ourselves and try to look good outwardly. Maybe we go to counseling to try to change inwardly. We might try to participate in some civic cause, do something good, try to cleanse ourselves but it just doesn’t work. The Bible says there’s only one source of cleansing and that source is Jesus Christ. Only He can touch our soul. Only He can touch our spirit. Only He can say “I will. Be clean.’
In the Jewish world, the Jews tried desperately to find cleansing. It’s in the heart of every man, every woman, to long to be cleansed within. The leper tried desperately to be cleansed but there was no hope, no means, even under the Jewish law for the cleansing of leprosy. There were provisions for those who came in contact with a leper. If you came in contact with a leper you had to go and show yourself to the temple priest and undergo rights of purification so that you would not acquire the disease. The first thing you would do after you’ve done to the temple priest is you would be washed. Your whole body would be washed and then they would take two birds. They would kill one of the birds and they would take the blood of that dead bird and they would mix it with scarlet and hyssop. They would mix it with cedar and that blood, mixed with those three elements. They would then take the live bird and they would dip the live bird in that blood and then they would set the bird free, symbolically representing his cleansing and his freedom. And then the person would be observed for a full week to make sure no spots or blemishes or discolorations of skin occurred. After a week the person would be washed again, and he’d be shaved. His head would be shaved and even the eyebrows would be shaved. Totally devoid of hair, washed and then three lambs would be taken. The lambs would be sacrificed, and their blood would be mixed with fine flour and with oil. Then they would take that blood, mixed with flour and oil, and they would touch the right finger, the right thumb, of the person who came in contact with leprosy with that blood and oil and flour and then they would touch the right big toe, and then they would touch the right ear, and all this was done in accordance with Leviticus 14 as the purification rite, but it did not have the power to make anyone pure. It did not have the power to cleanse anyone. Only Jesus Christ has that power.
This last week when I was in St. Louis, I went into a men’s restroom that had those hand blow dryers. I don’t like those. It seems to me they don’t work. You know those hot air blow dryers. It had some instructions on the hot air blow dryer. No 1 – Push the button. No. 2 – Hold hands under nozzle. No. 3 – Rub hands together briskly. No 4. – Machine turns off automatically. Well, someone had added a No 5. He put No. 5 – Wipe hand on pants. You know, some things are like that They just don’t work. They don’t get the job done. They don’t cleanse. They don’t purify. And that’s what all the measures of the world are like. All the efforts that mankind can make to cleanse himself do not work. There’s only one source of cleansing and that source of cleansing is Jesus Christ, and when come to Him, with a contrite heart in all humility and we say, “Lord Jesus, come into my heart. Be my Lord and be my Savior. I am a sinner. I confess. I want to turn my life around. Cleanse me.” He comes in and He cleanses us.
John said, “This is the message we have heard from the beginning; we proclaim also to you God is light. In Him there’s no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with God and we walk in darkness, we lie. We do not live in accordance with the truth but if we walk in the light as He is in the light, if we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sin, He is faithful and able to forgive us our sin, to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous. He is the expiation for our sins and not for our sins only but also for the sins of the whole world. He is the source of cleansing.”
In the Coptic Church and the Armenian Church, they refer to the communion service as the “oblation,” a word which means offering or sacrifice. But communion is not simply a time when we offer ourselves as a sacrifice to God, but as a time when we recognize that He has offered His Son as a sacrifice for us in order that we might be cleansed, in order that we might be washed, in order that we might he made whole.
I have a second teaching that I wanted to give this morning. I’m doing to need to make it very brief because our time short, but it is this. We see in these two healings of these lepers that Jesus Christ demands one thing from us, as Christians. He demands our thanksgiving. He was in another village near the border of Samaria and Galilee, and He was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance, probably more than 100 yards away in accordance with their Jewish law. They stood at a distance, and they shouted out in a loud voice. They said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When Jesus saw them, He shouted back. He said, “Go. Show yourselves to the temple priest.” So, they went, and they were cleansed as they walked. They were healed. And the Bible says one of them, just one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back. He turned back and he began thanking God and he came to Jesus Christ, and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, and he thanked Him. Jesus said “Did I not heal ten? Where are the nine?” No one found to return and give thanks to God except this man. He’s always looking for a thankful heart. He’s looking for people who love Him and are thankful for His blessings in their lives. He’s given us many things.
The Greek word for thanksgiving is the word “eucharisto.” It’s the word from which we get the word Eucharist. Throughout much of the Christian world, the communion meal is called the Eucharist because it’s also a time of thanksgiving. It’s a time when we come with thankful hearts to God for what He has done for us through the gift of His Son, a time of thanksgiving for the blessings He has given us, and He has given many blessings to each and every one of you. We live in the United States of America, and we are all people most blessed. Each and every one of you have many possessions. You have homes. You have roofs over heads. You have cars to drive. You can go to the grocery store, and you can buy the food you want. And for that, Christ wants our thanksgiving, but our thanksgiving involves much more than simply the thanks for the possessions and the things we have. The word for thanksgiving, the word “eucharisto” literally means “good grace.” We are to be thankful for the grace that God has given us, and He’s given grace to each and every one of you who believe in His name. He has given you forgiveness. He has given you cleansing and washing, and He has given you eternal life. He has given you salvation. After a million endless years, we can gather again in His name, and we will still believe because He is the resurrection and the life. What greater gift can anyone ever have and that is an expression of His mercy. That’s an expression of His grace and regardless of whatever circumstances we’re in in life, we have that grace, and for that we should be thankful.
You might be in the midst of some circumstances where you don’t feel very thankful. Maybe you don’t see God’s grace, but if you’re a Christian, and have eternal life, He’s called you to be thankful in the midst of every circumstance. Not for every circumstance but in the midst of every circumstance to give thanks and it’s an expression of our faith when we give thanks because we know that all things work together for good.
There are two hymns that I love. One is a hymn called “Now Thank We All Our God.” Many of you have sung that at Thanksgiving time. You may have sung it at other times. It was written by a man named Martin Rinkert, but he wrote it in a very strange circumstance. He wrote it in the midst of a great famine when thousands of people were dying. There were so many people dying that they could not make graves for them, and they literally dumped the bodies in the trenches and then his wife died. He was left to raise his two daughters. He had very little food, very little clothing. It was in the midst of a time like that that he sat down, and he wrote that hymn, “Now Thank We All Our God” because, you see, he knew that his wife was with Jesus Christ. He knew that his wife was happier in that moment than she had ever been in her time on earth. He knew that God would give him grace and strength to raise his two daughters. He knew that even in the midst of life circumstances such as that, God would give him grace, God would give him strength and he would raise those daughters up to be an influence in the world and so it was. God gave him grace. Even in the worst of times, he was able to thank God.
Another hymn that we sing every week is the “Doxology.” We sing it before the sermon every week. “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow”—that song was written by a man named Bishop Thomas Kent. His life was a life of suffering. His mom and dad died when he was very young. He lived a life of poverty. He was buried by six of the poorest people in his church. He wanted it that way, but he loved Jesus Christ, and he was very much aware of Christ’s blessings and Christ’s grace in his life. You see Bishop Thomas Kent is alive today. He still lives because of the grace of Jesus Christ in whom he placed his faith. He was a chaplain and King Charles II removed him from the chaplaincy because of a conflict with William of Orange. Thomas Kent still praised God even though he had had his chaplaincy ripped from him by King Charles II and he sat down, and he wrote that “Doxology,” that word of praise saying “Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him all creatures here below. Praise Him above ye heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” Able to praise God in the hardest of times, knowing that God works all things together for good and so it was. By the end of his life, by the power of God, Thomas Ken was restored as a Bishop, and he became the personal chaplain of King Charles II and that occurred by the grace of God. Thanks in the midst of all circumstances.
One of my favorite passages is in Romans 13 and I like the way it’s translated in the Living Bible. It says “What can separate us from the love of God? Life can’t and even death can’t. The angels won’t and all the powers of hell itself are not able to keep God’s love from us. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, or where we are — in the highest heaven, in the deepest ocean — I am convinced that nothing is able to separate us from the love of God as demonstrated by our Lord Jesus Christ when He died for us.” If you really believe that, then you’re thankful today. If you really believe that nothing can separate you from the love of Christ, then you surely have a thankful heart today. That’s why Paul says, “Give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” So, as we come to this communion table, we are to come in expression of gratitude, thanksgiving for God’s many blessings on our lives, most of all for the gift of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ who gave His life that we might have life, who gave us eternal life, who gave us salvation, who gave us cleansing, who has washed us. And it is also time when we confess to Him the sin that is in our life, and we commit our lives anew to Him and ask anew for His forgiveness. Before we come to the communion table, let’s have a word of prayer.