And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” [Matthew 26:27-28 (ESV)]
When Jesus forgave the unnamed woman’s sins, he caused quite a stir among the Pharisees and religious leaders who were His fellow dinner guests. People can forgive an offense against them, but they can’t forgive an offense against someone else or God! While I can forgive your $10 debt to me, I have neither the right nor the power to say you don’t have to pay the $150,000 you also owe the Bank of America, Sallie Mae, Capital One and Chase for your mortgage, college loan, car financing, and credit card purchases. A person can’t do that but God can! Because only God has the authority to forgive people’s sins, implied in Jesus’ forgiveness of the woman’s sins, is a claim that He is God.
This wasn’t the only time Jesus shocked the Pharisees by forgiving sins. On another occasion, a paralyzed man’s friends brought him to Jesus for healing. When Jesus told the man, “Your sins are forgiven,” the religious leaders accused Him of blasphemy. The Hebrew Scripture made it clear that only God has the prerogative to pronounce forgiveness. The book of Leviticus laid out an elaborate temple system of offerings for intentional and unintentional sins, with different animals offered for different kinds of sins. Every year, there was a special Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, with its elaborate forgiveness ritual in which the nation’s sins were paid for with the sacrifice of a goat and the people’s forgiven sins were laid on another goat (the scapegoat) and sent into the wilderness. To the Pharisees, Jesus daring to pronounce forgiveness without being a high priest or making a sacrifice was a blasphemous claim to divinity. His actions would have been blasphemous had He not been God. As both the Great High Priest and the final sin sacrifice, however, Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law.
Knowing their concerns, Jesus addressed the religious leaders and asked whether it was easier to pronounce forgiveness or heal. He then told the man to pick up his mat and go home! As the man arose and started walking, the crowd was astonished. By healing the man, Jesus confirmed His authority to forgive. The physical healing was as much for the religious leaders as for the paralytic. Although the man’s forgiveness couldn’t be proven or disproven, his healing was obvious to all and there was only one being who could both forgive sins and heal broken bodies—God!
Jesus’ healings were observable acts that identified Him as the Messiah and yet the very people who should have recognized Him seemed to deliberately turn a blind eye and deaf ear. When Jesus healed the paralyzed man, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, or a voice to the mute, He was fulfilling Isaiah’s Messianic prophecy of salvation made some 700 years earlier.
When entering someone’s home, while we might be offered some hand sanitizer or asked to remove our shoes, none of us expect the host to provide us with water to wash our feet. Back in Biblical times, however, hospitality was quite different. No one wore socks and the shoes and sandals bore little resemblance to the Nikes, Tevas, and Keens of today. Between the dusty roads and the oxen, horse, donkey and camel droppings on them, people’s feet were filthy. Foot washing was an expected sign of hospitality and a good host always offered water so a guest could wash his own feet. If the host were rich enough, his servant did the washing and, if the guests were honored enough, the host might do the washing. For example, both Abraham and Lot offered foot washing to their heavenly visitors and, before feeding them, Laban provided Abraham’s servant and men water for foot washing. On the last night of His life, Jesus took on the role of a servant and washed the feet of His disciples.
My grandmother lived in a beautiful large house. To the left of the foyer, behind closed French doors, was an elegant room she called the “drawing room,” but it wasn’t an artist’s studio where people drew. With its grand piano, silk draperies, formal furniture, and crystal chandelier, it was a room saved for entertaining special guests. Strategically placed near the front door, guests could go directly into it without passing through the rest of the house. As splendid as the room was, I never saw anyone in it; family and close friends always gathered in the “library.”
When Robert Louis Stevenson was just a boy, he was gazing out the window one evening and saw the lamplighter lighting the street lights. The future poet is reported to have said, “Look, Nanny! That man is putting holes in the darkness.” While it makes for a good sermon illustration, a more accurate version of his words is found in an essay he wrote in 1878, “A Plea for Gas Lamps,” in which the man expressed his opposition to the “ugly blinding glare” of the electric lights that were beginning to replace the gas lamps of Edinburgh. After asking God to bless the lamplighter, the poet described him as “speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the dusk.” The lamplighter, said Stevenson, “distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected it.”
Yesterday I wrote about the Song at the Sea or Song of Moses found in Exodus 15. There is another psalm known as the Song of Moses. Found in Deuteronomy 32, it was sung forty years after that first one, when the Israelites were again preparing to enter Canaan. With Moses’ death imminent, God had appointed Joshua as the nation’s new leader. Knowing that the people would turn their back on Him once in Canaan, the Lord met with Moses and dictated the words to this song. God’s words were ones of warning and Moses was to teach this song to the Israelites as a reminder of the consequences of disobedience.
Following the Israelites’ successful passage through the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army, we find Moses and the people singing a song of deliverance and praise in Exodus 15. This beautiful and powerful psalm vividly describes the warrior God Yahweh hurling Pharaoh’s chariots and army into the sea. This is Moses’ song but he doesn’t figure in the account at all. A paean to the supremacy and unrivaled power of Jehovah, all of the glory is given to God.
Devotions of the Heart 