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- The Healer | Matthew 8:14-17
The Healer | Matthew 8:14-17
He can heal all manner of afflictions
Caleb Lee
February 06, 2024
When you read the word, “Healer,” what’s the first thought that comes to your mind?
I tend to hold a negative connotation with the word, typically associating it with something like a shaman.
It’s just another way that the world has taken something that was meant to be good and turned it into something sinister.
But make no mistake: Jesus came to be the Healer.
14 And when Jesus entered Peter's house, he saw his mother-in-law lying sick with a fever. 15 He touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she rose and began to serve him. 16 That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. 17 This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”
Up to this point, we’ve seen Jesus heal a leper and an unknown disease. The leper he touched and healed, and the centurion’s servant he healed from a distance.
So truly there was no limit to what he could do.
Couple that with the people already being struck by how he taught, and you’ve got a recipe for big crowds wherever you go.
Can you imagine what that would be like?
Say you had an incurable illness and you hear about this Teacher who goes around healing similarly incurable ailments.
Wouldn’t you rush over to see what He was all about?
But Jesus was and is bringing about more than just physical healing.
4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53:4-6 is part of the passage that Matthew refers to at the end of v.17.
And here we have a picture of what it was that Jesus came to do.
To take our griefs and sorrows and lay them on Himself, so that we wouldn’t have to face the punishment of God.
Rather, Jesus takes that punishment on Himself for us to live in eternity with Him.
And living in eternity means that all of our afflictions will be healed, and it will be a place of no sorrow or sin.
That doesn’t mean that He won't heal all of our physical ailments on this earth.
But it does mean that even if He doesn’t, we can have confidence in the fact that we are facing an eternity of perfect health and joy.
Have a blessed Tuesday, friends.