Matthew's 8 and 9 Miracles

In this podcast episode, the host, Barb, discusses the book of Matthew in the New Testament. She explains that Matthew is the first gospel and is considered a bridge between the Old and New Testaments. Matthew focuses on revealing Jesus as the Messiah to the Jews. The synoptic gospels, including Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have similar stories and sequences. Barb emphasizes that the order of events in the gospels is not necessarily chronological. Matthew, who was a tax collector, uses numbers to structure his gospel and highlight important themes. Barb then discusses the first set of miracles in Matthew, which include the healing of a leper, a Roman centurion's servant, and Peter's mother-in-law. These miracles demonstrate Jesus' power and his willingness to help those who are despised or overlooked. Barb also mentions the significance of Isaiah 53 in relation to Jesus' death on the cross. Oh, hello, everybody, and welcome, kind of, to my house here in Minneapolis. This is the host of the Biblically Wired podcast. My name is Barb, and today we're going to get into the miracles in the book of Matthew. And I'm very excited, very excited. So the book of Matthew, first of all, just as a little bit of review, Matthew is the first gospel in the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are considered the synoptic gospels. Syn, S-Y-N, means together, and optic means see. So we are seeing these three things together. They are similar in stories, in the sequence of the stories, and at times they have the exact wording. John is in a league all by himself, and he writes his gospel last. So Matthew and Mark, both are argued with good research to be the first one written. We're not sure exactly who wrote first, but we know Luke uses Matthew and Mark to write his gospel because he says his gospel is on the foundation of eyewitnesses. Now Matthew is not placed first because the argument was won for Matthew's book being the first one. Matthew is placed first because it is the most natural bridge between the Old Testament and New Testament. Matthew writes to the Jews. Matthew's focus is to reveal Jesus as the Messiah, the Messiah we've been waiting for all these 4,000 years. That very Messiah that was predicted in Genesis 3 is Jesus Christ, who I walked with for three years. Another thing about the synoptics that we can't get confused about is they are not meant to be a chronological order of the time of Jesus Christ. The synoptic gospels tend to make it appear like Jesus had this big ministry in the north around Galilee, and he had some time in Samaria, and then he had time around Jerusalem. They kind of organized their gospels as if Jesus went from north to south. But the truth is, in the book of John, we see Jesus goes to the temple in Jerusalem three times, three years in a row during his ministry. So it is assumed Jesus' ministry was three years. And John also focuses a lot of his gospel in that southern section. So if we mix it all together, we get a better picture of the diary of Jesus Christ. Okay, so on another note here before we start, I wanted to remind us that Matthew was a tax collector for the Roman Empire. Tax collectors were absolutely despised by the other Jews. They had a reputation for lining their own pockets. But for Matthew to be a Jew plus a tax collector was a double hit. If a Jew became a tax collector and worked for the Roman Empire, they were kicked out of the synagogue, and that usually included their family. So his decision to be a tax collector was pretty radical. But God used that because Matthew was trained very well. And for him to be this author that puts this amazing book together comes somewhat from that experience because he needed to think so clearly. He needed to be so well organized. He needed to be so literate and so good with numbers. So Matthew, okay, I want us to picture he sits down to start this gospel of Jesus Christ. He has walked with him for three years. He knows he is God. He has seen him resurrected. Everything, just imagine. Even imagine doing a biography of our own mom or dad and sitting down and thinking about this massive task. What do I want to emphasize and how am I going to do that? To explain the creator of language using language is not an easy feat. To explain that Jesus is the Messiah to people who don't believe in him, to people that rejected him, to people that hate him is not an easy task. So what Matthew does is he uses the Jewish system of numbers to magnify his gospel. He reveals his book in this construction of sets of the numbers 3, 5, 7, and 14. This doesn't only promote the memorization of the book of Matthew, but it promotes way more than that. The number 3 to the Jewish people is a number that means complete or whole, W-H-O-L-E. It is the weakest number for complete. It is more the number man completes in some ways. Like he walked three days, this kind of thing. The number 7 is the number for complete with an emphasis more on what God does and that is the seven days of creation. Seven is more of a heavenly complete number and it also emphasizes vows and oaths. Okay, so the number 5, that is the number for mercy or grace. The Pentateuch is written in five books. The ultimate person of God is a person of mercy and grace and Moses emphasizes that in his writings. Now 14 is a double assurance of completeness. So that is seven twice. It's a double assurance that something is complete. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus gives 14 lessons and we can go through that in a different teaching. Today we are going to talk about the miracles of Jesus and why Matthew picked these portions to display to the Jews. What he is doing here is he is exemplifying that Jesus is God, that Jesus is the son of David, that Jesus is the son of man and lots of other things. What Matthew is doing here is emphasizing that Jesus is in fact the Messiah. So he, starting in chapter 8, gives three portions where there is miracles and these portions are divided by two portions where Jesus says, follow me. So it's super cool. We're going to get three sets of miracles and what are they proving? So the first set, first miracle, and this is a big deal, what is first? The first miracle is a leper. A leper comes to him and worships and bowed down before him and said, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. So one thing I want to emphasize here is this is the first time the word Lord is used in the New Testament. We've had eight chapters to this point, but the first time Matthew picks for someone to call Jesus Lord is a leper. Leprosy was a skin disease back in this time and it was a debilitating disease. It was catchy. And what they did in this day and time is they removed the lepers from the city and put them in their own community and their families could leave food for them Outside the border of their community, the goal was to separate the unclean from the clean. So they were outside the gate, the same place, I must say, that they kill our Messiah. Outside the gate, as in a dirty place. So the leper called him Lord and he worshiped him. You can just picture him bowing down. Now the rules for Jesus being a rabbi or any other Jew was that he must stay six feet from a leper. And if he is downwind of a leper, he must stay 150 feet away or consider himself unclean. So this leper was seen as such a hopeless person. So impossible to cure. Jesus healing a leper was almost considered as raising the dead. I also want to impart a belief or a myth regarding lepers that many of them believed was that their inside sin was seen on the outside. So they were dirty, they were unclean, they were outside the camp, they were terrible sinners. What does Jesus do? Jesus reaches out and touches the leper. Do you know the last time the leper was probably touched by a clean person? It could be decades for all we know. Their hands would have been curled up to be nothing but balls. Their hair would be gone. Their scabs would be all over their body. And Jesus touches them. Jesus did not have to touch this leper to heal this leper, right? I believe Jesus touched him because for the leper, it was the most meaningful way to be healed and to receive this miracle. I just think it's so beautiful. So that is the first of the three healings in this first chunk. The second was another person that the Jews could not stand. And that was a Gentile, a Roman centurion. Not only a Gentile, but a Roman soldier that's in charge of a hundred men. This is someone that the Jews could not stand. They were of the belief that Jesus was going to come and take the Romans down. And now the second person that Matthew mentions is a Roman centurion. This is just what is going on, they're thinking, right? Blow my shawl off. So a Gentile in this time was believed by a Jew to not honor a promise like a Jew. Also in the third century, a rabbi named Shimon ben Lakish says that Gentiles that honor the Sabbath deserve death. They didn't want anything to do with Romans trying to act like Jews. But now here is Jesus, a rabbi, healing a Gentile. So the centurion, which I think is kind of cool, he tells Jesus he doesn't need to come to his house. For the Jews, a rabbi was not to go into the house of a Gentile. So Jesus heals this Roman centurion's servant from afar. And who can do that? Who can heal somebody from far away? Only God. So this leper was an impossible healing. This Gentile from afar is impossible. And now for the third person he picks to heal, it's another surprise. It is a woman, a widow. Widows were the least in this community. They were supposed to be honored. But they often were not. They were taken advantage of. But Jesus heals Peter's mother-in-law. And also Matthew is revealing that yes, these fishermen, these disciples that the Jews did not honor were also important to Jesus. So right here, these first three healings, Matthew picks people the Jews do not like and do not agree with. This is the Jesus he served. This is the Messiah Matthew saw for three years. Jesus goes after the humble and the lowly and the least expected. And that's how Matthew starts his stories of the healings. Before he goes to the follow me passage, he quotes Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 is considered the fifth gospel. Isaiah 53 predicts 750 years before Christ dies on the cross. It prophesies his death. But more amazingly, it prophesies it in past tense. So Isaiah 53, what Isaiah is actually prophesying is the people who will become believers that put Jesus on the cross. The things that they would say. We killed him. We crucified him. And he died for our healing both spiritually and physically on this cross. And that is Isaiah 53 verse 5. I'm not going to go there right now, but I want us to realize Matthew is emphasizing this is your Messiah. He died, but this is God that I walked with for three years. Now he's going to go into three mammoth miracles. The first, Jesus calms the storm. Jesus calms the storm. So the storm was so bad. They call it a great storm on the sea. It was horrific. It was terrible. And the boat was being covered with waves. The boat was probably filling with water and somehow Jesus is asleep. It's hilarious. So the Sea of Galilee is a shallow sea. It's not humongous. It changes in sea level from the west side to the east side in a dramatic fashion. And this causes that sea to be able to have these huge storms out of nowhere. And it behooves us all to think about the fact that the Sea of Galilee was created for miracles. At the beginning of time, God created the Sea of Galilee for these miracles to take place. So what does Jesus do here? He rebukes the storm and it stops. So Matthew is showing Jesus is God. He is God over creation. He can command creation. The second miracle commands the demons to come out of two men. The demons here, interestingly, call Jesus the Son of God. This is Matthew 8, verse 29. In verse 27, when Jesus calms the sea, the disciples say, who is this man? Two verses later, the demons are answering them and saying he is the Son of God. So there we see Matthew is saying Jesus is God and he also commands the spiritual world. And the third thing he does here is he forgives sins. This is the story of the paralytic. In Mark and Luke, it shows that the friends drop him through a roof. Here in Matthew, he heals him. So here in chapter 9, getting into a boat, Jesus crosses over the Galilee and comes to his own city of Capernaum. I'm just filling that in there. And these friends bring their friend, this paralytic. And Jesus says, take courage, son, your sins are forgiven. And the scribes here accuse him of blasphemy. Jesus right here is saying he is God. I can't tell you how many people on Instagram and whatnot think Jesus never says he is God. Somehow he is accused of blasphemy all the time, but he never says he is God. But here he is revealing he is God. And he says the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. And tells the paralytic to pick up your bed and go home. Unbelievable. So this has its roots in Psalm 103.3. Where it says the Son of Man will heal all your iniquities or sins and then heal all your diseases. So for the paralytic, he forgives his sins and then tells him to get up and walk. What did Matthew reveal to us as readers here and as Jewish people? That Jesus is God. He can command the weather or creation. He can command the demons in the spiritual world. And he can forgive sins. So this is the next set of three. So we're going to move on to that last set of three miracles. I hope you guys are loving this because I am. So this last set of three, here we go. The first one is the bleeding woman. On the way to raise a girl from the dead. And on the way, this bleeding woman who has been bleeding forever, making her unclean. And she can't even go to the temple. This is not just a problem with bleeding, but this is a problem with being unclean. And she sees Jesus in the crowd and she comes up and she touches the fringe of his robe. And I want to go into this a bit because this is not the edge of his robe or tunic, I should say. This is his tzitzit. I'm going to spell this for you. T as in Tom, Z, I, T as in Tom, Z, I, T. Tzitzit. This is a garment that devoted Jews wear. And it's almost like this linen tank top kind of thing that's under their clothes. And it squares off on their hips. And there's four prayer tassels, so to speak, coming down. And those are the fringes. They are white with a blue thread going through them. So the people in that day had these tzitzits on them. An interesting part of that, too, is that thing is created all in numbers. And if you add up all the knots, it represents the Torah and the number 613. It's super deep and it's really cool. But my main point here is that that's what she touched. And the reason I wanted to bring that up is in Malachi 4, verse 2. It talks about these fringes that will be on the Messiah. And it describes them as wings. And beneath those wings, there will be healing, which is so fascinating. So Hebrew is an interesting language. There's 8,000 words in Hebrew. And there's 170,000 in English. So in this portion of Malachi 4, verse 2, when it talks about this fringe, it uses the word for wings. And the early rabbis and rabbis today will tell you it means wings. And beneath those wings, you will be healed. And it is a sign of the Messiah. So this woman that was bleeding, when she touched that fringe, she was declaring that Jesus is the Messiah, the one that heals from his wings. And I have to show you guys something massively cool here. Okay, this absolutely tops it off and slays me in the best way. So in the book of Mark, chapter 6, after they feed the 5,000 and Jesus walks on water, it says in verse 53, when they had crossed over, they came to land at Genesaret and moored to the shore. When they got out of the boat, immediately the people recognized him and ran about that whole country and began to carry here and there on their pallets those who were sick to the place they heard he was. Now listen to what happens in verse 56. Wherever he entered villages or cities or countryside, they were laying the sick in the marketplaces and imploring him that they might just touch the fringe or wings of his cloak. And as many as touched it were being cured. Come on, have we ever put that together before? This is insane. So right here again, Matthew picks the miracle that proclaims Jesus as the fulfilled prophecy of Malachi. You can't make this stuff up and how cool is that? How many of us have seen a picture of Jesus with the fringe? I had never seen that in my Christian life. I have since then found a few. But how cool is that? There was power in his fringe. I just like, I just wow. I about faint. I about faint. I also love how Jesus talks to the woman after and tells her that her faith has made her well. This public acknowledgement as the whole community has seen her as unclean. This public acknowledgement was important. This woman has not been able to be touched or hugged by her father or brothers all these years. What a celebration they must have had over her healing. Also, we see that Jesus was on the way to the official from the synagogue's home whose daughter had passed away. When he arrives, there's already flute players and funeral type stuff going on in the home. And Jesus kicks them out and tells them the girl is only asleep. He then takes the girl's hand and tells her to get up. So we know she was dead. They were not misinterpreting her illness. She was definitely dead. And Jesus raised her from the dead. This little story, the way it's sandwiched amongst all these miracles, it just kind of surprises me because it is revealing that Jesus has the power over life and death. We've seen he has the power over creation, over the spiritual world to forgive sins. This is revealing his power over life and death. In John 10, in an earlier podcast, you may have heard Jesus five times says, I lay my life down for my sheep. Five being the number for mercy and grace. So Jesus says not only that, but I have the authority to lay my life down and I have the authority to raise it back up. It's impressive because in Scripture, we see Jesus as the person who raised himself from the dead. We see the Holy Spirit was involved. And in another portion, we see God was involved. So the triune Trinity God all took part in this amazing event. It was a victory event. All of heaven was celebrating. Jesus was resurrected. Now, as far as raising someone from the dead, we might use the word resurrected. But some scholars think that is a stretch. If Jesus raises someone from the dead, they are resuscitated. According to them, they are brought back to life, but they will die again. Jesus was resurrected in an immortal body and then ascended to heaven. He did not need to die again. He had victory over death. So this girl, if she's born again, she will not die. But like us born-again believers, as Apostle Paul states, we will be absent from the body when we pass away, but present with the Lord. So we more move from one location to the next. We don't die. Death has been defeated. Now, we're going to move on to this last miracle of nine. And Jesus heals two blind men and a mute man. So this is the ninth scenario. In many of these scenarios, we do get more than one healing. But the way Matthew is laying this out, this is our ninth scenario. Two blind men come to him, and blindness was something that was common in Palestine, especially for those who traveled the desert for trade and whatnot, that gritty sand could get caught in their eyes, and it made it difficult. Also, their hygiene wasn't as good as ours, and eyes can be infected. So they came to Jesus for healing, and Jesus healed the blind men. Then we get the mute man, and we need to pause here because we can just read this and not know the original culture. For the Jewish people at the time, and for the people listening to the Gospel of Mark in those first many generations, a mute person who is demon-possessed is impossible to heal. They believed the only way to rid someone of a demonic possession was to know the name of the demon and cast it out. A mute man could not give them the name of the demon, so it was impossible. This is how they died. I don't know why the mute man couldn't write it in the sand, but this is how they died. Jesus healed this mute man of demon possession. And this is very clear fulfillment of Isaiah 35, verse 5 and 6 in part. Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will shout for joy. Shout for joy. With all of these, can you imagine actually what it was like to witness this? How celebratory, how victorious, and how the word must have spread town to town. As Jesus approaches Jerusalem in his final quest, the crowds are humongous that are following him. Not just for signs and miracles, many of them knew he was the Lord and Messiah. He had many disciples besides the original apostles, and he was seen as the king of the Jews. Not by all, but by many. So those are the nine sections of healing. I want to reiterate another thing. The number nine in the Hebrew culture meant truth. Truth. I tell you the truth. Matthew purposely picked out these nine sections to reveal what truth about Jesus. The first three, to me, reveal Jesus' top priority. And that is he came for the humble. He came for those that are seen as dirty, seen as less than, are the most desperate, and the ones the community hadn't even recognized in years. These are those background people that we can walk by, we can not see, but when Jesus comes, that's where his eyes are going to go. And that's what he did. For me, this really gives me pause. Who in my community would I be surprised is a priority for Jesus Christ? It's a very humbling thought. Very humbling. Next, those next three, my goodness, he rebukes a storm, he defeats some demons who call him the son of God, and he forgives sins. And that was an important piece to that paralytic. The paralytic was more in the need of forgiveness than healing physically. And I think that's an interesting thought for us, some of us who have struggled with waiting for healing, believing they can be healed, but in waiting. This is important for us to remember that Jesus healed already our sins on the cross. We have to remember that he is not impartial. He has the ability to heal, and this is something that is still here today for us. And those that receive healing should be a reminder to the rest of the body of Christ that God is near, and we should celebrate the healing of a dear brother or sister, just as much as we would celebrate it for ourselves. We are one body, and a healing in America means God has not given up on America. Thank you, Jesus. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll see this is kind of something that I learned when I went to Iraq and Lebanon. In the Eastern culture, they do a great job of being one body. Here in the West, we tend to be these individual silos, and we're asking God for something for me, for I, me, and my. And we see it in someone else, and we wonder, am I on the B team? Have I done something wrong? And the truth is, no, God is not impartial. God allows the rain to go on the good and the bad. God is not impartial. And I think that in the East, when they see a miracle for a brother or someone's family member becomes born again, there is massive celebration because what is to us a me thing, to them is an us thing. If God does a miracle in our body, or if God brings renewal to a brother in Christ, that's an us thing. That's an us thing. That was for all of us. And I wish that we had a lot more of that in the West. I think that we would be bolder in unity. We could bring all our gifts to the table. Nobody has to be the big king of gifts. Nobody has to feel like the least. All of us are using these gifts that God gave us for an important time in our history, in the history of our country. And my prayer is that our America will start to see that we are part of one global body called the Bride of Christ and start celebrating anything he does for anyone. Have joy. Okay. I want to thank you so much for listening. I hope this motivated you and helped you see that there is a lot going on behind the scenes of everything we read in Scripture. Tearing it apart, treating it like a puzzle of sorts is a super fun thing for me. I absolutely love this, and I don't mind doing the work if it blesses anyone else. So if this has blessed you, please share it with somebody you think would be blessed. I can't push this out any farther than I can, but you guys can. And if you're a fan of this, I just pray that you will spread it about. I have nothing left. The rest of my life is a quick vapor, but God is eternal. And may what he does through any of us bless the body in Jesus' name. Well, I hope you have a great day. And I know the world is tough out there, but this is not our home. So keep your chin up out there in Jesus' name.