Matthew 8

Last week we finished Jesus’ sermon on the mount, and we looked at the last six verses of chapter 7. Those last six verses were really like the call to action for us, specifically a call to obedience. Jesus talked about the possibility of building a house on the strength and stability of a rock, or on the loose, and shaky foundations, of the sand. He taught us that the only rock or the one solid foundation that our lives can be built on is an active obedience to Him and His words. We talked about how it’s not enough to just know about or acknowledge Him, that it’s not enough to just know His words, we’re not on the rock, until we begin actively obeying the things, that He has told us. He told us about a lot of things, through the sermon on the mount, lots of different lessons, and then He came to the end and basically said that if you want to be wise, that if you want to be built on a stable foundation, that if you want to stand when the difficulty or the storms get here, then listen to what I have to say and actually do it. Only then will you be built upon the rock.

 

That’s the understanding that we ended with last week. And today we move past the sermon on the mount, into chapter 8, and maybe you have looked at the picture here on the screen and noticed that the plan this morning, is to go through the entirety of chapter 8, and you’re like what in the world, that’s 34 verses, how are we going to do that? And I was right there with you, but we’re going to do it, and there’s a reason why we’re going to do it.

 

I see this entire chapter as kind of like an exclamation point that Matthew is putting right after Jesus’ sermon. And I don’t want to miss the impact of that exclamation point by breaking this into pieces. So, we’re probably not going to be going all over the place because we have enough to deal with already right here. So, let’s read this.

 

Read Matthew 8

 

In the first seventeen verses of this chapter, we see Jesus engaging with people, and specifically people that were sick or people coming on behalf of other people that were sick. The first person in this chapter that comes to Jesus is this man with leprosy. Leprosy is a disease that you hear about quite a bit in the bible. It’s something that the Israelites feared and I’m sure most ancient cultures did, because there was no known cure for it, and it was contagious. It’s interesting that the Bible prescribes in Leviticus 13 a very similar response to leprosy that we had to go through for Covid. Leviticus 13 talks about this need to cover the lower part of your face, to inform people around you of your infection, and to distance or isolate yourself from other people while infected.

 

Right now, in this world, that sounds really familiar, and so we kind of all have some experience with infectious diseases now, but for leprosy in those days, this usually didn’t go away, and people could be infected for 10-20+ years and then usually die from this disease. We lost a lot of people to COVID, but I think leprosy took the majority of people that got it. Leprosy would attack the nervous system, the respiratory system, the skin, the eyes and would do this over many years. It was a terrible disease that again they had no way at all to cure.

 

But this man in the first few verses comes to Jesus and it says, first of all, that he worshipped Him, and he said very simply there in verse 2 that “LORD, if You are willing, You can make me clean”. And then it says that Jesus reached out and touched him, which you don’t do with someone with a contagious degenerative disease, but He’s Jesus, and then He spoke, and He said, “I am willing; be cleansed” and immediately he was healed. What we see here, is that Jesus spoke, and leprosy listened. This incurable disease was cured in a moment, BECAUSE THE LORD SPOKE.

 

And then Matthew talks about another guy when Jesus arrives in the town of Capernaum.

 

Read Matthew 8:5-6

 

And I love this guy’s conversation with Jesus. First of all, respect for this guy, because he is a noteworthy guy, he has power and influence, and he is actually coming for help, which pride stops a lot of people from doing, but then he’s not even coming for himself, he’s coming on behalf of one of his servants. And Jesus is basically like, Yeah, I will come heal him. And the centurion guy kind of recoils back a little bit, and is like whoa, whoa, like I’m not worthy for YOU to come into my lowly home, but I know that if YOU just speak a word, that my servant will be healed right now. He’s like I have some authority too, I tell my soldiers to go, and they go, I tell them to come, and they come, I tell them to do this, or do that, and they do it.

 

This man was saying all of these things in recognition of Jesus’ authority as God, and was like, if you just speak, I know it will be done, because You have that level of authority in this world.

And Jesus in verses 10-12 marveled at this man’s faith. This was an uncommon faith in the midst of a people that really should have known and understood Who He was. But they didn’t.  And so, Jesus says that there will plenty of others, from the East, and from the West, from all over the world, that come to know Him and enter His Kingdom, and we’re part of that. We’re part of the people that He was talking about at that moment.

 

But back to this centurion guy, Jesus finishes His conversation with him in verse 13. Let’s look at that again.

 

Read Matthew 8:13

 

Jesus didn’t end up going to this man’s house. He didn’t even have to go, He was willing to go, but as this man asked for, Jesus just spoke, once again, and this man’s servant was healed. And into verses 14 through 17 we continue to see Him healing all types of sickness. He even heals Peter’s mother-in-law in there. Through this first section we see Jesus’ power over sickness and life. We see the power of His word. But let’s keep going, and we’re going to jump to verses 23-27. Let me read these again.

Read Matthew 8:23-27

 

Jesus and the disciples head out on a boat. We don’t know what the weather was like or what the weather looked like when they got on that boat. But we find them here, at this moment, on this boat, in the middle of a great tempest. A really severe storm. It says that the boat was literally getting covered in waves, and that is not a good thing. We want the water outside the boat, not inside the boat. And through all of this, it says at the end of verse 24, that Jesus was on the boat, sleeping right through it. Sleeping through the storm, sleeping through the waves crashing over the boat, sleeping through the panic of all of these other guys.

 

But eventually, the disciples were at their breaking point, and they went to wake Jesus up. But we have to remember something, several of these guys were professional fisherman, being on the water was not something new to them. Jesus literally called some of them, right off of their boats, right off of the job, to come follow Him. So whatever kind of storm they were in, must have not been some small thing We must be talking about an extremely bad storm, if it has these guys shaken up, and the boat taking on water. So, they wake Jesus up, and verse 25 tells us that they say “Lord, save us! We are perishing!”. This storm was so bad that these guys thought that they were going to die.

 

And so, Jesus wakes up, and in verse 26 He says, “Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?” And then it says, and pay attention to this, that Jesus gets up and He rebukes the very winds and the sea, and everything calmed down. It says in verse 27, that these men marveled and said, “Who can this be, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?” Jesus spoke, and the very systems of nature and of this world, listened to His word, and obeyed it. He spoke and the storm stopped.

And then we keep moving and we get to the end of this chapter, and Jesus runs into two demon-possessed men.

 

Read Matthew 8:28-29

 

And it’s kind of an interesting thing, because we see how they initially engage with Jesus in those first two verses, and Jesus hadn’t even said anything, He hadn’t done anything, He just walked into the area and these men met Him there. But the evil inside of them, the demons that were possessing these men, recoiled at very presence of Jesus. It’s a biblical and even scientific reality that darkness retreats in the presence of the light. And as the holiness and the presence of God, in Jesus Christ, just entered the area, the evil became uncomfortable, the darkness began cowering in the face of this light, and I love seeing that.

 

These demons were like, “oh no”, this is the very Son of God, have you come here to torment us? And notice, Jesus still doesn’t say anything, or Matthew just didn’t record it. But the demons keep this one-sided conversation going, they’re uncomfortable and they’re rambling, and in verse 31, they are like “If You cast us out, let us go into that herd of pigs over there.” And that’s a really telling statement, it wasn’t like, well if you manage to get us out of here, or if you are strong enough to cast us out, or if you think you can cast us out. No, if you look at what they say, they simply say, “If you cast us out”. They knew exactly Who was in charge in this moment, they knew exactly the gravity of His word, they knew it was His choice to do whatever He wanted to do in this situation.

 

And so, in this section of verses, there is recorded only one word spoken by Jesus. Jesus just says “GO”, and the demons run into this herd of pigs and then over a cliff of some sort and they die in the sea. Jesus spoke, even just one word, and the demons listened and obeyed.

 

And we’re going to bring this all to a very specific point, but let’s circle back for a moment and deal with verses 18-22.

 

Read Matthew 8:18-22

 

These verses happen right before they set off on the boat into the storm. In these verses we see two different guys run up to Jesus and express their desire to follow Him. But Jesus responds to these guys with a little bit of a reality check, in regard to following Him. To the first guy, Jesus announced that He was essentially homeless, He said foxes have holes and birds have nests, but I don’t have anywhere to lay My head. Jesus was warning this man that really following Him might come with some uncomfortable circumstances. That he might not get, or have, or keep, the things of this world, that bring him comfort, if he’s really going to commit to following Jesus for real.

 

And so, Jesus makes this comment in Matthew 8, because His way doesn’t necessarily lead to the stuff, it probably doesn’t, and here He used the extreme example that it might not even lead to a place to permanently lay your head. Jesus wanted this guy to be aware of what he was committing to.

 

And then Jesus talks to this other guy, who says, Lord let me first go and bury my father. The wording here makes it look like this guy’s father had already died and that he needed to guy bury him, but the original meaning and the original wording more likely means, that the guy was wanting to go be with his family, for whatever amount of time, until his father passed, and then he would come and follow Jesus.

 

And that’s a slippery slope, there’s always another thing that we can put before following Jesus, whether it be my family, or getting my job and education all worked out, or getting the finances all in order, or just when I am finally comfortable and satisfied with my life. Then I will follow Jesus. But that shows a complete lack of understanding of Who He is, He is Lord, He is God, He is Savior, He is the one Who loved us enough to come down to save us and we really think we can work things out without Him? We really think we can find satisfaction without Him? Our soul longs for something more, that this world can’t provide, IT LONGS FOR HIM.

 

But let’s take Jesus’ lesson here, right along with that. we have to understand the cost of following Him. The lesson here is that Jesus was never afraid of the honest account of what it meant to follow Him. Jesus wasn’t afraid to let us know it would be harder. There is far too much church going on where there is just an attempt to fill churches with people that are simply ok with associating with Him, or like having a social gathering at the church, but have never actually considered following Him with everything in this life. Jesus actually discouraged these people from fake following Him, by confronting them with the reality of what it meant to actually follow Him.

 

Let us really consider that. I mean, we’ve talked about this in previous passages, but we’re here talking about it again, because the Bible is talking about it again. I don’t want any of us to just be playing the part, my heart is for all of us is to truly follow Him in everything.

 

And so, we have this whole chapter, and we have seen these various points and circumstances through it, but why did we go through the whole thing? And how is it like this exclamation point that I described at the beginning?

 

Jesus told us last week in Matthew 7 that the only rock, the only solid foundation to build our life on top of, was to listen to everything that He tells us and then actually do it. He was like, you want to be considered wise? You want to stand when the storm gets here? You want to be founded and built on the rock, then listen to Me, do what I say, follow Me.

 

 

Let me read verse 27 again.

 

Read Matthew 8:27

 

Who can this be, that even the winds and the sea obey Him? And we can add to that, Who can this be, that even sickness and disease obey Him? Who can this be, that even the demons obey Him?

 

His name is Jesus. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. He is God who came down as a man. He has called us to follow Him, but if we don’t understand the gravity of Who He is and we don’t consider the seriousness of His calling on our lives, then I don’t think we’ll ever actually follow Him. We’re not going to follow Him on accident, and He knows if we’re faking it. But as we sit here today in light of Matthew showing us at that like everything, in every corner of this world listens to and obeys his commands.

 

Shouldn’t we obey Him too? I absolutely believe that we should, and we must.