At The Temple

The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them.

Matthew 21:14

Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last few days of His life on earth. The crowds shouted, “Hosanna!” Then He entered the Temple courts and overturned the tables of the money changers. His house was to be a house of prayer not a den of robbers.

Then this sentence sneaks in there. If we read it too quickly it’s easy to miss. Jesus was always healing people so we may not think much about it. But if we sit with it for a bit, we can learn somethings from it about healing.

These were not medically easy cases. Blindness has many causes and, even with all of our advancement in medicine, we still can’t cure most of them. If someone was lame, it could have been a skeletal issue, a muscle issue, or a neurological issue. Medicine is still struggling to find solutions to neurological problems. Yet, for Jesus, He easily healed them all. It didn’t take more effort for Him to heal these very difficult cases.

I’m sure these blind and lame folks had cried out to God for healing right where they were, right where they sat or in their own homes. But they never received healing. It wasn’t until they got up and went to Jesus that they were healed. Here we see the scandal of “particularity” or “chosenness,” and we see this all throughout scripture.

Israel was God’s chosen nation. That means other nations were not chosen. Yet, part of the reason they were chosen is because Abram responded to God’s invitation with faith. I wonder how many other men got invited before Abram but never responded to God’s invitation. We only know about Abram because he was the one who took that step of faith to trust God. The result is that his entire ancestry was blessed as the chosen nation.

Yet, chosenness isn’t just about being blessed. It’s about being a blessing to others. Israel’s role was to be blessed so that they could bless the world with a revelation of who God really is and what He is really like. The Messiah, Jesus, was the full embodiment of this role. If you want to know what God the Father is like, just look at Jesus.

And so God’s Kingdom came pouring through Jesus in the form of love, truth and power. Imagine a huge storm with clouds overhead. It is true that a tornado could drop from anywhere. But storm chasers go toward the tornados that have already dropped. They don’t sit around looking at the clouds. They run toward where the storm has dropped to the earth.

This was Jesus. He was the embodiment of God’s Kingdom come to earth. The scandal of “particularity” is that Jesus didn’t heal everyone on earth, yet He did heal everyone that came to Him. Then He raised up His disciples to be sent out and be lights in the world just as He was. The massive tornado became many tornados, spreading out as they invited God’s Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.

We learn from this that we must go to where God is moving. We can’t sit back and look at the storm clouds waiting for a tornado to drop. We don’t sit back and declare that God is sovereign so He can drop a tornado in our laps whenever He wants. That truth about what could happen doesn’t negate the truth about how God tends to operate in the world.

Learning about God also means learning His “ways.” And the pattern we see from Jesus and the New Testament is that we must go to where God is moving in power. We must go there first, and then we take that back to wherever we came from. This is exactly how it played out in Acts 2 with the Holy Spirit and the Jews that were in Jerusalem that day for the feast of Pentecost.

God is not a random and capricious God. He has certain ways of doing things. Our job is not to demand that God do things the way we want. Our job is to learn how He operates and adjust our lives accordingly. His ways are better than our ways. His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. Our lack of understanding should direct us back to Him as we continue to learn how He moves in the earth.