3 And some of the scribes said to themselves, “This fellow blasphemes.” 4 And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, “Why are you thinking evil in your hearts? 5 “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, and walk’? 6 “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then He said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your bed and go home.” 7 And he got up and went home. 8 But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men.
Authority is presumed by Jesus that only belongs to God, and the biblical scholars of that time objected. Their fine parsing of the text of the OT along with their honed manipulation of biblical truth forced them to reject Jesus’ actions as blasphemous. In other words, when Jesus forgave the paralyzed man’s sins, He was claiming to do something only God could do. Make no mistake, Jesus’ contemporary detractors knew exactly what He was presuming for Himself, namely divine prerogatives—despite present day assertions by critics that Jesus never claimed to be God! Jesus unabashedly identified objections to this as “thinking evil,” not just misunderstanding.
The issue at heart is one of authority: Does Jesus have the authority to forgive sins? He Himself responds by appealing to demonstration and logic, as follows. He healed the man of paralysis in plain sight for all to see. This was an undeniable, verifiable, eye-witnessed fact. Such a thing is humanly impossible. There are two ways, now, to explain Jesus’ argument. The first is that physical healing is the more difficult thing for a human to accomplish because it would be impossible to fake; yet saying “your sins are forgiven” does not lend itself to tangible proof. It is easy to simply say it because no one could objectively verify it one way or the other, as it were. The other way to consider this is that physical healing is much easier for God than forgiving sin. In the one case it simply took a verbal statement, in the second case it requires the death of the incarnate God Himself. At different levels, both aspects of the argument lead to the same conclusion—that Jesus has the authority on earth to forgive sins.
The healed man simply got up and went home to carry on life as God intended it. The crowds were “awestruck” for they recognized that God was at work in Christ. Their belief in Christ, however, had not yet advanced to the point of recognizing Him as Messiah, for they recognized only the authority of Christ to heal—that is what awed them, not His ability to forgive sins.
Father, in Your wisdom and love You do not always heal me of my physical problems. But You have taken care of my greatest problem by forgiving me for all my sin! Someday in glory I will be healed of the physical as well!
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