Seeking A Physician
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At Luke chapter four, the text records beginning at verse sixteen that Jesus entered Nazareth, the city where He had been brought up, and, according to a custom He practiced, He entered the synagogue and made Himself available to read aloud from the book of the Law.
Jesus selected a passage we would recognize now as being from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah. The passage from the ancient prophet described the mission of the promised Messiah as being, among other things, a work of healing.
As a matter of fact, Jesus discussed with Nicodemus at John chapter three that He had come to offer healing to the world when he compared his eventual lifting up on the cross to the lifting up by Moses of a brazen fiery serpent in the wilderness. That serpent, as recorded at Numbers chapter twenty-one, was for the physical healing of the Israelites, although the matter was far more spiritual than it was physical.
They had become afflicted by the live fiery serpents God had sent among them because of their ungodly behavior. Therefore, they suffered physically for their spiritual impropriety. On the reverse, their physical healing followed their spiritual corrections. Since those beholding the brazen serpent were healed, those responding to the cross of Christ are also healed, spiritually.
There is no man Christ did not come to heal in the spirit. Yet, there are so many who refuse to be touched by the finger of the Great Physician. Jesus, at Matthew thirteen, lamented at verse fifteen the hardness of heart, dullness of hearing, and refusal to see that had resulted in the failure of early Israel to be converted and spiritually healed.
Such might be compared to the stubborn one who suffers from maladies of which he is yet unaware and unknowledgable, and who refuses the examination of a qualified physician who could readily provide a diagnosis, a prognosis, and a cure. On the other hand, there’s the ones who, like Israel of olf had wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores that they had neither bound up nor treated with anointment, reading from verse six.
It’s one thing to not realize you’re ill, and, therefore, not seek treatment. It’s quite another to fully realize how ill you are and still not seek treatment. Such was the stubborn will of a sinful Israel, and is not unlike the just as stubborn will of those who have closed their ears to the Lord’s tender calling in the favor of a material and often sinful world.
Literally speaking, many have not sought medical attention because of it’s extreme cost. Spiritually speaking, the cost for you has been paid in full by the Redeemer, for, by His stripes you may be healed.