The Bible Study Podcast, episode 423. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues the study of the

gospel of Matthew with Chapter 8.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. We continue on with Matthew

Chapter 8. Jesus is done with the sermon on the mount, and he comes down and he starts to do work.

Jesus heals a man with leprosy. When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him.

A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said,

Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.

I am willing, he said, be clean. Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him,

see that you don't tell anyone, but go show yourself

to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded as a testimony to them. So Jesus gets right

back to work. He gets back to work with healing. He will heal a number of people in this particular

chapter. We have three different healings and the restoring of a demon-possessed man

all covered in this chapter here after he comes down from the mountain. And the first one is this man

who has leprosy. And leprosy, of course, is a terrible disease. It is a skin disease and not only

does it affect how you look, but also affects the nerve endings

so that you can eventually hurt your hand and don't realize it, and therefore you eventually

lose fingers. It doesn't cause the fingers to fall off, but people thought it did for so long

because it removes your ability to sense that pain. But in this time, in this day and age, in Jesus' time, if you had leprosy,

it had a second effect, which was you needed to stay away from people. You needed to

unclean, unclean if you came within stone's throw of them. And so this man who is bowing before Jesus is breaking the law.

He is doing what would be seen as the wrong thing for him to do. He's getting too close.

But that's not enough because Jesus actually reaches out and touches this untouchable man. This man who had to move

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