Hey everybody, I'm Tim McEy and this is my podcast Exploring My Strange Bible.

I am a card carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is

utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have.

On this podcast I'm putting together the last ten years worth of lectures and sermons

where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites

us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find those resources at thebibelproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week.

All right, well in this episode we're going to keep exploring the gospel according to Matthew.

These were teachings that I did a number of years ago as a teaching pastor at Door of Hope.

And we're going to look at a well known story in the gospel of Matthew, it's in chapter 9.

It's the story of Jesus forgiving the sins of a man who's paralyzed in his legs and then healing his legs

so that he can get up and walk away.

But there's a controversy that surrounds this healing that Jesus performs that becomes kind of the focus point for the whole story.

This is an important story like all the stories in Matthew.

It's not just in the gospel of Matthew to make us think Jesus is powerful for Jesus to forgive sins in a first century Jewish context was a loaded and symbolic act.

There was a very clear place where Israelites went to have their sins forgiven and it wasn't some random house up in the villages of Galilee.

It was the temple in Jerusalem.

What Jesus is doing in this story is not just acting powerfully.

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