Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Matthew 8:4

Jesus healed the leper and then told him not to tell anybody but to go show himself to the priest, and offer the sacrifice that the law required, "as a testimony to them."

Now, I'm not going to pretend that I know what is supposed to be the testimony (the healing? the sacrifice? the obedience?) nor to whom the testimony is given (the people nearby? the guy's family? the priests?).

But as I pondered those things, it crossed my mind that the priests must have been seeing an awful lot of healings. Yes, the priests had heard what was up with John's preaching. And then Jesus' preaching. And all those people going out to be baptized. But they also had all sorts of people coming to the temple to "show themselves to the priests" that the healings might be verified and the sacrifices might be made.

It almost makes a person suspect that God set up those purification laws in the Old Testament to ensure that the priests in Jesus' day would be faced with evidence after evidence after evidence that some dude was busy doing all those things that the scriptures said the messiah would do.

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