- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
THE TOUCH OF JESUS.
By G.A.Lucas.
“While Jesus was in one of the towns, a man came along who was covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he fell with his face to the ground and begged Him. ’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!’ And immediately the leprosy left him”
(Luke 5 v12-13).
This incident in the life of Jesus, so briefly told, is filled with the glory of Divine grace. Against the dark background of human failure and loathsome flesh, we see the heavenly Christ in all His spotless perfection engaging Himself to free His poor creature from the awful results of the fall that could only result in a slow and miserable death.
But God was also present in the city in the Person of Jesus. The reports of His ministry of mercy, power, love and grace, had swept through the land. Indeed, the deeper the need, the more reason there was to come and seek Him. And yet, all who came to Him for help felt a Divine power and glory radiating from His Person, for He was the image of the Invisible God, the Firstborn of all creation. It was this that caused the poor leper to fall on his face before Him and cry, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean”. The suppliant was but a child of fallen Adam. The One to whom he pleaded for help was none other than God manifest in human form, and yet he knew that no one else but Jesus could help him, the Man in whom all the fulness of Godhead dwelt.
What did the leper see in Jesus that was so different from other men? Not a man of the earth, but the second Man, and Lord out of heaven. He saw One who had come directly from the Father, from a home of Divine light and love in heaven. He was not tainted by sin, as every descendant of fallen Adam is. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was holy. What had caused Him to leave His Father’s home in the highest paradise to come into this poor sin-stricken world, where lepers, harlots, and evil men abounded? Two things amongst many, God’s glory and our deep need. He had taken a servant’s place, taking the form of manhood to glorify God in a life and death of devoted obedience to His will, in the place where every other man had failed. His great heart of love was so deeply moved to see God’s creatures the slaves of sin that He came to seek and to save that which was lost, and to bring men, women and children back to God as the fruit of His service of love.
Only Jesus possessed the power to make the leper clean. The leper knew this. Was His sympathy co-equal with His power? The suppliant was to learn this by personal experience. Had it been a matter of casting out a demon, the word alone of Jesus would have sufficed. But the cleansing of leprosy required something more than the spoken word. It involved his being touched by Jesus. To his fellow men he was an object to be shunned at all costs, but Jesus, the holy One, touched, or embraced him freely saying, “I am willing, be clean”. And immediately the leprosy departed from him and he was clean.
What does the touch of Jesus involve? It involved His Cross and all the unfathomable sufferings He endured there. By no other means could our sinful nature, typified in this case of leprosy, be righteously removed, and mankind be made clean in the sight of God. Only Jesus could undertake this great delivering work, and He could only do it by way of the Cross. The sinful nature we have all inherited from Adam manifests itself in a life of enmity against God, and this places us under His just judgment. If we are to be freed from this awful legacy which we have inherited so as to be clean in God’s sight, our guilty history must be closed up judicially in accordance with the attributes of God’s throne. Jesus accomplished this great work when He, who knew no sin, was made sin for us, and bore the wrath of God which was our due. This is what His touching the leper involved. Glory be to His Name, He has reconciled us in the body of His flesh, through death, that He might present us holy, unblameable and irreproachable before God. Through this great work of delivering grace the believer now has a saviour in Jesus glorified. God no longer sees us ‘‘in Adam” but ‘‘in Christ”, and everything we need to sustain us in our new position is bountifully supplied by Jesus from the glory, for we are united to Him there by the Holy Spirit.
Now that Jesus is exalted to the right hand of God He is available to any poor sin-stricken leper in the world to come to Him and say, ‘Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean’. He will touch and cleanse us immediately. Only Jesus can !