The Father and The Son

Broadcaster

Is Jesus Good Enough?

John David Clark, Sr. - February, 1992

“And it came to pass, as he went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off. And they lifted up their voices, and said, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ And when he saw them, he said unto them, ‘Go show yourselves unto the priests.’ And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed. And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks. And he was a Samaritan. And Jesus answering said, ‘Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger?’ And he said unto him, ‘Arise, go thy way. Thy faith hath made thee whole.’" Lk. 17:11-19

Jesus was pleased with the behavior of the healed Samaritan in this story, wasn't he? He commended his coming back to give glory to God for his healing, and he sent him away with a blessing. But try to put yourself in the place of those ten lepers. For years, no doubt, they had been outcasts of society, required by the Law to warn everyone publicly of his disease. Listen to what was required of lepers in Leviticus 13:45-46:

“And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.”

Lepers were consigned to a remote community, apart from the ordinary course of life. apart from the laughter of children, from the smiles of neighbors, and from the happy greetings of friends and family. They were put way from other people, away from the house of parents, and marketplaces, and from the readings from the Scriptures in the synagogues. They were doomed to a life of slow, revolting death, while in the distance, wagons jostled in the streets, farmers tended their fields, and smoke rose from homes where mothers prepared evening meals for their families in peace.

“Unclean! Unclean!”, would come the cry from the anonymous forms along the edge of the road, and everyone passing that way would hurriedly cross to the other side, their faces turned away. The wide eyes of the children innocently wondered at the deformed, decaying bodies of lepers sitting along the way. Imagine the horror which must have arisen in the heart of the man when he awoke one morning to discover on his body a sign of the disease! Try to imagine the heartache of watching it grow to the point that it could no longer be hid, and of having to present yourself to the priest, who would command you to walk through the streets, crying aloud to all, “Unclean! Unclean!” And try to imagine the heart-breaking pain of having to separate yourself from your family to live among others of “your kind”.

Those ten lepers had heard of Jesus’ power to heal incurable diseases, had possibly even heard directly from some who had been cleansed of leprosy itself. Now, the chance of a lifetime was upon them, for Jesus was passing through their village. They stood apart from the multitude that seemed always to follow Jesus, they stood apart and cried, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” They didn't know what he would do. Would he ignore them, give them a deed to perform to prove their worthiness of a miracle, or maybe even charge them a fee for their healing? But they knew he could heal them, and they just had to try to touch him while they had the chance. They were willing to humble themselves to Jesus to be rid of this curse of leprosy. When Jesus stopped and looked their way, their hearts must have skipped a beat. And at his command, “Go show yourselves to the priest”, which the Law required all cleansed lepers to do, they obediently started on the journey to Jerusalem. If this was all he required of them, this was easy.

They began to walk, just as leprous as they had ever been, just as repulsive to the travelers whom they met on the way. But somewhere down the road, they began to feel a difference in their deformed arms, faces, feet, and legs. They looked, and they were well! They were clean! They were free to go home! They would walk among the living again! Oh, the joy! The thrill of health! They must have leaped for joy!

Now, suppose you were one of the ten. Would you follow through with Jesus' commandment to show yourself to the priest? After all, that one small deed was the only deed that he required of you. Would you not obey the commandment of the One who had delivered you from a living death? Would you dare go home, or into town, or anywhere else on earth, before giving God’s high priest the opportunity to declare you officially to be clean? Of course not. What kind of gratitude would that show to the one who had set you free? Would you take his gift of renewed life and render disrespect and disobedience in return? Not possibly. But one of the ten, a Samaritan, despised by the Jews whether or not he had leprosy, could not let Jesus depart from that territory without first paying to him his debt of worship and gratitude. Leaving the nine to continue on their journey south to Jerusalem, he made his way back to the little village where Jesus was, and coming to him, fell at his feet and worshipped him. And he found there that Jesus didn’t mind at all.

Now, many a soul in that time would have condemned this man for coming in among healthy Jews without the priest’s blessing. There is no doubt that he did not do what the Law said to do, in the order in which the Law said to do it. He actually failed to obey the Law of Moses for the only reason acceptable with God for not doing so: to honor the Lord Jesus Christ. What happened here, though absolutely no one except Jesus understood it at the time, was a prophetic event, an event with such incredible repercussions that, if Jesus had attempted to explain it, his own disciples would have forever forsaken him, and the others would have put him to death.

You will remember that on the evening preceding his crucifixion and death, Jesus told his twelve disciples, “I have many things yet to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” (Jn. 16:12). What we see in this story of the lone leper who returned to give thanks to Jesus is one of those things which, at the time, the disciples could not bear to be taught. That message, which neither the disciples nor anyone else at the time could bear, is that Jesus alone is sufficient for your every spiritual need. To worship him and to serve him satisfies God the Father, regardless of all standards by which men have lived and judged since the beginning of the world. Jesus Christ supersedes all that came before him, so that all is nothing compared to him.

We Gentiles who have been allowed into the kingdom of God are blessed beyond what we can easily take in. We all, spiritually speaking, were lepers in comparison to God’s relationship with the Jews. We were so filthy in the sight of Jews that the elders of that nation forbade any Jew to eat with a Gentile. We stood aside and watched as the children of God danced in the streets and celebrated the communion with God that was denied anyone outside the circumcised nation. Even Jesus called us “dogs” and commanded his disciples, when he gave them power to heal, not to heal any of us. “I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, he said. We were, as the Samaritan was, despised by the people whom God called out of all other peoples to be His. And, like the Samaritan leper, when we openly confessed our miserable state and cast our lives at his feet, Jesus, in his great mercy, heard our cry for help and took away our uncleanness, making us fit company for God’s children, even if we never have performed the ceremonies of the Law that God gave to Moses.

Though the Master of the universe had cleansed him, the cleansed Samaritan still wasn’t good enough for the Jews of his time, “for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans” (Jn. 4:9). And the Gentiles who later were washed from sin with the holy Ghost were not good enough for the believing Jews then, either. The Jews who believed on him insisted that what Jesus by the Spirit did for us Gentiles was not enough, that everyone who hoped to be saved in the end still had to go to Jerusalem to worship God, that everyone must still observe all the ordinances and rituals of the Law. They sent messengers from Jerusalem to the Gentile believers in Antioch and beyond, teaching that although the Gentiles had received the Spirit of God, they would not be saved in the end unless they submitted to the circumcision of the Jews (Acts 15:1).

Paul and Barnabas vigorously argued against those respected Jewish teachers and took the matter to the “supreme court”, the council of elders at Jerusalem. There, Paul and Barnabas declared openly one of those truths that Jesus could not reveal to his disciples before they received the holy Ghost because they were not “able to bear it”; to wit, that what Jesus does for a Gentile is all a Gentile needs in order to be right with God. James, Peter, and a few others at that time agreed with Paul that Jesus was good enough, and they withstood arguments from a large group of Jewish believers who felt otherwise.

It was acceptable with God for the humble and grateful Samaritan to bypass the laws of ritual cleansing to bow at Jesus’ feet. It was not acceptable with certain men, but God knew that humble man’s heart-and theirs. It was acceptable with God for Gentiles not to be circumcised as were the Jews, once Jesus circumcised their hearts from sin by his Spirit. This is the message Paul carried everywhere he went. It was not a message of ritual and ceremony; it was a message of spiritual cleansing and holiness of the heart, an acknowledgement of the glory and sufficiency of Jesus’ work in a human heart. Submission to Jesus is better than performing the ceremonies of the Law, so much better that it makes the keeping of the works of the Law irrelevant. Jesus could not have persuaded his disciples in his lifetime to believe that, much less the multitudes or the elders of Israel. He had to die first, so that the Spirit could be given by the Father to his followers. Then, with the Spirit of God on the inside of them, they could bear to hear that wonderful truth and understand it. As Jesus had told them on his last night with them, “When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth. . . . He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you.”

To this day, God's children as a whole have not received Paul’s gospel concerning the sufficiency of Christ. It is a tragedy that is so great that it must be revealed to a man in order for him to be able to believe that it has even happened. Millions, perhaps billions, of souls have missed the point of Jesus’ sacrificial life altogether because Paul’s gospel somehow was lost along the way from there to here. Even before his death, Paul mourned the great darkness that had fallen upon the brethren. How many assemblies had Paul established in Asia Minor alone, and yet in his old age he lamented to Timothy that they had ALL forsaken the truth (2Tim. 1:15). And the truth? JESUS, ALONE, IS SUFFICIENT FOR YOUR SALVATION.

Do you already believe that? Do you really? Do you really believe that the baptism which Jesus gives is all the baptism you need? If one believes that Jesus is sufficient for salvation, then one must believe that what Jesus does is sufficient, mustn’t he? May God open our eyes to see that to practice any other baptism than the one Jesus ministers to men from heaven is to suggest that Jesus’ baptism is insufficient! Are you truly a son of Abraham, who stood apart from all earthly confidences and laid his life on the line for Jesus? The whole issue of life is the sufficiency of Christ. Some trust him alone to save them, and some do not. Do you?

My friend, consider. Let me tell you this, with all the sincerity I can muster. The only ones who will walk the streets of God’s new Jerusalem in the world to come are those who forsake the vanities of man’s superstitions and cast all their hopes at the feet of Jesus Christ, the Lord of both heaven and earth, the Master of here and now, and of eternity. And may God give us all the grace to do that both quickly and unconditionally, as befits the majesty of the Lord.