After calling some of his disciples Jesus Christ healed a leper near Gennesaret. Here are a few observations from Luke’s account of that healing.

The leper openly acknowledged that his healing was dependent on the will of Christ:

“Lord, If you are willing, you can make me clean” (Luke 5:12).

The leper wasn’t scalded or corrected for recognizing that it had to be the will of Jesus to heal him. Today’s insistence in charismatic circles that you have to build up enough faith to be healed, and if you aren’t its your fault, is a wicked, arrogant and faulty imposition. There was no arrogance in the leper. He “fell with his face to the ground” when he saw Jesus. This is total humility and reverent submission to Christ’s will and mercy.

Today we have self-serving preachers trying to tell Jesus Christ what he must do, and teaching their followers to do the same. No, Jesus does not have to do anything at all-he is the Son of the Almighty God, and we are the dust of his creation. If we are healed when we pray for it in humility, it’s because God choses to heal us. He chose not to heal Paul (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). Healing is not…repeat not, the norm for today. Instead we are all under the Curse-instituted not by the devil, but God (Genesis 3:17-19).

Jesus healed the leper with just a few words, and perhaps even the words were not necessary. We humans, and particularly those of the unbelieving kind, think that the Bible is teaching some sort of metaphysical magic spell in a healing, totally divorced from the physical. They think that since all they see is the physical there is no such thing as magic, and that therefore Christ didn’t really heal at all. What they are missing (willingly) is that Christ has complete mastery of all things, including the physical:

“For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16 and 17).

There was no “magic” when Christ healed the leper. His power over every particle of the universe allowed him, in a thought, to fill the nets of the disciples with fish. And it allowed him to maneuver and re-form the atoms of the leper’s body, and all their constituent particles and forces, so that the man had new flesh.

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