Friday, March 11, 2011
Luke 4:38-39 Jesus left the synagogue and went to the home of Simon. Now Simon's mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked Jesus to help her. So he bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. She got up at once and began to wait on them.
VICTOR OVER SIN'S EFFECTS
When sin entered the world in Eden, everything changed. God said to Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you ... By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food ... for dust you are and to dust you will return" (Gen 3:17, 19). In Paul's letter to the Romans he writes of the way in which all creation feels the effects of the fall: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time" (Rom 8:22).
Illness and disease is commonplace in our lives today, but it is not natural. Sickness and death are not part of a normal "life cycle," but they are the evidence that something has gone disastrously wrong.
Even as mankind's sin has stained and ruined the world in which we live, so also there is one Man who brings restoration and life, our Lord Jesus Christ. By His suffering and death He paid the price to God for man's evil, taking care of the root cause of our problems. By His resurrection from the dead He proclaims His victory even over sin's effects (such as death itself), and promises that victory to His children.
In several brief sentences, Luke's gospel tells of the way in which Christ "rebuked the fever" which was afflicting Peter's mother-in-law and it immediately left her. So it reminds us that our great Victor has rebuked sin and all it's effects, giving us life in Him. May we, like the woman who was ill, rise up to serve Him faithfully!
