Meditation for Monday
And it came to pass, when He was in a certain city, behold a man full of leprosy: who seeing Jesus fell on his face, and besought him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. Luke 5:12
In 1865, a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis died, after many years of being ridiculed by other doctors and health officials. At that time, one in every six women who gave birth in a hospital died from what was called ‘childbed fever’. Doctors in those days – less than 200 years ago – rarely washed their hands. They frequently went from case to case, and even from autopsies to live cases, with filthy hands. Dr. Semmelweis believed that lives could be saved if doctors washed their hands. He began washing his hands in a chlorine solution after seeing each patient. The death rate for new mothers whom he treated dropped from one in six to one in 50. Other doctors shrugged off his success, and laughed at his pleas for them to also wash their hands. Those doctors had no idea how filthy, how contaminating, how very dangerous they were. And so they had no idea how valuable it was to be clean. When it comes to sin, none of us have a full realization how awful it is!
The man in our text knew all about his leprosy, and how bad it was. Not only was he very sick and growing sicker, but he was a social outcast, deprived of everything that had been good in his life. He was shunned and rejected and reviled because of his disease, and he hated everything about it. Leprosy is not sin, but it is a very apt picture or illustration of sin. If you had told that leper that leprosy was in fact sin, he would have hated sin and understood how terrible it is. So if you or I could grasp how like leprosy sin is, we might begin to understand more of the nature of sin, and why God hates it so much. We can become accustomed to sin and at times never notice it. But not so God. Sin is always vile and offensive to Him, in the same way that leprosy is always vile and offensive to a leper. And yet, we fail to see that, like we should.
When we reach Heaven, we will be forever removed from the presence of sin. Nothing that offends God can ever enter there. Then we will understand what purity, holiness, and sinlessness are. With bodies, souls, and spirits untouchable by evil, we will be forever amazed that we could ever tolerate sin during our lifetimes on earth. But we are not there yet. Only by spending time in the presence of our God in meditation and prayer, only by feeding our souls on the holy Word of God, only by immersing ourselves in the company of the Lord’s people, can we know deliverance from the attacks of sin upon us.
The man in our text was full of leprosy, just as we are full of sin. The sin has been forgiven but it is still evil and disgusting, and we should never lose sight of that. – Jim MacIntosh