Luke 22:51

Luke 22:51

I. By one act, in a moment, Christ made Himself the repairer of the breach. The evil which His follower had done was cancelled; and through the kind interposition of a special act, the injured man was none the worse, but rather the better; and the harm, of which a Christian had been the occasion, was neutralised by his Master. Ill would it be for any of us, if there were not that refuge of thought to fall back upon, from all the foolish things and all the wrong things said and done, which we have afterwards so much regretted. It would be tremendous to think of all the trail of harm which we were dragging after us, if there were not a Christ a Canceller and a Rectifier.

II. There is a great difference between those troubles which come straight from God, and those which pass to us from the hand of man. There are a dignity and sacredness about the one and an almost defilement about the other. But it would, be a mistake to infer that any one kind of trial comes more under the remedial power of the Lord Jesus Christ than another. It does not matter where the root and spring of the trouble lie, as soon as they are brought to Him they are all alike. Take it, in all its breadth, whatever the wound be, and whoever was the wounder equally Christ is the Healer.

III. Malchus, as we have seen, had been one of the foremost against Christ. In his opposition to Christ he got his hurt. Christ cures the hurt which was the consequence of opposition to Himself. The worst hurts we get in life are those which we incur by taking the side against light, against conviction, against truth, i.e.against God. We all of us have borne, and perhaps some of us are bearing now, some of those hurts. Our only remedy lies with Him, whom we were, at that moment, in the act of making our enemy, when we got that hurt. And the marvel is, how He heals us; not a word of reproach, not a shadow of retaliation; it is enough we are wounded, and we cannot do without Him therefore He does it. There is no healer of wounds but the Lord Jesus Christ.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,4th series, p. 239.

References: Luke 22:51. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 143; T. Birkett Dover, The Ministry of Mercy,p. 209. Luke 22:54. A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve,p. 469.