The Divine Doctor

By Jeremy Walker

Three of the four Gospel writers tell the same incident of a man named Matthew, also named Levi, a tax collector. As a tax collector in that context, he was essentially a traitor and a thief. He was a traitor in the sense that, being a Jew, he was working for the occupying power, the Romans. He was a thief in that it was very typical of tax collectors to skim some of the money from the taxes they were to be collecting. They would put their own interest on top of things so they and anyone who worked for them would get a cut of whatever they took. So on both levels, Matthew would have been a despised man. 

But when the Lord Jesus saw this despised man, He called him and told him to follow Him. And Matthew stood up, turned his back on the life he had been living, and followed after the Lord Jesus.

Now one of the first things Matthew did, having come to Christ as a disciple, was to throw a great feast for the Lord in his home. And he invited all his friends whom the Bible describes as tax collectors and sinner. They were people the polite members of society, especially the outwardly religious members of the society called pharisees, wanted nothing to do with. These pharisees prided themselves on their own righteousness that, in their view, entitled them to God’s favor.

When they saw the Lord Jesus sitting among these sinners, they were offended and complained against Christ and His discipled. They asked why do He would be willing to eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners. They were mortified! They were horrified that Jesus, who claimed to be a religious teacher and a man from God, chose to associate with what they considered to be the scum of the earth. And the Lord Jesus responded by saying, “Those who are well have no need of a physician [a doctor] but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance” (Mark 2:17).

Now he is not saying the pharisees were actually well. But they certainly thought they were. They didn’t see themselves as having any need of a savior from their sins. They could see the sin in others, they had no sense of sin in themselves. So they didn’t go to a doctor. They didn’t go to anybody who they thought would help them because they didn’t think that they needed any help. But Matthew and his friends were there because they knew that they had the sickness of sin in their souls and Christ was there because he was the doctor who could do them good.

Now obviously we are in an environment where people are falling sick. They are crying out for medical assistance. But the point we need to take from this is that there is a sickness of our souls that is always with us. It may be that you’re in a situation at the moment where you’re feeling extra pressures, the things things you’re having to deal with are forcing sin out of your soul in ways you’ve never seen or needed to acknowledge before. And I want you to understand from God and from His Word that you need a doctor for your soul and you have a doctor for your soul. 

When sin bubbles up from your heart under circumstances such as these, it ought to remind you that you need a Savior. You need someone to make you clean. You need someone to make you well. You need somebody who is able to deliver you. 

But if you have acknowledged your sin and if you’ve come to Jesus Christ, you have a divine doctor. Christ didn’t come for the people who thought themselves good. Christ didn’t come to deal with the people who thought theHe came to call sinners to repentance. If you and I are in that situation, if we’re finding sin bubbling up out of our hearts, then it is to Christ that we must go hating our sin repenting of it and trusting in Him because He alone can make us well.

Watch this episode of A Word in Season here.

Jeremy Walker is the pastor of Maidenbower Baptist Church in Crawley, West Sussex, UK where he lives with his wife Alissa and his two sons, Caleb and William, and a daughter, Cerys. This article first appeared on his blog, The Wanderer.