Yeshua had authority to heal paralytics, forgive sins and call tax collectors to His select 12 disciples. The punchline and the context of these stories and the parables Yeshua told are crucial clues to the meaning of Yeshua’s parables and miracles. A common interpretation of the parables of the cloths and wineskins is that Yeshua is teaching that one needs to unlearn the Torah to learn the gospel, but parables of the same time period employing the same symbols have a different point.
Tag: healing
Part of Yeshua’s calling was to heal the sick and there was no disease that caused more Jews to tremble than the prospect of leprosy. Once a priest diagnosed a person with leprosy, that person was an outcast, shunned in the community and compelled to live a life of loneliness. Healthy people who came into contact with a leper were considered unclean, too. Yeshua’s healing of these lepers is very significant because he not only healed them with his words but with his touch. Some claim that Yeshua’s cleansing of lepers in this fashion was a rebuke and a refutation of the Levitical system but Yeshua’s healings actually uphold the Levitical system because he commands the lepers to go back to the priests to have their healing confirmed so they can rejoin the community of believers.
On the day after Shavuot (Pentecost), the priesthood in God’s temple are on trial, even as they put Peter and John on trial, as to whether they will cling to their presuppositions about God — that He created then vacated — or submit to the massive displays of God’s power in His house of prayer testifying to the reality that Yeshua is God’s Messiah.
There are language cues in Acts 3 that strongly suggest that it is a description of an event on the afternoon of Pentecost. Thus this is a continuation of the events of Acts 2. The Spirit of God is on display in the temple with power, a display meant to prompt Israel to “turn back” from their rejection God’s Messiah and be restored by God’s Spirit.