Matthew 8:1 Commentary and Bible Study

What Matthew records next appears to follow immediately after the Sermon on the Mount, but we must make allowances for the approach of Matthew which is to gather together material from different occasions into common themes. This may mean that not all of these events took place at the same time (Hendriksen). Matthew has told us the elements of Christ’s Galilean ministry – ‘And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people’ (Matthew 4:23) – and he has given us this great sermon as an example of his preaching. Now he adds to this a number of wonderful healings which belong to this second element of his work. In some cases the sick came to him of their own accord; in other cases those with desperate and incurable conditions, which defied all human help, were brought to the Lord by deeply concerned relatives and friends, including cases of demon possession. The size of the crowds gathered to him continued to grow and grow (Matthew 4:24-25), and as Matthew has already reported they came from many different parts of Palestine.