Matthew 9:12 Commentary and Bible Study

That brought Christ’s tremendous reply. He had come as a physician. He had come not just to teach, but to cure, to bring people from a life of alienation from God into communion with God, to walk with him, to know him. He had come to suffer and die on Calvary, to purchase the right to forgive people and transform them, and this is how he puts it. He is a physician: he is qualified for two reasons. He is qualified because he is divine; He is God as well as man. He is God incarnate. Only he is qualified to make an atonement for the sins of lost men and women. Only he has lived a perfect, sinless, spotless life. Otherwise he would be condemned for his own sin, so he alone is qualified. That's why there is only one true faith, the Christian faith, because it alone has a Saviour who came from heaven, who is qualified to be a physician to our souls, and a mediator – the great physician.Christ, the great Physician of souls, has not come into this world without good reason. But ‘if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain’ (Galatians 2:21). If men and women are quite capable of earning their own righteousness and making themselves acceptable to God, then they do not need a Saviour. He did not come to do what they are perfectly able to do for themselves. His coming is the intervention of God when no other remedy will suffice. Therefore the Physician of souls brings healing of the soul which we can find nowhere else. Again, if only some need it, and others can manage without it, then as far as those ones are concerned, Christ has come for nothing. That too is impossible, for if some can obtain righteousness, then there is no reason why all cannot obtain it.Why then does Christ answer by speaking about the whole and the sick, the righteous and sinners? Is this an answer which hesitates to say how hopeless the situation is? Or does Christ make concession to the Pharisees’ claim to be righteous? The answer seems to suggest the possibility that there are some healthy souls who do not need the Great Physician. But no, it is a skilful answer; it is an answer that gives time for men to evaluate themselves. The Lord is not suggesting that some are righteous, or whole, but he is putting a hypothetical case. If there were any righteous among men, then the Physician of souls would not have come for them, but in truth there are none. There is indeed a very great difference between the Pharisees and the tax collectors, but both of them are sinners. The difference is that the tax collectors who came to Christ for forgiveness had seen this, and the Pharisees had not. If any are ever going to find Christ as their Saviour, this is the first step: to realise our personal sinfulness and accountability to God. The disease of sin is universal; none can say they have avoided its effects. There is not one who is whole; who is righteous. Christ was born to save even Pharisees, if any are going to be saved at all. The existence of the healthy, the righteous, apart from one – the Lord Jesus Christ alone – is a possibility that must be rejected. The righteous is a class which no one should put themselves in.