Volume 6 Sermon 2 Luke 17:17
... it became an emblem of the moral defilement of our nature, which is total and universal. No representation can teach us more effectually the necessity, of casting ourselves at the Redeemer's feet, and crying, 'Lord if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.' Nothing short of a divine power could heal the leprosy, and nothing but this can heal the leprosy of sin. No medicine was available; the disease was hereditary and incurable. Hence when Benhadad sent his servant Naaman to the king of Israel to be healed, of his leprosy, the latter considered it as an intended insult, and indignantly replied, 'Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his leprosy?' So it belongs to God only to heal the malady of the soul, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
The leprosy being contagious as well as loathsome, it was necessary to exclude the infected party from all society. The lepers were accordingly shut out from the camp, from the city and temple of Jerusalem; they could neither taste the sweets of friendship, nor enjoy the privileges of public worship. They had to lament and say with David, 'My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore, and my kinsmen stand afar off.' The lepers which met Jesus as he passed through the midst of Samaria, not being suffered to approach, 'stood afar off,' and cried to him for mercy; and being withheld from general society, they herded together among themselves to the number of ten persons; and in this miserable and hopeless situation, Jesus found them. In like manner, being wholly defiled with a moral leprosy, are we as sinners shut out from the camp of God, ecluded from the society of holy and happy beings ...
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