There is a lesson here for the seeking soul which teaches him to get close to Christ. Personal contact with Him is the necessity. It suffices not for the sick man to look at the healing medicine, he must take it if he would be helped thereby. You must come to Christ, not come just a little way towards Him, if you want to be healed. The sinner must needs meet the Savior, his soul must come into contact with Him; and when this is the case, lo, the sinner is "made whole.”
There was no virtue in the touch of these sick persons! Think we, that the finger of a paralyzed man had power in it? Or that in the hand of the leper there was cleansing? Nor is there in us any virtue, or any good thing: the virtue dwells in Jesus, and through the touch the blessing was received. The touch was the evidence of faith; faith led to the touch. It was also the sign that the sick needed the healing of the Great Physician. On the one hand, in Jesus there is stored the fullness of grace and pardon and cleansing; on the other, in us is the absolute need. Faith puts the empty sinner into communication with the aboundings that are in Christ.
Many a soul carries its burden to this hour because there has not been the coming close to Jesus in simple faith. Some are content to hear of His gracious works, others satisfy themselves by looking at Him from afar off; but the healed people—the saved people—have been content with nothing short of getting close to Christ, each one for himself and herself.
"As many as touched Him were made whole!" We do not wonder at this; there is no room for surprise, the only surprise is that so few go to Him. Does it astonish us that we read of a dying thief being saved, or of a blasphemous man, a persecutor and injurious, being made a follower of the meek and lowly Lord? Or that we hear in our own day of the vilest and worst being "made whole,” and living no more the life of sin but living instead the life of faith? Do we lift up our eyes with amazement and say, "How can these things be?" By no means, for Jesus is so wonderful, and His salvation is so complete, and the cleansing efficacy of His once-shed blood is so perfect, that we know He can and does heal as many as come to Him.
"Whithersoever He entered, into villages, or cities, or country, they laid the sick in the streets, and besought Him that they might touch if it were but the border of His garment." What a sight of power and of pity, of grace and misery! The Son of God, who had come from heaven, surrounded with every type of human woe! And as He walks on, His heart moved in tenderness toward all, hundreds of weak hands stretch out as it were to touch the very skirts of His garments. If our eyes could but see, we should behold in this our day the selfsame Jesus, the Son of God, moving amongst the longing and perishing children of men, and we should see weak and helpless hands outstretched to touch Him, and "as many as touched Him were made whole.”
Before the night closes in, and the Lord has passed by to return in mercy no more, oh! stretch out the hand of faith and touch Him!