Some study questions for chapter 8.

There is a lot of action and danger in Mattthew's 8th chapter. Let's look into it by asking a few questions:

1. Why does Jesus instruct the leper to follow the commandment from Moses as to his healing but to refrain from telling anyone about himself, Jesus?
2. Leprosy is an illness, a difficult kind of bacterial infection, but it is also a figure for a specific spiritual state. What spiritual state is that?
3. What is the command structure in which the centurion lives and operates?
4. How does the centurion's experience of authority affect his ability to see Jesus accurately and his readiness to believe?
5. Where did Roman centurions come from? Were they Jewish or Gentile?
6. How does Matthew know that the centurion's servant was healed that very moment?
7. How do the people react to Jesus, those whom He healed: the leper, the centurion's servant, Peter's mother-in-law, the two demon possessed men in the tombs?
8. The scribe and the disciple in vv. 19 - 22 got different lessons from the Messiah -- different but similar, too. How were they similar? How was Jesus using his word like a scalpel to differentiate each individual from other things?
9. Is the Sea of Galilee dangerous? How does it figure into the story of the men crossing in the boat and into the story of the two demon possessed men?
10. How does this sea figure into Jesus' teaching? Does it relate to the previous stories of healing and freedom from possession?

We have a million more questions we could dive into, but let's start with these tomorrow morning at 7 AM.

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