Healing the Blind

When Jesus sees a man, in John 9:1-5, who has been blind from birth His disciples immediately ask Him, “who sinned, this man or his parents?” Jesus’ answer surely had to startle them. “Neither one . . . but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” What? Does that mean this man was deliberately made blind by God to make a point? Hardly.

Jesus was actually refuting a strongly held belief by many rabbis and apparently by His own disciples, that claimed terrible sicknesses came upon those whose parents had sinned or on infants who had somehow sinned in the womb. The reality is that we live in a fallen world. A world in which God’s perfection has been marred by Satan, and as a result sickness, disease, natural disasters, etc. occur all too frequently. Now here was a blind man, the very product of this fallen world, and the one Jesus chose to use in order to fulfill one of the signs revealing Him to be the Messiah. And when Jesus says “that the works of God should be made manifest in him (the blind man)” Jesus was employing a play on words. “Manifest” means to render, to make apparent. But it also means to lighten, to shine. Just two verses down Jesus declares He is the light of the world. He has come into the world to shine, to disrupt the works of the devil, to show God’s marvelous power and to fulfill prophesy.   

The rabbis knew that the Messiah would be revealed by three miracles: healing a leper, healing the deaf, healing the blind, and they had seen Jesus do all three. Even so, they chose not to believe or acknowledge Him. These three signs had great spiritual significance. Leprosy represented the gross stain of sin on our lives that only God could cleanse, while the deaf and blind revealed our sad inability, without God’s intervention, to hear or understand His word, and to see Jesus for who He really is.

Jesus is still healing the blind today. Every time someone comes into the saving knowledge of Christ, that person’s spiritual eyes first had to be opened, made able to see and understand spiritual things. Unfortunately, there are many like the rabbis in the above passages who, no matter what they see, no matter how convincing the evidence, refuse to believe.

For those we need to pray that their hearts be softened so that the Light of the World may shine in them.

Until next time,

Sylvia