The Man Born Blind

Where were you when the lights went out? Many of you have vivid memories of the great NY City blackout of 1965. You can recall the eerie sensation of seeing the City of Lights go dark. Some of you were trapped in the subway, and when the emergency lights finally gave out, you could cut the blackness with a knife.… no moon, no stars, not even the faintest glimmer. Imagine how that felt!

Perhaps you have had a problem with your eyes which has required surgery. As part of the healing process, you have had your eyes bandaged shut. Your eyesight was temporarily taken away from you. How did you feel?

Today, we are going to consider a man for whom this experience of darkness had been the only life he’d ever known. He had been born blind. His story is in John 9.

In an age of affirmative action, of hire the handicapped programs, we have little understanding of what life must have been like in ancient times for people who had disabilities. There was no system of Braille for the blind, no hearing aids for the deaf, no wheelchairs for the lame. There was no place for them in society. They were not given the chance to earn their keep, so they had to resort to the only occupation open to them - begging. In Jerusalem, the beggars would gather pitifully around the gates of the Temple, hoping against hope that the act of worshiping God would make the people a little more generous. And this is where Jesus found this man and changed his life.

What do you think of the miracle accounts of the Bible? There are three possible viewpoints on the miracles in Scripture:

1. To deny that they really happened. To take the stand that a miracle is an impossibility. The miracle accounts in the Bible are just the feebls attempt of a simpler generation to explain something they didn’t understand.

2. To admit the reality of miracles, but to regard the miracle stories as just that - stories. Stories for children. Stories to be told in Sunday School. Stories which are a kind of “window dressing” for the real meat of Scripture which is found in the doctrinal passages.

3. To believe 2 Tim.3:16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

On this view, we should say that there is something that God wants me to learn from each miracle that He did. So when we read about a miracle, we should expect to learn something about God himself and his purposes for us. And that’s as significant as anything we’ll ever learn about in the doctrinal passages of the Bible.

So let’s look at this miracle in Jn.9 with that in mind…

In John 8, John has been showing us that Jesus is the Light of the World.

John 8:12 When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

But we read in ch.8 that the people didn’t want this light. They were satisfied to follow their own flickering candle, and they hated the light of God because it shone right through them and exposed them as the sinners they were. So they rejected the light, they opposed the light, and they tried to extinguish the light. And that makes ch.8 a pretty grim chapter. But there are some wonderful contrasts between ch.8 and ch.9…

8 - Light of the World exposes the darkness of men’s hearts

9 - Light of the World gives sight to a blind man

8 - Jesus Christ is despised and rejected by the bigshots

9 - Jesus Christ is received and worshiped by a beggar

8 - the Jews stoop down to pick up stones to hurl at Jesus

9 - the Lord stoops down to make clay to anoint the blind man’s eyes

8 - Christ hides himself from the Jews

9 - Christ reveals himself to a beggar

8 - Inside the Temple, Jesus is accused of being demon-possessed

9 - Outside the Temple, Jesus is accepted as Lord and Saviour

Did you know that nowhere else in Scripture do we read of the healing of the blind but through the ministry of Jesus? Moses didn’t do it. Joshua didn’t do it. Elijah didn’t do it. Peter didn’t do it. Paul didn’t do it. Only Jesus did it. Why?

Because the Bible tells us that the healing of the blind was a special sign that the one who did it was the Messiah…

Isaiah 35:3-5 Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

In fact, the Bible says that the healing of the blind is a special work of God Himself…

Psalm 146:5-8 Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them—the Lord, who remains faithful forever. He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind…

Jesus did a lot of healing during His earthly ministry. He healed sick people, lame people, deaf people, people who were possessed by demons. He even raised dead people back to life. But did you know that He healed more blind people than He did any other kind of healing? That’s because He wanted to show that He was the Messiah. But it is also because He wanted to show that what He could do physically, He could also do spiritually. Not only could he restore a person’s physical sight, He could bring light into a person’s dark life.

So Jesus was walking near the entrance to the Temple when He saw this poor man. The man didn’t see Jesus; Jesus saw the man. The man didn’t seek Jesus out in the crowd; Jesus found him. And that is the way Jesus finds us. He takes the initiative, he seeks us out, he sees us and he heals us. And when it is done, there is not one iota of credit that we can take because the work of salvation is his from beginning to end.

Notice that the disciples immediately look for some cause for this man’s blindness. To be specific, they look for some spiritual reason why this man was blind. They were just parroting a doctrine of the teachers of the Law that all sickness was caused by some personal sin, either of the victim himself, or his parents. The Jews even taught that it was possible for a baby to sin while in the womb and hence to be born with some deformity.

Does this sound familiar? Some Christians today would have us believe that if you are sick, it is because you have sinned, or you are not spiritual, or you do not have enough faith.

But look at what Jesus said in v.3

John 9:3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned…but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.

Certainly we believe as Christians that sickness and pain and suffering is ultimately due to the presence of evil in the world, but we must hear Jesus when he says that you cannot automatically say that some personal sin is the cause of your specific suffering. It may well be that God has allowed it to happen so that His power, his grace, and his sufficiency may be shown through your life. Does that make God cruel and capricious and unfair?

Consider this story that C.H. Spurgeon once told…

An old Christian man, who had been blind all his life, was talking with a friend one day and he said “I have so much more to be thankful for than you do.” “What?” the friend replied in astonishment, “I have had my eyesight for all these years while you have been blind.” “True enough” said the old believer, “but you have had to look at so many sad and distressing things - faces that were unkind and angry. The very first face that I will ever see is the face of my Saviour who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Now that is the kind of grace that God has for His children who suffer. And I am impressed at how many of them are not angry or bitter or resentful. They are thankful, and gracious, and strong in their suffering.

Now Jesus showed his credentials as Messiah by healing this man. Look at how he does this in v 6

John 9:6 Having said this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes.

Why did he do this? In some ways, we could say that this would make the man’s condition of blindness worse, not better! If there was any faint glimmer of light before, there would be none now.

The Lord often has to bring us to a place of complete helplessness before he can help us. So often we are prone to cling to that one glimmer of light that we have, that one shred of our own self-sufficiency and strength. And we fail to trust him until that last ounce of independence is gone. So sometimes He just takes it away from us. There are times when it gets pretty dark in our lives. But don’t be afraid of the dark when Jesus is with you. He’s preparing to turn the lights on.

The next thing that happened was that Jesus sent this man to wash in the pool of Siloam. Often in Jesus miracles, He asks the person to exercise faith by doing something quite difficult in obedience to His instructions. For example, in Mark 3, a man came to Jesus with a withered hand. Jesus said “stretch forth your hand”. That must have been a terribly hard thing for that man to do. He had gone through life hiding that hand, concealing that hand, and now Jesus said to stretch it out in front of everyone.

The Pool of Siloam was about 3/4 mile away from the Temple, through narrow winding streets. It must have been very difficult for this blind man with mud on his eyes to negotiate his way through the jostling crowds and the clamorous marketplace, asking directions along the way to the Pool of Siloam. But he did it. He did it because he trusted Jesus. Notice that Jesus had simply said “Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam” He hadn’t made any promises to the man. He hadn’t said “Go and wash and you’ll be able to see.” So the man was going strictly by faith.

So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

What an experience for a man born blind! Notice that he went home. Sometimes it is hardest for a person who has met Jesus and had his life changed to go home. This man got a mixed reception from his friends and his neighbors and his family. It is hard to tell those who have known us best and longest that the Lord has changed our life, that we’re not the same anymore.

But tell them he did. And in the simplest terms, too. He said “It’s me. I have had my life changed by Jesus. This is how it happened…” That is the essence of a personal testimony. Every Christian has one. If you have met Jesus, then you have a personal testimony. And it is your best tool in telling others about Christ.

Most Christians get really intimidated about the whole idea of witnessing. They figure that you have to be a brilliant speaker, or know the Bible from cover to cover, or have memorized some elaborate method of sharing your faith, or have to be ready to answer any question under the sun about religion, or you have to be willing to do some really kooky things like stand on street corners handing out tracts, in order to witness. That is nonsense. All you need is your personal testimony. You just have to tell people that you have met Jesus and that he has made a difference in your life. You don’t have to have a PhD in theology to do that! Look at what this blind man did…

He simply related the facts of what happened to him. He didn’t have all the answers. When they asked him where Jesus was now, he didn’t have the foggiest idea! Later on, they bring him before the Pharisees - the religious bigwigs. The best theological brains in the country. Pretty scary, right? This man’s parents wanted to crawl in a hole and pull it in after them when the Pharisees started cross-examining them! They were so scared that they practically disowned their son! So the Pharisees start boring in on this poor beggar, asking him all kinds of involved theological questions. And he doesn’t know the answers. All he can do is to repeat the facts of what had happened to him in his encounter with Jesus. He stuck to his guns. He knew what had happened was real.

One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!

And the Pharisees, for all their theological expertise could not refute what had happened. How do you explain away a miracle?

But their unbelief was so hard and their hatred of Jesus was so strong that they wouldn’t abandon their prejudice against him in the face of hard evidence to the contrary. So they got rid of the evidence by throwing this poor man out. They excommunicated him. That meant being totally cut off from the community.

But what an honor to be excommunicated for Jesus sake. Because when they threw this man out, they threw him right into the arms of Jesus. You see Jesus wasn’t finished with him. Here was this man. He had received his sight, but he’d lost just about everything else he’d ever had. He didn’t even fully understand who Jesus was. And so the Lord finds him again and ministers to him. The Lord never leaves us to go through these things alone.

John 9:35ff Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” Then the man said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.

When you meet Jesus, you meet God. That’s an encounter that will make an indelible impression on your life. It will make you a different person. It will be like the lights just went on in your life. It will be like your blind eyes are opened for the first time. When you tell others about it, they may not understand, but they cannot refute its reality. And as you continue to be faithful to Jesus, He will reveal more of himself to you, just as he did for this man.