John 9
35 Jesus heard that they had thrown the man out, and when he found him, he asked, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”, 36 “Who is he, Sir, that I may believe in him?” he asked. 37 Jesus answered, “You have seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” 38 “I believe, Lord!” he said, and he worshiped him. 39 Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, in order that those who do not see will see and those who do see will become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard these things and asked him, “We aren’t blind too, are we?” 41 “If you were blind,” Jesus told them, “you wouldn’t have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.
Here’s the back story.
In chapter 8, Jesus, who at the lighting of the temple with the giant flames illuminating the entire city of Jerusalem said, “I am the light of the world.”
Now in chapter 9 he walks by a man blind from birth.
His disciples ask him,
“Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus answered. “This came about so that God’s works might be displayed in him. 4 We must do the works of him who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
Their question represents the theological fallacy that each instance of an individuals suffering is caused by their own sin.
All suffering is tied, generally, to sin, via the fall…but you can’t draw a straight line from every instance of suffering to someone’s direct choice.
Jesus says, “Neither of their sinned caused this suffering…but God intends to get glory through his life.”
6 After he said these things he spit on the ground, made some mud from the saliva, and spread the mud on his eyes. 7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means “Sent”). So, he left, washed, and came back seeing. 8 His neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar said, “Isn’t this the one who used to sit begging?” 9 Some said, “He’s the one.” Others were saying, “No, but he looks like him.”
There are some potential cultural/symbolic reasons why Jesus did the whole spittle mud routine…but bottom line…the man didn’t try to figure out why Jesus asked him to do this…he just did what Jesus said and he received his sight.
He could see, because photons could now hit his retina, and his optical nerve transmitted signals to his brain that turned them into sight.
That’s what happened physically…Jesus fixed whatever was wrong in his anatomy so that he could see the world around him.
There was a bigger purpose for this sign…signs point to something greater than themselves.
Something bigger both for that man and for others who would read of his story…like us.
He was going to “see” spiritually…he was going to put his faith in Jesus, the light of the world.
This is the bigger story
Those who knew the formerly blind man were in disbelief that it was actually him.
He kept saying, “I’m the one.” 10 So they asked him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ So, when I went and washed I received my sight.” 12 “Where is he?” they asked. “I don’t know,” he said
At this point the man can see the world around him, but he doesn’t yet see who Jesus is.
13 They brought the man who used to be blind to the Pharisees.
There is no nefarious motive in them bringing him to the religious authority…this was the natural thing for Jewish people to do in this kind of circumstance.
They probably had no idea the controversy it would stir up.
14 The day that Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes was a Sabbath. 15 Then the Pharisees asked him again how he received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” he told them. “I washed and I can see.”
Again, the man tells all that he knows of the story.
He doesn’t make any implications…he just innocently tells the facts…but they show their hand by declaring Jesus is not from God
16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, because he doesn’t keep the Sabbath.” But others were saying, “How can a sinful man perform such signs?” And there was a division among them.
17 Again they asked the blind man, “What do you say about him, since he opened your eyes?”
“He’s a prophet,” he said.
A prophet: means he represents God… the man knows Jesus is special…he doesn’t yet understand just how special.
18 The Jews did not believe this about him—that he was blind and received sight—until they summoned the parents of the one who had received his sight. 19 They asked them, “Is this your son, the one you say was born blind? How then does he now see?”
20 “We know this is our son and that he was born blind,” his parents answered. 21 “But we don’t know how he now sees, and we don’t know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he’s of age. He will speak for himself.”
22 His parents said these things because they were afraid of the Jews, since the Jews had already agreed that if anyone confessed him as the Messiah, he would be banned from the synagogue.
Now they have a real dilemma…the parents have confirmed his blindness from birth…but they will say no more because they didn’t want to be kicked out of their faith community.
What are you going to do with a verifiable miracle of this nature and that by a guy they are trying to shut down?
24 So a second time they summoned the man who had been blind and told him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.
“Give glory to God” is a like, “Swear on the Bible”
Tell us the truth about this man, which we already know by the way…we already know the truth that he is sinner and not from God.
Now exasperated, the man responds:
He answered, “Whether or not he’s a sinner, I don’t know. One thing I do know: I was blind, and now I can see!” 26 Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”
27 “I already told you,” he said, “and you didn’t listen. Why do you want to hear it again? You don’t want to become his disciples too, do you?”
That last line was probably sarcasm…but maybe he honestly wondered what they were thinking…. he quickly found out.
28 They ridiculed him: “You’re that man’s disciple, but we’re Moses’s disciples. 29 We know that God has spoken to Moses. But this man—we don’t know where he’s from.”
Now, the formerly blind man is just done…I’m sure he would rather be celebrating with his family his new found sight and not playing games with these men who are busy protecting their turf.
It is mind boggling to him.
30 “This is an amazing thing!” the man told them. “You don’t know where he is from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners, but if anyone is God-fearing and does his will, he listens to him. (this is what this guy said, it doesn’t mean john is endorsing his theology…this describes not prescribes) 32 Throughout history no one has ever heard of someone opening the eyes of a person born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he wouldn’t be able to do anything.” (In the Exodus and Acts, there are some demonic miracles)
Once again, they attack him because they can’t defeat his logic.
34 “You were born entirely in sin,” they replied, “and are you trying to teach us?” Then they threw him out.
Now we are back to where we started.
Jesus heard what had happened to the man that he had healed and went to find him.
He asked him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” (Messiah) “Who is he, Sir, that I may believe in him?” he asked. 37 Jesus answered, “You have seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” 38 “I believe, Lord!” he said, and he worshiped him.
39 Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, in order that those who do not see will see and those who do see will become blind.”
John has written this gospel to present Jesus…what he did, who he is…so that people would believe and be saved.
Here he tells of a man who is physically and spiritually blind…who becomes physically and spiritually able to see.
He would someday lose his physical sight…his eyes long ago closed in death…but he remains spiritually alive.
Then there are those in the story who can see physically and claim spiritual sight…who are in fact blind because they refuse to believe in Jesus.
This is a historical event, but John includes it in his very select materials because of how powerfully it speaks to belief and unbelief. Spiritual blindness and spiritual sight
Jesus is the light of the world.
Without light (belief in him) there is no sight.
Now, let’s do a case study before we make personal application from God’s word.
The famous twentieth-century British philosopher and atheist Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say to explain his atheism if he were to confront God after his death. Russell’s reply was: “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence.”
However, Betrand, like the people rejecting Jesus and the man who received his sight…did not lack evidence.
He and they, simply refused to believe.
Unbelief is the root sin in John.
Not just unbelief as atheism, which is of course, a kind of unbelief.
It is unbelief in Jesus as being who he says he is…Russell, disbelieved both in God and in Jesus as the Messiah.
He gave a lecture in 1927, that was turned into a pamphlet entitled, “Why I am not a Christian.”
It has been widely read and distributed.
He first attacks some of the arguments for the existence of God like First Cause, Design, and the Moral argument.
If you read his response to those very solid arguments for God’s existence…his responses are merely shadows of the robust presentations that have been given by believers
They are straw man attacks.
His daughter, in her biography wrote this of her father (His daughter loved him, she was not bitter about him or her childhood that is important to know…so her response is honest and not tainted by anger)
In practice, at home, ‘making up our own minds’ usually meant agreeing with my father…There was never a cogent presentation of the Christian faith, for instance, from someone who really believed in it”
“When he wanted to attack religion, he sought out its most egregious (agree jus) errors and held them up to ridicule, while avoiding serious discussion of the basic message.”
This is what I thought when I read his lecture…she confirmed it.
Next, in his “Why I am not a Christian” lecture, he turns his sights on Christ.
-He misquotes Scripture, in ways that he would never want done to his own work
He hollows it out and makes it say what was not intended…he is either being dishonest, or lazy, or just arrogant.
Likely he is speaking for the knowing smiles and the applause from the listening crowd who already agrees with him…I don’t for sure, but this is a common temptation in those kinds of setting.
They aren’t looking for factual truth…they want to be told what they already believe.
Like those who questioned the man born blind.
“Don’t confuse us with facts, we know what we believe.”
-Religion is based on emotion Russell said, while he believes facts.
Then he goes on to talk about his “faith as rationalist” (those are his words) and he describes it as being based partly on what he called “kindly feeling.”
Sounds subjective and emotional…it is.
He said that it is important to show that no supernatural reasons are needed to make men kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness.
Again, listen to his daughter describe how this worked out in his life.
When he tried to teach her to be kind she replied with…
“I don’t want to! Why should I?” She noted that a conventional parent might reply: “Because I say so … God says so….” Russell, however, would say to his children: “Because more people will be happy if you do than if you don’t.”
“So what?”, she would respond, “I don’t care about other people.”
“But you should,” her father would retort.
In her innocence she would exclaim: “But why?”
To her question over and over he would say: “Because more people will be happy if you do than if you don’t.” (what is called the utilitarian argument…which by the way, doesn’t work in anyone’s life, especially not for a little kid)
His daughter wrote: “We felt the heavy pressure of his will and obeyed, but the reason was not convincing—neither to us nor to him.
He could not live consistently his own convictions…because this is not how the real world works.
She went on, remember, this is a loving not a bitter daughter.
“My father was a feminist too, of course. His parents had been feminists, his first wife a feminist, he had campaigned for women’s votes long before it was fashionable. But feminism did not mean the same to him as to my mother. He was willing to treat her with absolute respect grant her every possible privilege, but he wanted her to make being his wife her career, and it was not a career she would have chosen for herself”
He was ready to promote women’s rights…as long as it meant women put him first.
I’m not being hard on him, look at the facts and listen to his own words.
He was married four times, had many affairs, often simultaneously with a number of women.
When he was once asked, “If it wasn’t unkind of him to love and leave so many women,” he replied:
“Why? Surely they can find other men.”
When pressed he said this…and I want you to consider it for a moment.
“Outside human desire there is no moral standard”
He hated Hitler and what Hitler did…but what Hitler did was to live by his own desire…just like Russell.
Now let me read more of his own words…then look at what was actually going on inside of him.
Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. (religion to him is based on fear) Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look round for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the Churches in all these centuries have made it.
When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
What is his basis for this beautiful free world free?
“Outside human desire there is no moral standard”
How’s the world doing with that? How has it ever done with that.
He was once enamored with Stalin’s socialism/atheism until he traveled to the Soviet Union and saw it firsthand what official atheism looks like in practice…he heard the sounds of the executions at night.
I said that Russell is a case study…because his ideas have shaped the modern world.
They are lies…as Jesus said, Satan is the father of lies…it is his native language.
But these lies, and others like them have ruined lives.
Russell wrote a book on Marriage and Morality…that was widely celebrated (Nobel prize), widely read…and put to practice.
The result has been untold human devastation in lives and families…because ideas matter.
Wrong ideas (lies) can destroy.
Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life”…these things always go together.
Let’s look briefly at Russell beyond the public persona and see what was going on in his heart.
More words from his daughter.
Somewhere at the back of my father’s mind at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there’s an empty space that had once been filled by God (he had become an atheist at 18 after losing mom and dad and others), and he never found anything else to put in it. He wrote of it in letters during the First World War, and once he said that human affection was to him ‘at bottom at attempt to escape from the vain search for God.”
Sounds like the woman at the well doesn’t it…she was looking to relationships with men to quench her thirst for God.
She however believed in Jesus…while Russell rejected him.
This the brilliant Nobel Laurette, great man of the world laid bare and exposed.
Now listen again to his words.
Here is the man, just a man…made of dust…who would return to dust…from his own pen.
But I do know the despair in my soul. I know the great loneliness, as I wander through the world like a ghost, speaking in tones that are not heard, lost as if I had fallen from some other planet
Then, he mourns his lack of peace in poetry.
Through the long years
I have sought peace,
I found ecstasy, (ek stuh see)
I found anguish,
I found madness,
I found loneliness.
I found the solitary pain
that gnaws the heart,
But peace I did not find.
He claimed, if he were to confront God after his death he would say “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence.”
That didn’t happen…it went very differently than that when God confronted him after his death.
I don’t know where Russell was at death and after…but he did not say that to God.
In John’s gospel (an account of the historical Jesus, not merely a work of religious fiction).
He writes…
Jesus came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
Russell chafed at the idea of this choice…either believe in Jesus and live or perish in unbelief.
He wrote “There is one very serious defect . . . in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”
Do you see the irrationality of this statement that was presented to a group of self-proclaimed rationalists?
Substitute other words for everlasting punishment and you will see it.
“I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in cancer/suicide/the holocaust/car wrecks.”
If hell is real…no humane person could fail to warn of it…they would have to tell others how to avoid it.
It is not just that Jesus believed in hell as a factually existing place, Russell is also offended with Jesus’ tone, which he calls “vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching.”
Really…have you seen that in the gospel? I’ve read them dozens of times…I haven’t seen it.
Jesus doesn’t hesitate or equivocate…he talks like a person who is convinced of what he is saying…that’s not arrogant or vindictive, that is authority.
There was nothing vindictive in his words or his life…Jesus said he came to seek and save the lost…to give his life a ransom for many.
If he was just a man…his claims would be arrogant, offensive, ridiculous.
Since he was not just a man…his claims are entirely appropriate.
He is the creator of the cosmos…when he says, “Listen to me or perish”…this is simply a statement of fact…we ought to listen.
Russell makes that common mistake of first saying “Jesus was a good man”…then attempting to dismantle what Jesus taught as being foolish and wrong.
He is either God…and therefore ever word from him must be taken in deadly seriousness.
Or he is not God and therefore he is absolutely a bad man or a mad man and all that he said is to be dismissed.
Russell’s core problem was not unbelief but misguided belief.
He believed absolutely in himself…and this did not serve him well
He wrote a book in 1947, called “The Faith of a Rationalist.”
Faith is a strongly held belief system.
A Rationalist is one who trusts himself to understand all that is true and real in the world.
He believed…not just in facts…he was a man of faith not a man of mere reason…he had faith in himself.
Everyone lives and everyone dies by faith…everyone.
Look at this quote…No one can sit at the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God
I have…many have.
Harold and Deborah Bullock: (1984…Natalie died.) “We still trust you God.”
No Betrand…you have faith in yourself.
Harold and Deborah trusted God
Here’s a personal quote:
No one can sit at the bedside of a newborn child and still not believe in God.
What did Russell do with his unbelief…when his own children were born…he had to suppress it.
In both cases, as in John 9…two people seeing the same thing in very different ways.
The Bible says that God is sovereign in our salvation and that we are to choose to believe.
Jesus never says…”pray that God will choose you”…he always and only says…”Believe in me”
We can, if we will…choose to believe.
SIMPLE APPLICATION FOR TODAY
Continue in disbelief like those Jesus encountered and like Russell did.
Or respond in belief as the man born blind did.
Look at his response.
Who is the Messiah, Sir, that I may believe in him?” he asked. 37 Jesus answered, “You have seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” 38 “I believe, Lord!” he said, and he worshiped him
That is our application…worship him.
We will worship with songs now…but worship in Scripture is seen ultimately in obedient lives.
We sing songs in here partly to train our minds and hearts to worship with our lives out there.
Two days ago, five children age 7-17 sat in this front row looking at me as I offered words of gospel hope at their dad’s funeral…words of hope that I believe.
I believe…so I can worship.