John 9:39-41 (The Curse and Cure For Blindness)

Psalm 1 and the Downward Path Into Blindness

In Psalm 1, you see this downgrade that happens. Blessed is the one who does not walk in the wicked way, nor stand, he's no longer walking, he stopped moving, he's standing, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit, now he's no longer standing, he's sitting.

The path of wickedness will take us down and down and down until we end up totally blind. That's what we're going to be talking about today, is how does the judgment of God come to bear on the blindness of man.

The Three Kinds of Blindness in the Bible

Now when we talk about blindness, there's essentially three categories in the Bible that describe what blindness is, three kinds of blindness that the Bible is going to attempt to show us. And the first is probably the most obvious, it barely needs explanation, it's the physical blindness that happens when our human eyes don't work.

Whether you're born blind with a congenital birth defect like the man in John chapter 9, whether you're injured or attacked like Samson after he's arrested by the Philistines and they literally put out his eyes, whether you're blind based off old age like Isaac the patriarch who at the end of his life could barely see and he became blind over the course of his life, or whether it's a divine punishment like when the angels of the Lord struck the men of Sodom with blindness so that they groped about in the darkness and they could not enter in.

There's a physical blindness that the Bible describes. And the entire Bible actually, it's funny, most issues that you look at in the Bible can be traced from the beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible, most of them.

That's called biblical theology. Systematic theology is when you look at one topic and you read all the verses about it and you kind of come to one idea about what it is. Biblical theology starts with Genesis and it traces an idea through the books of the Bible and it shows how it develops and it shows how it becomes grander and it shows how it anticipates Jesus.

Well, if we look at blindness in the Bible, we can see how it begins, we can see how it anticipates Christ, and we can see how it is eradicated in eternity. So for instance, the Bible did not begin with human physical blindness.

People were created good, they were created with perfect eyes so that they could see. And the indication from Genesis is that if Adam and Eve had not sinned, then their children would have never been born blind.

Generations and generations of descendants would have come and would have gone and they would have had perfect eyes. Which is an amazing thing because as I am now 38, I realize that my eyes are not perfect.

Staring at a screen for probably the last 15 or 20 years has not been well for me. And maybe you feel the same way. Blindness enters into the human condition because of the fall, just like every other malady of the human condition.

Blindness enters because Adam and Eve decided to rebel against the holy God and not just spiritual consequences, which was death, which was separation from God, physical consequences entered in like cancers, diseases, and blindness.

Like the man born blind in John chapter 9. They're wrestling with the question, did he sin or was it his family who sinned because he was born blind? Now blindness also in the Bible offers us this sort of rumbling of redemption.

We get to see how blindness anticipates Christ and how he's going to heal blindness. It's interesting and fascinating. For instance, God did not leave humanity in their broken state. He comes to them and he covers their sins in the garden of Eden with the skins of an animal.

He pursues them in relationship with Abraham. He saves them out of the judgment through the ark. He draws them out of Egypt and brings them to a land that is not their own at that point. He gives them a law and in that law, it's going to teach them how to live with a holy God.

So there's a certain level of redemption that's happened from Eden to this law. This law is going to help them overcome the curse and yet the law is powerless to heal the blind man. So we see that some progress has been made in the story of God, but yet blindness cannot be healed by the law of God.

There's actually conditions in the law that if you were born blind, you could never enter the temple. If you were born with broken body parts, you could not enter the temple. And there's reasons for that.

Reasons that we don't have time to get into this morning, but they are fascinating. But the law anticipates that a certain level of redemption has come to the people of God, but not enough. We need someone who is greater than the law.

Someone who's more powerful than the law. Someone who can turn the eyes of the blind into sight so that they can now enter into the presence of God forever. This man in John 9 grew up living in the Old Testament period, even though the book is in the New Testament.

He grew up blind, incapable of going into the temple because that's what the law of Moses said, but yet the greater Moses had come. And he healed the eyes of this man who was born blind so that now there was no separation between him and God forevermore.

And that's just physical blindness that Jesus healed. The law anticipated a healer, and Jesus was the long-awaited hope. Jesus claims this fulfillment in Matthew 11, verses 2 -5. He says, I am the one you've been looking for.

This is what he says. Now when John, while imprisoned, heard of the works of Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, are you the expected one or shall we look for someone else? Jesus answered and said to him, go and report to John what you hear and see.

The blind receive sight and the lame walk. The leopards are cleansed and the deaf hear. The dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. John in his weakness, in a moment of weakness, he says, are you the one we're supposed to be looking for?

And Jesus points to the miracle of eyes being opened because he came to do what the law of Moses could not do. Jesus ushered in a period, and there's only three periods in the Bible of miraculous activity.

We can sometimes read the Bible as if there's miracles happening all over the place. There's actually only three periods of miraculous activity in the Bible. Moses and Joshua, which all kinds of miraculous things happens in Egypt and also happens in the promised land.

It's about 70 years of miracles and then it ceases. Then you get to Elijah and Elisha and there's another period of miracles that happen for about 70 years. And we know that what God is doing is he's, he's ushering in new periods of redemptive history through miracles.

The law of Moses is ushered in through miracles because God wants us to look to that. So he's establishing the veracity of it through signs and wonders and miracles. God wants us to look to the prophets, the next period of redemption so that we will see and so that we will look for the signs and the wonders and miracles.

The third period of miracles is with Christ when he comes and with the apostles, roughly 70 years period. And then the history of the church records that miracles began to wane. Miracles were not commonplace anymore.

There's still missionaries all over the world who are preaching the gospel in places that have never heard the gospel, who will report that miraculous activity is happening. But what I find so fascinating is once the gospel had been established as God's means of saving the world, once it had been established with miracles to validate the power of the message, then the miracles began to cease.

Jesus opens up a period of new redemption history by doing miracles, by healing the eyes of the blind, showing that he was here to bring about what the law could never bring. And he's showcasing to us what heaven is actually going to look like because Jesus healed the eyes of the blind because we know in history that when Jesus returns and when he calls us home to be with him forever in heaven, there will be no more blindness.

There will be no more backaches. There will be no more knee pains. There will be no more injuries or death or cancers or diseases. In that moment, we will be given brand new bodies, brand new eyes to see and behold the face of Christ.

You see how all redemption can sort of pick up the theme of blindness? From the beginning where there was none until the end where there will be none forevermore, Christ is at the center of that story, eradicating blindness.

Spiritual Blindness and the Light of Christ

Now, that's a short biblical theology of a nutshell of physical blindness, but that's not the only kind of blindness that the Bible talks about. There's another category of blindness and actually physical blindness is not the primary category if you think about it.

The amount of verses are actually, the majority are talking about the last two categories of blindness. That's spiritual blindness and that's divine initiated covenantal curse of blindness. I'll wait for you to write that down.

I couldn't decide on a pithy title for that, so I might change the words a couple times in this, but God essentially goes above and beyond the spiritual curse that is inherent in all of us and he further, deeper, more intensely blinds the eyes of some who are his enemies.

We'll look at that in just a moment. Let's look at spiritual blindness, the second category. In the Bible we see that spiritual blindness is the inability of human beings to see, perceive, and understand the things of God because of sin.

Spiritual blindness is example for us in Romans 3 verse 18 in a section where Paul is talking about the entire human race and he says, there is no fear of God before their eyes, meaning that all of their eyes are dead and blind, that all have been born blind, all have been born without seeing, all have been born not being able to comprehend the light of the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ because it strikes the deadness of their eyes and they cannot comprehend it.

They can't see it. They don't rightly fear God because they cannot understand God and they cannot understand the things of God because of sin. So what this means is, biblically speaking, blindness affects both the body and the soul.

Some people are born blind physically, all people are born blind spiritually. I think that's why John 1 begins the way that it does. There was the true light which coming into the world enlightens every man.

He was in the world and the world was made through him and the world did not know him. And the reason that it didn't know him is not because Jesus wasn't the true light. He was the true light and he came into the world to shine the glory of the gospel.

The reason that the world could not know who Jesus was is because sin had so permanently disfigured their eyes that they could not see the light when he came to his own people. And this is incredibly important for us to understand.

All people are born spiritually blind. All of us. Every one of us. But yet, this condition is curable. Spiritual blindness is curable and it's curable by Christ and Christ alone. For those who have been chosen by God, spiritual blindness, incapable of seeing, all of those things can be cured by the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, where he will awaken us to the power of the gospel, where the Holy Spirit will come into us and awaken us and enlighten our eyes and give us desires that are brand new for who Christ is.

Before Jesus, we were bumbling around in the darkness, but yet because of Jesus, our eyes are open. In that moment where you look and you say, God, save me. I want to know you. I want to love you. That's because your eyes are now open.

What we often think about is we think that the moment we call out to God, God is responding to us. You don't call out to God until God has first opened your eyes. You don't see how desperately wicked your sin is until God opens your eyes.

You can't see that if your eyes are broken. But yet when he gives light to your eyes, when he does like he did to the man in John 9, where he smears the mud on that man's eyes and he creates brand new eyes for us, when he creates brand new spiritual eyes for us, and we see for the first time, there's many who will weep because their sin is so ugly.

There's many who will cry out in brokenness and say, dear God, save me. How could you save me? Look at who I am. That's a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing to see how desperately wicked we are, because if you see that, then you will see how Christ is the only hope.

You can't save yourself. You can try for a million billion years, and you will just be a million billion years further away from being able to save yourself. His gospel opens our eyes, but not for the damned, for those who are condemned.

I said this condition is curable, but for those who are not of Christ, the same gospel that awakened us and opened our eyes can be preached all throughout the world, and they will not be saved. They will continue to reject it.

They will argue that God's word cannot be trusted. They will try to invalidate the veracity of his word. They will say, well, that was then. This is now. Times have changed, which means that they are now the standard of truth instead of God.

No matter what the excuse is, no matter what the reason is, you can preach the gospel to those who are not God's people over and over and over and over again, and they will not see. And there's a variety of ways that this happens.

They'll do it in angry rejection. It's our brother Cheekay witnesses on college campuses all the time. There's a great quote from a man named George Whitfield who said, I was privileged by God today to have pieces of cat thrown at me.

That's weird. Like what kind of evil do you have to have to first of all make pieces of cat and then throw it at a preacher? This world hates the gospel, but there's also different ways. There's men and women who come every single week to churches all across this country who are there for something other than Christ.

They're there because they grew up in the church. They're there because they want their children to have traditions. They're there because they like feeling the community. They like the friends that they have there, but they're not there for Jesus.

That's a way to be spiritually blind while smiling in church services, while walking confidently and ignorantly towards hell. The gospel will divide. Some will hear it and some will respond to it in ways that are biblically authenticating, where it has fruit, where it produces hatred of sin and love for the Savior.

And then some will hear it and be hardened. Some will hear it and recoil. Some will have their eyes opened and some will have their eyes slammed shut by the gospel. The gospel does both. It does both.

It's dividing. It's a dividing gospel. I think this is why Paul describes this reality for us in 2 Corinthians 4, 3 -6 this way. He says, even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.

In whose case the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they may not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus is Lord and ourselves as bondservants.

That word is slaves for Jesus' sake. For God who said, light shall shine out of the darkness. It is the one who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

You see the two categories there. You see the two groups. Some are veiled because the God of this world has shrouded them in lies and in darkness because the God of heaven has given them over to the God of this world.

And yet some, not by their own power, not by their own strength, not by their own wit, and not by their own ingenuity have seen the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ because he shined it in our hearts.

Because he pointed it and healed us. Instead of hearts of stone, he gave us hearts of flesh and he converted us because his light was shown in us. His light was shown and his light is the glory of the face of Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament benediction says that we are blessed to be in the presence of God in his face. Look at this. The face of Jesus Christ is the light and the knowledge of the glory of God. And God had to shine it in us before we would see.

Again, some will have their eyes open and some will have their eyes slammed shut. Now, we see both of these first examples in John chapter nine. We see the man who was born physically blind whose eyes were healed in John chapter nine.

And it's that same man we talked about last week who had his spiritual eyes opened by Jesus as well. And we know that he had his spiritual eyes open because at the end of the passage he believes and he worships.

Jesus receives it. You don't believe Christ rightly and you don't worship Christ rightly if you're not truly saved. But there's a final category of blindness. Remember, all people are born spiritually blind.

But there's a further category that the scripture talks about. A category that goes beyond the spiritual blindness. A category that is a divinely initiated woe of particular and peculiar madness that God sometimes evokes upon his covenantal enemies.

Sometimes God curses his enemies with a deep and abiding blindness which renders them outside of grace, outside of mercy, and outside of forgiveness. Remember we just said that you can be healed of spiritual blindness if Christ is the one who saves you.

When God evokes this kind of blindness, it's incurable. It grips them and it will never let them go. And we first learn about this in Deuteronomy chapter 28. Now, Deuteronomy 28 is an interesting chapter.

It's near the end of the law. The new generation of people are getting ready to enter into the promised land. You remember their mothers and fathers actually died in the wilderness because of disobeying God.

So this is the final charge. This is letting them know what is your life gonna look like if you follow the law of God and what is your life gonna look like if you do not follow the law of God? These are people who had a unique relationship with God.

They had a unique law that was given to them so that they would know and so that they would love God. They had a unique blessing that they would be the people who were considered special of all the nations on earth.

Not because they were greater, not because they were mightier, not because they had better swords. They didn't have swords in the wilderness yet. They were considered unique because God was with them.

Because his presence was with them. They had a unique presence where they got to know and be in relationship with the covenantal God. And yet, because this unique presence brought about unique blessings, it also brought about unique curses whenever they fell.

Like Icarus in Greek mythology who in hubris and pride soared too high, too close to the sun. And the wax that held his hastily put together wings melted and he fell plunging from such astounding heights to his death.

The people of God who venture too far away from God, who venture too far away from covenantal obedience sometimes fall from such astounding heights. And while they can be known as the most blessed people on earth because of their relationship with God, sometimes they're seen as the most pitiful, cursed and ruined people on earth in the Bible.

To whom much is given, to whom much is required. They had a unique proximity to this God. They had a unique responsibility to be in relationship with this God. And Deuteronomy 18 lays out the terms. And the first half of Deuteronomy 28 is beautiful.

You read it and you're like, this God loves me. This God wants to see me blessed. He blessed when I go out and blessed when I come in. My whole life is blessed. My food bowl is always full. My family is always well.

There's no sickness or disease. This God really wants this nation to be blessed. But yet in the back half of Deuteronomy 28, when we see the curses that come upon these people, it's so severe. We'll look at just a single section, verses 28 and 29.

It says, if you break the covenant, the Lord will smite you with madness and with blindness and with bewilderment of heart. And you will grope about at noon as the blind man gropes in the darkness and you will not prosper in your ways.

You shall only be oppressed and robbed continually with none to save you. This is the same people that God said, we're going to be his blessed chosen people. And yet if they do not live under this unique law, respecting and honoring this unique relationship and presence and proximity that they have to their creator, they will be worse off than any pagan on earth.

This is a unique God initiated curse of blindness. The text says that they will wander around like a blind man at noon. I don't think that's an accidental metaphor. A blind man at noon is walking around when the sun is at its most beautiful and brilliant.

A blind man at noon is stumbling about in pitch black darkness when all of this light is available and they have no access to it. That is what God is saying of Israel. They will stumble about in a world that has so many blessings of God and yet they will have no access to it if they do not follow his commands.

Now we look at the story of Israel. They didn't take this very seriously, did they? We look at the reason why the wilderness generation was cursed to wander for 40 years and dies because as soon as God rescued them and gave them everything, they're worshiping a golden calf.

They're murmuring and complaining and blaming God for their very small inconveniences. After they finally get to the edge of the wilderness border, they say, we're not going to go in. These people are too strong.

Your God just rescued you from the strongest nation on earth, which is Egypt, and now you're afraid of a few Philistines and a few Canaanites. You didn't even lift a finger in Egypt and God delivered you.

God said they couldn't enter the land. And we would like to say that Deuteronomy affected the next generation and they changed their ways and they didn't actually follow in the same footsteps, but they did.

They went into the land of Israel and one of the first things that they do is this man named Achan. God says you cannot take the spoil when you conquer because these people worshiped idols. So what does he do?

He grabs an idol. He hides it in his tent because he secretly wants to worship anything other than God. And his people are devastated when they go up against the tiniest little town called Ai. It would be like Boston getting decimated by Tingborough.

Sorry, I was trying to think of one. Millions of people getting chased down by thousands. It's because they didn't follow God. God cursed them with a type of blindness in that situation that caused them to run away and be afraid and be scared and be terrified because they refused to follow him.

At the end of the book of Judges, this book, book of Judges, darkest book in the Bible. You have awful, awful things happening in the book of Judges. At the end of the book of Judges, it says everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

They were so morally debased that they would not follow God. They didn't do what was right in God's eyes, the covenant. They did what was right in their eyes. Lawlessness, hedonism. It doesn't get any better.

After the book of Judges, they get this brilliant idea that they want to have a king. God is their king. God is the one who rules them. So they pick the tallest and the man with the nicest parted hair and they give him the kingship and he leads them into absolute ruin.

God gives them what they desire. Eventually, he gives them a good king and a righteous king, but even David, he murdered one of his soldiers, pregnated his wife, brought a plague upon the nation where thousands of people died.

His own son died. David says, against you only have I sinned. You think it might, well, you also sinned against Uriah and you sinned against Bathsheba and you sinned, but you know, I get it. You look at the line of David, his people, they didn't learn from his mistakes.

At the end of Solomon's life, he's bowing the knee down to idols. Solomon's son, Rehoboam, rips the kingdom in half so that the kingdom now is a tenth of its former glory. You've got Manasseh, who is a king in the line of David, offering his child in the fire literally sacrificing his male son to a demonic God.

You've got all of these Davidic kings who are not following after the commands of God, but who are following after what's right in their own eyes. And God throughout this entire season and life of Israel has been unbelievably patient.

You and I, our patience is very short. Someone can say the wrong word to us and we're ready to hurt them and wound them with our own words. Think if God was like us, the people of Israel would have gotten one step into the promised land before gone.

And yet he waited hundreds and hundreds of years to punish them. He said in Deuteronomy 28, if you do not follow my commandments, you will be cursed. And yet look at the graciousness of God that he waited hundreds of years before he brought down these covenant curses upon his people.

But by the time we get to Isaiah, things have changed. The people have exhausted the patience of God. The people have run God out of his grace and now God is going to rain down upon them terror. This is a famous passage, actually.

It's Isaiah 6. And we often think about it from Isaiah's perspective. And we think about it from evangelism's perspective. Here I am, Lord, send me. This passage is in the midst of one of the darkest moments in Israel's history.

And Isaiah is not being sent to go see thousands of people, one to God. He's being sent so that no one will be converted and all of them will be left in their stupor. Think about us. It's a blessing to be your pastor.

It's a blessing for so many reasons, so many interactions, so many victories we've seen in Christ where we've met together and we've talked about something and a light bulb has gone off and or we've been in small group together or something like that.

We've seen victories. Think about Isaiah, a lifetime of people mocking him, hating him, rejecting him for the entire nation to go down in flames. You'd want to quit if you weren't absolutely called by God.

Isaiah 6 verse 5 begins this way. Woe is me. It's Isaiah talking. The reason Isaiah says that is because the holy God has come into his presence. The terrible, fierce, beautiful goodness, weighty goodness of God has come into Isaiah's presence and Isaiah as a man who wants to follow God, maybe the only one left in his nation who wants to follow God, who is actually what we would consider a good guy.

Maybe he's a pastor. Maybe he's like someone who just loves God. When God comes into his presence, it rips him apart. Imagine every molecule in your body being strained to the point of almost breaking so that your heart feels like that it's coming out of your chest.

Your legs feel like that they're breaking right there in front of you and all of it because God is so terribly good that we in our wicked frame can't stand it. He says, woe is me. I am ruined because I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.

Isaiah is being attacked by the holiness of God. He's being ripped apart by the holiness of God. And if it weren't for God doing what he did in the passage to cleanse and purify Isaiah, Isaiah would have died by the holiness of God.

Now again, we often focus on Isaiah in this passage. I want us to focus on Israel. Isaiah says, I live among a people of unclean lips and that was true. The state of the nation at this point is a nation that was completely lacking in repentance.

A people who had perpetually for hundreds of years broken the covenant of God. They have gone even beyond what the pagans were doing. And this is a people that God's patience had run out on. God announces in the next verses to Isaiah what he's about to do and it is striking.

Verse 8 through 13 says this. It's Isaiah. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and who will go first? Then I, Isaiah said, Here I am, send me. And he said, Go to tell this people, the people of the Jews, keep on listening, but do not perceive.

Keep on looking, but do not understand. Render the hearts of this people insensitive, their eyes dull, their eyes or their ears dull, their eyes dim. Otherwise, they might see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and return and be healed.

God is saying, even if it was possible for them in their state of spiritual blindness to return to God and be healed by God, that he is going to push them down to a point where they cannot repent, where it's impossible, where their eyes are completely broken, where their hearts are completely insensitive, where their ears cannot hear.

This is a deeper and darker blindness than they had ever experienced. This is a covenantal curse by God upon his people evoked by Deuteronomy 28 that was overdue by centuries. And the only reason that God did not pull it forth sooner is because of his grace.

He sealed their fate and Isaiah cries out in sorrow. He says in verse 11, Lord, how long? You can imagine the man barely being able to utter the words. Maybe he was like us and he thought, the Lord's going to send me.

The Lord's going to use me. The Lord's going to do something with me. And maybe for a moment, he got excited. My people are going to repent. My people are going to turn from their wicked ways. And then when God describes this to him, he says, God, how long is this curse going to be upon my people?

And God answers him. Verses 11 through 13. God answered until cities are devastated and without inhabited. Houses are without people. And until the land is utterly desolate. The Lord has removed men far away and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.

Yet. There will be a tenth portion in it. And I will again, or it will again be subject to burning. Like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled, the holy seed is its stump. The entire history of Jerusalem is captured in this statement.

This city is going to be under the mighty hand of God until no one remains. Until Judah and Jerusalem has been utterly devastated. Made waste in ruin. Where their people are deported and carried 700 miles, I believe it is with rusty shackles, with open wounds, marching in blistering heat under the hand of God's wrath for their indifference to his law.

The tenth portion. That's shown in verse 13. Is that 90 of this people will be erased? Gone from history. The population. If we use nice round numbers, started at a million, only 100 ,000 of people are going to return.

They're under the heavy hand of God. It says that it's going to this. It says that it will be subject to burning a second time. I think that that means than the course of Jerusalem's history. It will rebuild.

But it won't be like a mighty oak like it was before. It will be like a stump. It will not have the glory that it had in its former days. And eventually, as we know in the New Testament. Jesus will pronounce the final curse upon that generation and Rome will come in.

A man named Josephus tells us that it happened on the exact same day as Babylon burned the city of Jerusalem. I'm not sure Josephus said it, so we'll go with him. On the exact same day, 700 years later, something to that effect.

City of Jerusalem burned a final time. The temple was destroyed for a final time. And the Jewish people never again have a temple. The Old Testament period violently came to an end because of the violent and egregious hatred of God that was showcased by the Jews.

We see that culminate. Isaiah ends his passage with the holy seed. What is that? That's Christ. The greatest act of rejection and hatred of God that the Jewish people ever did or any people ever did was when they looked at Pilate and they said, we have no king but Caesar.

That was infinitely worse than when the Jews said, we want Saul to be our king. They looked at God in the face and they said, we have no king but a pagan Caesar. And Jesus said, on this generation, all of the judgment will fall.

All of it. When John uses the language of their eyes, seeing and not perceiving, and when Isaiah uses the language of them seeing and not perceiving, they are talking about a people who've been under the hand of God since the time of Isaiah.

Since the time of Isaiah until the New Testament, they were a people who were under the judgment of God. You remember when they built the third temple, the people weeped because it did not have its former glory.

We see in Leviticus when they built the tabernacle, God's fiery presence comes down from heaven and then dwells the tabernacle. We see in Kings when Solomon prays and blesses the temple, God's fiery presence comes down and dwells among them.

We don't see that in the book of Ezra. When they dedicate the temple to God, there's crickets, there's people crying and weeping. This is why John can open up his gospel and say that the light has shone in darkness.

The people of Israel were supposed to be the light to the Gentiles, and yet the whole world is filled with darkness. The center of that darkness is in Jerusalem. John goes on in verse 11 to say he came to his own and they were the ones who did not receive him.

This is not talking about general pagans like verse 5. This is a special kind of blindness that's fallen on the people of God. They didn't receive their... The downfall culminates and bubbles to a crescendo in John chapter 3.

Jesus says this is the judgment. This is the judgment that night has come into the world and men love the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.