Episodes in Life of T/lord 05 the Blind Man — Robert Constable

Shall we turn this evening for our meditation to the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John? John chapter 9. We want to consider this evening the episode in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ in which he healed the only case, I believe, of a congenital disease, the only case in which he healed a man who had been afflicted from his birth.

In chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, we shall read the first nine verses to begin with. And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, or his parents, that he was born blind?

Jesus’ Answer to the Problem of Suffering

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him, I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day. The night cometh when no man can work.

As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, which is by interpretation sin.

He went his way, therefore, and washed, and came seeing. The neighbors, therefore, and they which before had seen him, that he was blind, said, Is not this he that sat and begged? Some said, This is he.

Others said, He is like him. But he said, I am he. Therefore said they unto him, How were thine eyes opened? We need to read for just now, as I say, I think that this is the only case given to us in the Gospels wherein the Lord Jesus healed a man who had been, had an affliction from his birth.

Now this particular episode sets forth for us one particular phase of the complex problem of suffering, one phase of a complex problem. All the answers are not here, but some of the questions that we ask are here, and consequently I think it can be helpful for us to consider this episode very carefully.

As Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth, and as he and his disciples were walking along the street, and they saw this man, and were told later on that he was a beggar, so they saw him by the side of the road with a cup of some kind asking for alms.

You can get the picture of the Lord walking along the street with his disciples and his friends, coming to this man who was there at the side of the street, and stopping and looking at this man, because they engaged in a conversation about this man.

And as they stood there and they looked at him, the disciples asked a question, and it was a question that had been on their minds a lot, and that from time to time they thought of. And it had been on our minds a good deal during our lives too, and from time to time we think about this question, this matter of suffering.

And so they asked the Lord Jesus, they said to him, Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? The Lord suggests a problem without really stating it, and it offers some solutions to the problem, some suggested solutions, and there is an assumption behind all of this, and that is that there is some connection between sin and suffering.

Why should they ask him a question like this? Who did sin? Who brought that up? Why, the suffering brought that up. The very fact that there could be a man blind from his birth, sitting by the side of the road begging, brought up the question of sin in the minds of these men, nearly always does.

The great question, why is there suffering in the world? Now, this man was a blind man, he'd been born blind. You know all the distress, or you know something of the distress, theoretically at least, that would be involved in a thing like that.

Whenever a child is brought into the world imperfect, there is great stress, great sorrow. What do you think it would be like to have a blind child? That's what these parents had, they had a blind boy.

At the time he was a tiny baby, he never did see the light of day. My, how many times they must have had the question in their mind, what went wrong, what's the problem, how come this kind of thing has to happen?

It comes into the minds of anybody who goes through an experience like this. My wife and I had a little girl once, and she was born with what they call a spinal bifida, that is a piece of her spine was missing.

Nothing can be done for a condition like this. She lived for three months, and then the Lord took her home. But when you've had a situation like this in your family, and you've had somebody born imperfectly, it makes this a very acute question, how come this?

And the world is full of people like this. I never had heard the term a spinal bifida until our little girl was born with one, and then I found out that there's a dozen of them born every year in the same hospital.

They're all over the country. It's a common occurrence. Many are born crippled, many children are born retarded, and they don't have the mental capacity to advance normally. We see so much of this on every hand, and what questions it raises.

The doctor said to me on that occasion, it is only by the mercy of God that any children are born normal. I'm sure this is the case. But most people are born normally and are normal, but humanity itself is crippled.

That's where the problem is. Humanity is crippled. Humanity is imprisoned. Humanity is in trouble. Everybody knows it. As religious belief may be, every man is prepared to admit that humanity is in trouble.

Mankind is in trouble. Why is this a problem? So some are born this way, and some are born normally. Why is this a problem? Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor that was something of a philosopher, said in a workshop, look at the article, not at the shavings.

His whole attitude was, so what? Don't worry about the misfits. Be concerned with those who are well. Well, this may have done very well for a Roman philosopher, but our Christian concept has changed us a little.

The Christian faith has given us a concept of God that gives dignity and glory to humanity. Well enough for a heathen that didn't know anything about man's being created in the image of God not to care about the shavings.

But when you have a concept of God, and it is a good God, then you're in trouble when you look around, when you see how much suffering there is in the world, how many problems just like this blind man had.

And so we sort of protest against physical and mental and moral and spiritual Christians because, or people, because this challenges our concept of God and his goodness. It worries us because we think this ought not so to be.

We believe in a good God, and we see all the suffering and the sorrow and the wretchedness and the crippling and the devastation all around us. And somehow this brings us up short. And so we come up with attempted solutions to the problem, don't we?

You have explained this problem to yourself many times. You probably aren't satisfied with your explanation. But you have made one stab at it after another. Every time you know of a case like this, you react to this knowledge of the case.

And in your reaction, you get involved with your concept, your concept of God, your philosophy of life, the way you look at things gets involved. You attempt solutions to the problem. So you're just like the disciples here when they come along, and Jesus stops by this man who was born blind, and they know all about this fella.

And probably every time they'd gone down that street, he'd been there. And they knew from the neighborhood and the talk around, he'd been there a long time. He was born blind. And so they say to the Lord, Master, how come?

And they have a suggested solution, a very interesting suggestion that they make. They say, Master, who did sin? This man or his parents that he was born blind. Now, isn't that an interesting suggestion?

Because what's involved in a suggestion like that? How could this man have sinned and then been born blind as a result of his sin? Well, the only way I can think of that he might have done that is if there is such a thing as reincarnation.

That he'd been here before, and he'd lived a life of sin. And as a consequence, the next time he was born into the world, he was born deformed or crippled or blind or, as the Indians say, maybe this time a mouse.

Punishment for what went before. That was one thing. This isn't anything, you know, to downgrade the disciples about, because they thought they'd tried to come up with a solution. They couldn't come up with it.

Is yours any better? Who had sinned? This man or his parents? And very interesting the answer they got, wasn't it? I mean, the response of the Lord Jesus. It was no answer to them. He simply said, neither hath this man sinned nor his parents.

As I said, there's been a lot of attempts to suggest what might be the answer to this. Some people say that God is not just. Can you imagine an unjust God? If there is a God, he must be just. You run into too many problems when you try to come up with this answer, that God is not just and doesn't know how to run his universe.

A lot of people, though, wouldn't dare say that, but they think that, and they carry around a bitterness in their hearts all their lives against God. And the world is full of people like this. People that have been bitter against God because of something they couldn't explain in their lives, something that seemed to them to be an injustice.

Therefore, God is unjust. And as I said, they wouldn't say it out loud, but they think this. Some people would say it out loud, not everybody. And then, of course, there's the other proposed answer, and that is that there isn't any God anyway.

The answer of the atheist, that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of fury, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And therefore, it is no wonder that people are born in a condition like this.

In fact, it is a wonder that anybody is born outside of such a condition. But, you know, it's easy to sort of dismiss God from the picture, but it doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't change the suffering.

It doesn't heal the sufferer. It's just a quick way out, that's all. It doesn't solve the thing. Santayana, the philosopher, said this. Man is not supposed to understand life, he's supposed to live it.

But there's something about us, isn't there, that keeps niggling questions like this, pestering us all our lives. And we can't dismiss it this easily and say, we're just not supposed to know. So all the attempts at solution are unsatisfactory.

Nobody has come up with a satisfactory solution to the problem of suffering yet. And there's one reason why they have not. They don't have all the data. How can you solve a problem without all the parts of the problem?

Men don't have the data. They don't know the infinite purpose of God. They're unacquainted with the end of all of this. So how in the world can they come up with an answer about the details that go to make up the whole?

But there's an interesting difference here. Here's a man that had all the data. These disciples didn't ask me. I don't have all the data. They didn't ask the philosophers. The philosophers don't have all the data.

They asked the Lord Jesus. He has it all. He has all the data. So now we might prick up our ears real good, for we can really expect an answer now, because the question has been asked of the one person in all of time that has walked on the earth that can answer it.

What answer did he give? Neither this man nor his parents. What kind of an answer is that? Well, it has nothing to do with a basic question, really. It's simply a superficial answer to the surface of their question.

That's all. He not only didn't answer the question, he dismissed the question. He threw the answer. So what do you deduce from that? These disciples came to the one person who had the answer, and he didn't give it to them.

A question that has been bothering people ever since Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden. Well, it seems to me there's only one thing to take there, and that is that we're not supposed to know the answer to it.

You know, there's lots of things in life like that. We don't have to know the answers to everything. Sometimes you think we had to know everything. Well, we couldn't know everything if we had to. There's some things that God has kept to himself.

He said on another occasion to the disciples, it is not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath kept in his own power. You don't have to know that. Just leave that with the Father.

There's another passage in the Bible that says the things that are revealed belong to the children of men, but the things that are hidden belong to God. There are some things he's decided not to tell men.

This is one of them. And yet philosophers have spent more time on this question perhaps than any other single question in the history of philosophy. And the Lord Jesus dismissed it simply by giving a quick answer to the immediate question that they ask, who sinned, this man or his parents?

He just said neither this man or his parents. But he did reveal something in giving an answer like that. He revealed this, that there is the possibility of suffering apart from blame for sin. Now, notice what I said.

He said there is such a thing as the possibility of suffering apart from blame for sin. So there is suffering in the world that no blame for sin attaches to. You can't bring that question to bear upon it, who sinned, the man or his parents.

It's irrelevant. Jesus said neither one. Yet we sort of automatically hitch them together, don't we? When we see suffering in the world, we almost automatically ask the question the disciples ask. What was behind that?

Who sinned? Well, maybe nobody sinned. Because according to this, what Jesus says is it's possible that there be suffering without blame for sin. But he goes on, he didn't stop there. Neither this man hath sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be manifest in him.

Don't put a period here. Don't put a period here. It doesn't belong here. And it changes the meaning. This cannot be the meaning of the word, the verse. This period completely changes the whole thought of the verse and makes it appear to mean something it can't possibly mean.

Let's read it with the period, the way it's written probably in most of your Bibles. Jesus answered, neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

Period. And that sounds as though this man was born blind so that God could give a demonstration of his ability to heal him on this occasion. And that is an impossibility. It's impossible with the God I know that he would make a man stumble through life in blindness from birth to manhood just in order to give a sideshow?

Just in order to kind of convince a few people standing around that he was God? There was plenty of people around needed help that the demonstration could have been made on. This man didn't have to live in blindness from birth to manhood in order for God to find a subject to give a demonstration on?

Why, that's an impossibility. If God is God, God cares for his creation. He's interested in them. But put a comma at the end of that sentence, and you've got something that means something. Now, has anybody here got a revised version?

I don't have one up here with me. Somebody here have a revised version of the New Testament with them? Will you read this fourth verse for us out loud, please? I don't know that that is the revised, is it?

That's not what I'm feeling for. The revised version doesn't use the singular subject. We must work. That's what I was looking for. The revised version corrects this. Yes. We must work the works. Now, let me read it to you with a comma at the end of verse 3, and the plural pronoun.

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. We must work the works of him that sent me. This is something else again. It means an entirely different thing.

What this means is there is the possibility of suffering without blame for sin. But that is not important. The important thing is that we get on with the job. That's what Jesus is saying. Never mind all this philosophizing about things.

Get on with the work. It's a wonderful thing, this change in the revised version. It shows that it is not only the Lord Jesus that is involved, but it is his people as well. We, himself, and his disciples.

We, himself, and his disciples, and those for whom he prayed in John 17. We, the Lord Jesus, and you, and me. We must work the works of him that sent me. You know how much work is held up by the fact that people are always asking questions and talking things, talking about things and going around in big circles and little circles, arguing about things and wondering about things, and around and around they go and nobody works.

And Jesus said, let's not do that. Let's not get involved in a discussion here about why is this man blind. Let's give him his sight. Seems to me that's better. Wasn't it better that the man give his sight than that the disciples get an answer?

Oh, sure it was. The man thought so, I'm sure. And knowing God, I'm sure he thought so. The idea was to relieve this man, not argue about how come he was blind. And the Lord Jesus said, we're called into the fellowship of his service.

So Jesus denied the suggested solutions, and he didn't give any in return. He just said, no, your answer, your question is wrong. And then he stated the central fact of Christianity. He gave the man his sight.

The question was not answered. The problem was not solved. But the man's disability was done away with. I don't know how to make this real impressive, really, except that it's been impressed upon my own heart how good it would be if we'd quit talking about things and wondering about things and discussing things and arguing about things and get to work and do the things that the Father has sent us to do.

The Lord Jesus is pleading for that here in the face of so great a need. In the face of so great a need, let's not argue. Let's do something. Maybe part of our problem is that we don't really realize the extent of the need.

Or maybe our problem is we don't realize the extent of the power. That we must work the works of him that sent me. We are involved in this. God would work through us just as he worked through the Lord Jesus.

He wants to bring light into darkened minds and hearts through you and me. There are blind people all over. Spiritually, no light has been in the eyes of them that believe not the gospel. Blind eyes. You and I can argue about whether the heathen are lost or how lost they are and whether God has some other provision for them or not or how come conditions are in the mess they're in.

We can get all these arguments going. It's great, but it doesn't get any blind people saved. It doesn't bring light to dark hearts. And oh, how the heart of the Lord Jesus longs to get on with the work.

He reminds us there's only a little while. There's only a little while. We must work while it is day because the night cometh and no man can work. If we're going to do it, we're going to have to get at it.

We're going to have to do it. Better to remove the disability than to solve the problems. Now, the fact that the Son of God was sent to remove disability shows that such a disability is not the will of God.

That's what I said. It shows that such disability is not the will of God. Well, you say to me, you said that we wouldn't even be in this hall apart from the will of God the other night. Everything is according to the will of God.

No, disability is not according to the will of God. Look at Luke 4 .18. The Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world, to be sure. Look at 4 .18 and see something of what's involved in this. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.

This is the Lord Jesus talking. Because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.

This is what he came for. This is what he came for. You know, we sometimes get away from this. We sometimes sort of get the notion that the Lord only spent his 30 years down here waiting until he was to be crucified.

Sure, he came to die. But what did he die for? To bring men to glory. To relieve men. And part of this relief of men is what he's talking about here in Luke. The gospel to the poor. Good news to the poor.

Healing the brokenhearted. This is one of the reasons Jesus came, to heal the brokenhearted. There's another reason, to preach deliverance to the captives. And recovering of sight to the blind. To set at liberty them that are bruised.

How his heart broke for men. How he longed to relieve men of their disability. I said that the fact that the Lord Jesus came to remove disability is a proof that it is against the will of God. It is outside of the will of God.

God’s Use of Suffering and the Work of Relief

And I maintain this position. And I think it can be supported in the scriptures. But I tell you this, he allows it. Maybe outside of his will, but he allows it. He's allowed me a great many things that I know are outside of his will, too.

He allows many things outside of his will. And though he may allow it, he'll use it. He'll use it. This blind man was outside the will of God. His blindness was outside the will of God. So when Jesus came by, he removed the blindness.

He made the man to see. And the blindness of the lost is apart from the will of God, too. And that's why when you go out to witness for Jesus Christ and present the gospel to those that cannot see, you are doing God's work.

It is not you working. It is God working. God is against everything that hurts, everything that hurts men. Now, I'm not one of those, and I know you know this, I'm not one of those people that believe that in the doing of good works we can attain to salvation.

I know that the Bible teaches that this is not so. On the other hand, I know that any good physician is a servant of the Lord Jesus. Whether he believes in him or whether he hates his name makes no difference.

He is relieving the suffering of men. And this is in the will of God. Being used by God in the carrying forward of his purpose. Anybody who serves men for their health is doing God's work in the earth.

They'd only be doing a little piece of it. Relieving men. Relieving suffering of all kinds. God is against all human disability because God is against sin. Now, I said, and I was careful how I said it, and I'm sure you noticed that, that the Lord Jesus said that there is no necessary connection between suffering and blame for sin.

But there is no suffering apart from sin. It was because sin came into the world and death by sin that suffering came in. There would be no suffering if there was no sin. And so God is against this fruit of sin in the earth.

Well, that brings us to another problem, doesn't it? We've been talking about the problem of suffering. Now we come to the problem of sin. And that's a great problem. And the whole word of God is given to us to discuss that problem and to find the answer to that problem.

And it was found in the Lord Jesus. The one about whom we're talking here. He was able to remove the suffering because he was able to remove the sin. That's why the Lord Jesus said, what difference does it make whether I say to him, thy sins be forgiven, thee arise, take up thy bed and walk.

What's the difference? But because the Lord Jesus was able to handle the sin question, then he could take care of the suffering question. So he said to his disciples, come on, let's get on with the work.

Let's not argue about this. So he healed the man of his blindness. And then there's quite a story in the rest of this chapter about this man. He got into trouble because he got his sight back. His neighbors recognized him on the street.

It must have been quite a thing, you know. They'd seen him there. For years he'd been there on that corner. And now you see him come down the street with this 20 -20 vision. This would be quite a jolt, wouldn't it?

Some friends looked at him and said, what's going on here? Isn't that the fellow that was the beggar? Can't be him. Well, look at him carefully. Certainly that's him. Another neighbor comes along and looks at him and says, I never saw anybody look more like him in my life.

He certainly looks like him. Yes, sir. And while they're talking about him out loud this way, you know the way some people do, he said, I am he. Well, now, where'd you get your eyesight? Wouldn't that be an interesting thing to have to ask somebody?

This is tremendous. And so, because they couldn't figure this out, they took him to the specialists. They took him to the Pharisees. They're supposed to have all the answers, you know. Whether they thought this is wrong.

This fellow was blind. He's supposed to be blind. He's supposed to sit down there and beg. Here he is walking around alive and looking us all over. Anyway, they took him to the specialists. Took him over to the Pharisees and they told him about this.

They said, you know what? We found this fellow walking on the street and he's got his eyesight. He's perfectly good. He can see as well as I can see. He was on the corner. They're begging for the last 20 years.

This must have been quite a story. I wish I'd been there. There must have been a real episode here in the house when they came in to see the Pharisees and explain about all of this. And the Pharisees said, well, of course it isn't him.

You fellows are confused. That's what they call the neighbors then. And they said, well, you know, it's easy to mistake one fellow for another. There's something going on here that you don't understand.

Well, they said, we know his father and mother. How about getting them in? Well, that ought to be all right. Yeah. Bring in the father and mother. So they sent for his father and mother and his father and mother came in.

And they looked at him. You can't fool that, you know. They knew all the bumps on him. They'd been with him a long time. And they looked at him and they said, yeah, that's our son. They got a problem.

Even the specialists don't know what to do with it. So they said, well, very interesting. Tell us about this. How'd this happen? So he told them all about how it happened. All the details. They listened.

It's a real funny thing, you know. When people get frustrated, they do strange things. They couldn't think of any answers. What are you going to do with a case like this? And so one of them just pops out in the conversation and says, we know that this man is not of God because he doesn't keep the Sabbath day.

What does that have to do with it? Well, he was healed on the Sabbath. Right away, another one of the Pharisees said he was a thinking man. It might have been Nicodemus. It sounds like him. It sounds almost like what Nicodemus said in the third chapter.

How can a man that is a sinner do such miracles? Remember what Nicodemus said to the Lord Jesus? We know that no man can do these miracles that thou doest except God be with him. This is the same thing.

He said, how can a man that's a sinner do miracles like this? And so they started squabbling among themselves. Very typical. Lots of speculation. First, it's the disciples that speculate, and now it's the specialists that speculate.

The Pharisees are speculating. It is a trap we all fall into, this business of speculation. Hardly ever am I at a conference that somebody doesn't come up and ask me some question that there's no answer to.

When I was over in St. Petersburg last week, a man came up to me and asked me whether there was a race of men that lived between the first verse of Genesis and the second verse of Genesis. I said, I don't know.

I didn't meet any of them. You know, there's some... Why speculate? We don't know all that this contains yet, the wonderful things. Why do we dig up other stuff? Why do we always have to be wondering about things that really, in a sense, are none of our business?

If it was our business, we'd have been told. But speculation, oh, we love it. Next to rationalization, it is man's favorite indoor sport. But there... Let me tell you this. There are a lot of people that seem to be more interested in being good theologians or profound theologians than they are in being good Christians.

There's a lot of things we don't understand, but there are a lot of things we don't need to understand. God is using simple people to do his work in the earth. People that don't understand, very often, what the time of day is.

Simple people that are ready to believe his word, ready to act at his command, and he gets the blessing. Profound people that have got to know all the answers and dig, dig, dig, dig, and argue, argue, argue, argue, and they never seem to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Paul writes about some of those people. Now, sometimes we get worried about the details, about the unsaved, as I said, whether the heathen are lost and to what extent, and whether God hears their prayers and all of these things.

The important thing is they're blind from their birth. That's the thing to remember. And something needs to be done, and the Lord Jesus said, doesn't matter. Bring light to these people. Bring them light.

Major on the majors. Let's have some manifestation of the power of God, and less manifestation of men's words and men's ideas. Well, I heard a preacher preaching on this story one time, and he said this was the beginning of denominationalism, because he said here we had the Muddites and the Washites, the Anointees, and all the things that are involved in what the Lord Jesus did on this occasion.

There were times when he healed the blind just with a word, just touched their eyes. This time, he made clay on the ground, and he took the clay from the ground, and he rubbed it over the man's eyes. And then he said to them, go, wash in the pool of Siloam.

What was the important thing? The clay? The spittle? The rubbing it on his eyes? The command to go? No. These were not the important things. The important thing was what the man would do with these. Would he go?

And he said, so I went and washed and came seeing. You know, that's all it takes. To enter into the blessing of the work of God is obedience. Do the thing that is to do. So the Lord Jesus says in this story, let's get on with the work.

And then he shows in the story that the way to get the blessing is to be obedient to what he says. There's an epilogue to this story. Turn back to verse 35. Jesus heard that they had cast him out, because they cast him out of the synagogue.

Faith, Worship, and Obedience to Christ

And when he had found him, he said unto him, dost thou believe I am the Son of God? He answered and said, who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him? I wonder why he did this. I wonder why he said, who is he, Lord, and didn't just say, who is he, that I might believe on him?

Well, you know, they say that the people that are blind develop a very acute sense of hearing. And they can distinguish sounds much more perfectly than those of us that have our sight. And I am sure as I stand here, he recognized this voice.

This was the man who gave him his sight. And after all this episode with the Pharisees, he had come to the conviction that this man was of God. And he recognized him as his Lord as soon as he met him.

Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him? And Jesus said unto him, thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee. And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshiped him. Well, that's not the end of the story, but it is as far as we need to go.

This is the end, isn't it? Honor and glory and worship and blessing to his name. That's the thing. And it grows out of being on with his business and being obedient to his heavenly Father. To be told by thee what to do.