Clough John Lesson 42
A Messianic Miracle – John 9:1-4
Tonight we are on the questions of birth defects and in general handicaps. This is a topic that is not often treated in Scripture, yet it’s strange that so much is said in Scripture. The basis of what we are to say is found in this Psalm, this is one of the key Psalms and we’re going to study one section of the Psalm and then we’re going to go back to John 9 and go from verse to verse through various portions of Scripture to give the divine viewpoint response to physical handicaps.
Let’s look at Psalm 139, it’s a Psalm of David, it is written because David is praising God’s knowledge of Himself. The first 12 verses deal with God’s omniscience and His omnipotence. In these verses we have God’s character displayed toward David. David realizes that God is so intimate with David that He knows his every thought, that He is personally aware of him regardless of his location, regardless of where he is. Beginning in verse 13 he deals with why.
[Psalm 139:1-12, “O LORD, Thou hast searched Me, and known Mme. [2] Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising; Thou understandest my thought afar off. [3] Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. [4] For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, Thou knowest it altogether. [5] Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid Thine hand upon me. [6] Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. [7] Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? [8] If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there. [9] If I take the wings of the morning, and swell in the uttermost parts of the sea, [10] Even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me. [11] If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. [12] Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.”]
In Psalms 139:13-18 we have a key section on pregnancy. This is the section that tells us more than any other portion of Scripture about what goes on during pregnancy from God’s point of view. Now we wouldn’t know this, we could study the anatomy, we could study physiology, we could study all these things so we could mechanically describe the chemical changes occurring, we could describe the various hormonal systems and changes that are taking place in the woman and we’d have, after we’d done all the study we possibly could, we would have a mechanistic description of what was going on. But we would still lack an explanation of why that mechanism was going on.
Let’s start in Psalm 139:13, “For Thou hast possessed my reins [inward parts]; Thou has covered me in my mother’s womb. [14] I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are Thy works, and that my soul knows right well. [15] My substance as not hid from Thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously [intricately] wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. [16] Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect [unformed]; and in Thy book all my members were written, which is continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. [17] How precious also are Thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! [18] If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand; when I awake, I am still with thee.”
Now in verse 18, at the end, you’ll notice the conclusion toward which the other verses are moving, to show the depth and the riches of God’s thought s to the baby that is being developed and brought together in the mother’s womb. David writes this not as a baby but as a mature man. David writes this looking back, backwards, and he says I have watched God work in my life over many, many, many years, but if I have to go back to explain the origin and the basis of this relationship I have to go back to the pregnancy, when I was in my mother’s womb. That is where it all begins as far as I as an existing entity in history is concerned. And going back there, he said, I can see things… of course he was under God’s Holy Spirit’s illumination here, I can see things that God was doing then that tie together the things that have happened in my life. And so he’s going to move toward that conclusion as we study these verses.
Now let’s go back to the beginning verse, Psalm 139:13, “For Thou hast possessed my reins; Thou has covered me in my mother’s womb.” All right, “For” is a conjunction of explanation; this means that what follows, from verses 13-18, follows by way of explanation of verses 1-12 which was the magnitude of God’s thoughts. So here’s the basis for it. It says “Thou possessed my reins,” now the word possessed is qanah, and it literally means to purchase or buy, or to acquire when it is used in conjunction with an act of creation it’s emphasizing the fact that what is created is God’s own possession…God’s own possession. So You have possessed me, and this immediately leads to a completely different perspective on our life because what it says is that the owner of our life is not our self but it is God. It also denies, then, one of the great human viewpoint principles of our time that we are our own master, that we own our lives, that our lives are OUR lives, and as Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” and then he reasoned out from “I” to God. Not so in this psalm; you start with God and then God defines who I am. He defines and He owns the person and the life. So David acknowledges that ownership begins in the womb. God owns what is there and God owns, therefore, our bodies and our souls as well as our spirits, but the emphasis is body and soul here.
“For Thou hast possessed my kidneys,” literally, the word “reins” is “kidneys” and it actually means the top part of the kidney which is the adrenal gland. And it’s very interesting that the word, as we study the use of this word in Scripture, that it refers basically to the emotional makeup of the individual. And this is not talking about what the Holy Spirit does after salvation, it’s talking about the natural emotional disposition of the person. We are born into this life with, really several dimensions to personality. One is what we will call natural, and the other is the moral area. Now the moral area can be out of fellowship or in fellowship, it can be [can’t understand word], messed up in compound carnality and it can be improved. But there is a certain natural disposition that people have. This is why on Wednesday nights I’ve been so careful to keep on pointing out that “Blessed are the meek,” and “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness,” that all those beatitudes refer to supernatural dimension of the personality, it’s not talking about a naturally meek person there, that’s talking about a person who is meek by virtue of spirituality. But here that’s not the case; here it’s exactly the opposite. In verse 13 we said that the emotional makeup of the person is something God owns.
Now this is a pars per toto, a part for the whole, and it stands for the whole inner man, “my whole personality,” we would say, “You have possessed.” That means a person may be a very aggressive personality or a retiring type personality but whatever the personality God has produced it and it is His. And therefore it means that when we are saved and the Holy Spirit operates in our lives He does not change that basic personality. For example, the author of the Gospel of John is probably a much more quiet person than Peter. Now John was quiet when he was out of fellowship as well as when he was in fellowship. Peter was naturally noisy whether he was out of fellowship or in fellowship. That’s why he’s kind of funny, he lets it all come out, either way. John wasn’t, he was much more reticent. But regardless, those personalities remain fixed even after salvation. So don’t try to mimic the personality of someone; there’s a lot of that in Christian circles and novice believers are very prone to do this, pick up and imitate not only the moral dimension to the leader’s personality but the natural dimension. David would say that’s wrong, you own this, this is your possession and I’m just the custodian of this. You and I have a natural personality; God owns that and we can just use it, but we ultimately can’t change it.
“You have possessed my kidneys,” now it says, “You have woven together,” or “You were weaving together,” it’s an iterative kind of thing, “You were weaving me together in my mother’s womb.” It refers to the nine months of pregnancy that you were weaving, weaving, weaving, weaving, weaving, weaving, point by point by point. Some of you have had a chance to watch on television recently to the incredible machine and the National Geographic Society has put together an excellent series, I don’t know how they got the pictures, of the fertilization and the growth of the embryo; just an amazing series of pictures. And I thought of this Psalm as the family watched that picture, and watched the cells just multiplying, and then watched how within four to five weeks the spine begins to form, and then the little segments of the spine begin to form. And I mentioned to my boys as we were watching that, that all was missing in the picture was God’s fingertips working the material into the form of the human being. And here we have that mentioned, “You were weaving together” over a process of time David is saying. Now this argues again for our contention that the unborn infant is not alive because He wasn’t finished weaving together until physical birth. The thing isn’t finished until then, so you can’t argue that the unborn infant is alive; it isn’t. Nowhere in Scripture can you show that the unborn infant, the fetus, is alive. It is not considered a soul and therefore abortion is not murder; abortion may be wrong but it will be wrong on grounds other than murder. So in verse 13 we find this uniqueness, God’s interest in everything that’s going on. Notice Psalm 139 is after the fall.
He says [Psalm 139:14], “I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are Thy works, and that my soul knows that.” Now the praise is given to God for the natural creation of the person. “I am,” now it says in the King James “fearfully and wonderfully made,” I’m going to change that translation to accord more with the root stem of those words used. The first one, “fearfully,” I don’t know why they translated it that way, it’s a Hebrew word that is rendered “distinct,” or “unique.” And what he is saying is, “I will praise Thee for I am distinct,” and then he says I am “wonderfully made” and this is a plural noun in the Hebrew and it’s referring to “my awe-inspiring things” or “my members.” And that is the parts of his body. So he is talking first about his distinctness and then he is talking about, to define what is distinct, the pattern of his body, how he’s put together.
Notice he is not embarrassed the way he is put together, he is not apologizing for the way he is put together, he is praising God for the way he is put together. David had nothing to do with how he was put together and you had nothing to do with how you were put together and you don’t go taking blame or apologizing for the way you came out of the womb. That was not your responsibility and you ought never to take responsibility for that. This is exactly the point where too many people build a fantastic inferiority complex because God didn’t do this, God didn’t give me the brain I wanted, God didn’t give me the looks I wanted, God didn’t give me the stature I want, God didn’t do this and God didn’t do that. Now just a minute, God did a tremendous amount for you. And God has decreed that you are going to be a certain way and you are going to be a perpetually unhappy miserable full of mental attitude sins type person until you are able to accept that and do exactly what David is doing in verse 14, “I will praise Thee for how I am made.”
Now we live in a world system that hates
God and I want you to notice something; something that appears very
innocent. It happens to children a lot
in school, something that appears very innocent and is very satanic. Because the world has certain standards, we’ll
put human viewpoint standards, everybody has to be beautiful, absolutely, every
girl has to be cover girl type, every man has to be Mr. Perfect, all this kind
of stuff, all these are standards. Obviously
what they fail to tell you is that out of 1,500 girls one will qualify for the
picture for the cover. And that
obviously testifies by the method of selection that you have a very abnormal
type person on the cover, abnormal, out of the line. We have to be careful here because this is
where that third
Now it’s very interesting but all of the corpus of God’s Word gives no place to beauty or brains. The emphasis in God’s Word is always the moral dimensions, never the beauty or the brains. And obviously, then, we live in this society and so a kid goes to school and from the time this child goes to school until the time he dies he is subjected to this constant pressure, why don’t you conform to this Greek standard— why don’t you conform to this Greek standard! And he gets hammered and beaten with this thing. You can watch it how people are with children, it’s always the beauty queen, the little kid or the boy that’s the smart one, they always get all the attention and the plain Jane just kind of fades along. And of course this produces stress. And I want you to notice, there’s a completely different philosophy to Psalm 139, it’s God’s philosophy. In a fallen world that’s ridiculous, the Greeks were ridiculous anyway with their concepts, their autonomous absolutes, and so when it comes here to this point we have to break with tradition and it’s very hard to do this because particularly as Americans through advertising, and other systems, the advertising attempts simply amplify the pressure of these Greek norms and standards. Now this is not an excuse to go out and look as ugly as you can or act as stupid as you can. That’s to the other extreme.
The point is, the Bible doesn’t major on these areas; the Bible majors on something completely different. Now let’s watch how David develops it. Verse 14 is a denial of the Greek standards. It is saying I will praise Thee for how I’ve been made and if it doesn’t conform with Plato that’s too bad. You ought to teach your children to resist the pressure of the group, they’re always making fun of somebody. And children can be extremely cruel this way, extremely cruel. You get in a classroom and choose up for a test or something and the teachers always work this out, I think the teachers are in league with the thing, they don’t realize it but they encourage this kind of activity by the very way they run the classrooms. So the kids choose up teams, it’s a spelling bee or something and who gets picked for the last? The class idiot. I’ve instructed my children if they are ever in a position like this, you just go ahead and pick the person regardless of how smart they are, who cares about the idiot spelling bee, you’re not going to go through life with five extra points after your name because you won the second grade spelling bee. But the point remains though, still, there’s somebody else that can go through life hurt because of what happened in the second grade spelling bee. Now we’re not encouraging that kind of response but we’re just simply stating the fact, that this just grinds into the ground somebody else and it’s a wicked vicious system. And it’s time as Christians we broke out of that little mold and we let the people on the outside know that we have absolutely no respect for their asinine standards. And it might due to exaggerate the point a little to some of them to get the point across.
Now in Psalm 139:15, why does David do this? He says, “My substance,” the word “substance” has reference to his skeletal structure, that on which the meat was placed. “My basic frame, my skeleton was not hid from Thee,” the idea of being hid from God he’s already developed in verse 7, verse 8 of this Psalm. The hiding from God is not just that God’s playing hide and seek; the idea is that God is intimately interested in it. Do you know what this means? Do you know what this means? If that person is born with a skeletal defect that was not hidden from God. That ws not hidden from God! God made that that way. Now let’s go further, “My skeleton was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret,” and the word, later on in this verse, “when I was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth,” the word “curiously wrought” is the Hebrew word for embroider, and it refers to the parts of the body woven onto the skeleton, that’s the picture; first you have the skeleton, then you have the parts woven onto it. And notice again God is the One who is doing the weaving and if there is a deformity that is part of God’s embroidery. That’s the way the Scriptures picture it.
You see, the Greeks were so dogmatic about the beauty and brains standard, do you know what they used to do to deformed babies; they’d leave them out on the steps. That’s what Plato recommended in the republic, they’re human debris. This is the great philosopher that the western world looks up to. He formed the first communist state, Plato did, in his writings. And in this communist state run by the philosopher kings the babies were abandoned that didn’t live up to the certain Greek standards. Do you ever read of that in the Old Testament? You bet you don’t. Never! They were always absorbed into the system, they were always accepted as those who had been created by God, just as the (quote) “normal” child was.
So this is the theology of that entire treatment as we are going through this; this is why this Psalm is so crucial. “…when I was made in secret, in the lowest parts of the earth.” Now here is a metaphor that occurs time and time again, one of the great symbolic themes of Scripture but here is the mother concept of earth. I remember a while back somebody griped about one of the hymns saying “mother earth.” That’s a very sound concept, it’s talking about the biological point, the seeds are dropped in the ground, in the earth, to grow so also the woman’s womb is a garden. It’s viewed… in fact, that’s what it’s called in the Song of Songs, and she grows the fertilized seed. So that’s why here, “when I was wrought in the lowest parts of the earth,” it’s just referring to the womb; it’s an idiom for the womb.
It says in Psalm 139:16, and here is where it really gets detail and here’s where we have answers to many questions people often ask. You’d never guess it from the way the King James is translated; if you look at the King James you’ll see there’s a number of italicized words and when you get that many italicized words in one verse you know that the translator was really fishing for something. Let’s see if we can put this together better. “Thine eyes” it says, “did see my substance, yet being unperfect,” so far fine, God was superintending the process; “and in Thy book all were written,” forget the “my members” business, that’s italicized, it wasn’t in the original. “All were written,” now we’ve got to follow this carefully. “All,” and something’s missing, we’re going to fill that in later, “all were being written,” it is iterative, that means time and time and time again during those nine months of pregnancy something, all of which that something, “was being written.” And then it says, “in continuance were fashioned, when none of them.” That really makes a lot of sense, doesn’t that really turn you on.
Let’s look at what that’s all about. First of all it’s not “my members,” it is “days.” And it’s the word “all days preordained.” Now how you can get “in continuance thereof not yet” out of that I do not know, but the word is “days,” plural, “which are the preordained.” So let’s put it together. “In thy book all my,” my would be understood because it’s not somebody else’s days, “all my days, which have been preordained, were being written.” It sounds very determinist; it sounds almost fatalist. But it’s not quite. What he’s talking about is that God fashioned his body to do His calling and that God, therefore, in the rest of his life will lead that person in union and not in conflict with his natural assets. The natural body has been designed for the future and if that natural body consists of deformities then those deformities figure in the plan of God for that individual. That’s what it’s saying. You build a machine to do a job. God builds us to do a job and He doesn’t build us to do this job and then come around after salvation and say I want you to do that job. He builds us to do the job for which we’re going to be called; that’s what the “preordained days” mean.
Now David, in response to this says, Psalm 139:17, “How precious also are Thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great are the sums” plural “of them! In other words, God has tremendous interests, it’s the picture that every little piece of that embroidery, every little piece of that tiny body, every little part of that soul that’s being formed, the potential for the soul that’s being formed during pregnancy, all of that figures from the intimate thoughts of God. “How precious” and “How great are the sums of them.” He says, [18] “If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand;” that’s why, says David, in verse 18, his conclusion, that God can be so interested in him; it goes back to his creation. So much for Psalm 139.
Let’s now go to John 9 and pick up the text to see how this connects. To show you how a little child can get hold of Psalm 139 and use it to great advantage, we have some friends who have a child that was born defective and this boy goes to school and all the kids at school call him Frankenstein, a nice sweet treatment, and he has learned to absorb that and work with it and carry on, and when someone says oh Frankenstein, how are you doing, or some little snotty remark like that, he just goes on and says well God made me this way, talk to Him about it. An excellent response for a little child, but he has learned early in life to handle himself correctly. Now if he didn’t, and if he didn’t apply the Word of God he’d be a candidate for the funny farm by the time he got out of grammar school. But you see, there’s the difference, there are some parents, wise Christian parents who have had to work with a child who is born this way and daily have to fed him the Word of God so he can work with that situation, and he can take the knocks because he has doctrine in his soul. And he applied that doctrine, and as a young child he’s learned what a lot of adults haven’t learned, he’s learned to perfectly accept himself the way he is, give thanks to God, and if somebody doesn’t like it that’s that too damned bad for them, that’s basically the attitude. And he just rolls right on, just an amazing little fellow. And if he was operating on a human viewpoint basis I don’t know what he’d do, they’d have to take him out and put him in a special class somewhere; he’s not in any special class, he’s right in with the rest of the kids, constantly, constantly, oh Frankenstein, Frankenstein, how you doing, some little remark like this. That just shows you and proves that children can latch on to doctrine and use it very well.
Now let’s look at John 9. Jesus leaves the temple; as He walks out of that temple the mob has rejected Him. They have rejected Him time and time and time again. And now the Lord Jesus Christ walks out from that temple into a world that is filled with blind people. Now I’ve told you all the way through way this John series that when you read of an incident like this you’re reading of something that literally happened but John has arranged this for his argument. John has very cleverly introduced elements into these stories; he’s not added to the truth at all, he’s arranged the story in such a way, he says say, did you ever look upon that healing of the blind man quite this way before? And so there’s some elements that he reports here that are true spiritually in a deeper sense than just the literal event.
All right, Jesus walks by and He looks at this man, and His disciples immediately begin to ask Him, a theory of suffering. [John 9:2, “And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?] But before we get to Jesus’ theory, His answer to this, you notice what the disciples said, they thought he sinned or his parents sinned that he was born this way. And Jesus is going to deny that theory and we’re going to get into why He denied it but first a little point about blindness in the Bible. Something I didn’t realize until I began to do research on this particular passage. But you know, in all of the Bible there’s not one incident of a healing of blind person except Jesus’ healing, not one. Ananias healed Paul’s temporary blindness but that’s all; in all the healings, in all the miracles of Scripture, never is a blind person ever healed apart from the special miracle of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now another
very interesting observation; if you take all the miracles that Jesus did and
organized them on a frequency chart of which were the most frequent and which
were the least frequent, what do you suppose is the most frequent kind of
healing that Jesus did? Healing the
blind. You see, even that testifies to
the magnitude of Jesus Christ. When all the prophets and all the men who did
the miracles, which is Elijah and Moses in the Old Testament, did their many
miracles, they never healed a blind person, and
yet when the Lord Jesus Christ walks through town after town of
Turn to Isaiah 29:18; you’ll quickly see that the healing of the blind was something that the Jewish people looked forward for their Messiah, He would heal the blind. Notice, “And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness. [19] The meek also shall increase their joy in the LORD, and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel,” and so on. Continuing in Isaiah, 35:5, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.” Isaiah 42:7, what is the call of the elect servant of Yahweh? His suffering servant, His chosen servant. What is He called to do? He’s called in Isaiah 42:7 “To open the blind eyes,” something Elijah never did, something Moses never did, something no one had ever done; that’s the one the Messiah… see how clearly Jesus portrayed His Messiahship. How can anybody stumble over it.
Doctrine of suffering of John 9:2, the disciples walk by this man and they insist that the man’s congenital deformity is due to the man’s personal sin or due to his parent’s sin. This is two schools, rabbinic schools that operate. Most people at that time held that it was his parents who had sinned to bring this upon them. And by the way, that is true today; many parents who give birth to defective children blame themselves for the rest of their lives for something they supposedly did and that God’s punishing them with this deformed child. See, it’s the same theory, it’s in another century but people are the same and they come up with the same human viewpoint.
The idea of the human viewpoint suffering theory is simply the fact that in human viewpoint there is no answer to the problem of evil; evil is necessary in human viewpoint, you can’t get away from it. And therefore human viewpoint has never posed any more than the following three solutions. I don’t care who it is, I don’t care how brilliant they are, if they reject the authority of Scripture they can only handle the suffering problem and the evil problem in one of these three ways. We handle it in a fourth way but a person who denies the Bible cannot handle the problem except these three ways.
The first way is to deny that the evil is really there, kind of an auto hypnosis, and you probably know the one who’s most famous for this, Mary Baker Patterson Glover Eddy in her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, on page 243 and 244 says, (quote): “Sickness, sin and death are not the fruits of life; inasmuch as God is good He does not produce moral or physical deformity. Therefore, such deformity is not real but is illusion, the mirage of error.” Now poor Mrs. Baker Eddy had her teeth extracted and had morphine just before she died for some disease that evidently didn’t exist, and added morphine to solve the problem of pain that was just illusory and not real. And yet people have the gall to propose this absurd solution to the problem of evil, that it really isn’t there, it’s not real, it’s just an illusion. That’s one way to try to solve the problem.
The other
way is not to deny that evil exists but to deny that it is an evil
judgment. In other words, that the thing
really is evil, our sense of ugh, that sense that it’s wrong within us, our
judgment of it’s wrong. And this would
be proposed by a person such as Sir Arthur Keith who was a British
anthropologist, in his book, Evolution
and Ethics, listen to this beautiful statement: “The old tribal injunction,
‘thou shalt love thy neighbor,’ fellow tribesmen, and hate thine enemy, members
of other tribes, was restated by Jesus Christ as, ‘love your enemies, bless
them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’ Now,” says Sir Arthur Keith, “in this
amendment of the tribal law Christ tried to annihilate the law of evolution,
but after 19 centuries of Christianity the tribal crust of hate is as strong as
ever. Isn’t this due to the fact that
Christian ethics are out of harmony with human nature and are secretly
antagonistic to nature’s scheme of evolution.”
And then he goes on to add, “To see the evolutionary and tribal morality
being applied to the affairs of a great nation we must turn to
Most sensitive unbelievers try the third way out and that is the experience of the absurd, the existentialist way out, and that is that you stand on the brink of a contradiction. On one hand everything in your being says this is wrong and evil and suffering and everything outside of you says its suffering; one says it’s wrong, the other says it’s there and you stand with one foot in one world and one foot in the other and say I accept it, I sit passively by this contradiction. And how does one handle suffering in this situation? Listen to atheist Walter Kaufmann in his book, The Faith of a Heretic. “Man can stand superhuman suffering if only he does not lack the conviction that it serves some purpose. Even less severe pain, on the other hand, may seem unbearable or simply not worth enduring if it is not redeemed by any meaning.” Very good, we’d agree with Dr. Kaufmann up to this point, but now listen to what he proposes as a solution. Having rejected the Scripture, rejecting Mary Baker’s solution, rejection the evolutionary solution, what does Kaufmann say: “It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that nothing is worthwhile if the world is not governed by a purpose, we’re free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something out of it. The plain fact is that not all suffering serves a purpose and if there is any purpose to be made to it, we must give it a purpose.” So as you sit on your bed suffering, knowing in fact there is no purpose whatever to the whole thing, just pretend there’s a purpose, it’ll help you get through.
It’ sad but this is the only solution, this is the bankruptcy of human viewpoint. And then people have the nerve to say that we Christians are the ones who are blinding imposing our narrow superstitious system on society. We’re the only ones with the answer to the problem. All right, what is the answer to the problem?
The answer to the problem goes back to the doctrine of suffering which you should know by now but we’ll review six reasons why Christians suffer; same application to handicapped, same application to congenital defects, they are ultimately traced to the fall and that saves us from denying God’s goodness, God was a good God who permitted evil into existence for His own reasons, we do not know, but we know that since God is a good God they were not evil reasons. So we have the fall, we have rebellion against His plan as another source; we have our identification with the various divine institutions, we have the fact that we exist under Satan’s dominion, we have the fact that we can learn certain things and we have the fact of our testimony. So there are many reasons why these things happen, we don’t have to make them up, as Dr. Kaufmann, we don’t have to deny them as Mrs. Eddy, we don’t have to pretend our judgments are wrong as Dr. Keith. We don’t have to buy any of those three pseudo solutions. We buy God’s solution.
So what is God’s solution, then? John 9:3-4. [3, “Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.] He says no, your theory of suffering is wrong, this man has a birth defect and it id not due to the sin of his parents. He says, and notice it is a purpose clause right at the end of verse 3, “that,” and you notice it’s an elliptic purpose clause, it doesn’t seem to have any antecedent to the word “that.” You have to impose the antecedent; what is the antecedent to “that?” The birth defect. This man was born blind in order that… “in order that the works of God should be manifest in him.” That’s why, and that ultimately is the answer to all birth defects. Psalm 139 said I made that, I wove that person with a defect together, that’s part of My embroidery, says God. And I did it and I ordained his days…what did we say from Psalm 139? I made his body even with the defects in it, for the future and what I plan in the future for that person. And Jesus substantiates the theology of Psalm 139 here when He argues that this was done in order that God may work through the individual.
And in John 9:4 He adds something, something very crucial that we can apply. He says, “I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” Next Sunday I’ll interpret that more in the sense of leading into Jesus’ mission but tonight we just want to examine a principle out of verse 4 and the principle is that these deformities are finite in time. The soul is not deformed that goes into eternity. The deformities and handicaps we’re talking about are temporary, through life, and Jesus argues here there is only a limited opportunity to show forth the works of God. And this suggests that having defects since the fall make more efficient God’s revelation of His character; they provide more dense field of opportunities for God to show Himself to man. In other words, it speeds up glorification and it takes advantage of temporal history.
Now for some examples of how this worked to get firmly in mind what we’re talking about. Turn to Exodus 4, we’re going to take some Biblical men who had problems; some of these weren’t serious but they were handicaps, they were apparently born with them, and I want you to notice how God speaks to each one of these handicaps. Exodus 4:10, if you were here for the Jews for Jesus performance you remember how they pictured Moses, and this was the first time I think some of you realized that Moses had a speech impediment. Here’s the verse on it, “And Moses said unto the LORD,O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore nor since Thou hast spoken unto Thy servant; but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.” Now this is not just a lack of eloquence, that’s not just what he’s saying. “I am slow of speech and a slow tongue” means he had some sort of a speech impediment, it wasn’t very great but it was enough so that he wouldn’t want to get up before a million people and give an oration.
Now isn’t this interesting, the man who had to speak to more people
than any man ever did in history, the entire nation Israel, was a man chosen
because of his speech impediment. Now
how do we explain this? If you were God, and I’m sure if I were God I wouldn’t
pick a man with a speech impediment to do what Moses was designed to do. Let’s see what God says; Exodus
And then you remember Moses’ attitude toward his handicap, God tells him, verse 12, “Therefore go, [and I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt say.]” and do what I told you Moses, using the idea of Psalm 139 do you see why God’s telling Moses to go ahead. Moses, I know you have a birth defect, I know you have a speech impediment, I made you, and I’m the same one that made you and I’m going to send you out, I want you to do what I told you to do and that is go back to your people and talk to them about Me. I deliberately made you, Moses, this way for this calling, now do what I told you. So verse 13 is all screwed up in the King James but the gist of the matter is that Moses becomes passive toward his handicap and he argues that because of his handicap he can’t do God’s calling, he begins to whine, he begins to go into mental attitude sins and self-pity, and really we’d say self-destruction. God, I’m sorry, You didn’t know what You were doing when You made me. That’s in essence all we can say, isn’t it; if God made Moses with a speech impediment and God calls Moses to do this great work, what is the implication of Moses’ statement? God, You don’t know what You’re doing.
So obviously in Exodus
Let’s look at another illustration from Scripture, Deuteronomy 7, this is kind of a different handicap but it’s the same principle. Here’s an interesting kind of handicap, the principle comes up a lot and it came up a lot in Moses’ situation but here’s it applied to the nation. Here’s a believer called by God to a calling, so we have this goal out here. And God gets through saying I want you to do this and I want you to do that and you start to begin to fulfill God’s calling and it seems like you hit one cement wall after another. And so you hop over this one, go a little bit, bang. Hop over this one, go a little bit bang. And if you’re the subjective type by the time you hit the third cement wall you begin to say hey, wait a minute, am I in God’s will or not, what’s going on here? Why does He throw these cement walls up when this is supposedly His calling. Here you have a Scriptural answer to that problem.
Deuteronomy 7:21, God says I have called you to destroy the Canaanites, I have ordered you to destroy them in holy war, for “Thou shalt not be frightened by them; for the LORD thy God is among you, a mighty God and terrible [awesome]. [22] And the LORD thy God will put out those nations before you only,” it says, “little and little; that you may not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee.” Now what’s he saying? You’re going to run into road block after road block after road block. I have put those road blocks… I says God, have put those road blocks right in your path. Why? When you hit those road blocks you’re going to say well God, you’re unfair and if you called me… you’d create a four-lane interstate ahead of me, how come you’ve done this narrow bumpy road and I can’t even get my VW over the thing. What’s the trouble? God says “lest the beasts of the field overcome thee.” Now what’s that all about? We know the implication of the beasts. The beasts are always very closely in Scripture in this context tied in with the demonic powers. And the argument is that if He gave us an unhindered road ahead in our calling, and we began to move down that road at high speed, rapidly being sanctified, we would find ourselves vulnerable to satanic attack.
Now let me show you where that appears in the New Testament, precisely the point. 1 Timothy 3:6, here is why God seems to resist His own will for us. Speaking of the qualifications of a pastor, “I don’t want a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil,” and the point there is that the person was going to lose their grace orientation and you see the basic point in all the Christian life is the faith technique and the faith technique is orientation to grace. And if God allowed us to develop it the way we think we ought to develop, at our own rate going out here, finally we’d do a tailspin because we’d cut off ourselves from a grace attitude, we would no longer depend on the Lord, and so therefore boom, we’d be in trouble and we’d operate in a situation where Satan could take advantage of us, deceive us and do tremendous damage, not only to ourselves but to other believers. And so this is the reason why God resists, and resists and resists because every time you hit the wall, what do you do? Go back to... what was that promise, gee, I got a promise in here somewhere. You haven’t opened the Bible in three weeks, everything was going good. Bang! Blow it off [apparently holds up Bible] and look at it, find out what’s in there.
Now again this is a simple training that God has because He knows darned well what’s going to happen. Give you an easy time… and I’ve seen this in this congregation. I have seen some believers that it seems they cannot go more than a week without suffering. I have seen people here who come faithfully, who attend faithfully, who I know when they are not here, out in business or something, they’re on tapes, they’re constantly taking in the Word of God, and they seem to have steady growth. And then there are others, just as soon as they encounter blessing you never see them around, just fade out completely. And then I’ll be sitting here about 11:15 some morning and they come crawling in the door, have one of the ushers, will you show me a pew, all bloody and cut up from some disaster, and they’ll be here, oh pastor, oh, I’ve had a disaster. And they’ll try to get 18 appointments with me over the next two days to see if we can solve the problem and put all the pieces back together again. And then off sailing into the blue for another crash. So this is why God provides roadblocks. And often the road block will take the form of a handicap, perhaps an accident that will bring in a handicap on the person or perhaps just from birth God knows well, I’m weaving this one together but I know what he needs, because God knows our personality from birth. And because He does, in His love He provides those; and it’s hard, we’re not making light of the pain and the sorrow that happened at those hurdles. All we’re trying to do is go back and see the bigger picture behind those, why God does this.
Let’s turn to another man in Scripture. This one had more of a personality problem but again the principle would be the same to a physical problem. Judges 6-7. All during these examples there’s a theme that you want to remember. God has eternity in mind for you and for me; He’s interested in conforming us to the character, the moral character of the Lord Jesus Christ, not the Greek beauty and brains image. Gideon, in this section of Scripture you have a man, who as we exegeted when we went through the Judges series, Gideon was a man who was an extremely timid individual. And you recall the famous incident in Judges 6:11, “And there came an angel of the LORD, and sat under an oak which was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash … and his son, Gideon, threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites.” And you remember what the angel of the Lord said? Well, “might man of valor,” hiding from the Midianites. Now what God is going to do, and there’s more than humor here, God has in mind for Gideon a certain eternal destiny in which Gideon will manifest spiritual courage. Right now Gideon has a natural disposition, besides the fact that he’s out of it by faith, he has apparently a natural disposition of timidity; it does not come within his nature to be at all courageous. And this is the way his personality is; this is the way he was born.
Now God begins to work with Gideon and he begins to humor him at first. He says, “O mighty man of valor.” But notice in the famous test of Judges 7:2 “And the LORD said to Gideon, The people who are with tee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands,” now this is true, it’s oriented against Israel but in the context it’s also oriented against Gideon, “lest Israel vaunt themselves against Me, saying, Mine own hand has saved me.” Why is God giving a handicap and a road block to those people? Isn’t it the same reason we saw in 1 Timothy 3:6? Lest pride come in, He wants to keep us grace oriented and sometimes as He knows our personalities better than we do we have got to trust His wisdom, that for us, with our situation, we need that testing, we need that trial, and to question that we need it is to question the wisdom of God in giving it.
Let’s look at another case, this apparently again involved a speech
problem. Jeremiah 1:5, it’s just amazing
the number of men who have been called into the prophetic ministry of ancient
Jeremiah 1:7, “But the LORD said unto me, Don’t you say I am a child,” see that attitude again toward a handicap, toward an impediment. God refuses the person to whine and cry to God because of it. It’s very interesting, you see this time and time again. I made you the way I made you, don’t come to me about that. I tell you to trust me with this thing that I’ve given you and don’t start coming to me, blaming me the way I have made you. “Don’t’ say I am a child; for you shall go to all that I send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. [8] Don’t be afraid of their faces; I am with thee to deliver thee,” now why do you suppose he added verse 8? Because that’s exactly what Jeremiah would have done in his natural personality. He was a shy man and he would have been afraid of their faces. He’d have been afraid to stand up in front of two people to speak. But what does God tell him? Jeremiah, that’s exactly the place I’m going to train you in orientation to grace, I’m going to pick your weakest area from the human point of view and I’m going to put up here this standard of performance that you never could reach with your natural limited assets, and I’ve designed your life that way, Jeremiah, because I want you to be a grace oriented man. And that’s the only way you, with your body, with your personality is ever going to get grace oriented, for Me to constantly pressure in this one area. So you just trust Me, I’ll be with you in all these situations.
It’ just an awesome command and awesome answer. You don’t find God saying oh, poor Jeremiah,
we have to put you in a special class.
You don’t find that, not at all, that’s not the philosophy of God. Turn to Jonah 4 for another little angle on
this problem of handicaps a little incident down at the end. Jonah had completed his ministry at
Jonah 4:4, “And then said the LORD, Do you do well to be angry? [5] And Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the hill, and there made a booth,” see, he’s pouting out there, sulking, “and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.” Watch God blast him. [6] “And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief,” apparently he couldn’t even build a booth with a roof on it, God had to provide a roof from the heat. “So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the gourd.” Now notice, Jonah’s emotional response, he is “exceedingly glad,” he’s got his eye on this gourd. God’s got His eye on his soul for all eternity. And here he is out pouting in this little modified outhouse with a gourd for a roof. This means he’s ecstatic over this gourd. See, the trivial thing. So verse 7, “But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd, that it withered. [8] And it came to pass, when the sun did rise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live.”
Jonah 4:9, “And God said to Jonah, Do you do well to be angry for
the gourd? And he said, I do well to be
angry, even unto death.” The angry
response of Jonah, the emotional subjectiveness of his own soul. [10] “Then said God to Jonah, Thou hast pity
on the gourd, for which you have not labored, you didn’t make it grow; it came
up in a night, and it perished in a night.
[11] And should not I spare
What’s the meaning of God’s response to Jonah? Jonah, you think in terms of the ultra trivial; you are so fixed on your personal moment by moment comfort, you’re so glad of the release from an impediment, that you don’t have to suffer because you’ve got this beautiful gourd over here. And has that modified your behavior pattern? Has it made you a happier man? Not at all, because basically Jonah, you’re the kind of man that can’t stand temporal blessing. The first time you get temporal blessing you go into ecstatics over it but there’s no change in your soul so what I have to do is I have to remove that temporal blessing, I cut it down. I bring it to you quickly and I take it away quickly because you can’t take prosperity. And the quality, and it’s obvious from that last verse, what’s the quality God’s getting at Jonah? Minus grace orientation, Jonah doesn’t have it and that’s what God wants to see in his soul and God is going to perpetually harass him with the east wind and make him physically suffer until he has that attitude.
We could go through many of these instances, we’re going to finish with 2 Corinthians 12 which is the classic location for this problem of handicaps. Paul was a man who fought a handicap that was terrible in his life. We don’t know, scholars have debated over what it was, but the medical opinion, if you want to read this in very good form by a man who’s got a lot of background it, Man in Adam and Christ by Dr. Arthur Custance of Canada and he summarizes the medical evidence on Paul’s life that can be inferred from the text of the New Testament. And he has a great deal of evidence to suggest that this infirmity of the flesh was given to Paul very shortly after his conversion. He says there’s a tremendous shift in Paul’s personality; first Paul is the aggressive Pharisee, Saul, the fighter, Saul the man that goes everywhere and attacks and destroys, Saul the arrogant, Saul the powerful. And he says when you examine how he acts toward certain situations in his epistles, when you examine remarks he makes about his own health, when you examine remarks that in extra-biblical tradition describe Paul as almost a paralytic, as a man who was a hunchback in his later years, who was a man who had very little physical coordination left before he died, a man who apparently showed tremendous distortion and handicap in his physical body.
He mentions his own problems with human speech in Corinthians. Paul apparently deteriorated much, he
deteriorated so much that he had to apologize to the church at
Verse 6, “For though I would desire to glory, I shall not be a fool;
for I will say the truth. But now I
forbear, lest any man should think of me above that which he sees me to be, or
that he hears of me.” “Sees me to be and
hears of me,” do you know what Paul means there? What he meant earlier in the
same epistle when he says you know, I don’t present much of an impression when
I come in here. Remember he says to the
Corinthians, you people, I know what you’re going to say, you’re going to say
how can he be so bold in his epistles when he has such a weak unimpressive
personal appearance. So what he’s really
saying at the end of verse 6 is I don’t want you to think any more highly of me
than my physical wreck of a body that you see me come in, every time I come to
Verse 7, “And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the demon [messenger] of Satan,” so it was a demonic power that God released to be used to physically harm Paul, “lest I should be exalted above measure….” [8] “For this thing I sought the Lord three times, that it might depart from me. [9] But He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” In verse 9 you have in one verse a capsule summary of the divine viewpoint of all handicaps.
I’d like to draw attention to verse 9 because it prevents you from being passive. I know some people would take this and say well, that means that I shouldn’t seek any medical help, that I should avoid any operations, maybe, that would help me, because after all, God has willed this. That is a passive fatalistic application of a true doctrine. Notice in the same context in verse 8 what Paul did. He “besought the Lord three times, that it might depart from him.” Now that means that when a person does have a defect, when a person does face a physical handicap, yes, seek correction of that condition as much as possible. Don’t accept it passively, Paul didn’t. He’s your model; if you need an operation or if you have to undergo certain therapy, undergo that therapy, undergo that operation, see, out what you can do to minimize… because ultimately it is an effect of the fall. But having done all that, be prepared for a “no” answer, and be prepared to operate on the basis that “My grace is sufficient for thee, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.”
In conclusion I want to read just a short paragraph from Dr. Custance’s article about a medical doctor who at the age of twenty-nine got a disease, encephalitis [not sure of word: sounds like: ortho gi ca], which is a type of disease that gradually atrophies the body. “The English Medical Journal, the Lancelot, several years ago published a series of articles providing first hand accounts of what patients themselves have thought of disabling diseases. One of these accounts was written by a doctor who contracted this disease at the age of twenty-nine years old. In vivid language he describes the relentless course of his disease. First his hands began to vibrate, then writing became illegible; then he could no longer remember the names and faces of his patients. And later on, walking became so difficult that it was easier to walk backwards than forwards. And eating always had been a most difficult task, salivation being excessive. In time his eyelids began to stick to his eyeballs. And finally, only one finger responded to his desires and it was with this one finger that he tapped out the articles that he wrote. In spite of this, in due time he became known as “the author” and two of his plays were broadcast by the BBC. Then this one finger began to fail. Despite the terrible handicaps, he often described himself, [quote] ‘as a happy man with dozens of compensations.’”
The closing words of his testimony are remarkable. [quote] “How has this disease affected my character and my temperament? All for the better, I think. I can bear the keenest disappointment with almost complete equanimity; I am now much more sympathetic and can better understand other people’s foibles, peculiarities, bothers and ailments. My belief that man possesses a separate entity apart from his husk of a body has been greatly strengthened by my experiences. I sit, as it were, inside my [can’t understand word], watching my person behaving in its vile fashion, while my being is a thing apart, held a prisoner for only a short time. This rather queer sensation of being outside one’s self has been exaggerated by my complaint. It is most comforting and strengthens my faith that there is not complete extinction ahead but a better deal in a new life.”
Character development as a result of physical handicap. Why does God allow this? He, in Psalm 139, weaves our bodies and organizes our preordained days. Why? Because He loves us and wants us conformed to Christ’s image. And if it takes a handicap, God loves us enough to give us one, in spite of the fact we curse His face for it, God knows better and He knows we need that in order to get the character for eternity.