Clough John Lesson 43
The Light and the Word Brings Worship – John 9:5-41
In this passage
the Lord Jesus Christ is continuing His confrontation tactics in the city of
We studied last time the problem of physical handicaps, we introduced the problem of congenital blindness and we gave you, I hope, some help, if you face this problem of handicap yourself, or loved ones, or you face worse, a birth defect that is crippling for life, that the Word of God has something very definite to say to you and it has something that no psychiatrist can tell you, no psychologist can help you with it because they don’t have the ultimate frame of reference that the Word of God has. They can only help you substitute one gimmick for another gimmick but the Word of God has a definite philosophy of life, something to cope with handicaps and birth defects. So we spent some time pausing in the first four verses to examine this problem of suffering, a problem that is often maltreated today, a problem that is treated wrongly by most people simply because they’re embarrassed by it, those who are handicapped feel guilty, those who are handicapped feel they are second class citizens or worse yet, go into mental attitude sins of envy and self-pity and crippling themselves spiritually as spiritually.
But moving on, we come now to the great discourse on the light. Jesus says, “I am the light of the world,” and that’s the theme, the light. So since this is one of those, what I call… well, Carl Gustav Jung called “the collective unconscious” of the human race. And he argued that all men, whether they’re in Africa, Asia, Europe, or whatever, that all men in the depths of their being have these fundamental symbols, and he can’t very well explain it on an evolutionary base but we can. Now that this fundamental framework is, these fundamental images that all men carry in their souls, is part of our God-consciousness; we’re made in God’s image. And so the sea, the violence of the sea is used again and again in Scripture for certain things. The wind is used in Scripture over and over again for the things of the Spirit of God. Now the light, that too is one of these great fundamental themes that can be understood by any man, anywhere, whatever his language or culture. It’s a fundamental symbol of the soul of humanity.
We want to, then, before we get to the specifics and the details of Jesus’ give and take here, we want to examine more about the symbol of light. We want to go back to Genesis 1 to see where light is first mentioned in Scripture. In Genesis 1:2 the condition of the earth “was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was moving upon the face of the waters.” Notice again the cosmogony of Genesis argues against everything that you have ever learned in all of your education. If your education is right then you must reject Scripture and throw it in the ash can. On the other hand, if Scripture is right, then everything you have ever learned has to be reevaluated very seriously and very radically in the light of the Word of God. That’s the challenge that Genesis throws us. You’ll notice that creation begins with planet earth; it doesn’t begin with some sort of a primeval cluster of energy and matter that explodes into Isaac Asimov’s expanding universe concept. It’s none of that. Or I should say George Gamow’s idea of The Big Bang. It’s not that at all. The earth sits there, it exists materially, and it’s dark, and God’s first work in verses 3-4 is “Let there be light.” Now it’s not absolutely His first work because obviously He has brought earth into existence first, prior to the light. But it’s interesting that after earth is brought into existence then comes the light and the light does not wholly encompass the earth for there is still darkness there, so much darkness that it’s necessary in verse 4 for God to divide the light from the darkness. “And the light He called Day, and the darkness He called Night.” Why is that? Because God sets up the fundamental language of thought. These categories are too all encompassing for human finite man to begin with and so God gives us a head start by setting up a basic vocabulary for thought.
When all of Dr. Arthur Custance’s book are in the library I hope many of you will take these out and read, they’re very stimulating books, Zondervan has just come out with three of the ten volume set on this great creative thinker in the evangelical cause, you don’t have to agree with everything he says but I think many of you will find him the most stimulating author you’ve read in a long time. He points out a very interesting fact that in history wherever there has been children raised without a mother and a father, what we call feral children, they’re accidents, sometimes their parents are killed and they’re left in the wilderness to grow up and there have been these cases and they have learned to survive on the berries and the fruit and so on; other times they’ve actually been raised by animals. We call those feral children, the case of the feral children. And whenever in history we have cases of feral children, even cases when two feral children grow up together so there’s not a case of an isolated human being in the wilderness, it’s a case of two isolated human beings in the wilderness who have no other language speaking human around them, Dr. Custance points out it’s the record that when that happens the two feral children can never speak.
And it obviously argues that there is something outside of us that is necessary to trigger language, because although we have the brain and we have the thought equipment we need an outside trigger. And so the question that Arthur Custance raises is who taught Adam to speak? Obviously God did and here you see Him giving the first vocabulary in existence. Language is not self-starting; language has to be started from outside of your thought pattern and therefore the Bible is correct when it argues that man is a creation and that God had to initiate the language process; incidentally, evolution has no explanation for language, none whatsoever.
Now here in Genesis 1 God makes light and notice that He has only partial light because there is light and there is darkness. The darkness is not evil, the darkness is just there. Now that’s the picture of the first creation and that’s the picture given in the first chapter of your Bible. Now turn to the very end of the Bible, to Revelation 22, the last chapter. You go from the first chapter of the Bible to the last chapter of the Bible and there’s a progress in the history of the universe. In Genesis 1 you see the universe in what we call mortal history. We’re going to have two vocabulary words that are important as labels to describe what’s going on here. Genesis 1 gives us the first creation and mortal history. I’ll explain that in a moment, just understand the label; mortal history, Genesis 1, light and darkness.
Now in Revelation
22 we read, as John is granted the most exotic revelation that ever occurred,
John was honored as the last apostle to die, the old man on the island of
Patmos, exiled there, apparently all alone.
Caesar thought he had John; Caesar thought at last he’d gotten rid of
John, the pesky John who was always in Ephesus, starting off the Christians in
their problems and not integrating them into the Roman kingdom. And so he got rid of John, he thought. Surely
John will be safe from
And so in Revelation 22:1, “And He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. [2] In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, there was the tree of life,” notice the recurrent theme, in Genesis the tree of life, in Revelation 22 the tree of life again. And here the tree of life is no longer barricaded, its “bore twelve kinds of fruits, yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. [3] And there shall be no more curse,” the end of sin in existence, “there shall be no more curse,” no more death, all these things have passed away, “but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it;” notice this, where in the universe is God’s throne going to be? Planet earth; the planet earth is the theological center of the universe. Ptolemy may have been wrong and the early church may have been wrong, we’re not saying absolutely, but may have been wrong in making the planet earth the geophysical center of the universe, but the Church was dogmatically right in making planet earth the center of the universe theologically; it is going to be the headquarters of God Himself. “…the throne of God, and of the Lamb shall be in planet earth; and His servants shall serve Him. [4] And they shall see His face; and His name shall be in their foreheads,” they will have absolute intuitive knowledge of God’s being, not perfect in the sense of omniscience but they will have instant immediate revelation.”
Revelation 22:5, “And there shall be,” in verse 5, and the context of verse 4 is the key, “And there shall be no night there, and they shall need no candle [lamp], neither light of the sun; for the Lord God gives them light, and they shall reign forever and ever.” Notice what is said, that in immortal history, in that great second creation which we have not yet seen, the second creation will be physically lighted by the glory of God. It will not be necessary to separate the light from the day, for it says here “there shall be no night there.” No night, no darkness. This is not just talking spiritually, this is not just symbols, this is a description of the physical universe as it shall be after Christ transforms it. There shall be no darkness, “there shall be no night.” And notice it is in the context of verse 4. Why? Because “they shall see His face,” … “they shall see His face!”
Notice too why
this happens, it goes on to describe this kingdom, it goes on to describe, [6]
“… These saying are faithful and true; and the Lord God of the holy prophets
sent His angel to show unto His servants the things which must shortly be
done.” The idea is that this is a
certain thing, that the light is going to envelop the darkness. Notice back in the previous chapter, in
Revelation 21:22, “And I saw not temple therein; for the Lord God Almighty and
the Lamb are the temple of it.” They are the temple of it! They are
the temple, much like Revelation 22:4, there is an immediacy to the glory of
God. Verse 23 of chapter 21 draws the
same conclusion from verse 22 as in chapter 22 verse 5 draws a conclusion from
verse 4. In other words, chapter 22:4-5
go together and 21:22-23 go together.
And if you look at verse 23 it says “the city had no need of the sun,
neither of the moon, to shine in it; for the glory of God did light it, and the
Lamb is the light [lamp] thereof.” So
physically there is no darkness.
Now let’s come back to the theme; there is a difference between mortal history and immortal history. Mortal history is that time of physical existence when we as creatures are being tested for our loyalty. There is an address being made to your volition and to mine, are you or are you not going to submit to the authority of God’s absolute Word? That’s the issue. Are we or are we not going to be Creator oriented; are we going to be grace oriented? Are we going to worship the Father’s Son? Are we going to accept Him as the Father says we are to accept him, or will we reject. Now because this is a time of testing and because this is a time when God does not want to coerce and make phony decisions, God has provided both light and darkness so that those who reject the light will have a place, a place to hide. And so in mortal history there is darkness; it offers men respite because the man who defies and shakes his fist in the face of God, God is gracious to him too, for a while. He offers that man the opportunity of shelter, and darkness becomes the shelter for rebellion. It is a God-given shelter for rebellion, not for eternity but just for a time, that the rebellious person may never be forced to decide for Jesus Christ; he may be comfortable, partially, in his rebellion against the Word.
Turn to John 1 as John picks up the theme of light. He begins his Gospel with this light, he says in John 1:4, “In him was life; and the life was the light of man.” The light and the life are associated; it’s not any accident that in the physical world light and life are associated. One of the things that I’ve been working with recently is a little amateur solar-powered greenhouse, and one of the things I’ve been working with it in is to produce an awareness on the part of some of my children to see that life hangs by a slender thread; there’s only one process in history that supports us: photosynthesis. Destroy photosynthesis and we all die; no animal can survive without eating plants; we can’t survive, and if all the plants in the world today were deprived of light the photosynthetic process could no longer make food and we would starve to death within a matter of weeks. Light is necessary for life; God has designed the physical universe to be that way to remind us of the spiritual reality behind it.
And so in John 1:5 John argues that “the light keeps on shining in darkness; and the darkness has comprehended it not,” that is, it has not stopped it. The darkness is the shelter for the rebellious man, so for a time in history he’s given respite from judgment, in order to really make up his mind, do you really want this, is this really the way you want to live your life, or do you want to come out of that darkness into the light. God, in other words, is saying I’m not going to rush you exactly this moment, I’m giving you some time to decide so when you do decide it will be a real choice.
In John 1:9 John picks up the theme again, Jesus Christ “was the true Light, that lighteth every man coming into the world.” And John insists here that just as real physical light is necessary in order that you can see the external world and see your way through it, so he makes the profound observation that no knowledge is possible apart from the Triune God of the Bible. Some of you trained in philosophy or are interested in philosophy, you ought to pay very careful attention to verse 9… very careful attention. That verse is insisting that the locus of all knowledge is in the person of Christ and the presupposition of all knowledge is the Trinity of Scripture, that in fact you can’t have any knowledge whatsoever apart from the presupposing of Jesus Christ. And that’s a stupendous claim; that’s what John makes as he begins his Gospel. No knowledge is possible, including 2 + 2 is 4 apart from presupposing the existence of the God of the Bible.
Now in John 3:19-21 he develops the theme into its moral dimension, and I think when we get here we’ll be prepared for Jesus’ discussion. John does this again and again in his Gospel. In the Greek the word judgment can be written two ways; one is krisis, the other is krisma, krisis obviously looks like what English word? Crisis, and that’s’ what John is talking about, the judgment or crisis. To him, the incoming of Christ into the world produced the world’s greatest it has ever seen, a crisis that would not reverberate politically right away, but it was a crisis to mend souls. The “is” ending on a Greek noun, for those of you studying Greek, it’s a quick way to remember vocabulary, you have an “is” ending on your noun it refers to the process. This is the process of judgment. When you see a “ma” ending that is the result of the process. So when John writes krisma we mean the result of the judgment; when he writes krisis he refers to the process of judgment, and in verse 19-21 he is speaking of krisis, the process of judgment. “This is the condemnation” or the process of judgment, “ that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were continually evil. [20] For everyone that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. [21] But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.”
And so the only people that come out of that shelter of mortal history from the darkness into the light are those creatures that are being drawn by the Spirit of God. You might say that history can be looked at two ways; it can be looked at as God bringing men from the darkness into the light, or it can be that the darkness penetrates the light to drive men into the darkness who rebel. Either way you’ve got the picture of John; one a positive, one a negative. The light draws men to it, but the light repels. Walk into your room some time at home when there are about five roaches in the middle of the living room floor and turn the light on and watch what happens. That’s the picture John has of the sinner before the light of God. The light goes on and they flee for the nearest cover. And this is the overall outline of his Gospel.
How are men fleeing today? It’s easy, just watch men reject, they have a nice human viewpoint device for doing it, let’s take a few example so we can be really sure we understand how krisis is occurring in our generation. In the area of science men are arguing on the uniformitarian principle; they are arguing that principles that we observe in the present moment must be extrapolated backwards in time and that the become in themselves absolutes, and that there is such a thing as autonomous immutable omnipotent natural law. This doesn’t exist, of course, it exists only in the imagination of the western thinker. But nevertheless, they insist that science be built on this premise and if you dare to come into the science classroom with your Bible they say now the Bible is a very good book, the Bible helps us and we agree that the Bible can do wonders in your life but only one thing we ask, please don’t use it in this classroom. Use your Bible in the hall but don’t bring it in the classroom. The reason is that we must have an autonomous area, a shelter of darkness protected from the light in which we can operate in our rebellion. We must not allow the Scriptures in to affect our discussion seriously. So therefore it is excluded, so men in John’s terms are fleeing to the darkness and rejecting the light.
We see it politically; politically it would be referred to as neutralism, the idea, sometimes the distorted version of separation of Church and state, whereas I can function politically but let me just function politically and you people keep your Bible to yourself; let it not interfere with the political process. Isn’t it amazing, everybody fussed about Watergate; everybody fussed at oh, how horrible the ethics were of the people that hold high offices, and yet when you take the source of the ethics, the Bible, and try to inject it into the political process, oh, you can’t do that, that’s not being properly neutral. Now you can’t have one without the other. Either you’re going to have the Word of God and its ethics or you’re not going to have the Word of God and you’re going to have pragmatism. And on a non-Biblical basis what was done at Watergate is absolutely right. There is no one in this room and no one in the west and no one in America who can argue against Watergate on a non-Biblical basis; none. Watergate and anything else is perfectly legitimate once you’ve dismissed the Bible as an authority, an effective authority in the area of political thought. And so we go from science to politics and we could go to education, we could go to some other area and we’d be here all night. But I just show you some of these areas to show you that the light in the darkness and the krisis is still occurring because we are Christ’s extension in this generation, we are the ambassadors for Christ and we represent the light and the light must challenge the darkness in every generation and the men who love darkness will always flee to the darkness and resist the light.
So now we are prepared for this great, somewhat humorous dialogue in John 9. It’s one of the great literary highlights, many scholars think, of this Gospel. It’s a highlight in many ways; it’s a highlight, probably, because of the pathos of this man who was born with a congenital blindness, a man who never saw. A man, who, if he was born with congenital blindness, understand this, that his brain had no pathways to interpret optical data. Now this many surprise some of you but the miracle here is not just that the man got a new lens for his eyeball; the miracle is not just that a new eyeball was constructed with the eye muscles, and remember the eye muscles have never been used. The miracle isn’t just that; the miracle is that instantly when Christ created that man’s eyes He created the pathways to the optical nerve up to the brain so that he was able to look out and interpret immediately the data that was coming in through a completely new input to his brain. Before the blind man felt and he had heightened sensory perception; he had a heighten audio perception, he could hear. And this is only how a blind person can do, they hear and they can touch and they can sense but they can’t see. And so their whole thinking process has been colored by how they perceive the world through these senses. And here’s a man who within a split second of time, not only receives his sight but receives the ability to categorize optical phenomenon. And this is what Christ does and we’ll now examine how He does it.
The setting is still in the atmosphere of terror, terror that accompanied this Feast of the Tabernacles, we’ve noted it several times in the text; everyone is fearful of what the police are going to do, the Pharisaic police, who are moving in to trap Jesus and to squeeze Him out, to prevent any accumulation of people around this person of Christ; this must be cut off. And so they terrorize the people of their day. And in this atmosphere of terror, that’s the background for what’s going to happen now. You miss the whole thing if you don’t understand that everyone is shaking in their boots, it is a time of intense terror and intense intimidation; religious legalists always do this, they are specialists in intimidating people.
Now that’s significant because that’s the background that occurred prior to this remark. Now in the light of that Jesus had the audacity to say this to a group of people who had looked up at those 80 foot high lights that represented the light of God’s Word and Jesus just seems to almost casually say, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Now could anybody who is a good man and not God conceivably say this with a straight face and be considered sane? Obviously not. You see how important it is for you to grasp the background of the New Testament, to see what a magnificent Christ we have. These are the claims that Christ is making and as we go down through here I want you to notice how Christ acts toward people. And I hope that some of you that have a caricature of Jesus that you’ll get your caricature straightened out by how Jesus really acted in these situation.
John 9:6, “When He had thus spoken,” and remember, He is talking in front of this blind man, “as long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” He says right in front of the man, “and 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, [7] And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.” Now we have to stop at verse 6 and ask a question. Why is it that Jesus goes through this rigmarole of spit and clay to heal a person’s eyes. Haven’t we seen Jesus heal before? Haven’t we seen Him just walk up to the person, “Take up your bed and be healed?” Haven’t we seen Him do this on time and occasion, just heal directly by a command of His Word? Haven’t we seen Him create wine, which involves a creation of new atoms, H2O doesn’t have carbon atoms in it, wine does. When Jesus instantly created wine out of water there was a molecular and an atomic creation that occurred there. Now if Jesus did that with an issue of a word, surely He doesn’t need spit and clay to create an eyeball, to create an optic nerve. Why does Jesus do this peculiar thing of spit and clay? And then why does Jesus retire and tell him go wash in the pool of Siloam? He doesn’t have to wash in the pool of Siloam.
Jesus here is going to take on the Pharisaic establishment in a head-on collision. I brought with me part of the Mishnah and I’m going to read sections of the Pharisaic law that Jesus deliberately violated on this occasion. This is in a section called the Shabbat that deals with the area of the Sabbath, Shabbat 7:2, “The main classes of work are forty,” these are the ones prohibited on the Shabbat or the Sabbath day. “The main classes of work are forty, save one: sewing, plowing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, cleansing crops, grinding, sifting and kneading,” and that’s exactly what Jesus is going to do, He’s going to knead the clay with the spit and He’s going to do it right in front of the Pharisees; kneading is a direct violation of the high Shabbat law of the Pharisees. What else is Jesus going to do to irritate people. In Shabbat 14 we have a passage describing what can and cannot be done as far as anointing is concerned. “If a person’s teeth pain him he may not suck vinegar through them but he may take vinegar after his usual fashion. If he is healed he is healed. If his loins pain him he may not rub thereon wine or vinegar, yet he may anoint them with oil, but not with rose oil. The king’s children may anoint their wounds with rose oil, since it’s their custom to do so on ordinary days.” But then Rabbi [?] says: “All Israelites are king’s children.” And this goes on and on and on with this Pharisaic legislation.
But the gist of the Pharisaic legislation is that kneading and
anointing were specifically prohibited to do on the Sabbath day. So what does
Jesus do right in front of them: He kneads and he anoints. It is a deliberately engineered violation of
the legalism of the Pharisees. I delight
in showing this because so man Christians take this interpretation of 1
Corinthians that you must not irritate another Christian. A Christian who is a legalist you have to be
careful of, you might be a stumbling block to him. These Christians do not understand what that
stumbling block is but that doesn’t happen to be it, by the way. The stumbling block mentioned in Romans 14
and 1 Corinthians 8 has to do when someone has an area of weakness and you
encourage them in it; that’s what it’s talking about. Example: If someone is an alcoholic and you
deliberately drink right in front of them, you are a stumbling block to them,
you are encouraging them to go into an area where they are not morally equipped
to handle it yet. Now that’s what the
stumbling block is about; the stumbling block doesn’t mean if you happen to
walk into a group of believers who say that every woman who wears lipstick is a
prostitute, which they do in the New England area still to this day, that you,
if you’re a girl, you can’t wear lipstick.
I was talking to a man from
And so He spits, and by the way, there’s a process here too, the reason for the spitting is that in the ancient world saliva was said to have a healing quality and when He anoints this, to us it seems dirty but it really isn’t, saliva happens to be a very … known as a saline solution that obviously God isn’t going to design saliva in your mouth that’s going to be necessarily evil to your body; after all, everything that goes down has to go through it. Well, if it’s poison you’ve got problems. So saliva was said to have healing, purging qualities. Now Jesus isn’t affirming this superstition but it gives you background for why He uses that to anoint with. But there’s another element in this anointing that goes beyond just breaking the Sabbath. Notice what He anoints with? He spits on the ground and picks up clay off the ground—clay! What does that remind you of? How was the first man created? In Genesis 2:7 God made Adam from the dust of the earth. And what is Jesus Christ claiming here? I’m the Creator; as long as I’m in the world I’m the light of the world and you know why I’m the light of the world? Because I’m the Creator of the world, I am the One qualified to input light into the system because I am the Creator and to prove it to you, He says, I will ritually enact the act of creation in front of your face. And ironically the act of creation in front of their faces is not permitted by their own legalistic principles. Isn’t that amazing? The most profound history is the act of creation and following the legalistic premises God Himself couldn’t even create on the Sabbath day. That’s how restrictive legalism is to God and His activities.
So Jesus Christ then reaches down and He puts the clay on, and then tells him to go down to the pool of Siloam. Maybe to get this point across, if we were to take a more contemporary illustration, it would be like Jesus walked over to the campus of Texas Tech and demands an appointment to the chair of the professor of geology. And to cite and to show forth His credentials, to qualify him for the chair, He says I will produce sedimentary rock by floodal mechanisms in the nearest [can’t understand words] and so He takes the faculty of the geo science department out for a little experiment and so water comes cascading down into the lake and lo and behold, after it drains off we have the most beautiful sedimentary rock formation they’ve ever seen, and instead of being amazed that sedimentary rock can be made rather rapidly this way the faculty are all upset by the fact that He’s violated the uniformitarian principle in His experiment.
So here Jesus does the most miraculous work possible, the creation of a man’s eyeballs, his optical nerve, all of his optical interpretive processes in his brain and the concern of the Pharisees, He violated Shabbat 7:2.
Let’s see where this miracle occurred; [he shows slides]. We went to the pool at Siloam and I want to
show you where it is relative to the temple.
Here’s the temple area, this is from the model on display in the city of
There’s a reason for Him doing this: it attracts the attention of the Pharisees. Jesus wants the Pharisees to see the violation but He’s going to do it indirectly. You see, if He had done this out in the open, in front of the Pharisees they would be so emotionally charged against Jesus, just His person, that they wouldn’t see the work. So what Jesus is going to do, He’s going to do the same thing but He’s going to let the blind man be His messenger, so that the Pharisees won’t interact personally with Jesus first, they’re going to have to react first with the work of Christ before they interact with the person of Christ, and that order is set to avoid the emotional problems that they were having over His person.
So He sends the man down; he is healed and now John 9:8-14 we have the introduction of the Pharisees. “The neighbors therefore, and they which before had seen him that he was blind, said, Is not this he that sat and begged? [9] Some said, This is he: others said, He is like him: but he said, I am he.” Everywhere he’s going people argue you can’t be, oh yes I am, look at me, I am the same guy. And he was having an identity crisis in his own neighborhood. Verse 10, “Therefore said they unto him, How were thine eyes opened? [11] He answered and said, A man that is called Jesus made clay,” verse 11 is put in there by John to show you how little this man knew of Jesus. See, he was objective. The whole key in this is here’s a blind man who is objective; here’s people with side boards subjective. And the objective blind man knows more than the subjective person with all his sight. He’s objective, he doesn’t know who Jesus is, he doesn’t now al the theological hassle that’s been going on, he just says “A guy called Jesus made clay, and anointed mine eyes, and said unto me, Go to the pool of Siloam, and wash: and I went and washed, and I received sight. [12] Then said they unto him, Where is He? He said, I don’t know where He is [I know not]. [13] They brought to the Pharisees him that aforetime was blind.”
So now the neighbors decide this miracle has implications. The reason they do this is they are obvious, as the man is, that nowhere in the Old Testament was anyone ever healed of blindness. This is what I pointed out earlier, it’s a startling fact. Turn where you will in the Bible you will never find a healing of a miracle of a blind man; never, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. And that’s a reason that particular miracle of healing a blind man was saved; God didn’t let Elisha do it, God didn’t let Moses do it, God didn’t let Samuel do it, God held that miracle back so that when His Messiah came the Messiah could do this as a show-sign miracle to say see, I’m waving a flag, this is a Messianic miracle that no prophet does, only Messiah does. These people seem to have an idea that something’s going on like that. And so since they’re afraid, the atmosphere is one of terror, keep that in mind, atmosphere of terror, they don’t really want to say it so they say well, let’s just kind of go and show the Pharisees, see what they say.
John
John 9:18, “But the Jews did not believe concerning him, that he had been blind, and received his sight, until they called the parents of him that had received his sight. [19] And they asked them, saying, Is this your son, who ye say was born blind? how then doth he now see?” Now in verses 20-23 observe the behavior of the parents. Keep in mind I told you the atmosphere of this whole thing is intimidation and fear. [20] His parents answered them and said, We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind: [21] But by what means he now seeth, we know not; or who hath opened his eyes, we know not: he is of age; ask him: he shall speak for himself. [22] These words spoke his parents, because they feared the Jews: for the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. [23] Therefore said his parents, He is of age; ask him.”
Let’s look at the pressure, this is what the Greek word looks like, apo, that’s the prefix and the main noun is sunagogos, the congregation; apo, from. “To put from the congregation” or excommunicate. Now you see the Holy Spirit in all its wisdom selected this incident so we could be edified all down through the Church Age because the position of the blind man is going to be the position of many, many Jews who are going to have to be ejected from their community by their identification of Messiah. Listen to the Jews for Jesus or Arnold [Fruchtenbaum] when he comes, they’ll tell you what happens. So down through history this is to prepare this blind man that was so gutsy, he isn’t afraid of being excommunicated, but his parents are. His parents are successfully intimidated by the legalistic rulers of the day. So they transfer all… they don’t want to get involved you see. The greatest miracle, perhaps in the history of the world up until that point, has just occurred to their own son, but these parents are so out of it spiritually that they don’t want to get involved.
Now can you imagine parents thinking this way, parents who when
their son was born probably grieved that here… you know you don’t discover the
baby is blind for maybe a couple of weeks and you notice he doesn’t respond
like the other babies, and you put your hands in front and the eyes don’t
track. Maybe the eyes even look
blind. And you can imagine the tragedy
in that home over many, many years of having to raise a blind son, not being
able to play in the streets, until he learned to look out for the carts and the
horses that were going up and down the narrow streets of
John
John
The word “if” in verse 33 is a second class, if and it’s not so, that is, if and He is of God. See the man knows Jesus Christ is from God, he just doesn’t know his Christology, that’s all, he doesn’t know how to describe Jesus. But he knows He’s from God, he knows where this healing came from. And he’s marveling, just stupendous in verse 30, here are all these pompous people arguing about a little point in their Shabbat law about anointing and kneading, and he’s got two created eyes, and he looks at these guys who’ve had this saying all their life and he says you guys, you can’t see? I thought I had the problem, I think you guys got the problem. That’s what he’s saying. And so they case him out in verse 34, [“They answered and said unto him, Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us? And they cast him out.”] And he becomes the first officially excommunicated person in the Gospel history. It’s very interesting, it goes back to the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are you when men shall persecute you and revile you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for My name’s sake.” Happy are you and leap for joy, says Jesus, because it shows you’re of the elect. When the religious establishment of apostasy persecutes you that’s a sign of your salvation.
And so John
John
John
The Bible insists that no man is ignorant; there is no such thing as a person who doesn’t have some light and some knowledge. There is no person, because if it were true that we came into the world like John Locke thought we do, with a tabla rosa, the blank mind, if it were really true that we came into the world with a blank mind, Jesus logic here would be irrefutable, we’d have no sin. Blank minds aren’t responsible. And Jesus said you say you see and indeed they do, and so you’re responsible, “your sin remains.” And at this point He is condemning them as unbelievers; your sin is one that is appropriated, I am going to pay the price on the cross for your sin but because you are on negative volition you have chosen the works approach, you are going to try to justify yourself before My Father on the basis of works so keep your sin; if you don’t want My atonement you won’t have it.
Shall we bow…