Daily Meditations on the Bible / We stand with Israel
He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village.
Summary: Life as a blind person is hard. Without our eyes, we are limited to the use of our other senses. Many blind people compensate in amazing ways, but there is no substitute for being able to see. When we realize we are spiritually blind it is easy to “see” our need for God.
Continue reading “Mark 8:23 – Lost and Found”
But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind…
Summary: The truth about God is not hard to find. He has given us an entire book about himself. Ignoring the truth is not only possible, it is our natural instinct.
Continue reading “2 Peter 1:9a — Don’t Blink”
For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure …
Summary: Talking blind is like walking blind, only with your mouth. When we talk about spiritual things, we are talking about the unseen. If we are not quoting the Bible, which is our only source of accurate information about spiritual things, then we are making things up.
Continue reading “2 Peter 1:8a — Talking Blind”
Jesus said, ‘’For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”
Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, ‘’What? Are we blind too?”
Jesus said, ‘’If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”
The prophet Isaiah quotes God as saying:
”As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9)
This verse comes to mind as I ponder the meaning of Jesus’ words. It seems to me he is speaking metaphorically about blindness and sight, but he has also just healed a blind man and so he illustrates his point literally.
Continue reading “Deep Thoughts – John 9: 39-41”
I wonder what I would think of a blind man sitting to the side of the road begging? For me, begging always seems to conjure up images of someone unwilling to work. Of course, if a person is blind, that makes it hard to do any kind of productive work. That doesn’t mean, however, that a blind person does not have brains or would not do work if they were able to.
Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”
He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”
They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents.
What is a formerly blind man to do when people don’t believe he was blind? Even people who knew him or had at least seen him often argued about whether or not he was the same man. To my knowledge blindness was not one of the illnesses that would be considered “unclean” so there was no need for this man to go to the temple to be declared “clean” after he was healed. Even so, he was taken before the Pharisees by those who first encountered him after he was able to see. After explaining what happened to the Pharisees, they did not believe the man’s story.
Continue reading “Disbelief”
Have you ever thought about why Jesus used mud when he healed the man’s blindness? After all, Jesus had already calmed the storm, walked on water, and healed the man at the pool called Bethesda simply by telling him to get up and walk.
Continue reading “Magic”
There is a story in the Old Testament about a man named Naaman. He was an important man in his time as he commanded the entire army for the kingdom where he lived. He suffered from leprosy which in those days was a death sentence.
One day he heard about a prophet in Samaria who could cure leprosy, but when he heard what the cure was, he balked. What he was told to do was beneath his dignity. Eventually, he chose to humble himself, and his reward was that he was healed.
After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. “Go,’ he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam’ (this word means “Sent’). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.
Today we begin a new chapter in John’s gospel, and with the new chapter comes a new scene. When we left Jesus he was arguing with a crowd of indeterminate size. In this scene, he is walking with his disciples. In the last chapter, he may have been in the temple grounds. In this chapter we do not know where he is, but we know he is in a place with people and as the story unfolds we see that he is near the temple, so he is probably still in Jerusalem.
As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
I wanted to stop the story here because I find the question that the disciples asked very interesting. They see a man born blind and they immediately conclude that the reason for his blindness was that someone sinned, either the man’s parents or somehow the blind man himself sinned. This was not a question in their minds, but a fact. The only question was whose sin caused the blindness.
Continue reading “Defects”