Daily Meditations on the Bible / We stand with Israel
To this they replied,”You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.
You know that you have won the argument when your opponent gets so spittin’ mad that they resort to calling you names and throwing you out. It is instructive to read between the lines here and see how the man who was formerly blind responds.
Continue reading “Cheeky”
“We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.” The man answered,’’Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing’’
Do you remember who is speaking here? This was a poor blind man begging beside the road when Jesus found him. When asked why he was born blind, Jesus replied, “… so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
Continue reading “Logic – John 9: 29-33”
Then they hurled insults at him and said, ”You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! ”
The Pharisees claimed to be disciples of Moses. This is interesting because the function of a disciple is to be like their teacher. According to the Old Testament (Numbers 12: 3), Moses was humble. In fact, the Bible says he was the most humble person on the planet. In addition, as I read the books of Moses in the Old Testament, what seems to leap off of the page is that Moses did whatever God instructed him to do. He only improvised one time, that that one mistake kept him from entering the Promised Land. Even so, Moses trusted God and was faithful to follow his instructions.
Continue reading “Whose Disciple Are You? – John 9: 28”
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?”
A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”
He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”
John 9: 24-25
Have you ever noticed how some people will try and change the subject when they are losing an argument? In this story, the Pharisees are on the losing side of the argument, and whether they admit it or not, they seem to know it. When they demand to know the “truth” they are really saying that they think the truth is a lie. When they claim that Jesus is a sinner, they are making a claim to something that they really do not understand.
Continue reading “Facts”
So far in this story, Jesus happened by a man blind from birth. When asked why the man had been born blind Jesus replied, “…so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Then, he healed the man. Immediately people started arguing about whether or not it was the same man. After all, it is not natural for a person who has been blind to gain their sight. The argument is continued in front of the Pharisees who, not believing the man either, demand to hear it from his parents.
“Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?”
“We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
I give the parents full marks for caution. They literally did not “know” what had happened to their son. They answered as if they were in a court of law. (This was before Perry Mason was on TV, too!) They were wise to do this as in fact, they were in a kind of court.
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”
When my youngest son was in high school, he had worn glasses for most of his life and as was the custom for many young people, he had let his hair grow quite long. When he decided to switch to contacts instead of glasses, he also arranged to cut his hair short so that when he went back to school the next Monday he looked like a different kid. In fact, he looked so different that nobody recognized him. For a whole day, he enjoyed being the “new kid” until his friends finally figured it out.
His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, ” Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?” Some claimed that he was.
Others said, ” No, he only looks like him.”
But he himself insisted, ” I am the man.”
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.