If you would please turn with with me in your Bibles to John chapter 9, beginning at the first verse, John writes, ‘As he as Jesus passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is dead. Night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I ha I am the light of the world.’ And having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, ‘Go wash in the pool of Salom,’ which means scent. So we went and washed and came back seeing. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you give us your word to teach us, to guide us, to encourage us, and to build us up for the works that you have given us to do. We pray that you open our hearts and our ears to hear and to receive what you have to say to us today. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
So, as we return to our study through John’s gospel, we will recall that this incident happens during the fiveish months between the feast of tabernacles and the feast of Passover, just before Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. And more specifically, we’ll see that this happens between the feast of tabernacles and what we now know today as Hanukkah.
But on this particular day, Jesus and his disciples had just left the temple in Jerusalem. They were likely somewhere on the main thoroughfare that’s known as the pilgrim’s way. This is a road that leads up to the temple. It was a wide road and well-paved, and it was used by the devout Jews who were on pilgrimage because it gave such easy access for ritual cleansing at any one of Jerusalem’s countless mikvot, their ritual baths.
And so as Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?’ Now, this question that the disciples asked Jesus was far more important than we often immediately recognize. It is important because of the attitude and the assumptions that it reveals.
So long as religion has been practiced by humanity, there are certain truths about life that have been universally agreed upon and affirmed, about which even Christians will all agree: that sin, however it is defined, is bad and deserves punishment, and that God or the gods will always punish sin, especially sins that are committed against them. You might remember King Agamemnon. When he sinned against Artemis, he sacrificed his daughter as a propitiation to appease the goddess’s wrath and allow his fleet to sail against Troy.
Odysseus, after he blinded the Cyclops, was punished by Poseidon, which led to the events of his lengthy journey. Or we turn to scripture, and we see King Uzziah when he entered into the Lord’s temple to offer a sacrifice of incense like a priest. He was immediately inflicted with leprosy. He was rendered ritually unclean and unable to enter into the sanctuary to worship, and he became unfit to reign as king of Judah.
This same attitude and these same core assumptions were made by Job’s friends when they came to comfort him, when they tried to convince him of his apparent guilt and his obvious sinfulness. Eliphaz declared, ‘Remember, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.’
Bildad asked Job, ‘Does God pervert justice or does the Almighty pervert the right? If your children have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the hand of their transgression. If you will seek God and plead with the Almighty for mercy, if you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you and restore your rightful habitation.’
Zophar accused him, ‘For you say, ‘My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God’s eyes.’ Oh, that God would speak and open his lips to you, and that he would tell you the secrets of wisdom, for he is manifold in understanding. Know then, telling Job this, know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.’
This attitude, this is the world’s doctrine. The world believes and teaches that every disaster or human misfortune is blamed upon divinity’s anger, while every blessing and success is attributed to divine favor. Thus, works of religion became the means for us to assuage divine anger and secure divine favor instead.
Every religion became a system that regulated spiritual transactions of, ‘If I do X, then I get Y from God.’ I mean, even within our modern and very secular culture, this kind of attitude still remains popular. We believe good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people, and so if bad things happen to you, then you must therefore be a bad person.
How many TV shows or movies have you seen that have a scene where a character tries to somehow bargain with God? I mean, there’s too many examples to list, even a few. But the idea goes, you know, they say, ‘God, if you get me out of this, then I’ll go to church, or I’ll give money to the poor, or I will just try to be a good or at least a better person.’
But this attitude is utterly wrong because, aside from being simply unbiblical, the core presupposition of all such religious systems assumes that humanity has anything that God needs. It assumes that humanity is able to give God something that he desires that we alone can give him. It assumes that we might choose to give him what we all already owe him, like our obedience, fidelity, and love.
And worst of all, it assumes that God is beholden to or dependent upon humanity’s will and preferences. Every example of transactional religion is wrong because it assumes that humanity has a degree of authority and power over the divinity. It assumes that humanity is greater than the divine that they are petitioning.
And so therefore it is completely illogical and unreasonable because if God needs something that only humanity can give him, then humanity, we are greater than God. Or if God’s activity, what he does, somehow depends on our choices and will, then God’s not sovereign.
Or if humanity is somehow greater than God, what do we need him for? Why do we need God if we’re greater than God? But just as people wrongly believe that every good thing that happens to them happens because they have somehow pleased God, so too people wrongly believe that every bad thing that happens to them happens because of something specific that they’ve done to anger God. Both ideas are false and unjustifiable by scripture.
And this kind of attitude demonstrates that we do not understand who God is or what the difference is between justice and mercy.
So instead of being related to justice, the question that the disciples asked Jesus concerns God’s providence. And so Jesus answered their question, saying, ‘It was not that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.’ This man was not born blind because of anyone’s or any one particular sin.
First, Jesus points out that every particular human misfortune cannot always be directly correlated to a particular sin. But he also does not deny that sometimes the particular negative effects are the direct product of sinful causes. I mean, the sinful cause of Cain murdering Abel directly caused Cain’s exile. The sinful cause of Jephthah’s vow to the Lord directly caused the unfortunate effect of him offering his daughter as a burnt sacrifice.
The sinful cause of King David’s unjustified census directly provoked the Lord to anger and to inflict Israel with a plague. And the sinful cause of Herod Agrippa, his vanity and his acceptance of worship, directly provoked his death.
So while Jesus denied that direct correlation between a sinful cause and its effect is an absolute rule, every negative consequence of sin may still always be attributed to Adam’s sin back in the garden, which is the first sinful cause that flows down and affects all of us.
Second, Jesus reminded them that according to God’s law in Deuteronomy 24:16, fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin. Jesus proves that the assumption the disciples were walking around with is false.
Because if the man had been born blind as a punishment for sin, then it could only have been for his own sin, not the sin of his parents, because only the guilty party could be punished for a specific sin. But there was an important exception to that rule: the system of substitute atonement contained within the ceremonial law of the Mosaic covenant.
You find in Leviticus 16. I mean, technically this system is not an exception because the animals offered were not actually being punished. The sinner was offering them as a sacrifice, but they were still suffering the deserved penalty for that person’s guilt.
But Jesus, through his sacrificial death on the cross, graciously gave himself as our substitute. Jesus willingly chose to assume our penalty. He took it upon himself, offering himself in our place, forensically imputing our sin guilt to him as he imputed his righteous innocence to us. He took and suffered our deserved punishment. He chose that. It was not done to him. He asked for it.
So although only the guilty person could justly be punished for particular sins, sometimes the effect of God’s judgment against sin does carry on into later generations. When God declared his character to Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus 34, the Lord passed him by and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.’
But although these two pronouncements of God are in tension, each one shall be put to death for their own sin and visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, they do not actually contradict one another. See, the commandment of Deuteronomy concerns the actual punishment while the proclamation of Exodus concerns the derivative effects that follow punishment.
The idea expressed within this tension is what we call generational sin or the lasting effects and lingering consequences of earlier sin. Third, Jesus explained that the man’s blindness was neither his nor his parents’ fault. His blindness was not the effect of any particular sinful cause.
This man was born blind for a particular and intentional purpose. This man’s blindness, his disability, and all the suffering or misfortune he experienced on account of it were somehow meaningful and good. His blindness had divine importance and inestimable value because rather than being the consequential effect of sin, his blindness would be the righteous cause of a miraculous effect that the works of God might be displayed in him.
His blindness and the mercy of its removal would become the cause of an increase in God’s glory. To rightly understand the disciples’ question and Jesus’s answer, we need to consider the doctrine of providence.
And although we may be tempted to believe that God’s providence is just simply a moral good and the Christians’ replacement of the pagan idea of good luck, it is greater than that. Divine providence is neither a moral good nor a moral evil, except that it is a good that comes from God. Providence, as a general concept, is something morally neutral because providence was what Job had in mind when he faithfully declared, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’
And providence was what Paul had in mind when he proclaimed our hope that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. And concerning the doctrine of providence, the Westminster Confession of Faith teaches us that the most wise, righteous, and gracious God to sometimes leave for a season his own children to manifold temptations and to the corruption of their own hearts, to chastise them for their former sins or to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humble, and to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support upon himself, and to make them watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for sundry other just and holy ends.
Providence is neither good nor evil, but we may each choose whether we receive it as a positive or a negative. Providence is always a gracious good from the Lord because he provides it according to his sovereign will for his eternally good purposes without regard for our degree of deservedness. Because the punishments we might receive as divine chastisement for our sins are really providential mercies, because whatever that punishment may be, it is much less than we deserve.
Or the natural blessings we receive as divine beneficence, like the sunshine or the rain, those are providential graces because everyone receives them and has access to them without any regard for their moral status. See, both types of examples are God’s work on display, their works which should lead us to know the Lord, to love the Lord, and to justly give him praise and thanksgiving.
But even the negative things we experience that are unrelated to anything we have done are providential. Such sufferings are inflicted upon us to encourage us and to help train us to more closely rest in the Lord and better depend on his providential grace instead of our own strength and effort. The things we experience, whether we consider them as being positive or negative, they do providentially warn us away from sin and towards the righteousness of Christ instead.
So no matter what, the proper response to each example always is to bless, to praise, and to glorify God for the providential work he does. Just like Job, blessed be the name of the Lord. And this blindness that the man was born with, it was a work of God’s providence. And the miraculous healing that Jesus was about to perform was also a work of God’s providence.
Now, we might be tempted to suggest that if God inflicted blindness on this man just to demonstrate his power, the power to do and to undo, to either inflict blindness or to heal blindness, that would be a terribly unjust, wicked, and evil thing for us to say. Because lest we forget and misunderstand. Although this man was born blind, he was blessed with life and a family who took care of him. Even being unable to see, this man was just as blessed as many other people.
And he was surely more blessed than some others because, being born blind, he was not inflicted, but the Lord had simply withheld the blessing of sight from him—a gracious blessing that we all take for granted until it begins to dim or fade or is taken away from us. We would be sinfully wrong to suggest that God did something unrighteous by not giving this man sight at birth.
It would be sinfully wrong to suggest that God was unjustly punishing this man by making him blind before he even had the opportunity to sin. We would be forgetting that none of us deserve to see. None of us have a right to sight. Our eyesight is a gracious gift of God, just as is our taste, our hearing, and our sense of smell. No one has the right to call God unjust in relation to this man.
When Jesus said that this man was not born blind because of either his or his parents’ sin, Jesus did not justify them as being sinless. He did not declare them legally righteous. Rather, he simply affirmed that the man’s blindness was not the consequence of anyone’s particular sin. And even if his blindness was a punishment for sinfulness, then it would still be a just punishment because we’re all guilty of sin and deserve punishment.
Everyone’s born guilty because of Adam’s transgression and the sinful corruption of our nature; that is its lingering consequence. Fourth, Jesus next explained part of God’s will concerning why this man was born blind. Because we must work the works of him who sent me. Jesus needed to do what God had sent him to do because the Lord had prepared all of these miraculous works for him to do in advance.
This was not the consequence of an Arminian’s understanding of divine foreknowledge that God saw this blind man somewhere in the future and knew that he would be born blind and sent Jesus to heal him. But instead, this was divine foreordination such that God the Father knew that the blind man—he knew about it because God had decreed this man would be born blind without the blessing of sight because he was sending God the Son to providentially heal him and give him sight as a demonstration of his divine power and authority.
The Apostle Paul expresses the same sentiment to us in Ephesians 2 when he tells us that for by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing; it’s the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast. For then he explains this purpose to our salvation: for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in.
So the man was born blind so that the mercy of God in Jesus Christ could be displayed through his miraculous healing, and the elect—we have been saved. Individual Christians are saved so that we may likewise do good works of mercy as we follow Christ.
Fifth and lastly, on a spiritual level, Jesus was also emphasizing and demonstrating in a practical manner more of what he meant when he earlier claimed, ‘I am the light of the world.’ Jesus explained, ‘We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day because night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’
Now, I feel confident suggesting that the disciples did not really understand what Jesus meant at the time, especially since many Christians today will likely disagree over it. I think it was just another foreshadowing of Jesus’s quickly approaching death and resurrection.
But while Jesus, God the Son, was living and incarnate upon the earth, humanity was living in the spiritual daytime because the light of life was shining among us. It was easier then to do these good works by following the example of Jesus because he was obviously there present and watching. The spiritual nighttime fell over humanity when Christ died upon the cross on that Sabbath day.
And while he rested within the tomb, it was the darkest night, and Jesus’ disciples scattered and fled. Everything around them was dark and frightening, and they hid themselves out of fear of the world. But on the third day, on the first day of the week, when Jesus rose again, the light began to shine once more. And after he ascended to heaven to reign, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to fill his disciples with his light so that we may carry it with us and let it shine throughout the whole world.
And now, dwelling inside of each and every Christian, Christ’s light shines in the world. His light is how and why Christians do all the many good works of mercy and grace that we do. And one of the many ways in which God works his providence in the world is through our Christian works of love through our obedience.
And even while Jesus is reigning in heaven, he’s still also in the world because he lives within us. Then after having said these things, Jesus spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, ‘Go wash in the pool of Salom,’ which means scent. So he went and washed and came back seeing.
And so finally, by the merciful and miraculous providence of God, this man received the gift of sight. Hallelujah. Amen.
So what should we take away from this part of the story?
First, we need to remember to not allow the negative things that happen in life to make us doubt God’s love for us. Nor should we assume that we’re ever feeling the full force of his wrath because we are not. But we should examine ourselves and look for any indwelling sin that we need to repent of and then do so. Repent. Ask God’s forgiveness. Believe and trust that Christ has paid your penalty and then sin no more that nothing worse may happen to you.
We should also be looking ahead and considering our future and the immediate surroundings to see whether there are certain temptations or opportunities to sin approaching so that we may preemptively avoid them.
Second, we must refrain from self-righteously building ourselves up whenever we see the misfortunes of others. We may not use it as an excuse or opportunity to say that God is punishing them for something specific because we truly do not know.
And if we do that, then we would be sinfully judgmental as we are condemning them without knowledge or understanding or pity and mercy. But rather we should take those opportunities and pray for them. We should take advantage of those opportunities to offer them our help as loving support and care for our neighbors. We should also be mindful and consider whether their present misfortunes might also be providentially intended as a warning for us.
Third, the answer to the question of whose sin am I suffering for is always my own sin. Because God will not punish someone for the sin of another. Each of our sufferings are deserved and just, even as they are tempered with mercy. Because we’re all sinners needing God’s grace and forgiveness. We each have sins that we need to repent of. So asking this question should really just be the first step to our own personal repentance.
And lastly, we need to rest in and trust God’s providence. We need to remember that no matter what, no matter how hard our sufferings might be, we deserve worse. We each deserve worse than Job. And although Job was a righteous man whose faith was in the Lord, he was still a sinner.
His nature was just as corrupted by Adam’s sin as ours, and he understood even in the midst of his sufferings that the Lord is just and righteous. That therefore there must have been some holy reason for his pain. He must have deserved what was happening to him somehow. But Job’s biggest problem really came from his insistent demand to know why.
So the example of Job provides us with the best argument for why not to ask whose sin or which sin is the reason or cause for this punishment. Job’s response after God appeared to him was, ‘I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore, I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which I did not know. I said, ‘Hear, and I will speak. I will question you, and you make it known to me.’ Because I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear. But now my eye sees you; therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.’
So we should remember that since Job never got an answer to his questions, we should not expect one either—not on this side of glory anyways. And we would all be much better off by not asking.
So let us all remember that the Lord is good and he has given us all so many blessings through his divine providence. Let us all be satisfied and grateful that in every circumstance it is the Lord who gives and is the Lord who takes away. Therefore, it is right and good that we should always praise him. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.
Please stand with me and let us say together what we believe using the words of the Apostles Creed.