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?” Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
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.
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.”
Have you wondered as to why certain things have happened to you over the course of your life? The question is always posed, “why do bad things happen to good people?” Is your answer, “It must be because of something I have done” or “I must be cursed”? Have you ever thought that it has nothing to do with you, but for the purpose of glorifying God and revealing His works?
This blind man had no idea Who it was he was talking to. He had no idea that it was his “day of visitation”; yet he had been suffering with his affliction since birth. His whole life was lived under the burden and disgrace of his blindness and the assumption by all who saw that it was because of "someone or some sin” that he was blind. But unbeknownst to him, and everyone else, he had been waiting his whole life for the moment that was about to come for which he himself had been born; a visitation from God Himself that would deliver him, heal his blindness and take away his disgrace with a single touch!
What is interesting is that after he was healed, though he was the same man that he was before his deliverance, he was almost completely unrecognizable to all who knew him after his personal encounter with God Himself! He was a man raised in a home where Torah and the adherence to God was taught and lived out. He knew the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob… yet in an instant, all that he had known was swallowed up by his encounter with the Living God! And the very first person he saw was Jesus. He was instantly delivered from what had enslaved him his whole life.
Maybe you have been in the same place forever waiting for a miracle? I’m sure many are and don’t even realize that they were born for one single moment where God Himself will invade their space and unchain them from what has overwhelmed them and imprisoned them their entire lives. Every day he went to that spring hoping for a miracle from God. He went there with expectation and faith. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for not recognizing the day of their visitation because their spiritual blindness and arrogance prevented them from seeing Who it was that stood before them. Yet in the simplicity and faith of a child, this poor man who was blind, could suddenly see.
The moral: Don’t EVER give up… and don’t believe the lies. Be like the blind man who, though he was afflicted his entire life, NEVER gave up, but instead found out that all he had endured was for the purposes of God! And so is your life... Do you believe?
© 2012 Steven Bliss
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