We tend to think or believe suffering being is caused by sin and Jesus' disciples are no different when they asked about the man being born blind was due to the sin of the man or his parents. This is the lead in to a significant section by Dr. Sproul on sin, suffering, and the factors behind suffering and healing. Jesus proceeds to heal the blind man with the result that those who knew him were wanting reassurance that this was the same blind man.

Even though last time I was not able to finish the eighth chapter of John, we are going to move ahead this morning to chapter 9. I ask the congregation to stand during the reading of the Word of God. John 9:1–12:

Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

When He had said these things, He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva; and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And He said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated, Sent). So he went and washed, and came back seeing.

Therefore the neighbors and those who previously had seen that he was blind said, “Is not this he who sat and begged?”

Some said, “This is he.” Others said, “He is like him.”

He said, “I am he.”

Therefore they said to him, “How were your eyes opened?”

He answered and said, “A Man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to the pool of Siloam and wash.’ So I went and washed, and I received sight.”

Then they said to him, “Where is He?”

He said, “I do not know.”

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear it. Let us pray.

Father, as we contemplate this marvelous work of our Lord and His ministry to the man born blind, we pray that its lesson may be understood by us. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Before Abraham Was

Throughout the eighth chapter of John, as we recall, Jesus was engaged in a debate with the authorities from Jerusalem in which His credentials, His knowledge, and His parentage were challenged. In the context of this dispute, these adversaries of Christ kept appealing to their own lineage as the children of Abraham in order to declare that they needed no liberation from any power because they were already free people.

Then, this conversation about being descendants of Abraham continued, and it reached its climax in the segment of chapter 8 that I was not able to cover last time. In verse 58, Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.”

Notice Jesus did not say, “Before Abraham was, I was,” but He said, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Of all the “I am” sayings of Jesus found in the gospel of John, I do not think there is any more profound than this one. Jesus is clearly identifying Himself as eternal deity. Not only is Jesus using the formula reserved for God in sacred Scripture, the formula of “I am,” but also, by indicating His relationship to Abraham, He is calling attention to the fact that before Abraham was born, He was already alive as the second person of the Trinity.

That segues into the narrative I just read a moment ago, in which another of the “I am” statements is repeated: “I am the light of the world.” Here, the disciples of Christ call attention to a well-known beggar who had been blind from the day of his birth. They come to Jesus with a theological question: “His disciples asked Him, saying, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’”

A False Dilemma of Sin

Notice that Jesus’ answer to His disciples’ question indicates that, in the way the disciples phrased the question, they committed an informal fallacy of logic called the fallacy of the false dilemma—or popularly, the either/or fallacy. People will say, “It’s either this or that,” when in fact there may be a tertium quid. You need to watch out for those tertium quids, because they can jump up and bite you. That means “another option,” a third alternative.

Sometimes we make this same error. We are not thinking clearly when we reduce our options to two when there are actually more than two. Certain issues can be reduced, justly, to either/or situations. God either exists or He does not. There is no middle ground. But if I say, “Let’s paint the house either red or blue,” there is still a host of other colors that could be selected besides those two.

It is important that when the disciples ask this question, they make an assumption that Jesus has to correct. They assume someone’s sin was responsible for the affliction of blindness this man had endured throughout his entire life. That is their operating assumption, and it can be stated even further. The idea is that all afflictions, all pain, and all suffering are directly a result of someone’s sin. That was the idea addressed throughout the entire book of Job.

You may remember that Job’s friends came to believe Job was the worst sinner in the land because he was the most grievously afflicted person in the land. The thought of the time was this: There is a proportionate ratio between the degree of a person’s suffering and the degree of their sin. Of course, the entire book of Job is written to refute that falsehood, and it is nowhere more clearly refuted than in chapter 9 of John’s gospel, in this discussion.

Affliction as Judgment

Before we dismiss the disciples as stupid for the question they raised, we need to consider some other things. The disciples were aware that on many occasions in the history of God’s people and in the biblical record, personal afflictions were visited upon individuals because of sin.

I remember when I was a little boy, my father was zealous and scrupulous about the principle of tithing. In fact, as a lay preacher in the Methodist church, he would frequently preach on the biblical obligation of tithing. Because of that conviction on his part, when I was a child—long before I was even a Christian—if I was given an allowance of fifty cents, the first nickel had to go in the collection plate.

When my allowance was raised to one dollar, it was a matter of discipline in our house that a dime of that dollar had to go into the collection plate on Sunday morning. My father not only told us the principle of the tithe, but he also insisted, rightly, that it comes off the top—not out of what is left after we indulge ourselves with whatever else on which we are interested in spending our money.

Even though I was not a Christian at that time, it was a tremendous discipline, so when I did become a Christian, I did not have to adjust. So often people are used to living without tithing, then all of a sudden, they become Christians, and they say, “What am I going to do with this 10 percent that I haven’t considered beforehand?” It is a hard bite to take when you are not used to it. But for me, it was easy, because tithing was always there.

In the forty-ninth year of my father’s life, a friend of his who owned an automobile agency was on the brink of bankruptcy. Since my father was a corporate bankruptcy accountant, he agreed to help this man with his problem. During this year, my father gave his friend—he did not loan, but he gave—a sum of ten thousand dollars to help him in his business. If you have been around long enough, you know that fifty years ago, ten thousand dollars was a tidy sum of money. But he gave ten thousand dollars to his friend who needed it.

Because my father’s business was suffering due to all the time he was working on this friend’s business, his income was not at its normal level. So, for the first time in his life, that year, he did not tithe. He could not count the ten thousand he gave to his friend, so he did not tithe. He stopped short of tithing.

Early the next year, my father suffered the first of three debilitating strokes that ultimately took his life. I remember speaking to him when he could hardly speak, and he said to me, “Son, I’m convinced that God has afflicted me because I failed to tithe.” He went to his grave believing that. I did not believe it, because I knew how scrupulous he was over the course of his life, and I said to him, “Surely God’s not going to do this to you just because in one bad year you failed to give 10 percent of your income to Him.” But I could not convince him. He knew he had failed to do his duty.

I was absolutely sure that God would never do that to someone just because they disobeyed Him at a certain level—but I was wrong. God can and does visit people with afflictions when they disobey. Do not take this as a sermon suggesting that if you are not tithing, God is going to get you this year. That is not the point I am making. The point I am making is this: Throughout biblical history, when people violate the law of God, God often visits them with judgment.

What happened to the baby born of David and Bathsheba? The judgment of God came upon the child. God took the baby’s life as judgment upon David and Bathsheba. How about Miriam, the sister of Moses, when she protested against Moses’ marriage and acted in a sinful manner, rebelling against his leadership? God, we are told—not the devil—visited her with leprosy. A physical affliction came upon her as a direct result of her sin.

The point is that there are times when God disciplines His people and judges them by giving them affliction. So, we must never say, “That cannot be the hand of God.” On the other hand, we can never rush to make the judgment that every affliction is directly a result of God’s judgment upon our sin, because there are other reasons we are sometimes subjected to great affliction.

The Reality of Sin and Pain

The suffering of Jesus was because of the sin of the world, not because of His sin. There are many times that we suffer at the hands of a Father who is putting us through the crucible to refine us by fire, to teach us how to be more dependent upon Him, to the end that we may be sanctified and molded through those difficult tribulations. The New Testament resounds with teachings that warn us against making the assumption that when we are suffering, it is because of a specific sin.

In general terms, had there never been any sin in the world, there would never have been death. There would never have been pain. In heaven there will be no death, no pain, and no sin. There is an overarching relationship between the reality of sin in this world and the reality of pain. But it is when we reduce that to a one-to-one relationship in individual people’s lives that we go wrong.

I have preached on this once before, and I think I told you the story of a friend who, while he was in college, spent his Januarys with us, living in our home while studying during a January term that I was teaching for some local colleges. He was a victim of cerebral palsy. There was nothing wrong with his mind, but his body was profoundly afflicted. One day he came to me and asked if he could talk to me privately, and I said, “Yes, Harvey.”

In Harvey’s distorted speech pattern—he was very difficult to understand—he poured out his heart. He said that he had some friends at his college who were convinced of the power of faith healing. They came to him and laid hands on him for his healing. But he was not healed. They told him it was because he did not have enough faith, and so they tried it again. Still, he was not healed.

Then they told Harvey to claim his healing in advance in order for the healing to work—like telling a blind man, “Claim that you have vision,” while everything remains black. That is the kind of faith you need to receive the blessing. Harvey tried that, and it did not work. Then they said, “It must be because of some secret sin in your life.” So, he confessed all his sins, and they laid hands on him again, and still, he had cerebral palsy.

Finally, these friends came to the ultimate explanation. They said, “Harvey, you must be demon possessed,” and they tried to exorcise the demon of cerebral palsy out of his body. He came to me in tears, and he said, “R.C., do you think I’m demon possessed?”

I prayed for Harvey, and I thanked God for the incredible, brilliant testimony of his life in his faithfulness to the things of God and the triumph over sickness and disease that he had manifested so many times. I said in that prayer, “Lord, I thank You that You have given this man such a sweetness of disposition and a profound faith in You.”

When I finished praying, Harvey looked at me, and his smile went from ear to ear. He said to me, “Do you know what you said in your prayer?” I asked, “What’s that, Harvey?” He said: “You called me a man. That’s the first time anyone has ever called me a man.”

I have no idea why Harvey has cerebral palsy, and he does not either. But it does not matter. God gave him the greatest gift He could give any person: He gave him Jesus. Harvey was happy with that—until people unwittingly came with a distorted view of the relationship between pain, suffering, and sin, and tried to take away the joy of his salvation.

Suffering Yielded to Glory

The disciples come to Jesus. They ask, “Who was it, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” Now hold it—Jesus is not saying that the man born blind was sinless, nor is He saying that the man’s parents were sinless. What He is saying to His disciples, in straightforward terms, is this: “His affliction is not a direct result of his sin or the sin of his parents.” There was another reason he was born blind, and what was the reason? “That the works of God should be revealed in him.”

How many years did that man grope in the darkness, asking God: “Why me? When everyone else can see, I can’t see anything. My whole life, I listened to people talk about what they’re seeing, and I can only imagine. But I don’t even have any experiences or memories to aid me in my imagination because I’ve never seen anything. Why me?”

Imagine the frustration, the torment. Year after year, he had no idea that one day the Son of God would come to him and heal him. He had no idea that two thousand years later, someone would be preaching a sermon about his contribution to the epiphany of the glory of God in a church on Sunday morning. Who knows why we go through the things we go through? But the promise of God is that He brings good out of everything that befalls us and that He uses the worst pain, the worst suffering, the most confusing events in our lives to bring about, ultimately, His glory.

That is one of the hardest things. I have said to you many times: “It’s easy to believe in God. It’s not so easy to believe God.” But here we see a concrete example of how a man’s suffering that went on and on, year after year, finally yielded itself in glory.

That is why the Apostle Paul said that the sufferings and afflictions we endure in this lifetime are not worthy to be compared with the treasures God has laid up before us for eternity. If he had stayed blind for eighty or ninety years, what is that compared to eternity in the presence of the glory of God? But he did not have to wait to go to heaven to see the face of Christ.

The Power of Jesus

Listen to what happened. Jesus said: “I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” In essence, “I’m the light of the whole world, and just to show you, I’m the light of this man that you’re asking Me about.”

John continues, “When He had said these things, He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva.” Notice the difference between this and how Jesus does some of His other miracles. At the wedding feast of Cana, He does not go in and mix a recipe with the water in the purification jars to produce wine. When He goes to the tomb of Lazarus and raises him from the dead, He does not administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a corpse or rub some balm on his forehead. He just stands outside the tomb and commands Lazarus to come out: “Lazarus, come forth!” (John 11:43).

We see there the immediate power of God, and by that we mean that God works without means. But sometimes God brings His results to pass through means. When the Red Sea parted for the children of Israel, Moses did not just stand there and say, “Separate, O sea!” God brought a great wind, and He used the medium of wind to bring about the mighty work of the Exodus.

Jesus did not need spit and dirt to heal this man’s eyes. Do not think there is a chemical formula in Palestinian clay that will bring sight to blind people. That is not the point. Jesus is simply administering a touch, an object lesson.

For reasons we do not know, Jesus dramatizes this. He spits in the dirt, turns the dirt into clay, and takes the clay, almost as if He is saying: “Not everyone who was born from the clay got everything right the first time around. Some people are born from the dust with birth defects, and this man was one of them. Let’s go back to the clay.” That is pure speculation on my part.

Jesus takes the clay, puts it on the man’s eyes, and sends him to the pool of Siloam, saying: “Go to the pool of Siloam and wash. Go wash in the pool and come back.”

“So he went and washed, and he came back seeing.” What was going through his mind? You know, Scripture is the master of understatement. The man goes and does what Jesus tells him to do. He washes the dirt and the mud from his eyes. When he opens his eyes, for the first time in his entire life, he sees light. He sees people. He sees all these things that he had only heard about throughout those many years of blindness.

God Opens Our Eyes

The man comes back seeing, and he is looking for Jesus. Jesus is not there, but all the people are there. They see him coming back and say: “Wait just a minute. Isn’t that the man who is always out here begging, the blind man? Look at him!” Others say: “No, that can’t be him. It’s his twin, or he just looks like the man who we’re used to seeing groping in the darkness.” But he says: “I am he. I can see.”

The people said, “How were your eyes opened?” The man responded said, “A Man called Jesus”—that was all he knew so far, and we are going to look at this again next time, God willing. “How is it that you can see?” “This man called Jesus.” He did not say, “The Incarnate Logos came along and opened my eyes.” He said: “All I know is that the man they call Jesus came by. He made clay from the dirt, anointed my eyes, and told me to go wash in the pool of Siloam. So I went; I washed; I received sight.”

That is verse 11. Et abii, et lavi, et vidi. You have heard veni, vidi, vici, the most famous triad of Latin terms. “I came, I saw, I conquered”—right? This man said a phrase that should be memorialized for all time. “I went; I washed; I see. I did all that He told me to do. I saw this man named Jesus. He made this clay from dirt and spital, He put it on my eyes, and He told me to go to the pool of Siloam. He sent me, so I went. He says go; I go. He says wash; I wash. Now I see.”

“Then they said to him, ‘Where is He?’” The blind man responds, in essence: “I don’t know. I don’t know what He looks like. I see all of you, but I don’t know if He’s standing in your midst because I never saw before now.” But the moment would come when he would behold Him. Jesus did not just say He was the light of the world. He gave that light to those who had none. That is the light that comes into the world that the darkness cannot overcome.

You know as well as I do that the Bible uses the metaphor of blindness again and again for those who have never perceived the sweetness of Christ. Our eyes are blind until God, the Holy Spirit, without the help of spit and clay, opens our eyes so that we behold Him. Every one of the disciples could resonate with this man’s experience and with John’s statement in the first chapter, “And we beheld His glory” (John 1:14). Let us pray.

Father, help us to trust You in the midst of our afflictions, in the midst of our pain, and in the midst of our questions, when no answers seem to be good enough for the queries of our heart. Help us to turn to Christ, who is the light of the world. For we ask it in His name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.