Walk in the Light
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 man 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.” To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out John 9:30-34
A man born blind has been miraculously healed. Jesus mixed his own spit with dirt and rubbed the wet mud into unseeing eyes. Once the man washed off the mud he could see perfectly. But the Pharisees’ minds were already made up. This wasn’t God’s work. The healing happened on a Sabbath. No true man of God would break the Sabbath law.
The formerly blind man is now facing interrogation by the Pharisees but, naïve as he is, he makes more sense than they do. “We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will.” The formerly blind man reasoned that God must have listened to Jesus because otherwise Jesus could not have been God’s instrument in healing Him. To his thinking, Jesus couldn’t therefore be a ‘sinner’ because ‘God does not listen to sinners.’ If God ‘listens to the godly man who does his will’ and God listens to Jesus, then Jesus must be doing God’s will. It all seemed quite straight forward. The man was convinced that Jesus was from God. “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
This was more than the Pharisees could take. “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” They resented his reasoning, his conclusion and the fact he was lecturing them, so they resorted to abuse. “You were steeped in sin at birth.” They clearly thought his blindness was caused by sin. Jesus had already challenged this thinking earlier when His own disciples inferred sin was behind the blindness (9:2,3).
‘And they threw him out.’ This could mean they threw him out of the room or building where they were, or that they barred him from worship in the Temple and synagogue.
The Pharisees must have known restoration of sight to the blind was a promised blessing of the messianic age (Isaiah 29:18; 35:5; 42:7). Despite this, they rejected the significance of the miracle, the testimony of the man and the claims of the One who performed it. Ultimately they rejected the light.
Walking in the light is just as much our responsibility as refusing to walk in the darkness. Is there anything you’re doing in your life that you know you shouldn’t be? Will you turn around, face the light, walk away and let it go?
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