Blame

And His disciples asked Him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?" Jesus answered, "It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him." (John 9:2-3)

Jesus' followers asked him, "Teacher, why was this man born blind? Whose sin made it happen? Was it his own sin or that of his parents?"

Jesus answered, "It was not any sin of this man or his parents that caused him to be blind. He was born blind so that he could be used to show what great things God can do." (ERV)

Ever since sin entered this world we have been confused, especially when God tries to speak with us. When God asks us questions we have so many false assumptions about what He is thinking that we come up with answers that are nearly irrelevant. And when we ask questions of God, most of the time our questions are along the wrong lines or are based on assumptions that are contaminated with false views of God and how He feels towards us.

These disciples were asking their question of Jesus based on a very common but mistaken premise. They believed like most people do, that where there is evidences of a curse that there must be a corresponding offense that is inducing a punishment. And since God is the ultimate One in control and is assumed to be in charge of balancing the scales of justice, then whenever someone is suffering what is assumed to be a punishment, there must be a specific sin committed by someone somewhere that brought such wrath of God down upon them. The disciples were looking for someone to blame because everyone assumes that that is just the way life functions and how God relates to disobedient offenders.

One of the very first symptoms of the confusion that sin brings happened when God questioned Adam about why he was acting so strange all of a sudden. God asked some simple and respectful questions of Adam in an attempt to help him reason through what was really going on. But because of the intense fear, shame and distorted false ideas about God that now filled Adam's mind and heart, instead of answering the question honestly he immediately moved into the blame game.

Blame is one of the main pillars of Satan's government and is one of the most successful ways he keeps people trapped in delusion and denial. Blame is the main technique that Satan relied on all throughout his rebellion in heaven to deflect attention away from his own lack of integrity and create doubts about God's integrity. This tactic has remained his chief defense for the rest of his existence, and because sin has infused all of us with the nature of the great accuser, our natural response whenever there is a problem is to immediately look for some way of shifting responsibility away from ourselves through blame.

If Adam had simply answered God's question to him honestly, he could have admitted without prodding that he had disobeyed. But he was not experiencing terror induced by lies about God that now filled his heart, created by insinuations about God that he and Eve had been infected with by the enemy. Adam now assumed that God was looking for someone to punish violently for this offense and so he attempted to shift blame onto Even instead of speaking truthfully. In essence, Adam was telling God to kill Eve for the offenses they had just committed, because in his heart he assumed that it was God who was going to carry out the sentence of death that He had warned them would result from disobedience.

The power that motivates all of us to play the blame game rather than accept responsibility for our decisions and actions is our fear of punishment and death. This is the very same motivation that drove Adam to turn and betray the most lovely woman ever on this planet, one that shortly before he was madly in love with. Blame is a sure symptom of the effects of sin and it even undergirds one of the main philosophies of our day, evolution. The observed instinct of self-preservation at any cost to others around us is one of the results of sin in our hearts. Self-preservation above love was the new element that was introduced into the universe by Lucifer later turned Satan, and is the very essence of sin itself.

The instinct of self-preservation that drives all of us and is expressed in selfishness is the power behind the blame game that all of us are tempted to play whenever anything threatens our happiness or especially our reputation. Our hearts naturally desire for others to trust us, to think good about us and to like us. Because we have absorbed the lie that love has to be earned, we assume that God cannot love us unless we are free of blame for disobedience. Just as Adam and Eve assumed from the serpent's lying inferences about God that God intended to kill them if they disobeyed Him, those same inferences about God and His supposed treatment of disobedient children still drives our lives and distorts our relationship with Him today.

It is now one of the foundational assumptions of religions of all flavor that someone has to be to blame and must receive punishment for offenses. Our whole mindset about justice is infused with the notion that someone has to pay for breaking rules. It is all part of our debt mentality that shapes our view of reality. If someone disobeys a law, then there has to be a corresponding punishment that must be inflicted that will settle some imaginary score, that tips the scales of justice back into balance.

But where in the world did this whole notion of balanced scales come from anyway? If a person carefully reviews the history of God's interactions with His people (taking into account the fact that God had to 'dumb down' his communications to meet people where they were at times when their superstition and ignorance made them incapable of relating to anything close to heaven's reality) then this idea of balancing obedience and disobedience on some imaginary scale and the use of arbitrary punishments and/or rewards is a completely absurd concept.

It is true that people for thousands of years assumed that God invented this idea of arbitrary punishments connected to crimes. It is also true that one might come to that conclusion when reviewing the laws of Moses that were given to him by God. But this often fails to take sufficiently into account the circumstances and the surrounding cultures of the times in which all of this took place. It also fails to take into account things that God said many centuries later in retrospect about those instructions and how they miserable failed to accurately reflect God's true desires for His children on earth.

Such deep confusion and misinformation about God was blinding the minds of everyone on earth that God chose to send His own Son to explicitly reveal the truth about how God feels toward us and even more, to demonstrate that God is not involved in the blame game like we have always assumed He was. But at the same time He also allowed us to act out our mistaken assumptions about justice operates, based on the presumptions in the blame game, to unleash all our rage, bitterness and hostility on Jesus. Sinners did everything possible to shift the blame for their malfunctions onto Him and to kill Him with all the torture that could be imagined. In fact, Jesus even additionally took upon Himself all the pain and guilt that humans could not heap upon Him themselves. He did this by embracing the results of sin incurred in the heart of every sinner who would ever live and allowed all that blame, shame and pain to suffocate the very life out of Him.

Why did God allow all of this to happen to Jesus in such a public demonstration of hostility? It was to unmask the truth that the whole basis of what we call justice, a system that relies so much on finding someone to blame and then attempting to balance the imaginary scales by heaping pain and punishments on them, is all a dead-end trail, a futile attempt to fix our pain and problems. But at the same time, by allowing us to pursue that logic to the very end and seeing the futility of settling scores by inflicting pain on others, He uniquely absorbed all the power of the hostility that sin has produced in humanity. Thus Jesus earned the right to bring in a reign of grace in its place.

The whole notion that God operates His government based on blame and punishment is an idea introduced by the greatest accuser of God. Satan has so skewed our assumptions about justice that it is impossible for us to grasp the reality of heaven and how God relates to His created beings. Our only hope is for serious divine intervention into our thinking and perceptions of reality. We have been so immersed in false assumptions about God and about justice that nearly everything we think and assume is hopelessly tainted and distorted. Unless the Spirit of God brings new light into our thinking and we become willing to release our many false beliefs about God, some of which we cherish as foundational truths, we have little chance of ever becoming ready to live in the true kingdom that operates on very different principles.

Over the past few years I sometimes have caught glimpses of the radical nature of the principles upon which heaven operates that seem so strange and out of sync with how we normally assume things should operate. Because we have such limited and confused ideas about God and reality, we tend to squeeze the words and the revelations of the true reality into our own mold and redefine them to fit what we assume, to fit our model of religion and relationships. This forces God to have to use different approaches and different expressions to try to break through our false premises and seek to attract us into believing the good news about how He wants to relate to us. But again we try to force His words into our molds and make them fit our false assumptions about what God is supposed to look and act like and again He has to adapt His communications to get our attention.

Jesus came to reveal the truth about how heaven operates and how radically different God is from what we have usually assumed He was like. Only as we immerse ourselves in His perfect reflection of the Father do we have any hope of having the light of truth open our eyes to new insights and bring our hearts into alignment with the atmosphere of grace and peace and truth that we were designed to live in originally.

Jesus refused to endorse the blame game that religious people assumed God used. Jesus does take our situations and use them to reveal the real truth about God through His interventions that often disrupt and expose our false assumptions about Him. Jesus flatly discounted the whole notion that God is the one out to settle a score by inflicting punishments and pain on people for their sins. God is not the one who is to blame for all that we suffer here on this planet despite all the accusations of His enemies and friends alike. Sin is the cause of all the malfunction and sin is at root of our attempts to live apart from the only Source of life available to us.

Jesus came to reintroduce life and health and joy and proper relationships back into this planet that was lost when our first parents believed the lies of Satan about our heavenly Father. Jesus came to correct the assumptions we have about justice and our belief that punishments somehow even imaginary scores and debts. Jesus came to expose the total fallacy of the blame game and to reestablish the truth that love is the basis for true life, not our confused notions of justice.

Jesus chose to use this blind man as an example of the truth about how God relates to messed up people in sharp contrast with our many assumptions about God that are based on lies of Satan. Jesus chose this man to reveal in both his body and his ensuing testimony a fresh revelation of how much better God really is from what we have always assumed about Him.