Am I Blind Too?

Those of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these things and said to Him, "We are not blind too, are we?" (John 9:40)

I think this is a very relevant question that all of us would do well to ask. One of the biggest obstacles for the Pharisees of Jesus' day to accepting and embracing Him as the One sent from heaven to deliver them, was their deep-seated assumption that they understood religion and that they knew what God was about and what He wanted. So when Jesus showed up acting and living and speaking differently from their definitions of righteousness they saw no alternative but to label Him as a counterfeit and a sinner.

I look back over this chapter to see how blindness might be revealed in the attitudes of these men and several things come to my attention. But far more importantly I sense that I too need to ask the same question of Jesus and allow Him to open my own eyes to all the things I assume I am right about but in reality may still be very blind. If I am not willing to have my own blindness exposed by the light of Jesus then all of my study and profession of faith is just as hypocritical as these men who rejected Jesus over and over again.

• These men assumed and taught that when bad things show up in people's lives that it is God who is punishing them for sin. They believed that this blindness from birth was a sign of God's intense displeasure over some sin, an offense against God either in this man's life (how could that be if he had not even been born yet?) or in his parent's lives.
• His neighbors and pretty much everyone around him viewed and labeled him as 'that beggar who sits and begs'. They also seemed to assume that because of his incurable blindness that he would always be 'that beggar'.
• A new but rather awkward label that appears in this chapter is that he was the man 'who was formerly blind'. Interestingly the only identity that people gave him had to do with keeping him attached to his past condition.
• The religious people who were supposedly experts at knowing what God was all about determined that Jesus could not be of God because He did not follow the traditions of men regarding how to keep the Sabbath properly.
• Because the evidence in front of them about Jesus was so compelling and yet so conflicting with what they insisted on believing, the religious leaders began to indulge in a desperate denial of the facts. They insinuated that his parents were lying about his birth in an attempt to prop up their own theories about reality. They resorted to using intimidation to try to force others to deny the facts of reality and the obvious evidence in favor of Jesus.

Is this starting to look like something that could be called blindness? Desperate denial of reality in the face of overwhelming evidence, it seems like this qualifies as some sort of very serious blindness to me. But then I find myself convicted of falling into the very same condition all too often.

• These religious professors pressed the issue even further by emphatically declaring that Jesus was a sinner. But in doing so they were backing themselves into a corner of having to explain away the powerful evidence in front of everyone to the contrary. They were thrashing around trying to suppress or intimidate the positive testimony of anyone involved in this incident and attempted to get everyone to accept their false charges about Jesus as fact by threatening anyone who might dare to disagree with them.
• They claimed to be loyal disciples of Moses while trying to distance themselves from Jesus (who was the very One who had led, mentored and taught Moses personally).

• They stated categorically that they believed God had spoken to Moses, yet they were unwilling to admit any similarity between what Moses had taught and what Jesus represented.
• After this 'former blind man' had shared an irrefutable and compelling testimony in favor of the obvious truth about Jesus before these skeptics, their only response was to shame him and disfellowship him and bar him from participating with others in worship of God in the temple. They tacked on him another label of one who was 'born entirely in sins', even though their primary basis for that claim was now obviously missing.

When Jesus looks up this man who had defended Him before these virulent skeptics who professed to know God better than His own Son, He speaks a profound truth to him which was overheard by some of the Pharisees nearby who may have participated in the recent exchange. In essence, Jesus took the assumptions of the religious establishment about the relation between sin and blindness and turned it totally upside down. And in doing so Jesus called that 'judgment'.

I have always been puzzled by the statement Jesus made in response to this question until a friend of mine recently pointed out the connection between the beginning and the end of this chapter. When these men asked if Jesus thought they were blind, His response revealed that their assumptions about people born blind were actually backwards and that real blindness is something that people choose themselves, not something imposed by God as a punishment.

Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, 'We see,' your sin remains." (John 9:41) This is referring to the attitude that a person has about their relationship with truth. If a person is truly ignorant of true reality as defined by God because they have not yet had opportunity to know it and embrace it, then God can easily address that handicap just as He healed this blind man and ordained him to be an apostle and a powerful witness for Him. But when people have had repeated opportunities and advantages and have been exposed to abundant evidence of the truth about God and keep rejecting or distorting it, then their unwillingness to admit their blindness is itself a sin that blinds them even more as it hardens their hearts.

Every time I, as a professing Christian, resist living out the things God has shown me as being true, principles of reality that conflict with the traditions of religion, then I am bringing blindness onto my own soul and am damaging my capacity to see clearly. When I have received wonderful insights from the Spirit of God and have been blessed with rich resources from the Word of God and yet remain content to live in the shallows of acceptable religion as practiced by those around me, then I am inflicting blindness on my own heart and damaging my spiritual eyes and am in serious danger of causing permanent blindness for eternity if I do not repent.

I want to listen to the answers that Jesus gives me when I too ask if I am blind. I don't want to ignore the overwhelming evidence from all sorts of events and people in my life as to the reality of grace and the immutable principles of heaven that cannot be violated without eternal danger for my destiny.

Father, keep me from presumptuous sin. Open my eyes and heal from from voluntary blindness as well as inherited blindness.