The Spit of God

"While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world." When He had said this, He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and applied the clay to his eyes. (John 9:5-6)

This man had never seen light, but had certainly heard a lot about it. He also was right there listening to what the disciples and Jesus were saying about him, likely wondering what this was all about and what might transpire next.

Why did Jesus not just heal him immediately like he did other blind men? In this case He seemed to initially move in a different direction. If someone were to put wet, sticky clay on your eyes would it help you see better or would it make things worse?

Look how closely similar this is to the account in Genesis of how Jesus created man originally. He shaped the clay of the ground into a being that bore a striking resemblance of Himself and then kissed that form into life. This time He uses clay again but only works with part of a human that was malfunctioning. Then He asks the person to get involved in the process themselves and help to complete it by washing away the clay that was covering their eyes.

What does this imply about the power apparently inherent in the saliva of God?

What does this imply about our participation in God's healing work in our lives?

Avoiding the Blame Game

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 9:3)

As I meditate on this passage again and allow it to be applied to my own life, I notice something that has resonance with my past. It ties into my emerging new perceptions of what sin really is and what God is up to in my life as well as how to relate to my circumstances and environment growing up.

Because of the way I was taught to view God I developed a deep rebellion in my life that began to strengthen quite a bit through my early teen years. The picture of God I received during most of my growing up years was full of fear, intimidation and demands for external perfection along with implied threats of impending punishment. Because of this perception I both came to deeply resent God while at the same time feeling terrified about disobeying Him in the slightest way for fear of severe punishment.

This was, I suppose, at least some of the goal of well-intentioned people around me hoping to keep me in line with what they considered 'the truth'. However, the effect on my life was nearly the opposite. I not only came to secretly (even from myself) hate God and my own father who often represented Him in this way, but at the same time I was induced to repress my own awareness of this hatred. In my thinking, to hate God was yet another sin that would produce even more severe consequences. As a result of this convoluted thinking and my dark views of God, I was led to live a duplicitous life of self-deception and religious pretension while all the time my heart was both raging and dying inside.

It was not until many years later that the truth about the God of the Bible began to finally break through the many lies about Him that had barricaded my heart and He was able to get in and introduce Himself to me for real. Ever since then I have been slowly reevaluating and challenging my opinions about Him which in turn is dramatically changing and improving my relationship with Him and with others.

But for years I felt compelled to rehearse the facts about the extensive damage to my heart and the internal picture of God that was inflicted on me, especially by my father. It was a major part of my story, my journey, and my testimony did not make a lot of sense without that context. What my father did in the name of God and religion was wrong and not only did it terribly damage my own heart but was sadly passed down yet another generation in the way I represented God in my treatment of my own children. Sin perpetuates itself this way and I can trace it back further just as easily. My own father grew up in a much worse environment than I did and was actually doing well to improve his own perceptions about God as much as he did.

But as I read again these words of Jesus this morning in answer to His disciple's query about 'who's fault' this problem was, I realized again how deeply immersed I still am caught in the blame game. Just a couple of days ago I had a conversation with a good friend about this problem of being caught up in the blame game and was explaining to him that the very feeling of need for us to blame someone is a trap of Satan and is in no way reflective of how things should operate in God's family. When we desire to blame someone else for our circumstances or for something that is going wrong, we are being tempted to view life from the mindset of the world rather than living in the light.

God is not, never has been and never will be, engaged in the blame game. Blame draws us into arguments and produces defensiveness, none of which contribute to growth and thriving. Yet we are so accustomed to participating in this game that we seldom challenge its validity. We just assume that someone has to be blamed before anything can be repaired or restored. Yet if we would stop to consider this logic more honestly we would begin to see the absurdity of our compulsion to blame and would begin realizing that our desire to blame someone is really a secret attempt to avoid facing our own internal discrepancies and failings honestly.

Blame involves shame. When I try to blame someone for my problems I am attempting to pin the responsibility for my problem on them. But in doing so I am also shifting the responsibility away from myself. The problem with that is that when I place responsibility for my life on someone else I give up control over my own destiny. I am in essence depending on them now to change my circumstances and abdicating my own ability to change my circumstances or my character. To blame someone else for my problems is to make them responsible for fixing them and denying my own responsibility for my own choices.

Does this mean that others are never accountable for damage that they cause me? Not at all. Each person is fully liable for the way they relate to others and for the effect they have on other people's lives whether it be their children, their spouse, their friends or anyone else their life touches. This is a principle of reality and is how the kingdom of heaven functions. However, the Bible clearly teaches that we are not to act as a judge over other people. We never have the capacity to discern the heart, to know the extenuating circumstances that shape another person's life and take all the various factors into account to determine the rightness or wrongness of their choices. Only God is capable of making fair and truthful assessments of any person's choices and actions and He alone is to have that function.

Yet interestingly I find at the end of this chapter a reference to judgment in the concluding comments of Jesus to this blind man now healed. Jesus said, "For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind." (John 9:39) This has given me some strong clues in my search for the definition of the works that Jesus referred to in the beginning of this chapter. I am seeking to discern just what He meant by these works and explored that last time to some extent. Now I am seeing even more how the works of God involve bringing light into the lives of people who have never seen light before. But also, as evidenced by the following verses after 39, this same light can bring blindness to those who insist they already can see.

The very process of bringing light to bear on our circumstances and our reaction to that light is what Jesus calls judgment. I have been learning for some time now, and much to my relief, that real judgment has far more to do with simply exposing what is hidden in the heart rather than any supposed arbitrary decisions on the part of God about who is to be saved or lost. True judgment is never forced on anyone in heaven's way of dealing with things. Judgment rather is induced by bringing out into the open everything that we have been seeking to hide through deception or denial. Judgment is happening all the time in various ways and we can see evidence of that on a regular basis. However, there is a day of final judgment when everything everywhere and everyone will all coalesce at one point together to experience the ultimate exposure of what has been hidden, and all will see everything plainly for what it really is.

But what about the issue of blame? How does that fit into this picture?

Blame is one of the most effective ways of trying to avoid judgment. Blame is diverting attention away from myself to the faults and failings of others in an attempt to minimize my own responsibility for what is going on in my own life. Blame is engaging in self-deception to some extent which in turn sets me up for a negative judgment experience down the road. Therefore, if I am interested in encountering less embarrassment whenever a judgment experience comes along, it would be well to disengage from the blame game and start living in the light that surrounds and fills the presence of Jesus. When Jesus comes near, judgment always begins to happen; it is the same thing as saying that it is easier to see things when you have a good light nearby. When we want to see something in the dark, it is far more effective to simply bring around a good light to expose what is hiding in the dark rather than trying to figure out what is there by groping around, listening or sniffing the air or any other such feeble attempts. When we want to see clearly we need two things: we need eyes that are functioning properly and we need light to illuminate what is around us.

I am now starting to perceive that the works that Jesus spoke of in verses 3 and 4 have to do with this very thing. The works of God have to do with the light of God as well as the healing of our eyes, especially our spiritual eyes, so that we can properly discern what is real, what is true and what is not true. This whole passage is a dramatic illustration of what Jesus is talking about here at the beginning and is His response to the question of His disciples.

The disciples assumed, just as many of us have assumed all our lives, that our parents may be blamed for many of our problems. In addition, there are many wrong choices that we have made ourselves that have certainly contributed to many of our problems as we all can attest to readily. So it only makes sense to us, just as it did to those disciples, that if we could just figure out who is to blame for the dysfunction in our lives that we could understand things better. So we spend endless hours in discussion, research, investigation, talk shows, expose´s, psychoanalysis and any number of other such forums trying to figure out who is to blame for all the problems that make our lives uncomfortable. We even go to war and kill thousands of people in the name of trying to make things right. We destroy people's reputations, we curse our enemies, we engage in all sorts of activities supposedly to make things better all in the name of justice. Yet through all of this we find it impossible to find the freedom and joy and peace that our hearts were designed to live in and to rest in.

I have come to realize a truth that has helped to set me free a number of times. It is the real truth about the nature of forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood words in our language, and yet it has some of the most powerful potential to bring us the peace and joy that our hearts long for if we would ever grasp its true power. And forgiveness is directly related to this issue of blame and how we think we can escape our pain by blaming others for the malfunction we experience in our lives.

Forgiveness is in essence the reverse of blame. Forgiveness does not take away another person's accountability for their actions or choices, but at the same time it does refrain from using blame to shift responsibility away from ourselves. Many think that refraining from blaming others for things they clearly have done to hurt us is living in denial. We somehow intuitively assume that for things to be made right, blame has to be assessed or we will never be able to get free of the misery and pain we suffer through the offenses of others against us. Because of this, forgiveness as popularly perceived has very little appeal and doesn't even make very good sense.

The problem here is that both forgiveness and blame are not perceived correctly for what they really are or how they operate. We are quick to indulge in blame and are loathe to practice forgiveness because we have such mistaken ideas of what forgiveness is and have such misplaced trust and assumptions about what blame might accomplish for us.

When I blame my parents for my misshapen character, my rebellion, my screwed-up pictures of God and much more that can accurately be traced back to their influence in my life, I may be factually true in my assessments of their effect on my life but it does nothing to set me free from the damage these things have caused in my heart. Quite the opposite, when I indulge in blaming them, subconsciously thinking I may find freedom from my baggage, I only discover that the very act of blaming them is actually digging me deeper into the very pit they got me into to start with. I am now digging my own pit even deeper instead of escaping from it as I assumed blame could do for me. I am only adding to the problem instead of finding resolution and healing and deliverance from it.

This is because blame seeks to repair things by using shame against others and seeking to devalue their worth. This is Satan's clever trick that is woven into the very fabric of our fallen nature. We innately think that by diminishing the value of others through blame, shame and disgrace that we can somehow feel more valuable and worthy by comparison. Of course much of this is at the subconscious level and we are unaware that this is the mechanism of blame.

Forgiveness on the other hand, is God's way of bringing life and light back into the terrible malfunction of our lives and is the only way in which we will ever experience freedom and peace from all the damage that other's offenses have created in us. Forgiveness is a deliberate choice to take full responsibility for ourselves, our choices, our reactions and our own current situations. Forgiveness does not involve pretending that others have no responsibility for their actions and choices; however it does not focus on their malfunctions but focuses on my own ability to choose how I am going to respond and what direction I am going to move from here.

Forgiveness is relinquishing my right to blame, to accuse, to get revenge, or to get even. Forgiveness releases others from my desire to settle a score and chooses instead to put my life and my trust fully in the hands of God who alone can see all things clearly. He can be trusted to make everything turn out right in the long run. Forgiveness is letting go of my resentment against others and seeks to perceive them from heaven's vantage point rather than from the limited view of my perceptions in the present.

Forgiveness as practiced this way and demonstrated in the life of Jesus, sets the heart free to love, to be vulnerable, to be confident even when it may be hurt over and over again.

Forgiveness can only happen effectively and bring healing when the heart begins to experience the unconditional love that only is found in the heart of God.

Forgiveness is letting go of the grudges, the feelings of offense that come when others hurt us.

Forgiveness is trusting that God is the only safe one to trust and that His love flowing through our hearts can overcome all the fear and pain that others may use to manipulate and control us.

Jesus' answer to His disciple's question in essence revealed that their question was based on a wrong premise. They were trying to establish who was to blame; Jesus showed that blame was the wrong method to use if they wanted to experience life in heaven's perspective. Rather than looking for someone to blame, Jesus focused on bringing life, truth, light and healing into people's lives so that the real truth about God would be more obvious. By avoiding the blame game that regulated the thinking of those around Him, Jesus shifted attention to setting people free. Blame will never set us free; it only reinforces our prison walls and our darkness.

The works of God are seen in the mission statement of Jesus that He declared in His first sermon in the synagogue. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free." (Luke 4:18 NRSV) Blame does the very opposite of these things. Forgiveness expedites the accomplishment of these things. Jesus' life was a demonstration of the forgiveness of God and what that looks like in contrast to the religions of men. The cross of Jesus was a demonstration of the truth that no amount of abuse, pain, force or intimidation can suppress the love, compassion and forgiveness of God or entice Him to play the blame game. This is the example which shows me the path to life and freedom and love in my own circumstances.

Exploring Works

Jesus answered, "...it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world." (John 9:3-5)

I asked the question that has been surfacing repeatedly, “What does it mean that no one can work when the night comes?” So I asked God to explain it to me and this is what is starting to emerge.

Looking carefully and thoughtfully at the context where all answers should be found, I begin to see what looks like a valid explanation. But first I must grasp what the words mean.

The key word here is works. Because of lifelong baggage associated with this word I have to be very careful to lay aside my preconceived beliefs and reactions and allow the passage to define its own terms as much as possible. So whatever Jesus intended to mean by using this word it is very likely to be discovered in the surrounding verses and story. It helps to analyze the parameters of this word from these immediate verses.

Jesus says that the works of God can be displayed in this man who was born blind.

Twice in these verses it says that they are works of the God.

The term 'we' is used regarding working these works. That implies Jesus and at least one other person. Who is that other one or more? It is not clear yet. It could be Jesus and God; it could be Jesus and the disciples; it could be Jesus and the blind man, or it could be all of the above.

These works evidently can only be accomplished during a certain period of time that Jesus calls 'the day'.

Conversely, these works apparently cannot occur when it is no longer day. That is the puzzling part and seems to form some very tight restrictions in defining what constitutes these 'works'. But then I have to be careful not to insert my own assumptions about what is day or night but rather allow the passage to define them as well.

These works also are relevant to the words 'displayed' as well as working. They are works that 'we' can do as well as being displayed in a person's life.

In this case the place the works are going to be displayed, a person in whose life they will be evidenced may also have strong bearing on defining the nature of these works and their definition. The one in whom the works will be displayed is a man who has never, ever seen light before. That is very significant in the context of the next few verses.

I am starting to see a tight link between whatever it is He intended to mean by works and the concept of light in relation to this blind man who has never seen light. I also suspect that it is very significant that it is noted here that the man was blind from birth, not just a blind man without that extra description. Jesus is clearly making spiritual applications through this miracle which very quickly come into the open as the story progresses. This is made quite clear at the end of this story when Jesus explains to this man what is really going on around him.

And Jesus said, "For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind." Those of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these things and said to Him, "We are not blind too, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, 'We see,' your sin remains." (John 9:39-41)