Message (03/09/08)

John 9:1-7

“Beyond this wall!”

Introduction:

We’re born with a very poor eye-sight so that we can not see beyond this wall. So, we feel so many times like walking in a dark room—not knowing where we’re heading toward. However, when we come under God’s light, we start to see things and see even very differently. Yes, we got God’s light of eternity—a life beyond this wall—so things are totally different! This is what we call being “born again”. For, everything’s new, fresh and even totally different from the way we’ve seen before. So was Jesus, called himself the “light of the world” in order to give us this light—a new spiritual eyesight—that we may clearly see things in proper way.

Setting the Story: two kinds of blindness (vv. 1-2):

John, the original writer of the gospel, introduces the event with the physical blindness of this poor man—a man born blind. This is the way he’s born. No one could be blamed for this blindness—it’s a poor natural birth of this fellow (v. 1 “from birth”). However, on the reverse-side, there’s another blindness that John is trying to point out (v. 2). It is the spiritual blindness of all, that's unable to see things beyond this wall—wall of this man’s physical blindness. So, several questions in life, we got, that ask, “why?”. With this poor eyesight, we try to figure out all possible answers and come up with uncountable theories and self-contradicting philosophies. And the problem of this blindness is still unsolved even after thirty years had passed (cf., v. 23 “of age”). The only thing we’ve got after all is just a multiplication of unanswered “why”.

Visitation of God in Person: the light of God to save and bless (vv. 3-5):

Now, John is trying to introduce Jesus Christ as God’s manifest-visitation in person that is His gracious, favored attention to heal our blindness (v. 3 “to display/manifest outworking of God”). In fact, this is the call to work, to live, and to walk in his light—the manifest-visitation of God (v. 4 “do/be active”, v. 5 “light of the world”). Further, this is like kind of giving us a new measurement/ruler of life. For instance, to be active in his day-light means to live or walk by reflecting ourselves in Jesus Christ—the visitation of God in person. And, we know, that this visitation of God is His gracious, favored attention to save and bless us. So, we say that this is a new rule of life to reflect ourselves upon—reflect ourselves in the light of his power to heal, his love to embrace and forgive, his marvelous grace to bless us as displayed in JC.

Expected Response: simple faith (vv. 6-7):

Yes! ‘Grace’ is God’s key to bless us and ‘faith’ is our key to touch Him. Grace is God’s giving hand and faith is our receiving hand. Jesus Christ is the manifestation of God’s love, grace, power in person and we response him with faith and trust. Here again, we see another test of faith—a test on how much this fellow trust Jesus, the divine-healer (cf., vv. 6-7 individual command “go and wash” to “Siloam”). Another question but need not to answer is left here that is that how this man born blind safely reached the pool to wash his face. For, John expects that every reader has already got that answer….