The second thing they try to do is to separate the healing from Jesus. They had to acknowledge the healing because they eventually could not escape it. So they try to attribute it to some other source. They say, “Look, give glory to God. God's the one who does miracles.” And that's right, isn't it? God is the one who does miracles. But what they refused to admit was that God, in Jesus Christ, is the one who did the miracle. So although they were trying to get away from Jesus as the source of the healing, in the end, of course, they couldn't do it because Jesus had done the miracle, and the only adequate cause was God. That meant that Jesus Christ was God. So their second approach did not work either.
Yesterday, we were tracing the man’s increasing understanding of Jesus. We now want to continue to discover what the man goes on to conclude about who Jesus really is.
Now, here in the ninth chapter you have a man who was physically blind, and his physical blindness is a symbol of his spiritual blindness. Now what John is telling us is that just as salvation has to come from God as his free gift, so does spiritual insight to understand the truth has to come from God as well, because none of us can see it unless we're born again. That's what the story is about.
The second thing light does is causes seeds to grow. This is what’s happening to the blind man, spiritually speaking. The light of the knowledge of Jesus shines upon this man who had been born blind, and what you find in his story is rapid growth. And let me point out also, briefly, that this is the new section of the Gospel. In the first section, chapters 1-4, Jesus is revealing himself to others as the light. Then in the second section, chapters 5-8, you have hostility growing up against him. You see the light is shining and now the creatures of the darkness don't like it. They're fighting him, initially over the Sabbath question. But what they really don't like is that his goodness is exposing their evil, and so you have that building up. The great climax of that is in this horrible story of their trapping the woman, in the eighth chapter, and then a discussion at the end of the chapter where Jesus points out that they're really children of the devil.
We come now to the encounter of Jesus and the man born blind, recorded in John 9. This is the first miracle story that we've studied in this particular series. Of the different conversations we have looked at so far in this series, this is the first that involves a miraculous healing. John has a unique way of talking about miracles. The other Gospels handle these stories in their own way.
