As we have mentioned before, the nine cases in the Gospel of John are divided into two groups. The first six cases signify how the Lord as our life can deal with positive things, while the last three cases signify how the Lord as our life can deal with negative things. Let us review them once more. The first six cases reveal that the Lord as life is for regenerating, satisfying, healing, enlivening, feeding, and quenching. These six signs compose one group because they deal with the positive aspects of His life. The last three cases deal with the negative matters of sin, blindness, and death. Sin causes blindness and results in death. Therefore, these three—sin, blindness, and death—are grouped together showing how the Lord is our life in dealing with the negative things. In the first six cases the Lord brings us to something positive, but in the last three cases the Lord delivers us from something negative because He delivers us from sin, blindness, and death.
According to 20:30-31, the writer indicated that Jesus did many signs. From all of these cases, the writer selected only nine as signs. Therefore, these signs must be very meaningful, and the order in which they are presented must also be quite significant. For example, the first case is about regeneration, and the last is about the resurrection from the dead. Thus, the first case is about the regeneration in the beginning of life, and the last is about resurrection after the end of life. Furthermore, in the last group of cases, sin is placed first among the negative things because sin is the origin of blindness and death. Blindness originates from sin, and death is the ultimate end of sin. In this message we shall deal with the matter of blindness.
Some readers of the Bible are not clear that John 10 is a continuation of John 9. However, if you read carefully, you will see that chapter ten is a continuation of chapter nine. Hence, these two chapters form one section of the Holy Word. John 10:21 helps us to realize that chapter ten is a continuation of chapter nine, for the question is asked, “Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?” Nevertheless, each chapter covers a different point. In these two chapters, two major aspects of the Lord’s being are revealed: the Lord’s giving sight to the blind and the Lord’s shepherding of the believers outside of religion.
This case continues to prove that the religion of law could not do any good to a blind man, but that the Lord Jesus, as the light of the world, could impart sight to him in the way of life (10:10, 28). This sign was performed on the Sabbath day. It seems that the Lord again did a sign purposely on the Sabbath day to expose the vanity of the rituals of religion.
Blindness, as sin in the previous chapter, is a matter of death. A dead person surely is blind. “...the god of this age has blinded the thoughts of the unbelieving.” So they need “the illumination of the gospel of the glory of Christ” to shine forth to them (2 Cor. 4:4), “to open their eyes, to turn them from darkness to light and from the authority of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18). In the principle set forth in chapter two, this is also the changing of death into life.
Let us read 9:1-3. “And as He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered, Neither has this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God might be manifested in him.” The question raised by the disciples was according to their religious knowledge. They thought that the blindness must have been due to the man’s sin or the sin of his parents. This question, like those in 4:20-25 and 8:3-5, is a matter of yes or no, which belongs to the tree of knowledge resulting in death (Gen. 2:17), but the Lord’s answer in 9:3 points them to God, who is the tree of life resulting in life (Gen. 2:9). We have seen that the Lord in the Gospel of John never answers such questions with an answer of yes or no, right or wrong. This is because the Gospel of John is a book of life, not a book of the knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, the Lord said that the man’s blindness was so that “the works of God might be manifested in him.”
Why is it that the Lord never answers with a yes or a no? Because yes-or-no answers are from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Good and evil are just like yes and no. While both yes and no belong to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in this gospel the Lord comes to us as the tree of life. The tree of life is God as our life. Consequently, in this gospel the Lord never answers people with a yes or a no. He always refers them to God. The Lord does not refer to yes or no for an answer, but to God as the tree of life. The Lord’s answer in 9:3 brought His disciples directly to God, that is, it brought them to the tree of life. At this point, the disciples were still very religious, holding to their religious concepts, which belong to the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but the Lord was trying again and again to turn them from the tree of knowledge to the tree of life. Those disciples were under the Lord’s training in this matter for three and a half years. Even after that time, one of the disciples, Peter, had not thoroughly been delivered from the religious concepts, for in Acts 10:9-16 we see that Peter was still religious, still influenced by the knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps we consider ourselves as free from the tree of knowledge, but even now we may still be mainly under its influence.
When we were sinners, we lost our sight and could not see anything. Our blindness was due to our sinful nature. In chapter nine the man was born blind, signifying that blindness is in the nature of a person when he is born. We sinners were blind by nature because we were born that way. Have you ever realized that every sinner was born blind? Therefore, if we confess that we are sinful, we must also admit that we are blind.
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