Day 297 (John 9-10) - Year 6
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Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. In ancient Near Eastern culture, lots of people associated sickness and physical disability with sin. And it's true that occasionally there can be a link, like with the demonic, but in many of the healing cases we've seen, there's been no mention of sin at all. Scripture doesn't lay out a direct, consistent cause-and-effect relationship.

It's normal to adopt cultural beliefs as our own and assume they're true, so the cultural mindset of sickness being sin-adjacent has impacted even Jesus' disciples.

When they meet a blind man, the disciples ask, who's to blame for this man's blindness? Is he being punished for his own sin or for his parents' sin? And Jesus says, guess again. He's blind because this situation is going to be used to glorify God. This is probably challenging to them because one of the main reasons this whole way of thinking evolved was as an attempt to avoid blaming God for suffering.

But here, Jesus seems to put the onus on God. He's flipping the script again. This can be especially hard if we still have a hard time trusting that God is doing what is good and best. And frankly, it can still be hard even if you know that's true. Fortunately, God is still at work in this man's story to heal and to redeem. And guess what particular day it is when God chooses to do this work? The Sabbath.

Remember back on day 281 when we talked about the rules the Pharisees add to God's laws? They call it building a fence around the law. Remember how they made it illegal to spit on the dirt on the Sabbath because that was cutting it too close to the job of a brick mason? So, of course, Jesus throws his leg over that fence and decides that the best way to heal this man is not just to speak it into existence like we know he can, but to spit on the dirt, make mud, and put it on the man's eyes. This is shocking.

He's not just healing on the Sabbath, he's going next level with it. Maybe he wants to double down on the disrespect he's showing the Pharisees, or maybe he wants to show them that if he can break two of their rules at the same time and still heal the man, then keeping all their rules clearly isn't the way to draw near to God. And maybe this man is the Messiah. He's turning their whole belief system on its head.

After Jesus puts the mud on the man's eyes, he sends him to wash the mud off in the pool of Siloam. This pool is huge. It's 225 feet square. That's roughly four times the size of an Olympic swimming pool. It was discovered in 2005, and we go there on our trips to Israel. You can step down into it. During Jesus' day, it was a major hotspot in Jerusalem. So for Jesus to send the man there tells us he wants everyone to know about this healing. Why the change of process? Why isn't he trying to hide things anymore?

As he gets closer and closer to his death, he starts being more open about things, which is how it all comes together. And this incident certainly brought a lot of pushback. Of course, the Pharisees jump into the middle of it. They want to know who healed this man. But the thing is, he's never seen the man who did it, so it's not like he could pick him out of a lineup. All he knows is that his name is Jesus.

The Pharisees even round up his parents to verify the story. They're nervous about the investigation, though. They don't want to be expelled from the synagogue community. So when the Pharisees ask how he was healed, they say, uh, pass.

They interrogate the man again, and he seems to get kind of snarky with them. He's like, you guys are so curious about Jesus, sounds to me like you want to follow him too. That's awesome. Then he basically uses their own words to reason them into a corner, so they throw him out. Jesus comes back around to find him and says, hey, I'm

I'm the Messiah. I'm the Son of Man. And I'm here to help blind people like you get their sight and people who have sight to lose theirs. He's not talking about physical eyes here. He's talking about spiritual eyes. Those who think they can see, those who are not aware of their own spiritual poverty, like the Pharisees, he's going to blind them. Jesus condemns the religious and saves the lost. He's always pointing back to square one, spiritual poverty.

By the way, it's interesting that the more this man has to tell the story about who Jesus is and what he did, the more his faith seems to increase. His descriptions of Jesus go from the man called Jesus to he is a prophet to he is from God to he is God in the flesh over the course of this story.

In chapter 10, Jesus gives us another metaphor for his relationship with the church. He calls himself the good shepherd. In the Old Testament, we saw God repeatedly refer to the leaders of Israel as shepherds, but they were bad shepherds, wicked and selfish. In Ezekiel 34, God promised to raise up another shepherd for his people who would set things right again.

Jesus says he has a healthy relationship with the sheep, which is how he's referring to believers. He says other leaders may be sneaky and violent, but he's got a personal relationship with the sheep. They know his voice, and he's protective of them. Then he says something confusing. He calls himself the door of the sheep.

So are you the shepherd or are you the door? Yes. In ancient Israel, a place with lots of rocks and not much wood, sheep pens are made out of stacked rocks. When they're making the pen, they leave one section of the circle open for entry and exit. And when the shepherd rounds up all the sheep and puts them in the pen for the night, he lies down in the door and sleeps in that spot.

That way, the sheep can't get out, and thieves and robbers can't easily get in. The shepherd is the door. During the day, the sheep go out to find green pasture and are fed, and during the night, the sheep come in and are safe. The

The sheep have enemies, humans who want to steal them, wild animals who want to devour them. And Jesus says he takes his role as shepherd seriously. In fact, he says he owns the sheep. So he's obviously protective and possessive. He's not just a hired hand who clocks out and takes his paycheck. He's personally invested. In case it's hard to make the connection in this metaphor, the enemies of human sheep might include false teachers, corrupt leaders, and even the forces of darkness.

In verse 16, Jesus gives a nod to the Gentiles. He says, This echoes the prophecy of Isaiah 56, 8, which says, He closes this metaphor with a nod to his death. He says no one takes his life from him. He lays it down willingly.

Over the centuries, there have been groups who started to hate the Jews or the Romans because they say they killed Jesus. First of all, be glad Jesus died. We desperately needed him to. Because if he hadn't died, we'd all still be in sin debt.

Second of all, he says he'll be dying in obedience to the Father's plan. And of course, at the time, no one could make sense of what he was saying. Trying to understand the prophecies of pre-death Jesus sometimes feels like you're trying to play Wheel of Fortune when there still aren't any vowels on the board and you're like, huh? Then when it gets solved, you feel like an idiot for not seeing it because it was so obvious.

Then he rounds out the chapter with a confrontation with the leaders of the Jews, aka the Pharisees. They want him to shoot straight. Is he the Messiah or not? They just want him to say yes so they can kill him for claiming to be God. He says, By the way, the cause and effect relationship in that sentence is really interesting to me. He doesn't say, He says,

This section is also where my God shot appeared today. It's in verses 28 through 29 where he says, I give them eternal life and they shall never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the Father are one. To me, the single most comforting thing in the whole universe is that nothing can snatch me from the Father's hand.

Nothing is stronger than him, not even me. He says no one can do it, and I'm a someone. How incredible and reassuring and comforting is that? We're promised both eternal life and eternal security in his hand. He holds us secure. Because what he initiates, he will sustain and he will fulfill. And thank God, I could never do it. But he can and he does and he keeps doing. He's where the joy is.

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