“The Case for Christ - Blind Man/Bethsaida - Part 2”                     

The discovery of the riches of Christ are inexhaustible. I hope we can so lay hold of this that we are not content with just the status quo but will desire to move onward in Him.

If we were to live to be a hundred years old, or a thousand years old, or a million years old, we would still have to go on growing in grace, and learning more and more about the infinite wonder and beauty of Jesus Christ.

With all God’s grace and glory before Him, we can go on learning for a lifetime and still need eternity to know as we are known.

But how?

I believe that in the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida, Jesus was demonstrating the going on into this higher priority of life.

I say this for two reasons: first, because, many times, Jesus healed those who needed healing. And the accounts are given without elaborating on any of the details.

And, secondly, in this particular miracle, there is evidence of a divine design in it. It is in the hint given in the end of Mark 8.

There, Peter reacted to Christ’s announcement of how the Son of Man needed to yet undergo suffering. He rebuked Christ for saying such a thing.

Earlier, in verse 29, he had identified Jesus as ‘The Christ’ - that was good!

But, Peter was still half-blind to the reason Jesus had come. In verses 32-33, he could not identify Christ as the suffering Son of Man. You see - his vision was not yet clear!

His inability to see Christ clearly goes back to this miracle of the healing of blindness.

So - with each of the singled-out accounts of Jesus’ healings, which are few in comparison, there is a divine design that echoes and foreshadows certain aspects of His kingdom.

In the case of this blind man, it points to the steps of giving spiritual sight and of the process of seeing transparently, or clearly, or obviously.

It reflects the process needed to understand and live in the coming Kingdom of God through Christ - to ‘be found in Him’, ‘to attain the righteousness through the faith of Christ’, to ‘know Him in the power of His resurrection’, to ‘know Him in the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death’, as Paul outlined it.

We are made aware, in this story, that Jesus was looking into the man’s heart for He had something higher in mind than merely physical healing for him.
 
Thus, Jesus took the man’s hand and led him. Step by step, He took the man into a healthful union with Himself - to a new level of seeing - to a new kind of growth - to the reversal of his existing condition. 

As the man kept his hope in Christ, Christ’s work went on in perfecting the man’s condition.

The change was so dramatic that Jesus saw this man’s need to just go right on home without consulting or conversing with anyone along the way.

Notice that in v 26: ‘And He sent him away to his house,  saying, ‘Neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town.’

Why would Jesus say this? 

Not only did He not want His mission to become a spectacle that would be dragged to an earthly level, (remember His caution against ‘casting pearls before swine’) but He also knew human nature. 

It is so like us to want to use spiritual power for just temporal advantages. That is a very serious mistake. 

Why do you suppose Paul wrote: ‘...I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling’?

Without understanding, Christ’s power in reversing existing conditions can cause problems! 

And - how?

Let me explain briefly because it can easily arrest a growing soul and cause it to fall into a ‘coma of ignorance’. And that is because it misconstrues the reason for Jesus’ coming to earth, yes - the reason for ‘Jesus’ at all.

The Pharisees had dug themselves into such a sad state!

In Mt 9:13, when they saw Jesus and His disciples fellowshipping with the sinners and taxcollectors, they charged them with defiling certain ceremonial laws.

And Jesus connected their concern with His healing of sinners and told them: ‘The sick are the ones who seek out a doctor, not the ones who are well.’

Then Jesus had to go on to explain His mission. He had come to call sinners to repentance, not the righteous.  

He was not putting men into two classes - of sinners and of righteous - when He said this. All He was doing was correcting their wrong concept of His mission.

He quoted God’s message to Hosea: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’

You see, as in Hosea’s day, so these men were overly concerned about the formal rituals of temple worship.

They were hanging on to the ‘shell’ of worship but they had lost the center of it. They were missing the heart of it!

But Jesus told them that His mission was characterized by grace, by mercy, when He was seeking the lost - the sinners - those of us who are spiritually ‘sick’.

How was Paul taught this?

Paul, at one time, had been among such a group of Pharisees. 

He, too, misconstrued the reason for Jesus’ coming. He was in a very, very deep ‘coma of ignorance’ and needed the divine change of his spiritual condition.

One time, after his conversion, Paul sought the Lord three times to remove his ‘thorn in the flesh’, something that was troubling him physically.

Most think this was an eye disease, perhaps similar to the blind man’s problem. 

The only answer Paul could hear, when he came to Christ for healing, was: ‘My grace is sufficient for thee, for My strength is made perfect in weakness’.

Physical healing was denied Paul. For him it was to mean simply a dependence upon the grace of Jesus Christ to get him through - a dependence upon His grace to get through.

Paul accepted that divine condition and, as he submitted to it, the rate and measure of his growth settled the rate of Christ’s perfecting work in him.

He surrendered to Christ’s divine mission to the fullest - that mission characterized by pure mercy and grace!

And - thank God, he did!

For, had Christ granted his request for physical healing, I wonder if Paul would have seen the greatness of God’s grace in Christ to its fullest extent!

I wonder if he would ever have been able to say: ‘Whatever was to my profit, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ...I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ for Whose sake I have lost all things.’

Jesus had said in Lu 18:29-30, ‘There is no man that hath left...[all]...for the Kingdom of God’s sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting.’

When Paul became acutely aware of what Jesus said would happen to those who submitted to His condition, his prayer for temporal advantages died out in him.

He was far more bent on the goal of Christ spiritually reversing his existing condition to fit the garment of Christ in him.

And he could do nothing except go on so that all he could do in his teaching and preaching was to extol Christ.

He preached the salvation of Christ. 

He preached the resurrection of Christ. 

He preached the power of Christ. 

He preached the victory of Christ. 

He preached the splendor and riches of Christ. 

He preached the greatness of Christ. He preached union with Christ. 

He preached the indwelling Christ.

In short, he preached Christ and Him crucified because he saw something of the abundant, abounding, immeasurable riches of God in Christ Jesus!

And he was willing to go on giving up everything he had so that he would gain more and more of Christ!

I wonder - how many of us are ready for that!

Well - this was the follow-up of Paul: he was not healed but instead, was made to depend strictly on the grace of God to get him through to this higher spiritual plane of life.

We have no such follow-up on this blind man of Bethsaida.

All we know is that he faced the danger of using this temporal benefit shown by Christ in the miraculous healing.

You see - not only was it possible to sling the precious ‘pearl’ into the mud to be trampled upon by the careless, the heedless, the ignorant, but it was also possible to hang on to just that and never keep moving on.   

So - Jesus faithfully and carefully called him to ‘look up’ toward Christ - then He told him to move straight onward - - in other words, to grow spiritually intentionally, to grow and change consciously.

And just in the measure he expected the blessing of Christ of any kind, in that measure he would receive it.

Continuing a ‘fellowship with Christ’ by obedience to Him is one of the keys to His invisible power becoming visible in one’s life. 

And for that to continue to take place, all Jesus could do was give the man an injunction. The man himself had to follow through by obeying it.

He may have done just that - we do not know. We do know that every call of God in Christ is effectual and productive to the heart that heeds His call in obedience.

There are those of us who neglect the many warnings along the way.

It is so easy to just drive right through all the ‘red lights’ of life. 

It is so easy to take the benefits the Lord pours out upon us - even keep expecting more and more all the time - and then selfishly exploit them. 

And - if we do it often enough and long enough - we find we have developed such deep scar tissue that we do not even realize what we are doing. 

And we keep ourselves in that ‘deep coma of ignorance’. Then we wonder why things do not seem to be ‘clicking’ in our hearts!

That is the first signpost of danger in selfishly exploiting the outpouring of Christ’s power.

But there is a second reason why spiritual healing without understanding spiritual change is dangerous.

And, here, we look at the Church’s function that is designed to work spiritual healing on this earth.

The Church has been God-ordained to shape authentic Christians so that real spiritual power is operating in them.

But it falls into danger when it lacks that true spiritual power itself. At best, it only can use its by-products: social service, physical health, material improvements.

All of these things are good and right but real spiritual power does not lie there.

The invisible power of Christ is far more powerful than the visible. This is because the visible’s existence must first come into being through its invisible source.

Until the invisible power of Christ coursed through the blind man, the visible existence of it could not be seen.

So, also, the Church lies stymied without the infusion of that invisible, mighty working power of Christ in reality.  

It is sad to say that even the touch of only the name of Christ can become the object of superstitious, fallacious, groundless error.

When the poor woman pressed through the crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment for healing, she thought she could be healed secretly by an outward transfer of Christ’s invisible power of healing. 

She figured that just touching some ‘thing’ of His would be sufficient.

But - no - it was not the touching of the garment, the touching of something visible, that was the answer to her quest.

It was the actual invisible power of Christ that rendered the healing. He willed it. That is why she was healed!

I hope we realize how offensive and obstructing an error it is to think there is power in a ‘thing’ or in a human being. 

That is the sure road to cutting off altogether the invisible power of Christ for the visible unveiling of it - believe me!  

How, then, does the Church develop and sustain spiritual growth on the earth?

The church is not only to know, but in that knowing is also to do, and does because it has become and is! 

And that comes when the Church keeps close to Christ.

When it truly makes Jesus Christ its Head, there can never be a failure there.

It is then, and then only, that the invisible brings into being the visible by His power and by no other.

If we lay hold of this, we lay hold of the highest level life has to offer and spiritual healing will flow out from it. 

This is why Paul taught and preached as he did to all the churches.

This is what his ardent desire for the Church was: no other Head and no other ‘Footing’ - only Jesus Christ!

In understanding this, it functions just as God has designed it from the beginning.

Authentic Christians would be so shaped that real spiritual power could work real spiritual healing upon the earth.

So, then, in summary for tonight, each of us, and the Church-at-large, sets the measure of restoration for the perfecting of the work of Christ upon the earth.

If faith is imitation, if it is cheap, if it is flimsy, if it is built on fleeting advantages and perks, it is stymied and dies out in due time.

But if Christ’s condition of restoration through the work of His mercy and grace is accepted, spiritual restoration in Him moves onward. 

And that happens even though it steps along slowly and hesitantly, because Christ steps along slowly with it, keeping step and rank. It cannot fail, then, to develop and grow!

So - come - I say to you - become a true man of God - become a true woman of God! Stop playing ‘church’ and start getting serious - anchor yourself onto the Person of Christ. 

And - you will grow in the measure of your humble, confident heart’s desire.

You will be able to look up and see Jesus only - and you will keep discovering more of His riches - and understand  better the ‘mystery of godliness’ in the resurrected, living Christ.

May that be so in each of us! 

Amen! So be it!

We will leave it here for tonight and continue next week, Lord willing.