Morning. Good to be with you. We’re going to uh begin. We’re looking at John chapter 9 today. And I would just like to uh begin by reading the first seven verses of John chapter 9. It’s another one of those sprawling long chapters in the Gospel of John. And uh this morning we’re just going to look at the first seven verses. And it says, “As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. As long as I’m in the world, I’m the light of the world.” Having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, “Go wash in the pool of Saleom,” which means scent. So he went and washed and came back seeing. So we’re going to spend two weeks together in uh John chapter 9. And spoiler alert, really the big theme or the big uh uh thing we’re looking at in John chapter nine has to do with the subject of spiritual blindness. That’s the heart of the chapter and we’ll take a deeper dive into that next week. But today, this is the story that feeds into the topic of spiritual blindness. And uh this is it’s like the artery that feeds the heart. And the story deals, of course, with, as we just read, with physical blindness, but it’s far from inconsequential. It has a lot to say in its own right because it deals with something that all of us have to process all the time as we go through life, and that’s the matter of suffering. Our passage raises some interesting questions for us. How we think about suffering, our own suffering, suffering of those around us, how we analyze our suffering, how we process it, what we can think of positively concerning suffering, how we can use our suffering in a positive way in our world. So two parts really, one, how do we think about suffering? And two, how do we use that as a springboard to do something positive in our world? So in a flat disenchanted secular world, suffering of course has no purpose whatsoever. All suffering can be viewed as is an unwelcome intrusion. It’s an interruption to what we’re really trying to get out of life. Suffering in a secular world, it doesn’t have any redeeming value. Nothing seems more useless, uh, necessary, and meaningless than suffering. But our story in John 9 questions uh the origin and the meaning of suffering and Jesus provides a perspective that opens up a fresh new world of understanding concerning our suffering. Chapter begins Jesus and his disciples come across a man who’s blind from birth. And you think about that. I imagine like any other parents, his parents were very excited when they found out that the mom was pregnant and they were going to have a baby and nine months went by and they talked about names and set up a place in the home for the little baby and baby was born like every other baby. He’s perfect. He slept and he cried and he cuddled. But you imagine a few weeks or months after his birth, his parents become concerned because he doesn’t focus like other babies and you can hold something in front of him and he doesn’t seem to notice it. doesn’t respond. And the days go by and it becomes painfully obvious to the parents, something they don’t ever want to admit. But their baby can’t see, can’t recognize his parents’ face, his home, his neighborhood, colors, light, darkness, the food he ate. And he was going to have to go through that the rest of his life. So meeting this man, this person as a man now sparked some existential questions in the minds of Jesus disciples. They verbalize the question that we might ask just why. Why was this man born with a heavy burden that none of the rest of us seem to have to bear? You know, without a doubt, I think the most popular six-year-old in Edmonton history was Ben Stelter. And if you know a little bit of his story, in March of 2021, he was only four years old. He was playing hockey by himself in the basement of his uh St. Albert home. went upstairs to tell his dad that he didn’t feel right. Laid down on the couch and he vomited and then he passed out and he was rushed to the hospital by ambulance and his family was given the devastating news that Ben had a brain tumor. And after surgery, it was determined it was cancerous and his condition was terminal. So he went through radiation treatment. He was out of hospital in time for his fifth birthday. Huge Oilers fan. It wasn’t long before Conor McDavid was informed and went to meet the young boy. And McDavid said that when he met Ben, the boy gabbed on and on about how much he hated the Calgary Flames and especially Matthew Kachchuck. And as sick as he was, and as dire as his pro prognosis, he just remained a ball of passionate energy. So there was chemotherapy that followed, but the tumor grew quite rapidly. And in March of 2022, he was introduced at Rogers Place. He skated out with the team after the game, which the Oilers won. Uh Ben did a postgame news conference alongside Zack Heyman. And there were more game tickets that followed. He was often in attendance. He was there for part of a historic 10-game winning streak by the Oilers. He saw some playoff games until the Oilers were eventually eliminated by Colorado. For those few months, Ben Stelter was a local hero. He was cheerfully. He would call out, “Play La Bomba, baby.” whenever the Oilers won. And sadly, just a couple of months after the season ended, Ben passed away in August of 2022. And after he died, of course, there were many tributes in his memory. And one fan posted this comment. He said, “Coming off the recent funeral for the Oilers superfan, Ben Stelter on a Friday morning last week, it felt unthinkable jumping into a weekend, having just buried a six-year-old.” He said, ‘There are things in life we can never explain or fathom. You can’t hear about cancer impacting the health of someone who hasn’t even been around an entire decade yet and not feel gutted. Tragedies happen every day, but to see a little one go, who has an answer for that? Who does have an answer for that? The disciples, as they’re pondering this, they don’t claim to know the exact reason why this man was born blind. But they had theories. They had two theories really, and both sound pretty crude and unfeilling to our ears. Their question for Jesus was, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” C. Can you imagine posing that question? Was it Ben Stelter or was it his parents who sinned? whose disobedience resulted in a six-year-old dying from brain cancer. Now, obviously, the thinking of the disciples was locked into assuming that there has to be some causality and some culpability behind giving birth to a blind baby. They were operating by some innate sense of karma. I suppose that people deserve their misfortune and the blindness, it had to be an act of punishment, had to be some sin at the bottom of it. So let’s consider for a moment those two theories of the disciples. The first theory involves blaming someone else. The suffering the man experienced since birth had to be someone else’s fault. And the blame would naturally seem to fall on those closest to him, his parents. It’s never unusual to hear someone blame their parents for some of the difficulties they’re having in life. And they might not be completely wrong about that. All of our parents were or are of course sinful people. So there’s this wide spectrum of dysfunction that might have landed on us through our parents and that can leave a heavy residue of suffering in the lives of some. But the problem with continuing to blame someone else for our suffering is it’s like a mental and emotional culdeac that we just can’t escape from. I know a woman who’s had some success in life. She’s got education. She’s had some good jobs, but she’s struggled enormously in recent years. She’s suffered mentally and emotionally and financially. It’s always someone else’s fault. There’s always a scapegoat to blame her troubles on. She’s always the victim of someone else’s lies or someone else’s lack of integrity. And that’s her story. And she’s so consistently the victim that eventually it just loses plausibility. And you know, if you’re a Christian, you have even someone greater to blame because if you’re sh if you’re looking to shift the blame from your life onto someone else, it’s convenient because with God, you have this cosmic culprit you can pour your blame on. It’s no longer just your parents or your spouse or your supervisor or your co-workers or your tenants. You can blame God for all the troubles in your life. You’ve tried to be a good follower. You’ve tried to be a good disciple, a good servant. Each time you do that, you’re left worse off than you were before. So, we can take all our suffering, lay the blame on other people or on God, but it won’t really help us. It’ll leave us angry and defensive. Won’t help us understand our suffering, won’t help us deal with it in any kind of productive life-giving way. So one theory the disciples had that uh this was the fault of the blind man’s parents. It was their sin that was being punished that resulted in a handicapped child. If that was the case the blind man could go all through his life regarding his parents with great anger and bitterness. Now the other alternative the disciples suggest it’s not one of blame. Really it’s one of guilt. It’s the man’s own fault that he was born blind. It’s his own sin backfiring against him. Now, just think about that. We’re not told how they figured that out. Their little complicated mathematical algorithm they might have used to somehow theorize that a a baby’s sin could reach back into the womb. But they’re suggesting that as a possibility. Maybe they think in some sense this baby did sin in the womb. Maybe God in his fornowledge knew how this baby would turn out and what sins he would commit and determined that would begin the baby’s punishment right from day one. It’s like that movie uh Minority Report with Tom Cruz where there’s pre-information available concerning someone’s pending crime and the person can be arrested and uh and punished before they even have a chance to commit it. So blaming the blindness on the baby, it’s another insidious way for us to think about suffering. We can blame others and get very angry or we can look to ourselves and feel very very guilty. Why am I suffering? It’s got it’s got to be my fault. I’m a lousy person. I have to deserve this. And for some people, suffering really does trigger that endless introspection on their lack of worth. My life is a mess because I’m a mess. I’ve done this to myself. I don’t deserve any better. This way of processing suffering doesn’t look outside for someone else to blame. It looks inside at my own awfulness. So for some people like the disciples, suffering really only has those two possible explanations. Blame or guilt. Blame others, blame myself. Someone else has sinned against me or I’m being punished for my own transgressions. I’m reaping what I’ve sown. That’s a cold, that’s a brutal binary choice to make. But people make those kind of choices all the time. Not only on an individual level. Sometimes it plays out on a macro level. Often in terms of people’s politics, for example, some look at a person who’s struggling and they think, well, that person’s experiencing homelessness or addiction or they’re broke and they’re to blame for everything that’s happening to them. They’re lazy. They won’t find a job. They don’t save money. They spend everything they get. Their suffering is the consequence of their own poor behavior. They’ve got to pull themselves together. It’s not up to us to just give them a bunch of handouts. So that’s blaming individuals for their own misfortune. The other way is kind of like blaming the parents, blaming society for what’s been done to them. Society, our current world, it privileges some people. It disadvantages others. There’s great cultural history that’s created all kinds of victims. It’s not their fault. the what they’ve had to face in life. Society has robbed them of opportunities and has treated them with prejudice and has kept them down. It’s denied them a fair shake. So, rabbi who sinned, this man or his parents, conservative or liberal political views can provide different answers in terms of who to blame. Both answers might contain some truth, but both answers might really widely miss the big picture. In the big picture, whatever we think of that little narrow binary theory of the disciples, the disciples were absolutely right about one thing. All suffering is ultimately the result of sin. I mean, God created this great and perfect world. And mankind was meant to flourish and to uh be fruitful and multiply. And God created this perfectly welloiled machine. It’s a world with unlimited potential. and it was jammed with God’s presence and with the blessing of its creator. But man’s first act of disobedience in the garden, every subsequent sin that any of us have ever done is like taking God’s beautiful machine and pouring syrup into the gas tank. And the machine’s never going to be able to function properly again. It’s going to lead to all kinds of trouble. in in in Genesis 3, trouble between the sexes and trouble with having babies and trouble with working around all the thorns and thistles that suddenly seem like they’re everywhere. So, because of our sin, our world no longer functions the way it was designed by God. Everyone suffers as a result. All suffering traces back to that original sin in the garden. And the Bible’s very clear on that. And if you want to take it one step further, sometimes in the Bible, there’s a very clear onetoone correspondence between an act of sin and the suffering or the punishment that results. Think of Ananas and Safh. They lied about how much money they gave to the church. They’re both struck dead by God on the same day. Or David and Basheba were having a baby that was born of their adulterous relationship. Baby’s life was taken by God. Moses’ sister Miriam spoke badly of her brother and she was made to stand in the presence of God who was angry with her. And when the cloud of God’s presence lifted, Miriam’s skin was covered with leprosy. So they looked like snow on her. Sometimes in the Bible, there’s a very clear correspondence between a transgression and a punishment. problem is you and I, we don’t have the wisdom or the insight to universalize that principle in in our lives or in anyone else’s life. The theory holds true that all suffering results from sin. But applying that principle to anyone’s particular suffering far above our pay grade. We don’t have the right to match up anyone’s particular sufferings with particular sins. We’re not employees of some heavenly accounting department that’s has to balance the books. If you think about that, let’s see. This past Tuesday, Doug committed 14 identifiable individual acts of sin. So, we better brainstorm on how we can lay 14 bits of suffering on him in order to keep the books balanced. So, let’s make it so he can’t find his car in the parking lot. Or let’s let’s crash his laptop and make him lose the file that he’s been working on. or give him a really awful case of spring allergies or or let’s ensure that Florida wins Friday night and and it’ll be his fault, you know, or maybe it’s your fault. Maybe one of your sins resulted in Friday night and now we’re all suffering as a result. See, every sin has to have that commensurate piece of suffering attached to it or else the books won’t be balanced. I think we all know it just can’t work that way. subject of suffering has to be a lot bigger and more nuanced than that. It’s interesting, you know, in the book of Job, when Job’s life was completely ruined, he lost his family, he lost his wealth, he lost his health. Job looked for someone to blame and he wound up blaming God. In fact, gets kind of increasingly blasphemous if you read the book of Job as Job just uh wants to blame God for everything that’s gone wrong in his life. Meanwhile, Job’s friends take the other course. Their lives were fine. They were still living the good life. So, they blamed Job for all his troubles. They assumed, Job, you must be a sinner. You brought all this punishment on yourself. And they urged him to repent. So, it’s the same binary we find in the minds of the disciples. Job looked outside himself to blame God. His friends told him, “Job, you need to look inside. you need to do some self-reflection and look in the mirror and and this inordinate suffering has to be of your own doing. By the end of the book of Job, we’re given a glimpse into a perspective much much bigger and we’ll get to that in a moment. There’s a whole lot whole lot more nuance to suffering. The issue can be pretty confusing especially when suff suffering lands on us something out of the blue. So we need Jesus to explain it to us. The disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned? this man or his parents that he was born blind. And Jesus offers them and us this great word of explanation. Neither this man nor his parents sinned. But this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. Jesus says your binary, it’s wolffully inadequate. Those narrow limited theories, they don’t come close to being the last word when it comes to sin and suffering. Jesus says there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than any of us are aware of. And really it plays out at the end of the book of Job. God says essentially the same thing to Job and his friends. They’re looking at a part of what suffering is, but they can’t see the whole. So their conclusions are wrong and they widely miss the mark. If you read the the end of the book of Job, to Job, God essentially says, “Job, you know so little about me and about my ways, yet you stand there accusing me and blaming me for all your troubles. Your accusations betray just a remarkable lack of perspective.” for Job’s friends. God blessed them even more for misrepresenting him and their accusations they made against their friend Job, daring to assign this uh indisputable causality to their friend’s suffering. Sin and suffering is a lot more nuanced than any attempts we make to make a onetoone correspondence between sin and misfortune in anyone’s life. Yes, all suffering comes from sin in general, but we should be very cautious about making a connection between anyone’s sin and suffering in particular. You know, John 9 isn’t the only place where Jesus teaches his disciples this. There’s a passage in Luke 13 where Jesus refers to a tragedy that everyone would know about that had occurred in Jerusalem when a tower suddenly collapsed and it killed 18 people. It’s a kind of random thing that we just can’t explain. Not long after we moved to uh BC in the in the late 80s uh in uh cam loops, a semi-tra loaded with steel uh mistakenly took a highway exit that led uh into the long winding road leading to the heart of the city, the downtown area. And the air brakes had been maladjusted and and the truck careened down a 7% grade built up to a speed of about 120 km an hour. crashed into traffic waiting at a stoplight at the bottom of the hill in front of the hospital. Cars exploded and others were dragged and five people were killed, including a four-year-old boy. 15 were seriously injured. Truck driver from Red Dear had only been with the company about 3 weeks. He also died as his truck came to rest in a ball of flames. What do you do when towers fall or when trucks go out of control? How do we think about that? Spinking speaking of the tower that collapsed in Jerusalem, killing 18 unsuspecting people, Jesus put this question to his disciples. Do you think they were more guilty than all of the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you too will perish. There’s there’s some depth to what Jesus says here. Those words ought to make us very cautious about assigning cause and effect to sin and misfortune or to sin and tragedy. Jesus told his listeners here that everyone deserves to have towers fall on them. No one on earth deserves a safe life. We all have uh have at times resented God’s interference in our lives and we’ve continually felt that we were wiser than God and he’s given us hundreds of opportunities to obey him and to give ourselves to him that we have disregarded. So we all thwart and we we resist God’s authority over our lives quite a bit. Yet somehow we feel God has an obligation to follow after us when we wander and ensure that our lives remain comfortable. Jesus says that those 18 people weren’t any more guilty than anyone else in Jerusalem. But we all need to own our sin and repent of it because we’re all just as deserving of having the towers fall down on us. So, we’re all sinful people. God doesn’t owe any of us a pass when it comes to tragedy. All of us are called to repent of our sin and stay right with God. If God, you think about it, if God were ever to pay any of us back for all of our sin, the suffering would leave none of us standing. So once we clear away any notion we have of being able to make connections between suffering in other people’s lives or in our own life and sin, then we’re free to observe the tremendous grace that God has for us in this broken world that we live in. Jesus says that the reason the man was born blind was so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. And then Jesus went to work. You know, there’s no record in the Old Testament, none that I can find anyway, where blindness is ever healed. There’s one case in 2 Kings 6 where God strikes a group of Aramean raiders blind and then they’re led into the city of their enemies and then God restores their sight. wasn’t a pleasant experience for them. But they end up having a feast together and the Aramean raiders go away and they don’t bother coming to Israel again after that. But in passages in Isaiah that speak of the future coming of the Messiah, it said he will come to open eyes that are blind. In those days, it says the blind will see. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened. And when Jesus announces in Luke 4 what he’s come on earth to do, one thing he says is that he’s come to bring recovery of sight to the blind. If you go through the gospels and you categorize Jesus’ various miracles, you’ll you’ll find more people healed of blindness than any other category of miracle in the gospels. Dealing with blindness was a hallmark of messianic ministry. So in John nine, Jesus tells his disciples he has work to do. And then he gets down to work. Gets down, he spits on the ground and he makes a mud pack of his own saliva and dirt and he presses that mud into the man’s eyes. You wonder how’s that going to help? How’s here? Here’s mud in your eye. That doesn’t seem like a great cure for blindness. If anything, it’s going to make things worse. Then Jesus tells the man, “Now I want you to grope your way down to the south end of the city and wash in the pool of Saleom.” This man’s required to obey in the dark. And sometimes sometimes that’s the only way we can handle our suffering as well. All we can do is just obey in the dark. We don’t understand anything. In fact, it seems to be getting worse. But God still wants us to obey him with the with the light that he’s given us. Of course, this story has a very happy ending because the man obeys. He works his way down to the pool, likely with the help of someone who can see. He washes in the pool. He comes home seeing for the first time in his life. He’d never seen colors or the sky or grass or trees or buildings or the faces of people. And suddenly it’s just bursting in front of him with all of creation’s glory. That man’s suffering in the hands of the Messiah became a means of grace for the celebration of God’s glory. And the reason that Jesus, the Messiah, can so generously and indiscriminately relieve the suffering of others and relieve our suffering is because he was going to be the only innocent suffering the world would ever see. The only p person in history who didn’t deserve any trouble. He was the innocent one. He suffered and died on the cross for us, the guilty ones. He received the suffering owed for our sins. So we read Romans 8 now where it says there’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Opens up a whole new meaning then when it comes to our suffering. If we are in Christ Jesus meaning we’ve placed our faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for our salvation doesn’t make suffering easy for us. I don’t think anyone enjoys suffering but it makes it endurable. It it releases us from having to blame others for what’s gone wrong in our lives. for our misfortunes. And it releases us from having to absorb all the guilt and think we’re such lousy people because all this stuff is happening to us. And we don’t have to deny the pain of suffering. But if we’re convinced that suffering has a purpose, it’s not random. Then we have the power to prayerfully and trustingly tough it out with God. So our sufferings, we know it can’t mean that God is punishing us because all of the punishment already fell on Jesus on the cross. And God would never take two payments for one debt. Now, God can discipline us, but God’s not punishing us. God’s not going to God’s not going to punish Jesus for my sins, then turn around and punish me. So my suffering shouldn’t have to leave to lead to self-pity or self-lame. In fact, beyond that, it means that suffering always must have some intention behind it. Jesus says the blind man’s suffering was so that the work of God would be displayed in his life. So our suffering then can’t be useless, can’t be random, can’t be, as secular people think, an an unnecessary intrusion into an otherwise happy life. If suffering has a purpose, there’s so many passages in the New Testament that speak of how our trials develop us and they purify our faith and they refine us like pure gold. And if we’re assured that suffering actually has a purpose, then we know that our heavenly father must be supervising it. He’s behind he’s channeling it. He’s working it out for our best and for his glory. There’s some kind of loving agenda behind our suffering. And even when Joseph in Genesis 50, he realized that uh that his brothers meant great evil for him, but he’s able to say, “But God meant it for good.” God has a way of turning it around so that even if other people mean evil, God has a way of bringing good out of it. So like the blind man, our suffering, it opens a way for Jesus to go to work in our lives. So a healthy question for us to ask when we’re suffering question isn’t to ask well why did this happen to me as a way of questioning or blaming God. Rather we might ask the same question why is this happening to me as a way of discovering something new. There’s some new way there’s some purpose that God has in this uh as as difficult as our suffering might be there’s some purpose and plan behind it because we know there’s something positive to learn from it. There’s stuff in our lives that needs to be trimmed away. Stuff in our lives that God wants to add to. So suffering, it always has to be a path for growth, for our growth and for the growth of others. And in the end, somehow God’s glory and our joy is going to coalesce as a result. So there’s some things to pray. Some of you probably suffering a lot more than others here this morning. And you know how you’re suffering. There’s there’s things in your life that aren’t going very well and not going the way you would want them or had planned them or they’re suffering in the lives of people you’re close to and you’d love to bring relief to their suffering but you don’t know how. Here’s some things you can pray for just in a few moments uh of personal prayer. Thank God that he doesn’t correlate our sin and our punishment because all the punishment has already fallen on Jesus. Thank God that our suffering has some purpose and therefore it can be endured. And then pray for any that you know today might be right in this room who are suffering greatly and pray that God will provide purpose and meaning and growth and relief through it. Just take a few moments and pray that and I’ll close us off.