The passage in John is the one that jumped out at me today.
Whenever Jesus healed someone, He was not merely concerned about their physical healing, He was concerned about their spiritual healing.
His healings always included forgiving their sins, reminders to go and sin no more, or tracking them down again to ask them if they believed.
And that's exactly what He did with the man who had been born blind, not as a result of his sin or his parent's sin like everyone assumed (Job, anyone?!). But so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. So that through his disability, God would be glorified.
All life is precious to God for we are made in His image.
And it doesn't matter if we are disabled, if we are old, if we are sick, if we are healthy, or if we are unborn.
In his sermon Born Blind for the Glory of God, John Piper says....
Let me set up the situation we are facing in America and how today’s text relates to it. There are about 3,000 abortions a day in the United States and about 130,000 a day worldwide. Which means that the horrific, gut-wrenching reality of Haiti’s earthquake on January 12 happens everyday in the abortion clinics of the world. And it is likely that if the dismemberment and bloodshed and helplessness of 130,000 dead babies a day received as much media coverage as the earthquake victims have—rightly have!—there would be the same outcry and outpouring of effort to end the slaughter and relieve the suffering.
Americans have been giving 1.6 million dollars an hour for Haiti Relief for the last ten days—a beautiful thing. I hope you are part of it. It is so unbelievably easy to give with phones and computers. But the funding and resistance to the suffering of the silent, hidden destruction of the unborn is not so easy. So the 3,000 babies who are crushed to death every day in America by the earthquake of abortion go largely unnoticed.
Most of these babies are killed between 10 and 14 weeks of gestation, when the situation is, as they say, “optimal” for the complete dismemberment and evacuation. The babies usually look something like this.
We have no reason to think that there is any morally or spiritually significant difference between this baby and a one-month-old outside the womb. All the differences are morally and spiritually negligible. If it is wrong to kill a newborn, it is wrong to kill this baby in the womb....
With the development of prenatal genetic diagnosis, the drive toward eugenics has returned with a vengeance. Americans may heartily cheer participants in the Special Olympics, but we abort some 90 percent of all gestating infants diagnosed with genetic disabilities such as Down Syndrome, dwarfism, and spina bifida....
The message is that God knits all the children together in their mothers’ wombs, and they are all—all of them of every degree of ability—conceived for the purpose of displaying the glory of God.
You knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Psalms 139:13-15...
In every disability, whether genetically from the womb, or circumstantially from an accident, or infectiously from a disease, God has a design, a purpose, for his own glory and for the good of his people who love him and are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28). Therefore, it is wrong to think that such children in the womb—or out of the womb, or in their doddering old age—are unimportant, or without a unique, God-given worth in this world. (emphasis mine)
Yes, in this case Jesus healed the man physically. But Jesus wanted to be sure he received spiritual sight as well. And in John 9:35-38, Jesus tracked him down and he confessed his belief and worshiped Him.
Sometimes God uses healings for His glory. Sometimes He uses death for His glory.
It's all about Him.
It's about magnifying God.
It's about making less of us, and making more of Him.
Tomorrow's passage: John 10, Luke 13:22-14:24
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