Gospel in Life

Guest (Female): Welcome to the Gospel in Life podcast. Many of us often focus on the big moments in Jesus's life: his birth, death, and resurrection. But how would your understanding of Jesus change if you took a closer look at what he did and said throughout his life on earth?

Today, Tim Keller explores why Jesus's everyday experiences are essential for understanding who he is and how they invite us to have a deeper trust in him.

Guest (Male): The scripture this morning is from the Gospel of John, chapter 9, verses 1 through 7 and verses 35 through 38.

As he, Jesus, went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes. "Go," he told him, "wash in the Pool of Siloam" (this word means "Sent"). So the man went and washed and came home seeing.

Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" "Who is he, sir?" the man asked. "Tell me so that I may believe in him."

Jesus said, "You have now seen him. In fact, he is the one speaking with you." Then the man said, "Lord, I believe," and he worshiped him. The word of the Lord.

Tim Keller: Now, in the months of January and February, we've been looking at these accounts in the book of John of these miraculous signs. John says at the end of the book that what he has done is he's chosen particular miracles that Jesus did among many others.

He chose the ones that he did because they not only happened and were displays of power, but each of them, John thought, symbolized something about what Jesus Christ came to do. They tell us something about who he was. So each week we're looking at one of these signs.

This is the healing of the man born blind, the sixth of the seven miracles and signs. It takes up the entire chapter. We gave you the beginning and mostly the end of it. It's a story about a man who was born blind and he is healed in the very first few verses.

Then there's quite a bit of interrogation that goes on between the Pharisees and the man. We didn't read any of that because it's 41 verses and it was too long to read or have printed, but we will refer to it. At the very end, the man comes back to Jesus. They have that encounter that you just heard read and he comes to faith.

What we learn by looking at this passage is looking at the three groups of people that we see. We have the disciples, and they have a set of questions in the very beginning about the man born blind. Then there's the Pharisees and how they respond. Finally, there's the man himself.

What we're going to learn from the disciples is something about pain and suffering. What we're going to learn from the Pharisees is something about spiritual blindness. What we're going to learn from the man is what heals it all.

First of all, let's look at what the disciples teach us about suffering. It's not the main point of the passage—the main point is spiritual blindness—and yet we learn something quite interesting from the very beginning. As they are going by a man who's born blind, his disciples ask him a theological question. "Rabbi, look at this man suffering. Who sinned? Why was this man born blind? Who sinned, his parents or him?"

The "why" question is always attached to suffering. Why me? Why them? Why God? Whenever you have suffering, you have this "why" question. But if you look at this particular kind of "why" question, you'll see that it's sneaky. The counsel is leading the witness. The questioners are assuming the answer.

The question is: did his parents sin so that a blind child was their punishment, or did he sin? How you could be born blind as a result of your own sin is a little weird to contemplate, but probably the disciples were trying out some theories on Jesus.

One of the theories was that many of the rabbis actually taught that you could sin in the womb. Secondly, there were other theories that the Jews did not hold to, like reincarnation or the pre-existence of a soul, where you might be sinning because you lived wrongly or unvirtuously in some former life.

Perhaps they're thinking maybe God looked into the future and saw this man was going to be a selfish, sinful man and decided to punish him with blindness at birth. They're trying out these theories.

The reason why they'd go so far as to say it was somehow this man's sin that caused him to be born blind was how strongly they believed—and how strongly rooted in the beliefs of the centuries it is—that if you are having a hard life, you must have done something to deserve it.

If you're having a tough life, something bad has happened to you, you must have done something bad to deserve it. It goes like this: we reap what we sow. God is a judge. If you have bad circumstances, it must have been bad behavior on your part.

This is really deep in us. There is a song in the middle of *The Sound of Music* where Captain von Trapp has met Maria and they realize they love each other. They sing a song, and the song says, "Somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good."

Maria says, "Somewhere I must have done something good, or I wouldn't be having this wonderful life." Of course, the implication is that if you're having a bad life, somewhere in your youth or childhood you must have done something bad.

There are three huge problems with this assumption, this assumed answer that the relationship between suffering and sin is a tight one. One is that it creates tremendous pride and self-righteousness on the part of the people who are having a good life. We take credit for it.

There have been psychological studies that show people want to believe that it's the sufferer's fault. We all have a psychological bias when we see someone in trouble to say, "Well, they probably weren't careful. They probably should have done this."

We want to believe to some degree it's the sufferer's fault because it assures us that it couldn't happen to us because we're not like that. So, it creates self-righteousness. Secondly, it's not true to the facts.

There are plenty of good people that live miserable lives, and there are plenty of tyrannical people who prosper and die happily in old age in their sleep. It's simply not true to the facts and it's incredibly cruel to the suffering person.

Jesus rejects the premise. He says, "Neither. Neither this man sinned nor his parents sinned. This blindness is not the result of somebody having done something wrong." But if you're going to understand what he's saying here and what Jesus's view of suffering is, you have to put this right alongside a parallel spot in the book of Luke.

There's another place where Jesus was asked a very similar question. There was some discussion going on in Luke 13 about a couple of terrible incidents. Jesus and his disciples were talking about the fact that there was a group of people who were killed at some public event and a group of people who were killed when a tower suddenly fell on them.

The question to Jesus is: "Were they worse sinners because that happened to them?" There it is again. That is the assumption of Job's friends, by the way, in the book of Job. They say, "Job, you're having a bad life. You must be doing something wrong. Repent, get it right with God."

So, they ask if they were worse sinners, and Jesus says, "No." But then he adds, "But repent, lest ye likewise perish." If you put the two together, you see Jesus's incredibly nuanced and rich understanding of suffering.

First of all, he's drawing on what the Bible says in Genesis chapter 3 and in Romans 8. The Bible says that God did not originally create the world with suffering in it. He created a paradise. He did not originally create a world filled with death, suffering, and disease.

But when the human race turned away from God, everything in the world stopped working properly. Everything is wrong. Death comes in, suffering comes in, and all these bad things come in. The world doesn't work.

Therefore, there is a sense in which the human race is getting the world it deserves. We turned from God and we have a world that doesn't work right. There's a sense in which sin in general from the human race causes suffering in general.

That's why Jesus could say, "Repent, because we all deserve to have towers fall on us." Don't say, "What about those bad people that had a tower fall on them?" He says repent, because you could have a tower fall on you and it would be perfectly okay.

What he meant was that in general, the human race deserves to have a tower fall on it. That's the world that we've got. But even though Jesus agrees that sin in general causes suffering in general, he denies the idea that individual suffering is necessarily caused by individual sin.

Just like God rejects it at the end of the book of Job, Jesus rejects it right here. To say sin in general causes suffering in general, but sin in particular is not necessarily the cause of suffering in particular, is amazingly different than any other view I know. It's rich and it's nuanced.

On the one hand, if you believe this biblical view, it gets rid of self-pity and anger. Bad things happen and you don't say, "Why me?" You don't get angry at life or angry at God. You know that we're in the world we deserve.

On the other hand, when bad things happen to you, you don't start to beat yourself up and say, "I must be living in a bad way. Something must be wrong. It's all my fault." You don't just beat yourself up.

What does Jesus say then? Why is the man blind? Jesus says the right answer: it's mysterious. God has his purposes. But the point is, God has work to do. "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him."

All things work together for good to those who love God. What it's saying is you may never see it or understand it, but it's mysterious why you might be suffering. It's not necessarily the result of something you've done wrong.

Even though you may not know what the purposes are, God is at work. God is working in this. If you have that view, I tell you, that is about the only way I know to get through it. You can't just get filled with anger and upset.

In other words, you can either go through life when suffering happens saying, "I hate thee," or you can go through life saying, "I hate me." But neither are right. So, that's what we learn from the disciples.

The main point of the passage, though we'll see it's related, is spiritual blindness. We particularly understand this when we learn at the end of the chapter that Jesus Christ charges the Pharisees with spiritual blindness.

They don't like the man born blind. They say, "Wait a minute, this guy Jesus did this? Are you sure you were really blind? Were you really born blind?" They go and talk to his parents. "Yes, he was born blind."

How could this be? They show that they're very hostile to Jesus and upset that Jesus has done this miracle. At the very end, Jesus says that they're blind, they're spiritually blind.

Just as the feeding of the five thousand symbolized Jesus's ability to deal with our spiritual hunger, the healing of the man born blind symbolizes Jesus's ability to deal with our spiritual blindness.

What is spiritual blindness? Well, let's talk about it. At one level, without even getting too spiritual, I think we understand that there's such a thing as sight that's not literal.

For example, when an eighteen-year-old is starting to apply to colleges, he begins to realize the college he gets into and how well he does is going to, to a great degree, be setting the course of his life.

Suddenly he realizes that back three years ago when he was fourteen or fifteen and he didn't see the point of all the studying and grades, he realizes he was an idiot. His whole grade point is lower than it should be.

The eighteen-year-old says, "What a fool I was! What an idiot I was!" He's not talking about a lack of physical sight. He's saying, "I didn't see." It is a lack of wisdom.

Years ago, I had a brother-in-law who picked me up at an airport. We got into the car and he buckled his seatbelt. It surprised me because generally over the years he never used to buckle his seatbelt.

I said, "Hey, I see you're into safety now." He says, "Yes, well, I had an experience." He told me he went to see a friend in the hospital who had gone through a windshield and had 120 stitches in his face.

For whatever reason, ever since then, he has been buckling his seatbelt. I asked if there was any new information that he got or more statistics. He said, "No, it just came home. I realized I was being dumb."

Look at that word "realize." What does realize mean? It means it got real to me. I knew it abstractly, but I didn't see it. I thought about it, but I didn't see it. It wasn't real to me.

We could talk about sight as being literally seeing things, but we can also talk about sight as the perception of reality. Now, what is spiritual blindness in the Bible? And what is spiritual sight?

This gets us into the very subject of eternal life. Jesus says, "I can give you eternal life." You know what that means? It means we're dead in some way. We're spiritually dead. We're physically alive and we're physically seeing, but we're spiritually dead until he gives us life.

We're spiritually blind because they go together. To have life means to be able to sense your environment. Any form of life has the ability to sense some of the environment.

A plant can sense the environment, can't it? It doesn't actually have sight or hearing, but it can sense light and dark, heat and cold. So, plants can sense their environment to some degree.

But animals are a higher form of life, which means because they have more senses, they can see things coming. The plants can't see things coming. On this planet, plants can only sense their environment to some degree.

Animals can sense more of their environment. Human beings can sense even more. We all believe that human beings have senses beyond the five senses. Do you think there is such a thing as justice and injustice, tragedy, right and wrong?

Do you believe those things are there? We have a moral sense because we have other senses that the animals don't have. They can't sense the difference between justice and injustice.

Guest (Female): Jesus was the most influential man to ever walk the earth, and his story has been told through books, movies, and articles in hundreds of different ways. Can anything more be said about him?

In his book *Jesus the King*, Tim Keller journeys through the Gospel of Mark to reveal how the life of Jesus helps us make sense of our lives. Dr. Keller shows us how the story of Jesus is at once cosmic, historical, and personal, calling each of us to take a fresh look at our relationship with God.

During the month of March, we'll send you a copy of *Jesus the King* as our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the transforming love of Christ with people all over the world. So, request your copy today at gospelinlife.com/give. That website again is gospelinlife.com/give. Now, here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching.

Tim Keller: Every higher form of life is able to sense more of the environment. It is to see more of reality. So, what does it mean to get your spiritual sight? What does it mean that you're spiritually blind and by the Holy Spirit you get spiritual sight?

Until the Holy Spirit opens your eyes spiritually, you can't see other things out there in the environment. The two things that you can't see are the reality of sin and the reality of grace.

Here's a perfect example of it in the Pharisees. This is the second interrogation in chapter 9. They summon the man who was born blind after his parents assure them he really was born blind. It's not a farce.

So, they come back and are talking to the man previously born blind about Jesus. They say, "We know that this man Jesus is a sinner." The man replied, "Whether he's a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know, I once was blind but now I see."

They asked how he opened his eyes. He said, "I told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?" So, they hurled insults at him.

They said, "You are this fellow's disciple, maybe. We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses. As for this fellow, we don't even know where he comes from." The man answered with brilliant rhetoric.

He says, "Well now, that is remarkable. You don't know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. God doesn't listen to sinners. Nobody's ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing."

To this they replied, "You were steeped in sin at birth, and how dare you lecture us?" and they threw him out. What you've got there is spiritual pride. "You're a sinner, we're not sinners. How dare you lecture us? What do you know?"

Let me talk to you about sin and pride. When the Holy Spirit opens your eyes, it's not like you didn't know that something was wrong with you. In fact, plenty of people were raised in the church and they heard that they were sinners and they agreed.

There are plenty of people without spiritual sight raised in the church and they tacitly agreed, "Yes, I'm a sinner, I'm flawed." But it's only when the Holy Spirit opens your eyes that you realize you're a sinner. It becomes real to you.

You begin to see, for example, the depth of the corruption of your motives. You always gave yourself credit for doing a lot of good things until you began to see your motives. The Holy Spirit enables you to see your motives aren't what they should be.

There is all this pride and self-righteousness, the desire to control other people, a desire to feel better about yourself, a desire to try to get God to bless you. You realize even the motive for the good things I've done are terrible.

You also begin to realize you're not in control of your life. When you spiritually start to see, you realize, "I thought I was in control of my life. I am driven by fears, I'm driven by lusts." I don't necessarily mean sexual lusts. I'm needy.

I realize that I'm out of control in many ways. I thought I could run my life, and there's no way I could run my life without outside help. This is called conviction of sin. This means you may have agreed that you were a sinner in some general way, but now it comes home.

You begin to see it. It becomes real to you. Along with that always goes the beauty of grace. Oh, you may have thought in your head, "Yeah, I know that Jesus Christ died on the cross for me." You may have even believed that.

You can grow up in the church without spiritual sight. People do that all the time. But when sin becomes real to you, grace becomes real. It becomes brilliant, it becomes beautiful. It becomes not just an abstraction, but when you see it, suddenly it changes you.

Remember my brother-in-law said, "Well, I saw it, but I didn't see it. I knew it, but I didn't know it. Now I do." This is absolutely critical to understand. Have you had your spiritual sight given to you?

Almost anybody who has spiritual sight knows they are, to some degree still, and knows they have been in the past deeply blind. That's the reason why at the very, very end, Jesus says two little things about spiritual blindness that are extremely important to understand.

At the very end of the passage, Jesus makes a strange statement and it's overheard, and then he makes a strong statement. Jesus says, "For judgment I have come into this world so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind."

Some Pharisees overheard him saying this and they said, "What? Are you saying we're blind too?" Jesus said, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin. But since you claim you can see, your guilt remains."

Jesus is saying two extremely interesting things about spiritual blindness. The first is a kind of reversal. He says, "I came into the world that those who see would be blind and those who are blind would see."

What he means is something pretty powerful. He doesn't mean literally that people who've got spiritual sight would lose it. But there are brilliant people out there, brilliant people.

They write great books, lecture, they are experts. Jesus says the people who are the most brilliant, or the most successful, or the people who the world most advantages, when it comes to the gospel, are at a great disadvantage.

The people who are the most disadvantaged by the world, when it comes to the gospel, are the most advantaged. Because the gospel is that you are a sinner saved by grace. That's what your spiritual sight opens your eyes to.

You are a sinner and you can never save yourself, and you need to be rescued by the sheer grace of God and because of what he did through Jesus Christ. That's the gospel.

That means the people who are saved are not necessarily the good people, but the ones who admit that they're not good and that they need a Savior. The people who are lost are not necessarily the bad people, but the proud people.

The more brilliant you are and the more successful you are, the greater disadvantage you're at. When you hear the gospel and it says it doesn't matter how brilliant or successful you are, you're all sinners, you're all saved by grace.

You need to come in and just be beggars needing grace. You've got nothing to recommend yourself. That is not nearly as difficult for a person who has failed to admit.

But it is so much harder for a brilliant person to admit, "I am blind." It's so much harder for a successful person to admit, "I am spiritually bankrupt."

Jesus says it's interesting: this blind man, because he's blind, because he's suffering, that's how God's going to do his work. "That the work of God might be done in him." That's Jesus's answer.

Generally speaking, unless troubles come into your life, it is pretty tough to come to grips with the gospel, to even give it a second look. Jesus says the gospel is such that the people advantaged by the world are at a disadvantage.

The second thing he says is because they said they were not blind, they are. That means something pretty simple. If you're having trouble with your sight and you won't go to a doctor, that's the only thing that will destroy your sight.

The doctor might be able to either retard it or might even do something to arrest the change. But if you've got a problem with your sight and you won't admit you got a problem with your sight, that's the only kind of problem that has no remedy.

Therefore, Jesus is saying the deepest blindness is blindness to your own blindness. There is no greater blindness than to be blind to your own blindness. If you do not know what I'm talking about at all, the only blindness without a remedy is a blindness you're blind to.

Lastly, how do you deal with it? How is it healed? By that we can look to the man. This man has been physically blind and now he's physically seeing.

If the whole miracle is about the fact that Jesus can also cure spiritual blindness, then it only makes sense that this man would not only have his physical blindness cured, but his spiritual blindness.

It's not a surprise when Jesus says, "You have now seen him. In fact, he is the one speaking to you. I'm the Son of Man." Then the man said, "Lord, I believe." He's getting faith.

Then it says, "and he worshiped him." If they hadn't added the word "worshiped," I don't think we would have really gotten to the heart of the issue of spiritual blindness and spiritual sight.

It's astounding that a Jewish man would worship another standing human being. I doubt very much that this man understood why he was doing it. Certainly he didn't have a well-developed theology.

I'm sure he wouldn't have said, "I'm kneeling before the second person of the Trinity." But he knew, he sensed the deity, and he worshiped him. This is the ultimate healing of spiritual sight.

Worshiping the wrong thing is the ultimate cause of your blindness. Therefore, worshiping the right thing—God himself, Jesus—is the only way to cure the spiritual blindness.

It will only be cured in time as you get to be a better and better worshiper. There is a little quote that I've been using when I talk about the relationship of faith to work, but it's particularly helpful when it comes to worship and sight.

This is a man who's an author and a writer, and he was talking about how difficult it was when his whole life was revolving around his writing. He needed to be a good writer. It was his God.

Because of that, it distorted his sight. He said, "When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth." It was his identity, his hope, his salvation.

"When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn't able to read my own writing well. I couldn't tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane."

"So I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see." When the most important thing in his life was his writing, he couldn't see it.

He was too scared to admit if it was bad. When he saw other people writing better, he couldn't admit how well they were writing. Because writing was the most important thing to him, it completely put him into denial and deception.

I want you to know that if you say you're going to clean up your life and be a good person so that God will bless you, guess what? You're not going to be honest about yourself.

You won't be able to see your flaws or your sins. You'll be getting more spiritually blind. If somebody criticizes you, you'll go to pieces. You'll shift the blame.

If you live for your moral goodness, you'll be blind about yourself. If you live for your children, you'll be blind about them. If you live for anything, it puts you into the spiritual darkness.

Therefore, it's only when you begin to worship in such a way that God becomes the supreme beauty and joy of your life. He becomes the most important thing. His love for you is the measure of your worth.

He is the thing that most satisfies you. That's the only way to clear it up. To the degree to which you worship and give God your heart, to that degree you will find your sight clearing.

How can that happen? It only happens when you see something that happened on the cross. You can't just tell yourself that you have to worship. Your heart has to be engaged.

How can you engage your heart? You have to see something. Here's what I want you to see: when Jesus Christ was on the cross, darkness came down. It wasn't just a physical darkness.

He also said, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He was being plunged into spiritual darkness. He was losing the light of the Father's love and face that he'd always had.

Jesus had perfect spiritual sight. He could see into people's hearts and sensed the reality of God the Father all the time, but not on the cross. He was being cut off and plunged into spiritual darkness.

Lucy Shaw, a Christian poet, wrote a little poem called "Mary's Song." It is ostensibly about Mary thinking about the baby she was carrying, Jesus, and reflecting. The last lines go like this:

"Blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,

Brought to this birth for me to be reborn,

And for him to see me mended,

I must see him torn."

He has to be torn if we're going to be mended, and he has to be plunged into darkness to see our darkness ended. He did that for you. If you see him doing that for you and begin to say, "Thank you, Lord," you've begun to worship and your sight's begun to clear. Let it happen.

Let us pray. Our Father, we ask that you would help us to recognize that our sight isn't what it should be. Only through faith in Jesus Christ does our sight begin to clear up, and only through worship does our sight completely clarify.

We want to see more and more of spiritual reality. We want to understand the world that is really out there, and we know that's not going to happen unless we worship you.

So, we pray, Lord, that even here at the end, as we stand and sing, you'd begin to move us into a deeper level of worship for the rest of our lives, so that we can also say, "Once I was blind, but now I see." In Jesus's name we pray, amen.

Guest (Female): Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel-centered teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner.

Your partnership connects people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelinlife.com/partner. That website again is gospelinlife.com/partner.

Today's sermon was recorded in 2014. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.