Jesus heals a man born blind
John 9:1-2 NIV: "As he 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?'"
Why would they think the man could have been born blind because of his own sin? How could he have sinned before birth? If not him, why must his parents have been the cause?
The answer begins in Exodus 4:11 NIV, "The Lord said to him (Moses), 'Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?'"
According to the timeline graph in the NIV Study Bible, Moses quoted this declaration from God sometime between 1446 and 1406 BC, which would be about 1450 years before Jesus encountered this man. For all that time the Jews believed God decided who would be born with birth defects.
Why would the sin of his parents have caused his blindness? The answer is in Commandment number 2 of the Ten, Exodus 20:5, "I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation."
Punishing the children for the sin of the parents was how these primitive superstitious people imagined their god to be for over a thousand years.
This form of punishment is repeated in Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9, Job 21:19 and Jeremiah 32:18.
It was God's habit to quell his vengeance upon the children. See Deuteronomy 28:53, "Because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you."
This is echoed in Jeremiah 19:9, "I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters."
Reverberated again in Ezekiel 5:10, "Therefore in your midst parents will eat their children, and children will eat their parents."
But Jesus explains no one sinned. The man was born blind and had lived all his life as a beggar so that Jesus could make some mud from spit and dust and magically give him sight. See John 9:3-7.
Amazingly, a lot of Christians today think that is all true and God is love.
Oren Piper
Siloam Springs