Seven Miracles - Pt 20

No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the Lord. The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord. (Proverbs 21:30-31 ESV).

Yesterday we saw the first reason why Jesus healed this blind man with mud he mixed on the Sabbath. Today we see the second reason for the mud. It is to show that God usually uses means in doing his wonderful works in this world. Jesus could have simply spoken and the man’s eyes would have been opened. However, we see most of the wonders of God in the Old Testament were brought about by the use of human means. This is the meaning of our reading today. Solomon reminds us that “the horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord.” God is decisive in the victory, but he uses means. He doesn’t need the horse, but he uses the horse. You see, there is some truth to “an apple a day makes the doctor stay away.” Thin for a moment about the bigger picture of the truth revealed in Jesus using the common mud to heal the blind man. This means that God does not reject the physical world he has made. He uses the means of food to sustain life. And, he uses a thousand remedies to bring about healing, from sleep to penicillin, from Riboflavin to radiation, from sunshine on the skin to cough syrup for the throat. And lest you think this removes the mystery of God’s wonderful work, consider boring down through layer after layer after layer of physical causes for why antibiotics work against strep. Forty or fifty layers down into the molecular, subatomic activities of the smallest particles, or non-particles, there comes a point where there is no explanation inside this closed material system. The final explanation is always God. And if our hearts are alive and humble and worshipful, we will not stop until we see God at the bottom of everything. It is no small thing, to believe that God uses means to accomplish his purposes. Jesus used mud. Then, Jesus sends him away to wash in the pool of Siloam. The name of the pool meant sent and John bothered to point that out. Perhaps because the reason the pool was called Sent is that the water in the pool was sent there by stream from a distant spring. In pointing this out, Jesus may have been making a comparison between the pool called “Sent” and himself as the one “sent” from the Father as the living water (cf. John 4:10-11). If that’s right, then the water signifies not just cleansing; and, it is not just healing, but life. When you meet Jesus and receive him for who he is, you live, and you see, and you begin to be healed, and will be healed completely before he is done with us at the resurrection.