John 9:24-34 (NIV)
A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”
He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”
Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”
He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?”
Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.”
The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. Nobody has 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; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.
The Sanhedrin made a tragic mistake in judgment about this man, who had been blind from birth, and whom Jesus had healed. Their mistake was based on a non-biblical idea of human suffering.
This non-biblical idea is found in the disciples’ question in John 9:1-2, and the corrective is found in Jesus’ response in verses 3-5:
John 9:1-5 (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?”
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, we must do the work 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.”
The common theology back then was that if someone was born with a birth defect, that it was punishment either for the sin of the child while still in the womb, or of the parent(s). The logic behind this theology is that since God wouldn’t allow anything bad to happen to an innocent child, the explanation must be that the child with the birth defect isn’t innocent – they must have done something sinful in the womb to cause God to inflict this kind of punishment on them. (Hence the angry declaration from the Sanhedrin: “You were steeped in sin at birth!”) Or, if not the child, then the defect must be punishement for the sins of the parents, and God was punishing them by burdening them with a broken child.
But when His disciples betrayed this same theology by their statements about this man before Jesus healed him, Jesus corrected them on the spot: The birth defect wasn’t the result of a sin of either the child or his parents. Instead, God allowed the birth defect so that the work of God might be displayed in that person’s life.
The same theology that tries to make sense of the bad things that happen in peoples’ lives is addressed by Jesus in Luke 13 as well:
Luke 13:1-5 (NIV)
Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them–do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
The fact behind Jesus’ theology here is also clearly brought forward by Paul: ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Bad things don’t happen to people because they are somehow worse sinners than someone else. And, if we really stop and think about it, we really do know that bad things don’t only happen to the worst sinners.
So what is the answer to the problem of evil in a world created by a good God? The simple answer is that we don’t live in the world as it was when God created it in the beginning, when He declared every created thing “very good.” (Genesis 1:31) Instead, we live in a world that has been broken by sin, and that brokenness leads to all of the death and disease and birth defects and personal tragedy that we see today.
The good news is, as Jesus noted, that God can use the bad things that happen to us to show forth His work in and through the lives of His people. People like Joni Erickson Tada come immediately to mind. Paralyzed from the shoulders down in a diving accident when she was just a teenager, she has impacted literally thousands of lives for the kingdom of heaven. Her life is a huge testimony to the power of God to work through someone’s weaknesses and brokenness. Another is a man named Dave that I saw on a Focus on the Family video years ago. This man was terribly burned by a phosphorus grenade in Viet Nam; his face was grossly disfigured. But God sent him out to speak to high school students all over the country about the kingdom of God, and his impact was huge.
Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, had a brother, a strong and devout Christian, who developed and eventually died from a horrible, degenerative disease. The long and often painful struggle with this disease by this godly man was enough to make even the strongest believer wonder what God was doing. But instead of relying on folk theology like the Sanhedrin used with the man born blind, Ken and his family turned to the Bible for their answer. And, as a result, it strengthened their faith in the God who is in the process of healing our broken world, and who was with their son and brother all the way through this disease, and clear through to the other side. This successful search for answers is documented in Ken Ham’s book: “How Could a Loving God…?” (Copyright 2007, Master books, Inc. Green Forest, AR)
It’s vital as Christians that we get our theology from the Bible, not from our opinions or the thoughts of people in our society today. The Bible was written by the only one who actually knows the answers to all of the questions that we could possibly ask. And by getting our theology from the Bible, we will avoid the tragedy of bad theology that the Sanhedrin fell prey to, which ultimately led to them rejecting not only the recipient of the miracle, but Jesus the miracle worker, and ultimately the God whom they claimed to serve.