This year the church of England will be having a voting on the acceptance of same-sex marriage inside the church. We as a church have been having this topic as a point of discussion and our stance in this. Each and everyone is obliged to have an opinion if we want to be a part of this society and as Christians the Bible is a high ranking authority in our convictions. Obviously I have an opinion about this and need to think carefully about it so when my opinion is questioned in our democratic society, I will be able to make a contribution. What I think is right or wrong will not be part of this post, because my concern goes beyond that.
In the past week we had a prayer night where we prayed for the voting and what is right decision to make. During all this time I heard a lot of people claiming we need to stay firm in the biblical truth and that we need to keep the foundation of the bible firm. Even during our group prayer we prayed on how the truth must prevail. Someone even explicitly prayed that other interpretations and opinions are irrelevant. This claim really shocked me because there is ONE opinion that truly matters and that is Gods opinion. I am not saying that we should deny the bible or what we think is right, but what shocked me is that I felt we were putting our own truth and wisdom in such a high status that we didn’t feel necessary to ask for Gods help during this. As if we were God himself.
A friend texted me later on in the week and recommended a sermon from her current church she is going. Today on my way back from work I gave it a listen and thought it was really fitting into what I was experiencing so let me elaborate a bit further. The sermon was based on John 9:1-41, the story of the blind born man that Jesus healed with his saliva and mud. You can find a link to the sermon below.
After the healing of the man, the Pharisees appear and start discussing about how Jesus actions were unlawful because it was Sabbath.
John 9:16 – 16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” And there was a division among them.
The Pharisees stayed in disbelief about the matter and did a lot of research to “see” what was going on. They asked the blind man (twice), the people around, the parents of the blind man. The Pharisees were still in disbelief. The second time they approached the blind man they said.
John 9:24 – So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.”
The Pharisees were so fixated on the law, the scripture, that they claimed to know de facto that Jesus is a sinner by not submitting to the Sabbath. Contrary the ex-blind man who said.
John 9:25 – 25 He answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
The ex-blind man stayed humble and admitted that he does not know if Jesus was a sinner or not. This led to the Pharisees calling him a disciple of Jesus, but the disciples claimed to be disciples of Moses. Because they knew…
John 9:29 – “We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.”
Yet the humility of the ex-blind man led him to this “insight”.
John 9:30-33 – 30 The man answered, “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
This man has an attitude of submission towards God and is willing to question the law for the sake of submitting to the will of God. Yet again the Pharisees were stubborn and arrogant and were not willing to even listen to this man.
John 9:34 – 34 They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.
Their arrogance is so big it even hurts from reading it. The Pharisees cast the ex-blind out and Jesus hears about this. He goes up to him and they chat, the ex-blind worships him because he sees know the Son of Man in front of him. The last portion of this chapter says something beautiful yet very scarry.
John 9:39-41 – 39 Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” 41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.
Arrogance is something we need to be careful of especially for us higher educated people who like to say phrases like: I have studied for X years…, I am a PhD …, I have thought about this…, I know… My finger points first and foremost towards me! Can we be so arrogant that we think we see but we are actually blind? Is our arrogance so huge that we even think of ourselves as the owners of the Law? Are we the ones who have read the bible and no one can tell us anything different from what our opinion is? Do we see the truth of what laws must be kept firm and whoever does not abide to them is a sinner like Jesus on a Sabbath? Or are we humble enough that we submit to Jesus, the law giver and Judge, the one that is the foundation of time and space beyond everything we can see or even imagine? The Pharisees claimed to see but became blind.
I hope we can stay humble and pray for God’s will and wisdom in our lives so that he can show us the truth and how to act. I pray that we can see through the bible the one who wrote it, the one whose opinion actually matters.
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John 9: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+9&version=ESV