The Identity of Christ as the Light of the WorldՕրինակ

Day 4 Devotional:

The Result of Seeing the Identity of Christ

In verses 34 to 41, after Christ had healed this man, He went out of His way to look for him after the religious leaders threw him out of the synagogue. This is the good news of the gospel; we did not go to look for God. In His love for us, He came to look for us in our spiritual blindness and lostness.

When Christ found the man, He revealed His identity to the man, just like He revealed His identity to us when He found us. The man responded to Christ with faith by saying, “Lord, I believe.” Verse 38 tells us that the man then worshipped Christ. And so, this man, who had been blind his whole life, was given new eyes.

He was given not just physical eyes, but also spiritual eyes to see the real identity of Christ. The sight he will prize his whole life, the best thing he will ever lay his newly opened eyes on, is the Christ who had healed him. This applies to all of us who have responded in faith to Christ and His gospel.

In contrast to the healing of the man’s physical blindness, and his spiritual healing that enabled him to see the real identity of Christ, the Pharisees were blinded by their own false sense of self-righteousness and self-knowledge.

The extent of the blindness of the Pharisees was revealed by the fact that while they thought of themselves as being devoted to the work of God, they were so consumed with themselves that when God Himself showed up in the form of Christ Jesus, they failed to see Him. The Pharisees did not simply fail to see, they refused to see. They tightly shut the eyes of their heart to the identity of Christ.

We can summarise our third R from this passage by saying that the result of seeing the identity of Christ as the light of the world through the gospel and placing our faith in Him, is our spiritual healing, while our refusal to do so, like the Pharisees, keeps us in spiritual blindness, darkness, and under God’s condemnation.