Transcript
Well, praise the Lord. It’s time to start our service. As always, we send you our love and our greetings to all our friends all over the world. God bless each and every one of you and especially the ones who reach out so regularly. We’re keeping you all in your thoughts and in our prayers.
If today’s your first time joining us, you wonder who we are and what we’re up to. Well, my name is Charles Paisley and I and most of our listeners here are formerly members of the cult following of William Branham known as The Message. The Message is a global doomsday cult with millions of members. The Message started right here in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and it spread all over the world.
I’m formerly the associate pastor of the second oldest message church in the world which was the flagship church of one of the oldest and largest international sects of the message, and this is a little mission that we operate to offer encouragement to those leaving the message and to take a look at the plain reading of scripture.
Scripture Reading: John Chapter 9
Now today we are in the ninth chapter of the gospel of John and I’m going to try and go through this whole chapter today. If you want to follow along with me I’m going to start reading in verse one. We’re using the English Standard Version and I’m just going to read down to the end of the chapter.
The Apostle John writes:
“As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned or his parents, but the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. As long as I’m in the world, I am the light of the world.’
Having said these things, he spit on the ground and he made mud with saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and he said to him, ‘Go wash in the pool of Siloam,’ which means Sent. And so he went and washed and came back seeing.
The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some said, ‘It is he.’ Others said, ‘No, but he is like him.’ He kept saying, ‘I am the man.’ So they said to him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’ He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” So I went and I washed and I received my sight.’ They said to him, ‘Where is he?’ He said, ‘I do not know.’
They brought him to the Pharisees, the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was on the Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, ‘He put mud on my eyes and I washed, and I see.’ 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. So they said again to the blind man, ‘What do you say about him since he opened your eyes?’ He said, ‘He is a prophet.’
The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they came and called the parents of the man who had received his sight. And they asked him, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?’ His parents answered, ‘We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind. But how he now sees, we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him. He’s of age. He’ll speak for himself.’ His parents said these things because they feared the Jews. For the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue. Therefore, his parents said, ‘He is of age. Ask him.’
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.’ He answered, ‘Whether he is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.’ They said to him, ‘What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?’ He answered them, ‘I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?’
And they reviled him, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are the disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses. But as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.’ The man answered, ‘Why, this is an amazing thing. You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 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. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind, if this man were not from God, he could do nothing.’ They answered him, ‘You were born in utter sin, and you would teach us.’ And they cast him out.
Jesus heard that they had cast him out. And having found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshiped him. Jesus said, ‘For judgment I came into the world that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things and said to him, ‘Are we also blind?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would have no guilt. But now that you say we see, your guilt remains.'”
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, Lord, as we open your word today, give us eyes to see the light of Christ and hearts that are ready to receive your truth. Open our understanding as we consider the testimony of your power and grace. Remove every blindness and pride of unbelief and deception from your heart, from our hearts, Lord, and help us to see clearly the glory of your son. May your truth shine brightly upon us today. This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Amen. Well, here we are in chapter nine, brothers and sisters. And as I’ve read this story to you here today, I really want to draw your attention to three main things in the story. We’re not going to go necessarily through it all verse by verse, but I just want to draw your attention to three key points.
Point 1: An Escalating Conflict
And the first point I’d like to draw your attention to is related to the escalating conflict that’s happening here between Jesus and the Jewish leaders.
If you remember starting back in chapter 7, Jesus came to the Feast of Tabernacles, which was a week-long feast, seven days, went Sabbath to Sabbath, eight days, I guess, technically. And every day at this feast, Jesus was having a run-in with the leaders. And in the last chapter, we read, Jesus had his biggest run-in yet while he was teaching in front of the treasury. That was right next to the temple. And it’s right to the spot where the people would go to pay their tithes or make donations. And in that back and forth that was happening by the treasury at the temple, Jesus was told by Jewish leaders that he was demon-possessed. And they came down really hard on Jesus.
And Jesus replied to them that they were liars and sinners who didn’t keep the law. Jesus told them they were children of the devil. And he told them that if they continued to reject the truth that he was telling them, then they were going to die in their sins. And it finally escalated to the point that they were starting to pick up rocks to stone Jesus to death. And Jesus had to make his getaway to keep from being killed. That’s how the last chapter ended. Jesus was making his getaway to keep from being killed.
And now what we’re reading here in chapter nine is happening on the same day. It’s just after Jesus makes his getaway from the crowd that was trying to kill him. He gets away. He gets off a bit and then chapter 9 happens. And in many ways, what’s happening here is the exact opposite thing a person would do if they were trying to calm the situation down. Because what Jesus does here in chapter nine is he goes and he does the very same thing which had started them hating him to begin with. Jesus is healing people on the Sabbath yet again.
And if you go all the way back to chapter 5, you remember the man at the pool of Bethesda. We see this as a recurring problem because Jesus also healed the man at the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath and he had a confrontation with the leaders that day. And if you read through the other gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, this is a repeating problem where Jesus is healing people on the Sabbath and the Jewish leaders hate it and accuse him of being a sinner. They’ve already had multiple big disputes with Jesus over this. They don’t want him to heal people on the Sabbath. And they’re actually convinced that it is a sin when Jesus heals people on the Sabbath. And we’ve talked about that in detail in prior lessons about, you know, Jesus’s response to them and why they were mistaken.
But right here, what does Jesus do? Right on the back of them trying to stone him and him making his getaway. What does Jesus do? He just finished that big verbal back and forth with him. Essentially told them they’re going to hell and that they attempted to stone him. Instead of just quietly going back to Galilee, what does Jesus do? He does something that is guaranteed to add more fuel to the fire before he finally leaves Jerusalem to go back home. He goes out and he heals somebody on the Sabbath.
And in this way, in the eyes of the Jewish leaders, Jesus is a repeat offender. And he’s making it very clear to them that he is not going to listen to them or respect their authority over things where they are so terribly, terribly mistaken. And that’s the truth with religious leaders. It’s true that the leaders in the temple had certain roles and responsibilities that indeed descended from God, from the law, from the Bible. But when they exceed and go beyond what God had given them to do, they had no authority whatsoever. They had no authority to force rules on Jesus that were not in the Bible. And that is exactly what’s happening here. They’ve invented rules that are not in the Bible, and they’re trying to punish and destroy Jesus for not keeping those rules. And Jesus continues to heal people on the Sabbath, regardless of what they think.
And as you think about that, it tells us something about Jesus, doesn’t it? It tells us that he’s someone who was determined to do the right thing even if it killed him. In fact, that was his actual mission, wasn’t it? He was going to keep doing the right thing until they killed him for it. And as we’ve seen with Jesus, when he met the woman at the well, or when he met Nicodemus who’d came by night, or really all the different stories we’ve read about the people who’ve been accepting him, Jesus was not nearly so strong in the way that he spoke to them, was he? Not as strong as he’s been with this group of leaders who keep confronting him. With them, Jesus has been direct. He’s been blunt with them in a way that he’s not been with others.
And I think that’s something important for us to take note of. As Jesus spoke to these people who hated him and wanted to kill him, I do believe he spoke with a tenderness and a care in his heart, even though he was saying hard things. And I don’t believe he was yelling and screaming at them and turning red in the face as he told them, “You will die in your sins.” As he told them, “You’re of your father, the devil.” Even when he delivered his hard words and strong messages, there was a way to speak the truth in love. And yelling and screaming is not a loving way of speaking. And that’s the first thing though overall I want you to take note of here. Jesus was healing this blind man immediately after fleeing from people who were attempting to murder him. And he’s doing it on the Sabbath. Something that is necessarily going to enrage those enemies even more when they find out about it.
Point 2: Sometimes Bad Things Just Happen
Now, the second thing I want to point out to you also about these verses is the question that Jesus’s disciples ask him here in verse two.
They want to know why the young man is blind. And their assumption is that either he or his parents must have been sinners. If he was born blind, maybe it was a punishment for his parents or maybe it was because he was a sinner himself. That’s their natural assumption. And in Jewish society back then, that was a common view. And things like that are also unfortunately a common view in the message. There are people in the world who when you look at something that’s gone bad in their lives or something befalls them, people will assume it’s happening to them because they’re a sinner and God is therefore punishing them.
And Jesus has been asked these sort of questions in the other gospels too. One time there had been a tower that had collapsed and many people had died when it fell on them. And Jesus said, ‘Do you suppose that the people in that tower were worse sinners than the people who had not been killed?’ And the answer is no. The truth is sometimes bad things just happen. And that’s all that they were. They were just bad things that happened. The tower falling on that people and killing them in the days of Jesus was not a special act of punishment from God. It’s just what happened. And Jesus made that point when he was asked about it.
And the world is full of all kinds of things like that. Things just happen. It wasn’t a punishment from God. It wasn’t a demon getting somebody. It wasn’t anything like that at all. It’s just what happened. Because we live in a world of cause and effect, and there’s a lot of things wrong in the world. Maybe some greedy builder decided to use subpar bricks and that’s why the tower fell down. Or maybe a big storm blew through and blew it down. Or maybe it was just a bad building site with a bad foundation and nobody knew. It was just a mistake. And it’s that way in life. Accidents happen. Mistakes happen. And it’s not always the devil or God. Sometimes it just happens.
And the same is true with illness and sickness and things like the blindness that this man was born with. The man was not blind because he was a sinner or his family was sinners. It wasn’t demons. It wasn’t a punishment from God. It’s just how it was. It’s how it happened. And that is the answer that Jesus is giving in this story. And so, it’s important to take notice of that.
And the truth is, I believe this is true. In most of the cases that we encounter in life where things seem to go wrong or things are bad, that’s really what it is. It’s just what happened. You know, here in the community I live in, there was a flood here not very long ago that washed through the town. God wasn’t punishing the town. It was just a flood that came through. In the same community, there’s a little girl. She’s 9 years old with leukemia. She’s not a sinner worse than anyone else. Her parents are not sinners worse than anyone else. It’s not a demon of cancer. It’s just what happened and it’s an illness and it’s sad. And we make a very serious mistake when we start thinking about somebody who’s sick or something bad is befalling somebody that well they must be a sinner or they must have made a mistake and God is punishing them. Actually, it’s us making a mistake if we go down that road and do that.
And it’s not that it couldn’t ever happen because sometimes God does curse and punish people. You look at Judas Iscariot. He was cursed for betraying the Lord, wasn’t he? Or you look at some of the kings of Israel. They disobeyed God and God sent a calamity because of it. Those things can happen. But if something like that does happen, there’s no guessing. You don’t have to guess about it. Judas and the apostles didn’t have to wonder about what happened to Judas. Judas didn’t have to wonder and the apostles didn’t have to wonder if what happened to him was because he was a sinner and God was punishing him. We don’t have to wonder because we know God makes those things known. And the people who are being punished, they know they’re being punished not because they have a feeling and they’re worrying about it, but because God has made it very clear to them.
And if God has not made it clear, then we’re better not even trying to probe into those sort of things because what you end up doing is you just make it worse. You think about it. This boy was already blind from birth. Isn’t that bad enough? Isn’t that a bad enough thing for somebody to have to experience without everyone else thinking he’s a sinner, too? And that’s exactly what people are doing when they go down that road. They just really—they’re just making things worse.
And in the message, there’s a whole lot of people in the message who are very talented, very skilled at making things worse. People who are a little sick, they’ll give them advice about doctors and faith that actually makes them worse. There’s people who are depressed and they’ll give them advice that actually makes them suicidal. They make it worse. I’ve seen those sort of things over and over again while I was in the message. And message people, a lot of them have a deep talent for making things worse. And one of the ways that people make things worse is by doing what the disciples are doing here to this man. They’re assuming he is a sinner and they’re heaping that reputation upon him even though he’s not.
Point 3: The Cruelty of False Religion
Now, the third and the final thing that I especially want to point out to you and what I’m probably going to spend the longest time talking about here today is about the cruelty of false religion.
You know, as we read through this story, just look at how the people treated this man. Not just after he was healed, but before he was healed. This man was a beggar on the street. Do you see that? He had to go out and he had to beg for food. He had to beg to survive. You notice that this man’s a beggar, but he had parents, didn’t he? He had a family, didn’t he? There’s a whole community of people there. Yet here, he was left to be a beggar. And you have to ask yourself, how could that be? How could that be?
And part of it can be very well true that people just assumed he was a sinner and he was getting what he deserved. And just on that basic level, it was a very sad condition that that man was enduring before Jesus had met him. He wasn’t simply blind. He was a beggar. He was destitute. Obviously, his family didn’t even care that much about him to let him be out on the street as a beggar. And this is something you see common in false religions everywhere. They don’t really care so much for those in need. Not really. The people who aren’t useful to them, the people who can’t produce or benefit them, they don’t really care about those people. The people who are truly in need, the blind, the disabled, the widows, the orphans, the infirmed. Oftentimes those people are just abandoned like this man seems to have been.
You know, you think about the church I come from and all of the widows who just kind of disappear. The church don’t do anything to help them and they just more or less are abandoned to die. We’ve seen that happen over and over with the elderly and different ones. They’re a burden on the community and it’s easier to just write them off as sinners or forget about them than actually do the godly thing to care for someone. We had a lot of widows and infirmed people in the church I came from. I remember one particular person who was disabled in a very bad way. They could hardly walk. I mean, they were in a—their back was severely injured and misfortune fell on that particular person, you know, after they had lived years in that condition and their house burned down and they lost everything. They were destitute. They were infirmed. They lost everything.
And you know what the church did for that particular man? Nothing at all. Nothing at all. They didn’t take up a collection. They didn’t give him a donation. And even though he came to church for years and years, he paid tithes, they didn’t do anything for that man. And that was the normal way of things. The church would sit on millions of dollars in the bank account while people would suffer, you know.
And I think about all the widows. There was one woman, a really kind lady, and I won’t say her whole name, but she was Hattie Wright’s sister-in-law. If you spent your lives in the message anywhere in the world, you know who Hattie Wright was. And Hattie Wright’s sister-in-law came to my church. And she came for decades and decades to Faith Assembly. And her husband passed away. And then her daughter who took care of her also passed away. And she was left in a very sad spot. She had no husband. Her daughter who was her caretaker died and she was just left alone with nobody to help her. And you know what Faith Assembly did for that woman? Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. They didn’t even go to her daughter’s funeral when she died, her caretaker’s funeral. In fact, most of the people in the church probably don’t even remember who she is because they just forget and abandon people. They just abandon people.
But I went to the funeral. I sent her a card. I spoke to her. I tried to say comforting words. And I wish people at the church cared enough to do something for those sort of people, but they don’t because it’s a cruel, false religion. People can go to church for decades and pay tithes for decades, but in their hour of need, it’s not uncommon for them just to be totally abandoned.
And in this story, we see how false religion is. In the case of this blind man, they don’t take care of their own. This was a blind man in Jerusalem near the temple and he had to be a beggar. They couldn’t take care of him. No one was there to care for him. And the false religion treated this man like utter trash before he was healed and as we’re going to see after he was healed.
And we look at how they reacted to him after he was healed. If we start maybe down in verse 32… The man said, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born in utter sin. You were born in utter sin, and you would teach us.” And they cast him out.
Because this man would dare to open his mouth and say something they didn’t like. They just threw him out like a piece of trash. Do you see that? There’s no hearing him out. There’s no looking into the things that he said. They could care less there was a miracle. And first they just falsely accuse him again of being a sinner. You see that? Falsely accuse him of being a sinner. And they don’t even listen to him and they throw him out. False religion hates to hear things that rub it the wrong way. They don’t care. You know, even if you had a—even if there was a miracle, they don’t care. They can’t just rejoice that things are better for this man. But because the miracle happened through Jesus, the man has to be shut up. He has to be gotten rid of because what he’s saying here is contrary to our program. We got to get rid of him. Shut him up. Throw him out. Destroy his life. Ruin him. Get rid of him. He’s saying things we don’t want to hear. That is how cruel false religious leaders are.
If you look back at verse 22, in the preceding section here, verse 22, his parents said these things because they feared the Jews. This is the spot where they called back to his parents and his parents wouldn’t give an answer. His parents said, “Go ask the boy because they feared the Jews.” For the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue. Therefore, his parents said, “He is of age. Go ask him.”
The people are so against Jesus. They’re so determined to keep what he is saying and what he is doing from impacting them that they’re prepared to do very radical things. What we’re reading here is a very radical thing. They are prepared to throw people out of their community. They’re prepared to shun them, to cut them off from their friends, from their family, from their livelihood, from their community. They’re prepared to totally cut these people off. And this man’s parents won’t even tell the truth because they’re afraid of that pressure that comes with that. They’re even willing to go along with breaking up their own family. And this religious crowd of leaders are turning families against each other. Even this man’s parents here are obviously cowed. Even his parents will go along with the wicked leaders and knowingly swallow whatever line that they have to in order to keep their leaders happy. Do you see that here?
These are the same sort of things we see that happen in the message churches, especially the abusive and the hostile ones. This is a wickedness that’s on display here in this Jewish synagogue, just like we see in message churches. And it’s very common. Unless you toe the line, unless you hate who the leader tells you to hate, unless you shun who the leader tells you to shun, unless you keep all the information out that they don’t want brought up, then they’re going to run you out. And it don’t matter if it breaks up your home. It don’t matter if it breaks up your family. It don’t matter if it ruins people’s lives. It don’t matter if it costs people their jobs. It don’t matter if it drives people to suicide. All of which has happened. They could care less. Their objective is not you. It’s not your well-being and it’s not seeing you saved and happy and with the Lord. The objective is to shut you up and to do whatever it takes to achieve that. And that is what this man who had been healed by Jesus is experiencing. Verse 34. They answered him, “You were born in utter sin and would teach us.” And they cast him out. They cast him out.
You know, this is something I think a whole lot of us listening here have experienced. Leaving the message is a whole lot like this man’s experience, isn’t it? They turn on you. They rob you of everything they can rob you of. They cause you as much harm as they possibly can. They treat you like trash and then they throw you away like trash. And they could care less because they are deeply, deeply wicked. And it’s not godliness that drives people to behave that way. It’s the devil who they serve that inspires that sort of behavior.
You know, I think of one dear brother who’s in contact with us from time to time. A man who was a minister in the message, brothers and sisters. When he left the message, they broke up his home, his wife, his children. It was awful what they did to the man. I think of another person who left the message. They ruined his career. They caused him vast financial damages. There’s another person I know. They took their home and they had to go live in a barn to survive. The message people did that to them. I think of one sister, her husband divorced her and threw her out on the street with nothing, no job, no—she had to go live in a shelter. And that’s the case of a lot of people of how they get treated and thrown away like trash by the message community. They’re just as bad and worse as what we’re reading about what happened to this blind man. And it’s happened in message churches the world over. The world over. And it is wicked. It’s wicked. Absolutely wicked.
And so, as I say, a lot of us who listen here, we know just what it’s like to be in this man’s situation. You know, the Apostle Paul said that he suffered the loss of all things to follow Jesus. And I know quite a few people who listen here and communicate with us are not too far off from that themselves. I know there are people in different places. Maybe they listen here or other people who have left the message and they might have their comments or they might look down on us in different ways. Maybe they don’t like certain things. But what a lot of us have suffered and paid to follow Jesus out of that cult is a whole lot more than I think a lot of people can grasp. You and I know it because we’ve walked the path. But a lot of people just cannot grasp the cost. But I know it. And you know it because we experienced that cost firsthand.
Jesus Finds the Outcasts
And I want you to be encouraged today. And let me read the ending of this chapter to you as I close this lesson. Look at how Jesus came alongside this man after they threw him out, after they cast him out. And what I want you to notice is this because this is really special to me. You know, the message may throw us away. Our false religion may throw us away. They might not have a place for us. But you know, in John 14, I’m excited when we’re going to eventually get there. In John 14, Jesus said, “I have a place for you.” In this world, we may never find a place where we belong. But I’m going to promise you one thing that I know is true. Jesus, he has a place for you. He does have a place where you do belong. And he is coming to take you to that place one day. This world might abandon you and its false religions might abandon you, but Jesus will not abandon you.
Look at verse 35. Look at that. When Jesus heard that they had cast him out and having found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Now, do you see what happened there? Jesus heard that they cast this man out. Word got to Jesus that this man had been thrown out of the synagogue. Word got to Jesus what had happened to this man. Word got to Jesus of how these wicked false religious people had treated this blind man that he had healed. Brothers and sisters, word gets to Jesus. Word gets to Jesus.
And what did Jesus do? It says here, having found him, Jesus had to go find this man. Jesus went out looking for him. When he heard that this man had been cast out and that he was alone and that he had lost it all, Jesus went looking for him. Do you see that, brothers and sisters? Jesus was looking for us. Friends, if you’re out there today all alone, I know many of you are. Jesus came looking for you. And that’s why you’re still here. It’s why you’re still holding on to him. It’s because he came looking for us.
Verse 35, Jesus heard that they had cast him out. And having found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Do you believe in the Son of Man? You see, that’s the question that matters. It’s not, “Do you obey the rules of Judaism?” It’s not, “Do you submit to the right religious leaders?” It’s not, “Do you know the seven thunders?” or have you heard the revelation of the seven seals? It’s not do you know a prophet William Branham. None of those things are the right question. But what Jesus asks this man, this is the right question. Do you believe in the son of man? And that son of man here specifically is referring to the prophecy from the book of Daniel. It’s the prophecy of the savior who would come and raise the dead and set the people free. It’s the son of man prophecies of Daniel. And he asked this blind man, “Do you believe in the son of man, the one who’s to come from the book of Daniel?”
And he answered, “Who is he, sir? Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Who is it? Who should we look for? How many times I have heard that exact same question from people when they first leave the message or people who are struggling while they’re in the message trying to think what to do. Who is it? Who should we look for? If it’s not William Branham, who is it? Who is it? If he’s not the prophet that we’re supposed to follow, if it wasn’t William Branham, who is it? Who do we look for? Who do we replace him with? Jesus answered—rather the man answered and who is he sir that I may believe in him. Jesus said to him you have seen him and it is he who is speaking to you. He said Lord I believe and he worshiped him.
He worshiped him. That’s something special right there. This man had been cast out, abandoned all alone, and the savior came to him. The savior, Jesus, came looking to him, and he found him. And this man believed on Jesus. And I want you to pay special attention to what this man did when he came to this knowledge. What did he do? He worshiped Jesus. He bowed down and he worshiped Jesus. And this happens at various places in the gospel. People bow down and they worship Jesus. And you just think about that what that entails. And also notice Jesus never once ever rebuked anyone who worshiped him. Jesus let people worship him without a word to stop them.
Verse 38, he said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. You know, it’s not wrong to worship Jesus. In fact, it’s an appropriate thing to do. I know where there are churches where it’s frowned upon for worshiping Jesus for various reasons. But Jesus always accepted worship whenever it came his way in scripture. I just want to make sure you notice that this man worshiped Jesus and Jesus accepted the worship.
Now verse 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.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things and said to him, “Are we also blind?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt. But now that you say we see, your guilt remains.”
You see, the Pharisees are people who thought they had it all figured out, when in fact they didn’t. And that was a sin. It’s a sin to think you have things right and be so sure of it when you shouldn’t be and you’re wrong. Being blind to your need can be a sin. It’s the sin of pride. You know, Jesus calls it blindness. They’re incapable of seeing. They simply cannot see the reality of their situation. But they’re too proud to admit they’re blind. Not even if you put it in front of their faces. They cannot actually see it. And they can’t see it because they’re blind. Yet too proud to admit they’re blind.
And I thank God today that we’re not blind. We’re more like this man who bowed down to worship Jesus. Our eyes have been open to Jesus, not from physical blindness, but from spiritual blindness. We’ve seen the truth. We’ve seen our savior. And we’ve discovered that the message was just a cult. It was just a false religion like so many others built on lies and made-up stories invented by deceivers. And it’s a sad and it’s a tragic thing to find out that William Branham was a false prophet. But let me tell you today, there’s good news, brothers and sisters. Jesus. He is still a real savior. And if you’ve been cast out and if you’re all alone, you can be sure Jesus is looking for you, just like he went looking for this man. Amen. Come to Jesus today. And there’s hope and peace in him. Hallelujah. Amen.
Ministry Update
Before I close in prayer, I do just want to give you a quick update. I am going to be taking a bit of a break here for the next few weeks. I’m going to be doing some work during that time with some of the brothers overseas and we won’t be putting out regular lessons here for a little bit. So, you just pray for us, pray for our work overseas and just keep all that in your thoughts and your prayers and we will be back with you as soon as all of that is done.
Closing Prayer
Now, let me go ahead and I’m going to close now in prayer.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word and for the light of your son that opens blinded eyes and reveals the truth. Thank you that when we were lost, confused, and cast aside, you did not abandon us, but you came looking for us in your grace and in your mercy. Lord, keep our eyes open to see clearly. Deliver us from every form of spiritual blindness, from pride, from deception. Help us never to trust in empty religion, in men, or in false systems, but to place our faith fully in Jesus Christ alone.
For those who have been rejected and wounded or cast out for following the truth. We ask Lord that you comfort them and strengthen them. Remind them that though this world may reject them, Christ has received them and he has a place prepared for them. Give us courage to stand for what’s true, grace to endure hardship, and hearts that, like this man we’ve read about today, bow before Jesus and say, “Lord, I believe.” May we walk in the light of Christ and worship him faithfully and follow him all our days until we see him face to face. In Jesus’ name we pray and ask these things. Amen. Amen.