When Unbelief Investigates a Miracle

This is the first thing to know about unbelief. That kind of unbelief that is willful and resistant is also hostile. It starts intellectual, becomes emotional, then becomes verbal and ends up physical. And unbelief, if pressed, can go down that path pretty fast. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. If you haven't had the procedure done on your eyes, you probably know someone who's had laser eye surgery. In the last two decades, millions of people have undergone the procedure, fixing a common physical problem. But there's another kind of vision problem that's much more serious, and it's one that human hands can't begin to fix. I'm talking about spiritual blindness.

The question is, what is the remedy? What's the cure for spiritual blindness? Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur looks at what the Bible says about this in his current study, Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture. Now here's John. Now open your Bible to the ninth chapter of the gospel of John. As you know, if you've been with us in our study of the gospel of John, it's often called the gospel of belief, or the gospel of believing, because John gives us his purpose in writing at the end of the gospel as he begins to wrap up in chapter 20.

He expresses the purpose for which he has written. These have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name. From the first chapter on to the very end, it talks about believing, but we've also noted all the way along that it is also a gospel of unbelief. While it presents to us the truth concerning Christ in order that we might believe, it also chronicles the rejection of Jesus Christ.

We learn that at the very beginning, chapter 1, verse 11, He came into His own, His own received Him not. It is the gospel of belief set in a context of unbelief. So we are always seeing John writing that you may believe and realizing that even as Christ comes to prove who He is, He is confronted by constant unbelief, and that is still true today.

God Himself calls all men to believe in His Son, but the vast majority do not, and the vast majority did not when His Son was here walking in their midst. So while John's gospel is the gospel, the history that is designed to bring us to belief, it is at the same time a chronicle of unbelief. And we've seen unbelief in a number of forms. We saw the bewildered, kind of confused unbelief of Nicodemus to whom Jesus said, if I have told you earthly things and you believe not, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? We have also seen the demanding unbelief of the nobleman from Cana to whom Jesus said unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe. We saw another kind of belief, the self-centered hypocritical unbelief of the leaders of religion in Israel to whom Jesus said, because I tell you the truth, you do not believe Me.

We saw the blind unbelief of the Galileans who saw the miracles and still didn't believe, and Jesus says you have seen and do not believe. Belief and unbelief all the way through the gospel of John. There is even the mysterious unbelief of the brothers of Jesus of whom it is said, neither did His brothers believe in Him. But what stands out in this panoply of forms of unbelief is the willful truth rejecting hard-hearted unbelief of the Pharisees, the scribes, the chief priests, and the rulers of religious Israel to whom Jesus said, I tell you the truth and you believe not. You can in studying the gospel of John put together a theology of unbelief. You can draw a very complete characterization of unbelief. But in this ninth chapter in particular, you get an insight into the character of willful, obstinate, stubborn unbelief.

You find in this chapter kind of the pathology of unbelief, its characteristics, its nature, its marks. This is a passage then that one can read as a narrative. You can just read the story. It's a wonderful story, a blind man born blind, and of course Jesus meets him at the gate to the temple, gives him his sight by creating two new eyes, puts saliva in dirt, makes a little mud, puts it on his eyes, tells him to go wash. He does, finding his way to the pool blind.

He comes back seeing. This incredible miracle has happened. It's a very simple and yet marvelous story. That ends in verse 12.

We went through that last time. The man born blind can now see. We follow that up starting in verse 13, and we begin to see the religious leaders, the Pharisees in particular, investigating a miracle. They're going to investigate this dramatic demonstration of divine power.

As we watch this, we can just read the story, and the story is dramatic and dynamic on its own. But as we go through the story, what strikes me as I read through this story is I see the character of unbelief. I see the nature of unbelief. Now, unbelief comes in many forms, but in all of its forms, it demonstrates these kinds of components.

So they're going to unfold for us. This is one of the, I think, one of the challenging things as we study the Bible is to make sure that we don't just read the history and maybe miss the revelation that it's giving to us that's not immediately on the surface. While, as I said, the story is enough to sustain our interest and have an impact on us, if we look a little deeper and examine what's going on, we begin to get a better understanding of how unbelief functions and how it operates. And if you're wondering why that's important, I want to tell you it's very important so that you know what to expect because your responsibility is to carry on the gospel ministry to preach Jesus Christ. You're going to confront unbelief.

Most all of the people to whom you give the gospel will reject it. You will your whole life confront unbelief, and you need to know how unbelief operates. This is a narrative story, so it's simple. It doesn't take a lot of explanation. It's not some kind of a dense, comprehensive, compound argument of theology or anything.

It's just a story. So we're going to cover the story and try to extract out of it the characteristics of unbelief that can prepare us for what we're going to face. So primarily, I would say, this story instructs us on what to expect when we confront unbelievers. The characteristics of unbelief are exposed. There's a second feature here, though, that is historic.

It's historic, and it is this. It is in this event and in this conversation that the blind man has with these leaders that we see in graphic demonstration the schism between Christianity and Judaism, between, if you will, the church which is latent in these believers, and the synagogue. This is where Jews and Christians divide into two antagonistic separated realms, and that comes out. On the one hand, the Jews affirm Moses. On the other hand, the believers affirm Christ, and it is that division that has existed ever since even to this very hour.

So we will see that schism which has perpetuated itself through history and will until Israel turns to see the Christ they rejected and embrace Him for who He is, and that will happen someday in the future. But the main lesson here is about unbelief. We're going to see how unbelief makes conclusions before it does examinations.

It's predisposed to its own viewpoint. We're going to see how unbelief establishes false standards. We're going to see how unbelief demands more and more evidence, but when it receives that evidence, it doesn't respond as any appropriate person should, any thinking person. So there's a kind of irrationality in unbelief. Unbelief does biased research.

It can look at facts and come to the complete wrong conclusion. Unbelief is self-centered, selfish, egocentric. All these things are part of unbelief, but we'll try to break it down into some words, so I'll throw some words at you.

Maybe some of you haven't heard. First of all, I want you to see that unbelief is inimical, inimical. You probably haven't used that word today, or any day for that matter, but it's a really good word, and it means hostile, hostile. It means adverse. It means pernicious, ill-disposed.

It could even be dangerous. Unbelief is not benign. You need to understand that. When you're dealing with unbelievers, you're not dealing with some benign reality.

This is an aggressive attitude to take. When you don't believe in the gospel and you don't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you inevitably are hostile toward that. That is why it is unbelievers who ultimately persecute Christians. It is unbelievers, religious unbelievers, rejecting the gospel who crucified Jesus by the hands of the Romans. It was unbelievers who persecuted the apostles and martyred almost all of them. It was unbelievers that were pouring out threatening and slaughter against believers in the early chapters of Acts. It is unbelievers through all of human history that kill Christians. It is unbelievers today that massacre Christians in various parts of the world. So unbelief is inimical. That is to say it is hostile.

It poses a certain danger. So you need to see that and understand that. Now, already the Pharisees have decided that Jesus is kind of a combination of demon-possessed, Satan-inspired and insane, and they have essentially said that. That's the mantra that the Pharisees have been parading around and articulating. That they have determined already. While not all unbelievers are equally hostile, unbelief in its own nature is hostile to the truth, and it may take many forms.

It may become aggressive to the point of injury, attack, or even execution martyrdom, as we know through history. So we're going to learn about, first of all, the inimical character of unbelief. Let's look at verse 13. They brought to the Pharisees the man who was formerly blind.

Now, who are they? Go back to verse 8, the neighbors and those who previously saw him as a beggar. The people who knew him when he was blind, the people who knew him when he was begging by the gate of the temple where Jesus met him, these people bring this man to the Pharisees. And you can ask, why did they bring him to the Pharisees?

There are a number of possibilities, of course, and maybe it's a blending of all of them. First of all, maybe just some sort of simple need to get the Pharisees who were the religious leaders and the ones who totally knew the law and knew the Scripture, knew God, could represent heaven, to sort of sign off on how this happened. Maybe they were looking for some theological explanation from the theological elites of Israel.

That is certainly within the realm of possibility and reason. Their neighbors, their folks that see him at the temple, and this is massive. This is incomprehensible to them, because as the blind man says later in the story, no one had ever heard of anyone being healed of blindness, and he was right. He knew his Old Testament. There's not one single healing of a blind man in the entire Old Testament. It was unheard of.

He knew that. So this is remarkable, and maybe they just wanted to check off the Pharisees to find out how they viewed this and how they were going to explain it. It is also possible, nuancing that just a little bit, that the Pharisees had been continually discrediting Jesus, continually saying that He has a demon, He is insane, He is of Satan, He is not of God.

They had propounded this all the way along. They were seeking His death. They had come to the place, according to verse 22, where the Sanhedrin had passed a law that if anyone confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, they would be un-synagogued, thrown out of the synagogue, banned, cursed in the society. So since the Pharisees had made this law, there was a certain fear and concern on the parts of the people that they were going to have to figure out how this Jesus, who could heal this blind man, fit into the purposes and plans of God, when that's obviously divine power. But if we say He's the Messiah, we're going to get thrown out of the synagogue.

So maybe they just needed some kind of further explanation. Why such a severe punishment for someone who wanted to affirm Jesus? And there's another possibility, and this would be a more negative one, and that is that they knew Jesus had broken the Sabbath. They knew that healing was not allowed on the Sabbath, and they didn't mean miracle healing, but medicinal healing. According to rabbinic law, if someone was sick, you couldn't do anything to make him better on the Sabbath.

But if someone was dying, you could sort of prevent him from dying but not make him well. You were allowed to neutralize his moment of dire straits but not make him any better because that would be a violation of the Sabbath. So here, Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath. They were perhaps going to report him to the Pharisees on a negative level because he broke the Sabbath. Furthermore, he had taken clay, spit in the clay, put it on the eyes of the man, and you weren't allowed to do that because that was work on the Sabbath. So Jesus had violated the Sabbath. That seems to be in their mind because in verse 14, it was a Sabbath on the day when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes. This is not necessarily still the Sabbath because they wouldn't have convened on the Sabbath, but they went back and told the Pharisees it happened on the Sabbath, so that must have been part of the conversation. He had then been guilty of working on the Sabbath.

And you know they had these ridiculous laws. You couldn't fill a lamp with oil on the Sabbath. You couldn't light a wick on the Sabbath. If a man extinguished a lamp on the Sabbath to spare the lamp to save the oil and conserve the wick, he was guilty of violating the Sabbath. So you couldn't light one.

You couldn't blow one out. Petty, ridiculous rules. There is even a rabbinical statute recorded by Maimonides, the historic Jew, specifically prohibiting the spreading of saliva on anyone on the Sabbath because they believed saliva had some kind of medicinal value, and they weren't allowed to spread the saliva on the Sabbath according to Maimonides, so Jesus had done that. So He had broken their Sabbath. So there has to be that component in them coming to the Pharisees. So some of them are Pharisaic disciples for sure. Some of them, some of the neighbors and the people who knew what was going on have taken up the cause of the Pharisees.

They bought into their form of apostate Judaism. So they dragged the man who had been born blind in front of the Pharisees, and maybe some of them wanted an explanation, and some of them wanted to know why the law against a man who could do this, but probably the most dominating reality was what do we do about the violation of the Sabbath, and that was what concerned them the most. By the way, the Lord did whatever He wanted on the Sabbath because He says in Mark 2.28, I'm the Lord of the Sabbath. I'm the Lord of the Sabbath. In John 5, remember verses 16 to 18 when He had healed the man at the pool on the Sabbath, and they were after Him because He did it on the Sabbath, and He said, My Father works on the Sabbath, and I work on the Sabbath. God doesn't rest on the Sabbath, and I don't rest, and they accused Him of blasphemy because He made Himself equal with God. He paid no attention to their ridiculous rules that they had concocted to compound the Sabbath into the worst day of the week. In Mark 2.27, He said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

It was made to be a day of comfort and rest and joy and refreshment, and they had turned it into an impossible ridiculous burden. So He purposely violated their Sabbath, the laws that they had invented, not God's. Matthew 15 and 9, you have substituted the traditions of men for the commandments of God.

So this is the issue. They bring this man to the Pharisees. Verse 15, the Pharisees also were asking Him again how He received His sight.

Why does it say again? Because the neighbors had asked Him back in verse 10. The neighbors and the others and the people who knew Him were saying to Him, How then were Your eyes open? So again He has to answer the question, this time from the Pharisees, how He received His sight. He said to them, He applied clay to My eyes, and I washed and I see.

Very straightforward, very simple answer. What else could He say? That's all He knew. The Pharisees, they don't want to take the word of the neighbors. They don't want to take the word of the folks that are there. They want a first-person testimony, so they ask the man. The other folks' testimony of what the man had said was inadequate for them, so they ask the man. The man gives them a simple straightforward answer, which is verifiable.

By the way, that's a cryptic moment. A lot of other conversation must have been going on with people saying, Yeah, we know Him. We've known Him.

We've seen Him by the gate many days, many months, many years. Yes, this is the man, but He needed to give the testimony Himself, and so the Pharisees ask Him to, and He does. Verse 16, therefore some of the Pharisees were saying, This man is not from God because He doesn't keep the Sabbath. I'll stop right there at that point. This is supposed to be an investigation, which means the conclusion's supposed to come at the end. This is the conclusion before the investigation. This man, meaning Jesus, they won't call Him Jesus.

They call Him this man, this man, and you'll see them do that repeatedly, this man. They don't want to mention His name, but they've already made a conclusion. The conclusion is, this man is not from God because He doesn't keep the Sabbath. This is their little sort of logical syllogism.

A logical syllogism has a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. The major premise, all people who are from God keep the Sabbath. Minor premise, Jesus doesn't keep the Sabbath. Conclusion, Jesus is not from God. That's the syllogism. He doesn't keep their hair-splitting, trifling, ridiculous little rules on the Sabbath, but all people from God would. He's not from God, couldn't be from God. So this is backwards as unbelief would always reveal itself.

We start with the conclusion and then reason backwards. The conclusion is, they reject Him. They're hostile toward Him. However, there is a group within the Pharisees that can't be so easily persuaded by this syllogism. They have their own syllogism, and it shows up in the middle of verse 16. Others were saying, we assume others of the Pharisees, how can a man who is a sinner perform such signs? How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs? They had their own logical syllogism and went like this. Only God can open blind eyes.

Jesus opened the eyes of this man born blind. Conclusion, Jesus is from God. Group A, it's the Sabbath issue. Group B, it's the supernatural issue.

Group A is unmoved. We don't know about group B, but we do know the end of verse 16, there was a division among them. But this kind of division was part of what was happening with Jesus.

If you go back to chapter 7 in particular, you can go back and start in chapter 7, verse 40, and some say this, and some say that, and some say this, and some say that, and some say, well, no prophets coming from here and there. So there was a division among the people. It says there was a division. Chapter 10, verse 19, there was a division. Jesus brought a sword. He brought division between people.

So we're going to follow group A because they sort of take charge. They are the hard-hearted unbelievers, the deniers. The first thing we learn about them, and we've covered it already, is they have made their conclusion, and they are hostile toward anything that offends or anything that assaults that conclusion. This is the first thing to know about unbelief.

That kind of unbelief that is willful and resistant is also hostile. That's why we gave you the four steps of conflict. It starts intellectual, becomes emotional, then becomes verbal, and ends up physical. That's what will happen in the story. It starts as a discussion about facts.

It then becomes emotional, and the man starts sarcastically firing away at them, and then it becomes them firing at him, reviling them, and eventually physically they throw him out. Those are the sequences of conflict. And unbelief, if pressed, can go down that path pretty fast. So unbelief, first of all, is inimical.

That is, it is hostile toward the truth. You've been listening to John MacArthur, chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary, and the featured Bible teacher here on Grace to You. The title of John's current study, Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture. Now John, in closing today, you said that unbelief is hostile to the truth. And if there's a truth that more people than anything else are hostile to, it seems to be the idea that Jesus is God, and he's Lord of all. So for that listener who knows people, maybe people in his own family, who reject the truth that Jesus is God, what encouragement would you have for those listeners? How should they approach their conversations with their loved ones who reject the deity of Christ or the lordship of Christ?

Well, it's the essential truth. Salvation comes to those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus said, You'll die in your sins to the Jews, and where I go, you'll never come.

Why? Because you believe not on me. There's no salvation in any other name than the name of Jesus Christ. Understanding who Christ is and what he has done is necessary to eternal salvation. No one who has a wrong view of Christ, no one who fails to submit to Christ, will ever escape hell. So the gospel begins with Christ. Paul says, I am determined to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified. So that's where all Christian witness begins.

And I want to help you with that. I'm looking right at a book titled The Deity of Christ. That's the issue, the deity of Christ.

It answers the question who he is, and it shows you biblically details from the revelation of God in his Word that make it unmistakably clear as to who Jesus Christ is, and that is the foundational necessity to believe to be saved. The book, The Deity of Christ, is based on the MacArthur New Testament commentary series, and it pulls content from those commentaries and arranges them for easy understanding and even for study. So if you've never contacted grace to you before, and that's most of you, do that today and request the book, The Deity of Christ, 215 pages, and we'll send you a copy free of charge.

That's right, free to anyone contacting us for the first time. And just ask for the book, The Deity of Christ. This is a great tool for anyone who wants to know Christ in a deeper, more meaningful way. This book, The Deity of Christ, is our gift to you if you've never contacted us before.

Get in touch today. Call 800-55-GRACE or make your request at our website, gty.org. John's book titled The Deity of Christ will help you better understand who Christ is, what he accomplished, and why he's worthy of your worship and what he expects from you. Again, for a limited time, we will send you a free copy of The Deity of Christ if you have never contacted us before. Just call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE or go to our website gty.org. And while you're online, make sure to take advantage of the thousands of free resources that can help you better understand God's Word. You'll find previous broadcasts of this program, video clips of John's various conference and television appearances, and the Grace To You blog. You can also download all of John's sermons free of charge in audio or transcript format. The address again, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to watch Grace To You television this Sunday, check your local listings for Channel and Times, and be here tomorrow as John continues his study, Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.