The Gospel: Sign, Light, Sight

SUNDAY SERVICE 15 SEPT 2013
SPEAKER: DR SUNNY TAN
TEXT: John 9

A summary

The blind man’s encounter with Jesus is very much an analogy of a Gospel journey that leads a person from information to salvation .

Sign
John’s Gospel referred to Jesus’ deeds and miracles as a sign.

John 20:30,31 Now Jesus did many other signs...but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John 2:11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him. 

People are always in need of directions, a signpost. A sign is simply a pointer - it could be an event or an indicator of something invisible that may be good or bad. It is not the sign we admire but the thing it points to. So Jesus’ miracles, life, death and resurrection were called a sign of Jesus’ divinity, pointing us to the invisible God.

Light 
Humans do not generate light from within. Our eyes merely receive light, and without light which comes from outside of us, we can’t see.

If Jesus is the 'Light of the World’ it is not that the world is in darkness but that humans also lack the capacity to see.

Sin blinds us to our need for God. In order to see, we need Jesus to bring light to our true human condition, to see what God wants us to see. It is not enough to come to Jesus as the blind man learned; Jesus needs to touch us so our ability to see God is first ’healed.’

Sight
The religious teachers could not see what the blind man saw, and neither could they understand what the healing pointed to.

As in the blind man now healed, our sight too must be enhanced by knowledge to recognise or understand what to see. It is usually the invisible things, the spiritual things that are lost and not missed because we cannot see them.

Sunny quoted Eugene Peterson who explained how Jesus must first be the Way that points to Truth. Life is the consequence of committing to the truth.

As believers, our community ought to be a signpost - or the Gospel - that points to Jesus. But above all, each one of us is always in need of a personal encounter with Jesus. Only then will we begin to see what He wants us to see, in order to possess the life He desires us to live to the glory of His name.

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Rev Dr Sunny Tan is the Academic Dean of Malaysia Baptist Seminary. Both he and his wife Dr Rosalind Lim live in Penang.