Some claim that any and every instance of sickness and suffering in the world is the direct consequence of sin and that if we have enough faith then God will remove all sickness from us. We see this theology at work in Job's friends and even the disciples of Jesus. However, this perspective is not what scripture teaches and Jesus himself corrected his followers about this false perspective. While yes suffering sometimes is a specific chastisement from God, it is usually the consequence of living in a fallen world. Yet in the midst of all this pain, we can have hope that none of it is meaningless - God is at work even in the midst of our suffering, both for our good and his own glory.

Well, it really is a delight to be here. For many reasons, there are a lot of dear friends here in this auditorium and I'm so grateful to be able to be with them but it's been a delight to prepare to preach at a conference on suffering of all things And so I've been immersing myself in what God has declared about this whole matter of suffering. And I came home the other day and I was so encouraged, you know, after spending an entire day about this, I walked in the house and Deborah says, "'What's up with you?' I said, "'I am so happy. I've been studying the doctrine of suffering.'" I said, "'Really honest, Deborah. I mean, I am so encouraged, you know.

It's like a million pounds has been lifted off of my soul. And she said, so you're happy? Yeah. She said, who do you think's happier about this than you? I said, who?

Me, that's what she said. She's happier than I am. You know, every wife wants a happy husband, that's for sure. Well, I'm so, I really have been very delighted to deal with this subject. And it's, of course, obvious to all of us that every person here is experiencing afflictions of some kind, some heavy, some not so heavy.

But I know from personal knowledge that some of you have had children die. Some of you have had remarkable reversals, heartbreaking situations, things that you never imagined could possibly happen, have happened to you, various kinds of failures, betrayals, attacks have happened. Sickness, theft, sometimes incurable sickness. And after just hearing the apostle Paul's thorn in the flesh, you know, some of you know anyway, that you reach a point and you're looking at that thorn and you've been pulling on it and it's not coming out. And you wonder if it's ever gonna come out.

And you might be like the apostle Paul, and it's not coming out. Because God sent it to stay with you. To continue to help you. And, you know, so we all share this common thing. You know, when I was when I was a young man in seminary, over 40 years ago, a seasoned preacher said to me, he said, preach to broken hearts, because that's pretty much all you have in front of you whenever you're preaching.

And it's true, you're always with someone with a broken heart. You sit next to somebody on an airplane. You know the bank teller, the waitress that's waiting on you. Your pastor, You can't meet anybody in this world that isn't suffering from some level of difficulty and affliction. Now when you're really young, you don't think you have any afflictions, but then the older you get, the more you realize they are there and they are real.

And I was very taken earlier this week when I was reading Mark Chapter 3 and just my normal reading in the Bible. And a statement jumped out at me. As many as had afflictions pressed about him to touch him. And the Bible makes it really clear that people come to Jesus Christ when they're in a time of affliction. Many people are converted because of a time of great affliction.

Maybe they made some terrible error, committed some terrible sin, and the pressure gets so great that they have nowhere to turn to Jesus Christ. And that's why in Mark, as many as had afflictions pressed about him to touch him. Nobody comes to Jesus without some affliction. And, you know, the Bible makes it clear that we need him, and that's, you know, the reason that he is the man of sorrows, and he's acquainted with grief. That's really the foundation of our whole understanding of suffering.

I'm sure we'll get to that at some time. But Isn't it the most wonderful thing you've ever known? Is the man of sorrows. The man of sorrows has enough medicine to heal every sorrow you ever experience. I mean, He has healing in His wings.

And the only reason He has healing in His wings is because of His suffering. And so he should never despise suffering. Now my text for tonight is in John chapter nine, verses one through five. I'd like you to turn to John nine and find verse one. While you're getting there, John chapter nine is dedicated wholly to the healing of a blind beggar.

He suffered profoundly in adulthood, physically, socially, economically, and religiously. And John is illustrating that he is the light of the world. This whole discussion that he's been having with the Pharisees began in chapter eight, where the Pharisees fraudulently brought a woman, caught in adultery, and he interrogates them. They realize they really don't have witnesses, and they all walk away, and he says, I am the light of the world. He's shining the light upon the darkness, and then the Pharisees have set themselves to kill him, and he departs, and he passes out of the crowd, and he passes by this blind man immediately.

So what began in chapter eight is continuing on, it'll go all the way to chapter 10 verse 21, where this whole narrative finally concludes. So we're kind of catching Jesus in a moment of conflict. It's a very moment of tremendous conflict because they want to kill him. So verse one. Now as Jesus passed by, now In the previous chapter, the very last verse, He passed through the crowd.

And the very same language is used in chapter nine, the chapter breaks don't really often mean anything. Now Jesus passed by, So he passes through the crowd and he passes by a man who is blind for birth. And then his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind? Well, they want to know why he was blind, but they already think they know why he's blind.

And then Jesus answers in verse 3, Jesus answered, neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. And Then Jesus says, I must work the works of him who sent me while it is day. The night is coming when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. Now, Jesus is passing by this man.

The Pharisees want to kill him, and he stops. Now just get your heart around this moment for a second for this man. He's been blind from birth, He's never seen a color in his life. He's never seen his mother's face. Don't miscalculate how significant that is.

How many hundreds of hours a baby looks into her mother's face. He never saw that. He never saw a rainbow, he never saw a sunset. So this man had very little hope of any kind of success in this world. The way that we defined it, No job, he had to beg, he had no esteem in the community, he was a beggar, he was an outcast, he had no money, he was completely dependent, he had no opportunities for marriage, he was a religious outcast, He had nothing at all going for him.

And Jesus passes by. Which if you read the Gospel of Mark, you see this remarkable pattern. So much of what Jesus does while he's passing by. He's the man of the Spirit, he's filled with the Spirit and every moment is God's moment. It's the moment of the Spirit.

You know, a lot of people want to know, what's my ministry? Well, here's what we tell people in our church. Your ministry is the next person you meet, while you're just passing by. And Jesus lived like that so much. So I love this part of the story.

The man didn't see him, but Jesus saw the man. Jesus sees him. And this actually I think has tremendous theological significance, and that is that God sees us before we see him. There's a brilliant illustration of this in the prophet Isaiah, in Isaiah chapter 65 verse one. And God says in Isaiah, I was sought by those who did not ask for me.

I was found by those who did not seek me. I said, here I am, here I am. I stretched out my hands all day long to a restless people. It's a picture of Jesus in the days of the new covenant, and he has his arms out and he's saying, here I am, here I am. That's exactly what was happening to this man.

And Jesus makes the first move, and this is how it is in salvation. He makes the first move, and he draws you. Now, this whole passage of scripture is about why suffering, why blindness, and it's a critical text in understanding the whole doctrine of suffering. And it's very important that we understand what's happening here because it's actually very common in our own day. We have wrong thoughts about suffering.

And like the disciples who grew up in a particular era with a particular theological misunderstanding. We too have grown up in an era with many wrong thoughts about suffering. We live in a society which seems to think that the ultimate good is to be without pain. And there is an inner prosperity gospel preacher in every one of us. And because of these things, you know, people believe many lies about suffering, and I think it's critical that we cross this issue here, to just to discern whether there are any of those lies resident in us.

Some of those lies have come from the harm, really, of the Pentecostal movement, the Pentecostal prosperity movement, and a result, many people have thoughts about suffering that are totally contrary to scripture. And your inner prosperity gospel preacher is telling you that God did not intend for you to suffer. Well, the Pentecostal prosperity gospel preachers say that you're suffering because of unconfessed sin, lack of faith, your negative confession, or maybe you haven't given enough money to said evangelist who's on television. And I thought it was very interesting that we're doing a conference on suffering in Tulsa, Oklahoma, under the shadow of the man who was considered the father of the prosperity gospel teaching in America, Oral Roberts, who forged and bred many disciples of the word of faith in the health and wealth gospel movement. And he taught that physical health and financial prosperity only come to those who can have a particular kind of faith and can make a particular kind of positive confession.

And his disciple, Kenneth Copeland, and the rest of these, T.D. Jakes, and Creflo Dollar, and Pat Robertson, and Robert Tilton, and all these, I mean, you could go on and on and on. But they claim that the Abrahamic covenant promises a blessing for wealth, and they say that Jesus atonement, atoned for the sin of sickness and poverty, and they teach that physical health and financial prosperity are achieved by claiming it. In fact, I mean, you can go to Richard Roberts' website today, I did a few days ago, and you can find his prosperity remedies for accidents. I'm reading from his website arthritis broken heart getting pregnant getting jobs addiction travel safety blood disorders getting pregnant blood pressure children headaches legal problems.

He says, you know by praying this prayer of faith you can get quote-unquote a better job at the right place for the right pay with the right benefits, unquote. And they say that God cannot be glorified through experiencing poverty. And some of them claim to have a debt-breaking anointing. There have been so many wrong ideas about suffering fostered. You know, in my preaching, going to preach in Africa, I learned that many of the African witch doctors have the very same message and technique as the prosperity preachers.

They offer the same things. They really just do the same things. You know, they have the same list. The witch doctor controls God for you and they create pamphlets about how you, and they list all these different things you can find on the Oral Roberts website. And you can get what you want.

You can get it through the witch doctor in any African village. But It's not just in the African village. We just had a Super Bowl quarterback think that he won the Super Bowl because his wife was practicing witchcraft. And she makes a little altar for him. This is Tom Brady, of course.

And makes an altar, gives him these little stones and some drops, and makes an altar that he can go with pictures and all kinds of things like that. And she says a little mantra, and he says, I stopped questioning her a long time ago because it works. So the prosperity gospel's all over the place. And it's in religion, it's in various professional sports, It's all over, it's in our hearts, that's the problem. We really don't think that we should have suffering, and so we misunderstand suffering.

Now, This passage is really about that. Why was this man blind? Why? That's the question. And it's a very important passage because it forces us to face these questions.

Why disabilities? Why sickness? Why suffering? And Jesus gives one element of the answer to this question and it forces us to recognize that there are purposes of God in hardship and in physical defects. Physical defects.

And they're tied to the genetic code, in this case blindness. He was born blind. And we have to face the fact of God's sovereignty over the genetic code. We already believe that. And You know, what do you mean?

You know, children, genetic code, what is that? God forms you through genetic combinations called genes, not the genes that you wear. They are the, it's the information that make you who you are. What color hair you have, what color eyes you have, how long your arms are, everything. This is the genetic code.

And God knit you together in your mother's womb. He put your, he combined the genetic code of your father and mother and made you who you are. That's what we're talking about right here in this passage of scripture. Everybody has to come to terms with the fact that it's God's sovereign hand that combined everything in their genetic code. But the disciples want to know the cause of this man's blindness.

Now, everything in this chapter, I think, is kind of a commentary on this question, who sinned? His parents or this man that he was born blind? And so the disciples are in this conversation now, it's Jesus' disciples that are asking the question. This is not the Pharisees now, the disciples, they saw what was happening and they're now questioning him. And rather than having compassion, they want a theological discussion.

And They're philosophizing and they're communicating their theology of suffering. The disciples are declaring their doctrine of suffering and it's very important that we get our doctrine of suffering right. The disciples didn't have it right, and they were Jesus' disciples. And their theology was pretty simple. If you're sick, If something bad happens to you, then somebody sinned.

You sinned or your parents sinned. And you see this doctrine in various places in the Bible. Well, you remember Job's friends. This was the doctrine of Job's friends. Job, what did you do?

And they pounded him. They did not realize, and Job didn't realize what was happening. God was in process of belittling the devil. Had nothing to do with what Job ever did. Nobody knew that.

We could go off and talk about that remarkable story, but these disciples are communicating the theology of suffering, and they were really on a fault-finding mission that was in their religious DNA. And the disciples had been infected by the doctrine of the day, which was the doctrine of the Pharisees. I'll summarize it. You get what you deserve. You're good, good things happen.

Bad, bad things happen. Now, If you read the Bible, there is an element of truth in particular situations to that. But the rabbis were convinced also that sins were, that punishment was laid upon children who had parents who sinned. And they had a wrong interpretation of Exodus 20, verse five. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, "'visiting the iniquity of the fathers "'upon the children to the third and fourth generations, "'to those who hate me, but showing mercy "'to thousands of those who love me "'and keep my commandments.'" They had twisted the meaning of Exodus 20, verse five.

And this is very common today, you have people who believe in generational curses that you pay for the sins of your parents. That's a whole long discussion. But it's not just religious people that had this philosophy during this era. Epicurus, a Greek philosopher in the third and fourth century BC, he posed four questions about evil and suffering, And their questions really were a backdrop to the doctrine of suffering that the disciples embraced. Here's what a picker said.

Is God willing to prevent evil but can't? Then God is not omnipotent. Is God able to prevent evil but won't? Then God is not good. Is God both able and willing?

Then where did evil come from? Is God either able, neither able nor willing? Then why call it God? So, you know, this was their doctrine. Now I wanna give you just a quick summary.

I'm gonna give you five bullet points about what the Bible teaches about the causes of suffering. I'm just gonna give you five to try to reduce down. The first, suffering can be the result of bad choices. Proverbs makes this very clear. The fool experiences really hard providences.

The young man who commits immorality, the end of it is the dead are there. You get drunk, you're going to get hurt. If you respond harshly, the conversation won't go well. But a gentle answer turns away wrath. So there is a certain kind of suffering that's the result from bad choices.

Secondly, there's suffering that can result from God's chastisement for sin. Of course, we know that Hebrews chapter 11 makes this very clear, Miriam's leprosy, Uzzah's death, when he touched the ark, the death of David's son, the death of Ananias and Sapphira. There are times when God will kill you or punish you for your sin in a particular way. On the other hand, sometimes the wicked prosper. And sometimes they're very healthy and very wealthy when you have poor saints and sick saints at the same time.

So it's not something that man can understand why something happens. Number four, all sickness and disability is the result of Adam's sin and the fall. You can trace every sickness to the fall. And this should help us to hate sin, because every malady is related to the fall. And fifthly, suffering can be completely disconnected from bad choices and from God's chastisement and from the sins of others.

And I think Job is an example of this. He was blameless, and yet God was doing something completely different than what anyone thought. But hey, here's the deal. The disciples want to know the cause, and Jesus wants them to know the purpose. They're on a fault finding mission, he rather wants them to understand his purposes.

They're pointing fingers, Jesus is on a healing mission and they want sort of the gory details of why this is all happening. Now, here's one thing that we learned from this passage of Scripture that Jesus is unraveling this theological system. And what Jesus is saying is that no matter what has happened to you, It is a theater for the glory of God. And God willed this man to be born blind so that God would glorify himself through his blindness. And, what?

God wrecked this man's life? God made this man a beggar? God made this man a person who could never see a color or own a home. God made this man so that he could never get married so that he would be a religious and social outcast his whole life. Are you telling me that God did that?

And Jesus is saying, you know, these disabilities have a meaning, and blindness and lameness and bleeding and cancer and cerebral palsy and genetic irregularities and blindness. They have meaning, they have a purpose. And what we learned from this passage is that God will sometimes shatter your dreams in order to display his glory in his own time. He reduces you to different dreams that have a greater glory. And when God shatters your opportunities, All you have left is God.

And God revolutionizes your life through the hardship. And these afflictions are necessary. He's bringing many sons to glory, and because of that, afflictions are necessary. Hosea speaks of what suffering does to a follower of God. He has torn us, why?

That he might heal us. He has struck us down, why? And he will bind us up. And you know, All discipline, as the writer of the Hebrews says, isn't pleasant, but it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Suffering is necessary.

It's not pleasant at the moment, but God has great things in mind for all suffering. He wants to glorify himself through suffering. You know, just a few weeks ago, a little boy in our church, he reached up and pulled a cup of really hot tea all over his face and his back, and he had secondary degree burns. They rushed him to the hospital, and he was in the hospital for an entire week treating his burns. But I went to see this little boy.

It was shocking what the nurses and the doctors were doing to him. Every four hours, they were taking a cloth and soap and water and scraping him. And he's bleeding and they're not letting anything accumulate, they're just, and every time the doctors walk in he begins to cry. And I'll never forget what his mama said. He said, my son and his mother are learning What it means that all discipline is not pleasant at the time.

And guess what? That treatment continued on. They brought their little boy home and continued that treatment for about a week, scraping multiple times a day. I mean terrible burns. You would never want to do that.

You know, you would, it's so painful. And the doctor said, we do this because there won't be any scarring. If we let it go, he'll be scarred for the rest of his life. And now he has this baby, beautiful skin. All discipline doesn't seem to be pleasant for the time.

But those who have been trained by it are strengthened, just like that little boy. Afflictions come from God. They come from God. And God has good uses for pain. And all of his inflictions of pain arise out of his nature, out of his omniscience, out of his omnipotence, out of his sovereignty, out of his love, out of his compassion.

His nature is the guarantee that he will turn the affliction to his glory and to our benefit. Now there are many secondary causes to suffering. We know God is the primary cause. There are many places we could go to scripture to prove that, but we often experience pain because of secondary causes, bad decisions of our own, bad decisions of other people. We might experience pain because of good decisions that we made.

Perhaps it's the sinfulness of others. But if you don't believe that God is the author of suffering, then you'll always be obsessed with second causes. And you'll always be pointing the finger, just like the disciples were pointing the finger. God Himself is the original and the ultimate cause of suffering. And it's very important that we get our eyes off of the secondary causes.

Look beyond the secondary causes, because God works all things according to the counsel of his will. Job said, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Forget the Sabeans, forget the weather, forget the attackers, it was the Lord. Job's confidence remained in God.

Later on, he writes that he would come forth as gold. He says, I will come forth as gold. Not I might come forth as gold. Not I hope to come forth as gold. I will.

Job believed that God Almighty was sovereign over his suffering. Earlier on he said, shall we receive good from the Lord and not evil? Ecclesiastes chapter seven says that God makes some things crooked and he makes some things straight. Maybe there's someone who has a child or is grappling with some disability. Michael Beets wrote a book called Disability in the Gospel.

He said this, God creates some people with genetic anomalies, not only for the sake of his own glory, but also to show our own brokenness and our need for his grace. The disabled among us, whether genetically disabled or otherwise, remind us of our own inherent disabilities. When we see them with their limitations, we begin to see ourselves in a new, more honest manner as broken men and women before God in need of redemption of body and soul. So it's very clear that God made this man blind. He knit him together in his mother's womb so that every genetic characteristic would be used for the glory of God.

Did God permit it or ordain it? He ordained it. That's the answer. You know, God does this many times. He permanently disabled Jacob, touching his hip socket and then renamed him and left him wounded for the rest of his life as a testimony of his brokenness and his need.

And when God told Moses to go to Egypt, he said, I am who sent you. Moses said, not me. God said, who made man's mouth? Who makes him mute? Who makes him blind?

God says, is it not I? I. I am the one. David said you formed my inward parts. We have to come to the conclusion that every physical problem is not always connected to a spiritual problem.

And these are realities of the sovereignty of God. And so the reason that you're suffering, here's the answer, is so that the works of God would be displayed. Your need, your weakness, your sickness, your genetic malfunction is made for God's glory. And God shatters your dreams sometimes for that. You might say he wrecks your life, But he's not wrecking your life.

He's actually healing your life through your sickness. C.S. Lewis gave an illustration of this, about how God often tears down. Maybe God's tearing things down, you know, in different parts of your lives here, even right now. C.S.

Lewis compared your life to a house. He said, imagine yourself as living as a living house. So got that? Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house.

At first, perhaps, you can understand what he's doing. He's getting the drains right, he's stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. You knew that those jobs needed doing, and so you're not surprised. But then, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably, and it doesn't seem to make any sense. What on earth is he up to?

The explanation is that he's building quite a different house from the one you thought of. Throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor over there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage. But he's building a palace, and he intends to come and live in it himself. Our lives are a lot like that.

And I think that it's right to conclude that having life in Jesus is way better than having a healthy body. We live in a world where people think that health is their greatest good and it isn't our greatest good. And God does not always heal like Paul. And sometimes you've been praying about that thorn in your life. And you've pulled on it and you've pulled on it and you've had other people pull on it.

And you've had multiple people pull on it, and it's not coming out. And so what are you gonna do? Feeling sorry for ourselves is usually what we do. We loathe our bodies and we don't like what God has made in the way that we look and our noses or whatever it might be, whatever we are, however God made us. God says that he makes everything beautiful in his time in Ecclesiastes 3.

Now, overvaluing health can cause you to lose the kingdom of God. Overvaluing your health can cause you to lose your happiness. Would you rather have your eyesight more than anything else? Would you rather have something of lesser value? But God always has a purpose for our pain, and he makes that very, very clear in his Word.

And I like what Thomas Brooks said about this. He said that our afflictions do different things. I'll just read some of the things that he says afflictions do. They kill weeds, they neutralize infection, they draw out poison, They crucify your heart to the world. They destroy pride.

They bleed your sins. They prune your heart. They heal your diseases. They increase your spiritual communion. They fix your soul on eternal things, they silence the attractions of the world.

And that's why David said, it was good that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes. So what if your healing comes through your sickness? What if your gain comes from your loss? What if your wisdom comes from your woe? What if your hope is a result of your heartbreak?

Or your contentment from your tumult, or your comfort from your misery, or your delight from your distress, or your solace from your slander? I mean, this is the way God works. He magnifies his glory in weakness. And so we should never despise that. And he did say, as many as I love, I chasten.

Now the foundation of this is something more beautiful than anything else in the world to a sinner. The foundation of our suffering is found in the man of sorrows who suffered for sin. Our iniquities were laid upon him. His suffering is what caused our relief. And the Bible makes it very clear that Jesus Christ bore our sorrows.

He took our sorrows. He experienced every sorrow that every human being ever had that they deserved for their sin. The sorrows that we deserve for our sin were laid upon him. We have a suffering savior. And in Isaiah 53 it makes it very clear that he carried our sorrows.

And the picture there in Isaiah 53 is that he takes your sorrow like a yoke off your back and God puts it on his son. And his Son carries your sorrows when you believe in him, and you hear his voice, and you follow him, and you repent of your sins, that he carries your sorrows. But the foundation for all suffering is the suffering of the man of sorrows. And he suffered so that when you're in sorrow, that he carries you through all of your sorrows. And that only happens to those who have been born again.

And so we dare not judge for appearances about our deformities because God has ordained them for us. And when your inner prosperity gospel preacher is preaching and you start feeling sorry for yourself, remember that the foundation of your freedom is a suffering servant who carried all of your sorrows. And it was through his sorrows and through his suffering that has made us escape from eternal suffering. The suffering of the Son of God, as horrible as it was, was good, because it worked for the purification of sinners. And the suffering of sinners is good, because it's been designed by God to bring glory to him.

And every sufferer has an opportunity not to be stuck in their suffering, but to bring glory to God and be carried in all of their sorrows. And so the disciples had it all wrong and Jesus set them all straight. And their inner prosperity gospel preacher was silence. And they finally understood why all this suffering in the world. And I pray that God would use this passage to help us do the same.

Lord, your ways are not our ways. Your wisdom is beyond all of our imagination. We thank you that you are omniscient. We thank you that you are omnipotent. We thank you that you are sovereign.

We thank you that you are good and that all you do is done out of love. And I pray, Lord, that you would deliver any of us here who've fallen into self-pity, anger, wrath toward the second causes, disappointment when actually you've brought things to us so that we would turn our eyes to Jesus. The man of sorrows. Who has enough balm for every sorrow. Amen.