Lord, I Want to See or Jesus Heals Two Bind Men (Matt. 9:27-31)

“Lord, I Want to See”
Matthew 9:27-31

INTRODUCTION:
When I was young, I had several allergies. The specialist examined me six months before he normally saw kids with allergy problems. He could hear me breathing down the hallway. I ended up being allergic to 90+ items. For a few years, I took allergy shots. But when my dad decided to start preaching, he had no medical insurance and my allergy shots stopped. For years, I would take OTC medications but nothing really helped. You name it and I tried it. But nothing really helped; especially if an allergy attack had already started.

From the time I was 4-5 years old up until I was twenty years old, if you had asked me what I would want Jesus to do to me if He were here present, I would have asked Him to get rid of my allergies! I was so miserable and a lot of kids at school made fun of me because I had allergy problems and I had dark circles under my eyes because of allergies. I sneezed a lot. I had itchy eyes. My nose would run constantly in the spring. Sometimes I had breathing problems. It felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest.

If Jesus came up to me and asked, “Paul, what miracle can I do for you?” I would have said, “Get rid of my allergies! Please!” I even wished I could have cut my nose off, just to get rid of all those allergies. As an adult, especially living in Michigan, I have far, far less problems than I had as a child.

Jesus could have done that, too. Whether He would have done that or not, I don’t know. But He could have done it. Jesus performed miracles unlike any person had / has ever done before.

There were almost no blind people miraculously cured in the OT. God struck the men of Sodom blind because they were going to gang rape Lot’s visitors (Gen. 19:11). God told Israel not to mistreat the blind (Lev. 19:14). He will go on to say that if you do mistreat a blind person, you will be cursed (Deut. 27:18). When the Syrians invaded Israel in 2 Kings 6, Elisha prayed and asked God to strike the soldiers blind. God did. Elisha took the soldiers into the capital city of Samaria. Others wanted to kill the POWs but Elisha said, “No.” He prayed and asked God to give them their sight. God did. Elisha fed them and sent them back to their own land. Those Syrians never invaded Israel again. When Job was defending himself against God and the injustice of his suffering, Job said that he was “eyes to the blind and feet to the lame” (29:15).

In Psalm 146:8, the psalmist says that Jehovah God “opens the eyes of the blind.” Isaiah writes in 29:18 that one day, the eyes of the blind will see. In 32:3, Isaiah says that along with the eyes of the blind being opened, the “ears of those who hear will listen.” Do you see here that associated with the miracle of making the blind to see is the associated requirement that ears need to listen. Isaiah says the same thing in 35:5.

God revealed a song to Isaiah in chapter 42, which pictures the Servant of God who would be anointed with the Holy Spirit of God and among the things this Servant would do is to “open blind eyes” (42:7). In v. 16, the servant will lead the blind and make their darkness into light.

Do you see what we have then? The psalmist says that Jehovah God makes the blind to see. Isaiah says the Servant of Jehovah God will make the blind to see. When the blind receive their sight from the Servant of God, then they need to listen to the Servant of God.

After Jesus was baptized and then tempted by Satan in the wilderness, He goes home to Nazareth. Luke records (4:16-21), that Jesus went into the synagogue and read the Isaiah scroll (Isa 61) about the Servant of the Lord healing the blind, and He told the people in Nazareth that He was fulfilling that prediction!

Let’s study this miracle (Matthew 9:27-31) in the life of Jesus and learn some lessons from it.

THE TWO BLIND MEN - 9:27-28:
This is, apparently, the first record of Jesus healing blind people in His ministry. Matthew chapters 8 & 9 are noted for recording one miracle after another as Jesus begins His ministry. There are three specific occasions where Jesus healed the blind: here, in Matt 12, and Matt 20. Mark mentions a separate occasion in Mark 8. Luke does not record any unique miracles related to the blind. John has a unique occasion and dedicates a whole chapter to that miracle in John 9. If we add them all up, then, there are five specific times when Jesus heals the blind. This, as I said, is the first occasion. However, there are more specific examples of Jesus healing the blind than of Him performing any other miracle.

Verses 27-28: “Have mercy on us, Son of David!” “Mercy” is not, first, an attitude or feeling of the heart. Although that is how we tend to think of it. Mercy, rather is an action; it is a response of the heart, the response of love. If you will look back for just a moment at Matthew 6:2, you’ll see that Jesus says, “When you give to the poor…” “Giving to the poor” translates a word from the same word family as “mercy” here in Matt. 9:27. These men are not just wanting Jesus to feel for them. They’re wanting Jesus to do something for them!

You remember that Matthew writes His gospel account to show us that Jesus is the Son of David (Matt. 1:1). This is not the first miracle Jesus has performed, even in Matt’s gospel. The first miracles performed by Jesus are recorded back in 4:23-25. What is special here, is that for the first time in Matt’s gospel, some Jews have recognized in this miracle worker the “Son of David!”

The reason that is important is because the “Son of David” was believed to be the “Messiah” (John 7:42) and the “Messiah” was believed to be that “Servant of the Lord” in Isa 42: the one who would make the blind see. These two men don’t simply believe that Jesus can work miracles; they are associating Him with the Servant sent from God, the Messiah: that One who would perform miracles!

(v. 28) Jesus and the two blind men entered a house. Jesus asked them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They said to Him, “Yes, Lord.” Trust in Jesus is powerful. Jesus illustrated the power of trust in Him in Matt. 17:20 when He said that our trust can move mountains. Everyone understands that statement to be an exaggeration. But the point is well taken. If you truly trust Jesus Christ, that trust will cause you to follow Christ in all that you do, and you will have success in life.

But that trust is also the prime condition to receive God’s favor. Without trusting God, there can be no pleasing God (Hebrews 11:6). That’s why it is so important for us to grasp the significance of this and all miracles. They are designed to give our trust a foundation.

You and I are in a similar position to Jesus as these two blind men were. In other words, since they were blind, they had not seen any of the miracles Jesus had performed. They were dependent on the testimony of others. In a similar way, you and I have lived in an age far distant from Jesus so that we have not seen any of His miracles. You and I are dependent on the testimony of Matt, Mark, Luke, and John relative to the miracles Jesus performed. Do you trust that Jesus would see to it that these events would be passed on through reliable witnesses?

JESUS HEALS THE BLIND MEN - 9:29-30:
In this event, Jesus touched their eyes and told them that He would do as their faith had desired. Then their eyes were opened.

v. 29-30: Jesus warned them not to tell anyone. At that point in the ministry of Jesus, He had to be careful about His popularity. He was working on the Father’s timescale and there would come a time for Jesus to be crucified. But that was still a few years in the future. Jesus tells these men to keep this miracle to themselves.

THE REPERCUSSIONS OF JESUS’ MIRACLE - 9:31:
v. 31: Of course, they could not keep the miracle to themselves. They went out and “spread the news about Him throughout all that land.” Notice this statement is almost exactly the same statement that is said after Jesus raised the little girl from the dead back in verse 26. When miracles happen, the news spreads like wildfire. Jesus healed and healed and healed some more. All the while, He was giving multitudes of people reasons to believe that He was the Christ, the Son of David, the Son of the Living God, and our Savior. We should talk to others about Jesus Christ with the same intensity and enthusiasm that these two men talked about Jesus healing their blindness.

What are the repercussions of Jesus’ miracles? Everyone has to answer the question: Is Jesus for real, or not? We either take His miracles and His teaching seriously. Or we reject His miracles and His teaching. Because, His miracles were intended to prove His teaching.

Following the healing of the blind man in John 9, the Jews were struggling with the question of the identity of Jesus and some of them gave this reasoning (John 10:21): “A demon cannot open the eyes of the blind, can he?” Of course, the answer is “No.” Jesus either is who He claims to be or He is not. You can’t have it both ways. Either He is the Son of God and the only way to heaven or He is not. Did Jesus open the eyes of the blind or not?

Just because Jesus does not / did not heal my allergies does not mean He doesn’t love me or that He did not perform miracles when He was on earth. Many people think that just because Jesus does not do miracles today or does not do miracles on them today, therefore He is not the Son of God. Some people in the Bible had that same question too. At the death of Lazarus, (John 11:37), “some of them said, “Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?”

Do you see their question? What was wrong with Jesus? If He could open the eyes of the blind, why did He not save Lazarus from dying? People ask a similar question today: “Where is Jesus when I am hurting? Why did Jesus allow my loved one to die?” Well, the answer to the people’s question in John 11 is that God was following His plan. Jesus was following the Father’s plan. I do not know His plan for me and you do not know His plan for you, other than us obeying the gospel in order to be saved. We do not know what God has in store for us. That is the reason why trust is so important and that is the reason why this miracle of healing the blind men is so important!

Please listen to this poem by Garnett Ann Schultz called “The Bend in the Road:”

Don’t wish the road straight with never a bend
That you might see far up ahead,
Be thankful in knowing just only today,
Not the pathway tomorrow you’ll tread,
The shadows, the heartaches, tomorrow may bring
Shan’t cover the joys of today,
As long as you only can see to the bend,
The future can hold what it may.

The path may be rugged, a short distance there,
A hill quite a problem to climb,
But God holds the future, ’tis not meant we see,
If we live but one day at a time,
The bend in the road conceals oh so much,
The twists and the turns through the years,
It lightens our burdens until we are strong,
Concealing life’s troubles and fears.

Who knows what’s beyond every bend in the road
When plodding and seeking life’s best,
Could be a promise of something worthwhile,
A chance where our hearts shall find rest,
A smooth bright tomorrow will surely be ours,
’Tis this that the yonder may hold,
If we’ll only keep faith, never caring to know
What’s beyond every bend in the road.

Jesus gave sight to the blind so that we could trust Jesus through every bend in the road.

Now that we recognize that Jesus is the Servant of the Lord who gave sight to the blind, Isaiah also tells us that we need to obey that Servant of the Lord. We need to do what He tells us to do! Trust does not exclude obedience. Trust requires obedience. That’s how you know that trust is real. Trust obeys. Jesus’ brother, James, will say that trust is made complete through obedience (2:22).

We work in the church, trusting that God will bless us for our dedication. We worship, trusting that God will strengthen our spirits through worship. We give, trusting that God will provide for our needs. We teach, trusting that God will work in the hearts of those we teach.

Trust the Jesus who opened the eyes of the blind. Trust Him and do what He says.