Friday, June 22, 2007

Healing through Jesus Christ

Interesting discussion in the Bloggernacle pondering whether we might opt to prevent homosexuality by pre-natal treatment.

I have no answer to offer. But the discussion suggested some instructive parallels with the New Testament incident recorded in John chapter 9. Jesus anointed the eyes of the man who had been blind since birth, and told the man to go and wash in a pool of water. The man followed his instructions, and his eyes were opened.

I cannot say from reading the scriptures that the many acts of "healing" performed by Jesus, during his ministry, imply any particular value judgment by the Savior regarding physiological or mental dysfunction. What we can learn from the scriptural accounts is that Jesus had compassion on the people for whom he provided healing ministrations. He granted the healing that they sought from him, in the form of relief from the problems they felt were afflicting their lives.

From my reading in the ninth chapter, there are many details that seem to open more questions than they answer.

For example, I cannot imagine what to make of the disciples query that apparently prompted the healing.

And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?


When Jesus administered to the man, the story says he made clay with spittle and applied it to the man's eyes, before instructing him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. I am not sure this procedure was common to his healing ministrations, and wonder why he did it this way. Why not just pronounce the man healed, and make it so?

I have afflictions of my own that I suffer with. Jesus has not deigned to relieve me of these burdens. While I would hypothetically like to participate in the process designed to educate me in true appreciation of God's eternal purposes, I suppose the dim hope always lives, somewhere in the back of my mind, that it might not be quite so agonizingly painful.

Impatient soul that I am, yet I wait on Jesus Christ for healing. I know it will come, in the Lord's own time.

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