Why did Jesus heal the blind man partially the first time and completely the next tim
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Why did Jesus heal the blind man partially the first time and completely the next tim -
April 30th, 2012, 01:20 PM
Here is the passage:
Mark 8
22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23 He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”
24 He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”
25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village.”
I have been asked this question with other questions by agnostics and atheists in discussing who Jesus was and how Christ did stuff.
I really did not have an answer I liked and spent many hours in study and even looked up some “good” commentaries. The idea always centered on the blind man’s faith did not fit.
Last week I was teaching an adult class on Mark 8 and asked the class the question (really not expecting much). A quiet lady that usually doesn’t say anything came up with this idea:
Jesus left the crowd of the city, but would most likely have the 12 with him (somebody was there to remember what happened).
Jesus was always trying to teach mainly the 12 with everything else being a back drop (so to speak) with His three years ministry. (that is something I had been emphasizing in class).
Jesus just got through calling the 12 (blind) verse 18.
This healing of the blind man thus becomes a living parable for the 12. The 12 are blind and Jesus is going to heal them partly during his three year ministry (they will vaguely see the truth), but don’t worry because later (day of Pentecost) Jesus will provide the 12 with perfect vision (insight). He is doing it in stages like he did with the blind man.
That message was not for the masses in the city, but the 12.
She came up with that on her own while we were sitting there, wow.
Slogan/motto:
Mat 7:12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
Reputation:
April 30th, 2012, 04:22 PM
HI,
There are many on TOL who do not see clearly, but because they claim to when they do not then they will not get to seeing clearly for they have gone to others for it.
22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23 He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”
24 He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”
25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village.”
I have been asked this question with other questions by agnostics and atheists in discussing who Jesus was and how Christ did stuff.
I really did not have an answer I liked and spent many hours in study and even looked up some “good” commentaries. The idea always centered on the blind man’s faith did not fit.
Last week I was teaching an adult class on Mark 8 and asked the class the question (really not expecting much). A quiet lady that usually doesn’t say anything came up with this idea:
Jesus left the crowd of the city, but would most likely have the 12 with him (somebody was there to remember what happened).
Jesus was always trying to teach mainly the 12 with everything else being a back drop (so to speak) with His three years ministry. (that is something I had been emphasizing in class).
Jesus just got through calling the 12 (blind) verse 18.
This healing of the blind man thus becomes a living parable for the 12. The 12 are blind and Jesus is going to heal them partly during his three year ministry (they will vaguely see the truth), but don’t worry because later (day of Pentecost) Jesus will provide the 12 with perfect vision (insight). He is doing it in stages like he did with the blind man.
That message was not for the masses in the city, but the 12.
She came up with that on her own while we were sitting there, wow.
(Seemed obvious to her).
Have any of you heard that explanation?
Does it fit?
Jesus showed us that His people were the Fruits of the Tree of Life in the New Garden of God.
Paul -- 043012
---Gal. 4:16.
---"Am I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth"???
Slogan/motto:
Mat 7:12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
Reputation:
May 1st, 2012, 04:44 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by bling
Kind of disapointing responces.
Well you will not get any other from me then.
Did you investigate why David killed Goliath twice?
Slogan/motto:
II Timothy 2:15, Psalms 6:5, I John 3:1-2, Romans 5:1 I John 4:18, I Timothy 2:4-5, II Corinthians 9:8,11, III John 2
Reputation:
May 5th, 2012, 05:24 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by bling
Here is the passage:
Mark 8
22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23 He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”
24 He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”
25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village.”
I have been asked this question with other questions by agnostics and atheists in discussing who Jesus was and how Christ did stuff.
I really did not have an answer I liked and spent many hours in study and even looked up some “good” commentaries. The idea always centered on the blind man’s faith did not fit.
Last week I was teaching an adult class on Mark 8 and asked the class the question (really not expecting much). A quiet lady that usually doesn’t say anything came up with this idea:
Jesus left the crowd of the city, but would most likely have the 12 with him (somebody was there to remember what happened).
Jesus was always trying to teach mainly the 12 with everything else being a back drop (so to speak) with His three years ministry. (that is something I had been emphasizing in class).
Jesus just got through calling the 12 (blind) verse 18.
This healing of the blind man thus becomes a living parable for the 12. The 12 are blind and Jesus is going to heal them partly during his three year ministry (they will vaguely see the truth), but don’t worry because later (day of Pentecost) Jesus will provide the 12 with perfect vision (insight). He is doing it in stages like he did with the blind man.
That message was not for the masses in the city, but the 12.
She came up with that on her own while we were sitting there, wow.
(Seemed obvious to her).
Have any of you heard that explanation?
Does it fit?
If you can believe then you receive,
if you partially believe, you partially receive.
"And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship and in breaking of bread and in prayers." Acts 2:42
"For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?" Psalm 6:5
He didn't you buffoon. You investigate what is said, and think about it.
For the OP, why do atheists think he took two times, and why would the gospel writer tell us it took twice rather than one time? If he was a fraud, wouldn't it be once?
This healing of the blind man thus becomes a living parable for the 12. The 12 are blind and Jesus is going to heal them partly during his three year ministry (they will vaguely see the truth), but don’t worry because later (day of Pentecost) Jesus will provide the 12 with perfect vision (insight). He is doing it in stages like he did with the blind man.
That message was not for the masses in the city, but the 12.
She came up with that on her own while we were sitting there, wow.
(Seemed obvious to her).
Have any of you heard that explanation?
Does it fit?
Yes. It fits. It is plausible deduction from the text.
I agree with Nick here that twice reveals authenticity to the message and healing.
We aren't told why which leaves us speculating. I like your class member's speculation.
Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,
to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, forever. Amen. -Ephesians 3:20 & 21
1Co 13:11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. - Let's at least work at it?
*************************************
Separation of church and State is not atheism "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
Slogan/motto:
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic build
Reputation:
May 9th, 2012, 08:52 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by bling
Here is the passage:
Mark 8
22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23 He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”
24 He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”
25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village.”
I have been asked this question with other questions by agnostics and atheists in discussing who Jesus was and how Christ did stuff.
I really did not have an answer I liked and spent many hours in study and even looked up some “good” commentaries. The idea always centered on the blind man’s faith did not fit.
Last week I was teaching an adult class on Mark 8 and asked the class the question (really not expecting much). A quiet lady that usually doesn’t say anything came up with this idea:
Jesus left the crowd of the city, but would most likely have the 12 with him (somebody was there to remember what happened).
Jesus was always trying to teach mainly the 12 with everything else being a back drop (so to speak) with His three years ministry. (that is something I had been emphasizing in class).
Jesus just got through calling the 12 (blind) verse 18.
This healing of the blind man thus becomes a living parable for the 12. The 12 are blind and Jesus is going to heal them partly during his three year ministry (they will vaguely see the truth), but don’t worry because later (day of Pentecost) Jesus will provide the 12 with perfect vision (insight). He is doing it in stages like he did with the blind man.
That message was not for the masses in the city, but the 12.
She came up with that on her own while we were sitting there, wow.
(Seemed obvious to her).
Have any of you heard that explanation?
Does it fit?
A word search of the Bible for the word trees will bear fruit to those receptive ... no pun intended.
the two steps were only a few moments apart, not months, so there was no time for ‘natural healing’ to occur, and the details given show that it was not a case of psychosomatic or ‘hysterical’ blindness being relieved (see below). The fact that Jesus took two stages does not mean that He was limited to some non-supernatural means to do His creative miracle. Perhaps it was so that we would see a proof of inspiration through the medical details given by the human writer, Mark, but of which he could not possibly have known the significance—details which were similar to those experienced by the people mentioned below, who had regained their sight after many years of blindness.
Virgil
Virgil was a 50-year-old man, blind from childhood, whose sight was restored in 1991 after a cataract was removed and a new lens implanted in one eye. His story is told by Oliver Sacks, Professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, in his book An Anthropologist on Mars.1 When the bandages were removed, Virgil could see, but he had no idea what he was seeing. Light, movement and colour were all mixed up and meaningless; all were just a blur. His brain could make no sense of the images that his optic nerve was transmitting. Although he now had eyesight, he was still mentally blind—a condition of perceptual incapacity known medically as agnosia.
Virgil could read the third line on a standard Snellan eye chart, equivalent to a visual acuity of about 20/100 (with a best of 20/80).2 However, he could not distinguish words, even though he could read Braille fluently, as well as raised or inscribed letters; he could easily read the inscribed letters on tombstones by touch. A cat was particularly puzzling, as he could see parts clearly—a paw, the nose, the tail—but the cat as a whole was only a blur, as were human faces. At the zoo, Virgil found it difficult to identify animals, and did so either by their motion or by a single feature, e.g. a kangaroo because it hopped, a giraffe because of its height, a zebra because of its stripes, and lions because of their roar. A few days after his operation, Virgil said that ‘trees didn’t look like anything on earth,’ but a month later he finally put a tree together and realized that the trunk and leaves formed a complete unit.
People who have formerly been used to a world they accessed only by touch, hearing, taste, and smell tend to be baffled by ‘appearance’ which, being optical, has no correlation in the other senses. People who have been totally blind from birth (congenital blindness) or early childhood have lived in a world of time alone, not time and space. Thus the step at the end of a porch is something which occurs for a blind person a short time after he leaves the doorway, rather than something he is aware of in space. Sacks quotes the autobiography (Touching the Rock) of John Hull, a blind man, who says that, for the blind, people are there only when they speak; they come and they go out of nothing.
Sighted babies learn to master all this as time goes by, an achievement, it should be noted, which is beyond the capacity of even our largest super-computers. People who become blind later in life have built up a ‘visual memory’ of the way things look and how they fit together in space. However, for the newly sighted, it is a huge learning task involving a radical change in both neurological and psychological functioning, a change in ‘the perceptual habits and strategies of a lifetime’—in short, in identity.
Sacks says that these sorts of difficulties ‘are almost universal among the early blinded restored to sight,’ and he mentions a patient, S.B., who could not recognize individual faces a year after his eye operation, despite his then having perfectly normal elementary vision.3
From such case histories, it appears that when sight is suddenly restored, there is the need for the development of some new pathways in the visual cortex of the brain. Thus the story of the Bethsaida blind man who saw ‘people as trees walking’ is not a poetic account; it is a clinical description. Like Virgil, this blind man could see, but he had the additional complication of agnosia—he could not make sense of what he was seeing. Jesus, having given his eyes sight, then heals his agnosia—in one miraculous instant his brain was taught what the rest of us have learned from childhood.
So why did Jesus do it this way for this man, as He didn’t have to, and apparently did not do so for any of the other blind people He healed?4
We don’t know for sure, but perhaps it is because, in healing the Bethsaida man in these two stages, He has given a built-in stamp of authority to the authenticity of the account, one that is discernible only to modern-day readers. There is no way that an apocryphal or fabricated tale could have had these details: surgical correction of congenital blindness was not being done then, so the author could not have known about the problem of agnosia in the newly sighted.
It is thus irrefutable evidence that a miracle did occur at Bethsaida. This miracle of healing would have involved restoring or creating eye structures, as well as creating new nerve pathways and connections in the brain. It was thus of the same order of miracle-working power as the making of Adam from the dust of the earth or Eve from Adam’s rib, in a similarly short time
Yes. It fits. It is plausible deduction from the text.
I agree with Nick here that twice reveals authenticity to the message and healing.
We aren't told why which leaves us speculating. I like your class member's speculation.
There is no room for "speculating" in the Word of God, and God does not require us to "speculate" on THUTH!! – God said what He said; you either understand and have Faith in it, or YOU DO NOT!!!
Paul – 051012
---Gal. 4:16.
---"Am I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth"???
Slogan/motto:
Your faith is what you believe in and by their fruit you shall know them
Reputation:
May 10th, 2012, 05:54 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by bling
Kind of disapointing responces.
It was reading that passage that revealed to me that throughout the Bible, trees and their individual characteristics are used as symbols for the different lives and personalities of people.
So when Jesus gave sight to the man the 1st time, the man was able to see other people as God does in the Bible.
Doing a study on the different characteristics of trees and other plants that appear in the Bible can be very rewarding. Sometimes you have to go beyond the Scriptures to understand the purpose. For example the tree that was used to supply the wood for the Ark of the covenant had a “Cedar like” quality to it that would not allow parasites to penetrate it.
Sin is a parasite in the Bible and that is why David said “purge me with hyssop, because hyssop is a natural “vermifuge” that destroys parasites living in us.
Sin as a noun is a living parasite and principality within us
Please read and support: "Modern Day Prophet" by Douglas Duncan
There is no room for "speculating" in the Word of God, and God does not require us to "speculate" on THUTH!! – God said what He said; you either understand and have Faith in it, or YOU DO NOT!!!
Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,
to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, forever. Amen. -Ephesians 3:20 & 21
1Co 13:11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. - Let's at least work at it?
*************************************
Separation of church and State is not atheism "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
It was reading that passage that revealed to me that throughout the Bible, trees and their individual characteristics are used as symbols for the different lives and personalities of people.
So when Jesus gave sight to the man the 1st time, the man was able to see other people as God does in the Bible.
Doing a study on the different characteristics of trees and other plants that appear in the Bible can be very rewarding. Sometimes you have to go beyond the Scriptures to understand the purpose. For example the tree that was used to supply the wood for the Ark of the covenant had a “Cedar like” quality to it that would not allow parasites to penetrate it.
Sin is a parasite in the Bible and that is why David said “purge me with hyssop, because hyssop is a natural “vermifuge” that destroys parasites living in us.
Sin as a noun is a living parasite and principality within us
But SIN as a fruit, is what God is trying to get across to the unlearned!!
Psalms 1:3 KJV -
The whole idea of a Christian to be fruitful and bring forth good fruit is of the New GARDEN OF GOD. – Still a Parable however, but still referring to Christians as TREES OF LIFE, TO THE LOST WORLD. – Reject it and desire rather, the lusts of the eye, and the evil fruits of the devil and his children.
Paul – 051012
---Gal. 4:16.
---"Am I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth"???
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
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