Sharing and QC (14/8/20)

Joyce raised the account (unique in the gospels) in Mark 8:22-25 of the two-step healing of a blind man in Bethsaida.We all would believe that he did not do this because of lack of power, but because there was an intentional effort to teach a lesson as well as to miraculously heal someone in need. In the passage immediately before Jesus had rebuked his disciples for their hardness of heart and said, "Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?" (v.18). Jesus had just healed a deaf man in Mk 7:31-35 and would be thereafter recorded as healing the blind man. The passage following (v.27-28) records the disciples' confession of Jesus as the Christ. So the 2-stage healing is most likely a reference to the progressive increase of spiritual insight of Jesus' disciples.

We probably should not equate the process that non-believers go through to become believers with this progressive gaining of spiritual understanding. Some unbelievers become believers without many stages. The growth of a believer to full grasp of the truth of Christ will take eternity. However, we do see that it can take different stages for people to come to faith, and we can be sometimes content with sowing rather than aiming to harvest (Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor. Jn 4:36-38, c.f. 1 Cor 3:6)

Then we asked: Is the measure of suffering the measure of one's faith? Could it be that more mature and faithful Christians will be given more suffering?

I said that we can answer this question by asking ourselves why we suffer at all? In the Bible we are told that suffering can be because of godly discipline when we sin (Heb 12:3-11), persecution from an unbelieving world (2 Ti 2:3, 3:12), a means to draw us to God and away from the world (2 Cor 12:8) and because we live in a world with both moral and natural evil. So we can conclude that it is only sometimes the case that the greatest suffering falls on the most mature believer, because there are many reasons why we might suffer.

In Lk 13:1-5 Jesus mentions moral evil (from the sin of moral agents) as well as natural evil ('natural disasters'). His rhetorical questions tell us that great suffering is not to be linked causally with great sin in this life. Rather, all suffering points us to the ultimate suffering of eternal death. We will all 'perish' spiritually (c.f. Lk 21:18) if we do not repent