Stephen
Terry, Director
Signs
of Divinity
Commentary
for the October 12, 2024, Sabbath School Lesson
"The man answered, 'Now that is remarkable! You don't know
where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to
sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever
heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God,
he could do nothing.'" John
9:30-33, NIV
We like to think we live in a
more enlightened time than when Jesus walked the shores of Galilee two thousand
years ago. Like the Pharisee looking down on the Publican, we look at those
ignorant ancients and pat ourselves on the back for we know we would never
betray Jesus or deny his being the Messiah. We can trace every step of our
growing spiritual maturity through centuries of reformers and the denominations
founded by them. We finally got it right in our day. We are the chosen citizens
of the Kingdom of God destined to meet the Time of the End with faith and
patience as we await the arrival of Christ the Bridegroom to take us home where
we belong. We are the remnant of Revelation, chapter 12. We keep the commandments
of God and have the testimony of Jesus. Revelation, chapter 19 tells us that
the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.
We keep the biblical Sabbath,
evidence of our faithful commandment keeping. We claim Ellen White had the gift
of prophecy. We even refer to her writings as the Spirit of Prophecy. So, we
tic all the boxes to be God's remnant, chosen people. Who can doubt our
movement of destiny? We have grown to over twenty-three million members
worldwide. While this is barely even a drop in the bucket compared to over eight
billion souls walking the planet, surely twenty-three million in the space of
less than two centuries is evidence of God's blessing. Besides, we have built many hospitals, schools, and universities, not to mention the thousands of churches. We are a people uniformly
marching into destiny, waving the gospel banner, called out of the evil
Babylonian denominations who worship on Sunday and are destined to perdition
for creating and teaching a false sabbath. We alone see the danger of this
false sabbath as being the Mark of the Beast and warn the world. While others see
the Mark of the Beast as a microchip or a tattoo, they are deceived and will go
into perdition as all the Sunday worshipers will. We alone are right in all of
this. Or are we? Will this separate the sheep from the goats on that coming
day? Will it be what separates the five foolish virgins from the five who went
in to rejoice with the bride and groom? Is the straight gate the Sabbath and the
wide gate Sunday worship? Have we charged ahead furiously like a horse with
blinders, unable to see what is around us for the narrowed vision we enforce on
believers, sometimes mercilessly?
When we compare what we are
today with the religious environment of Jesus' day, it is astonishing how
little has changed. Now as then, the wealthy control the church. They ruled the
temple and the synagogues as they now rule the conferences and the local
churches. It is visible in every area of church praxis. The common people in
the pews who eke out their existence from week to week on fixed incomes come on
Sabbath, but they are not the ones calling the shots for worship, how the
church budget is allocated and spent, who the religious leaders for the major
offices locally and conference wide will be. Should they nominate one of their
own for a leading position, it would die in the nominating committee. As I have
heard more than once in such meetings, "Those who are contributing the most
financially to the church should decide how the funds are used." Granted, I
have never heard this from the pulpit, but what happens at church is determined
behind closed doors in various boards and committees not in the weekly sermon.
After enduring the sermon, which
is usually a regurgitation of dogma and presents little that is innovative or
challenging beyond general aphorisms parroted for generations as the
foundations or pillars of Adventism, growling stomachs move the believers on to
potluck. This is where church praxis reveals itself in full form. Seeing vegetarianism
as the health message in its entirety, the Baptist favorite of fried chicken is
frowned upon and will produce whispers among the saints asking, "Who brought
THAT?" Salvation by diet, it turns out, is a tenet of Adventist dogma as
opposed to salvation by temperance and exercise. We love to teach cooking
schools, but rarely evangelize with workout sessions. Even our efforts in
teaching abstinence from substance abuse have become anemic over the last half
century. Our 5-day Stop Smoking Plans were innovative and helped smokers to
leave that pernicious habit behind, but like other community outreaches, it has
been placed on the shelf to gather dust. America and the rest of the world
never needed ministry for substance abuse more than now. It has become a crisis
of epidemic proportions. But if we have the Sabbath each week, we tell
ourselves that we are good.
Potluck also highlights another
issue. When allowed to choose their own seating, the poor, disabled, or unknown
visitors are often seated at their tables and the wealthy leaders and power brokers
of the church sit at their own. When one of them does choose to sit with the
poorer members at potluck. The faces of those who do not choose to do so reveal
their thoughts to be, "He knows not what manner of person this is, or he would
not have sat there." The poorer members are well aware how the wealthier
members view them. Although nothing was said outright to them, the whispers,
eye rolls, and subtle gestures tell the story that they should stay in their
place. Sadly, those subtle hints have become so natural to those displaying
them, they do not even realize they are doing it. Laodicea does not realize the
truth of their condition. Only Jesus can open their eyes to their need.
We are as blind to the needs of
others as we are to our own, as blind as the man Jesus gave sight to. Ironically,
Jesus did not simply speak and cause his sight to return. He took clay and put
it on the man's eyes. Genesis tells us God used the same substance to create humanity
in the first place. It was as though he were returning the man to what humanity
was meant to be from the beginning. We often speak of being like angels and
flying about the sky with halos and harps. But what is wrong with simply being
again what God intended from the beginning? Will heaven not be heaven without
wings, halos, and harps? For the blind man, heaven may have seemed to have
arrived when he could see the faces of those who had loved and cared for him his
whole life.
Will we be happy if heaven is
all about caring for others more than ourselves? Would it be heaven if every
time someone expressed an opinion everyone else took it upon themselves to
shoot it down as so often happens with social media? If we enjoy trolling
others, we are more like those religious leaders who trolled the blind man for
his healing, refusing to acknowledge anything he or his parents said as truth.
They even went as far as to ban him from synagogue when he would not admit they
were right, and he was wrong. They were like those who today say we must believe
them despite the evidence of our eyes. Power always feels threatened by new
perspectives gained from new vistas, and new vistas come from eyes being opened.
How many
of us are like that blind man, blind from birth? We go to church each week and
listen to sermons and the continuous inculcation of dogma without
introspection. Leaders take it upon themselves to guide those of us they
consider blind on their same paths as others did to
them. If questions arise to challenge blind belief, those raising them can be
expelled as the blind man who encountered Jesus was. The blind man was no fool.
He knew he had experienced love in his parents care for him and in Jesus'
healing of his sight, and he knew that what the religious leaders were giving
him was not love. While they should have been rejoicing with him, they
condemned him because their dogma, cast in stone, had no room for a miracle
that had never happened before.
As Seventh-day Adventists, we
must seek healing for our own blindness. We get so caught up in dogmatic "truth"
that we stumble to learn that love is truth. For if God is love, and Jesus is
God, and he is the truth, mathematics tells us that love is truth, for if A=B
and B=C then it follows that A=C. No matter how complex we make our belief system,
it does not change that simple formula. Jesus said it succinctly, "Love God and
love others." - friendly others, enemy others, disabled others, poor others,
even others who do not want or feel they need to be loved. Our lives are short
and the need in this world for love is immense. There is no time or space to
clutter up what time we have with anything else. Love always.