Why Bad Things Happen
One of the hardest questions to answer is "Why do bad things happen?". It is usually followed with "to good people", but it can also be left as is. If God is real, why does He allow all of the evil in the world to be?
There is really only one answer, and it isn't one people are comfortable with -- free will. It started with free will for the created angels. I'm not sure how many types of intelligent life God has been responsible for creating throughout eternity. Clearly, there are entities which defy anything we have observed today. There are the cherubim, seraphim, and the four living creatures. There are also archangels and angels. The Bible doesn't really say anything about the free will of the first three groups. Cherubs, seraphs, and the four creatures are barely mentioned at all. But angels are referenced many times, and there is certainly evidence that they have and execute their own free will.
It is this free will that really forms the basis of the reason for why bad things happen. Sometime between the creation in Genesis 1:1 and the state of the earth described in Genesis 1:2, Lucifer led a rebellion against God that was put down. Genesis 1:2 records the state of the Earth, where it is believed Lucifer had his kingdom, after God's judgment. The rest of Genesis records God putting the planet back into a livable state with life abounding once again. But the hatred of God by Lucifer is at the root of what has gone wrong with mankind ever since.
When modern man was created again at the end of Genesis, God gave him free will as well. Lucifer, whose hatred for God and all He represents knows no bounds, wanted to destroy mankind who had been given dominion over his previous kingdom. We all know the story of how that went as Adam and Eve listened to Lucifer's whispering and subtly altering what God had commanded to entice them to sin. Their free will allowed them to go against God's restrictions and their disobedience cost them Eden and the closeness that they had shared with God up to that point.
Lucifer's work trying to destroy mankind and separate as many as possible from God hasn't abated over time. The Bible is largely silent on what would have happened had Adam and Eve not sinned. Clearly, they had a good relationship, up to that point, with the Creator of the Universe. This is sheer speculation, but I assume that there would have been no real problems in their or their descendants existence had they stayed true to God. They had a tree of life that evidently allowed them to live in an immortal state. There is no evidence of health issues. There is no evidence of struggle or difficulty in providing for their food needs. In fact, part of the curse for their rebellion was that they would now have to struggle to survive. So it isn't an unreasonable leap to say that their free will choice to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is what has led to much of the pain and suffering that has plagued mankind ever since.
But that has also led to many warped ideas about what happens to people and why. Many believe that if something bad happens to you, it must be because of something you did, thought, planned or otherwise were involved with. That is sometimes the case, but there is no scripture that would declare that just because something bad happens it is necessarily your fault. This was at the root of John 9:1-7. A man was born blind. The disciples asked Jesus why this was so. They assumed that either the man or the man's parents must have sinned for this tragedy to have occurred. And blindness is definitely a hard life, now as then.
Jesus answer, however, wasn't what they expected to hear. He declared that sin wasn't the issue at all. The man was born blind so that Jesus could show the mighty works of God. Now I know that that isn't what I want to hear when I'm down and discouraged about something going on in my life. I'm pretty sure it isn't what anybody would want to hear when in trouble. And I also want to be clear that I suspect that God didn't pick this one man in particular and cause him to be born blind just to show off His power. It was simply the fact that there were many maladies around, happening naturally to people, and Jesus chose to fix this one.
I believe that Jesus statement was more along the lines that anytime you see a significant medical or other problem in the world, if you are a Spirit filled believer, then you have the opportunity to show God's power to the world. It isn't because the man sinned or someone else sinned that the bad thing, in this case blindness, happened. Due to the fall of mankind, all sorts of things happen that were never God's intent, and which only are happening because of the free will choice that our ancestor did. Ask God if He wants you to be His instrument for change in any given situation. If the answer is yes, act. If the answer is no, move on. God's will is what is important in any situation.
But the flip side is also true. If something has happened to you, then you also need to put yourself in a place where God's people are. It is true that sometimes people are led to people in need. Ty Buckingham gives a good account of this about 19 minutes into the sermon. It runs for about 10 minutes after that point about a Walmart shopping experience he had. But as people aren't always as good as he was at this time, you need to be around Christian Spirit filled believers. The Bible doesn't say whether Jesus was led to this man in order to do a work, or whether the man heard of Jesus and came to seek Him out hoping for a healing. But they were both in a position where God could work by some means.
Jesus goes on to declare that He was the light of the world and He had to do the works of God while it was day because there was night coming when no man could work. Each Spirit filled believer needs to hear and heed this particular message. Just as Jesus had a season to work, so each of us has a season to work or each person we meet has a season for something miraculous to happen in. We need to do the work He has assigned us to do while it is day and everyone can see what is going on. There is coming a time in the earth (and indeed there have been times throughout Christian history) where there was darkness. While God was still at work (or Christianity would have died out), it wasn't necessarily a time when the miraculous was spread about from person to person like wildfire. Today, we live in an age where we can spread God's word more easily than ever before in a way that can be understood by people around the world. But at the same time, there is great darkness, and the news organizations which might have trumpeted God's work a century ago is now indifferent to God's work. Don't let that discourage you from doing the work. Spread the word on Facebook or your church websites or other social media whenever God does something of significance for someone you know. Help God make your own light.
Jesus makes some mud, anoints the eyes of the blind man, tells him to go wash in a pool of Siloam, and when he does so, the man comes back able to see.
On Blinders and Testimony
The story continues in John 9:8-27 is the bulk of the chapter and discusses the people's reactions to the miracle. The people who were his neighbors were shocked. They didn't believe it could be him because people who were blind from birth didn't all of a sudden see. He declares it is him and at their request, tells how he came to be able to see. The people wanted to know where Jesus was, but the man didn't know. They were probably going to report Jesus since it was the Sabbath and God wasn't allowed to work on the Sabbath. As it was they drug the man to the Pharisees. Traditions can be rough.
When he recounted his story to the Pharisees, they declared Jesus couldn't be of God because He didn't keep the sabbath. Others didn't feel a sinner could do miracles. So there was division among them. They required his parents to come to verify that he had indeed been born blind. The parents were afraid of the Pharisees because they had put out a religious order that if anybody said Jesus was the Christ, that person would be thrown out of the religious establishment. So they said it was their son, he was born blind, but they didn't know how he was now able to see, and said that since he was old enough, just ask him.
There's just so much there that is wrong, and some of it still happens today and is something God is still dealing with. First, God is ultimately in control of what He does. He will work when He wishes to work. And if He wants to do something in someone's life, like a healing, it's going to happen if He can find someone willing to be an intercessor or operator. He's not going to force something that would be considered a blessing on someone who doesn't want it, but He's also established the pattern that He wants the Christian church to follow, and He works within His own guidelines. At any rate, the timing of what He does is certainly up to Him, and just saying nothing can happen because it's the sabbath is ludicrous.
Yet the Christian church today needs to realize that the opposite is also true. That's the second point. God can work whenever He wants. It doesn't have to only be on the sabbath either. If God wants you to do something on a week night at Walmart, then that's what He wants. It doesn't have to wait till Sunday. Somehow, we've gotten the mistaken impression that God can only work through the pastor or an evangelist, and only within the confines of the church building. That is manifestly untrue, but it is what Satan wants us to believe. The fewer people who can see a miracle, and certainly the fewer who aren't already Christian the better.
Third, God doesn't work on demand. Jesus did the things that He did because He was in tune with what God was wanting to do already. Much of the criticism of miracles today is that they don't adhere to the scientific method. They can't be reproduced at will by people, duh, and picked apart until some flaw is found. People experience miracles all the time around the world. But no, they aren't reproducible in the micro sense. They are being reproduced in the macro sense, but that doesn't satisfy the skeptics. If a particular thing can't be exactly repeated, then they choose to ignore it completely, to their own eventual destruction.
Fourth, we need to not be like the Pharisees and declare that particular works of God were for the past and can't happen today. Whole denominations are saved, but deprived of the power of God, due to that belief and mind set. It's the same thing the parents of the man who was healed dealt with in Christ's day. The church had rules about what could go on, who could be declared Christ in this case, and there were real punishments if you didn't follow their beliefs. While it would be great if all churches believed what God declared true, stood for what God stood for, and condemned what God condemned, this isn't the case today. Read the word and learn God's stand on what is going on around us.
The Pharisees then stood up to the man and berated him, declaring Jesus to be a sinner, and wanting to know the truth about what happened. This wasn't good cop / bad cop. It was all bad cop. The man said he wasn't going to judge whether or not Jesus was a sinner. All he knew was that before he couldn't see and after the encounter with Christ, he could see. The simple truth of that statement is what we need to have more of today. Several people I know or knew personally experienced healing in their lives. I can't speak to their spiritual state. I can't speak to the spiritual state of those praying for them. All I know is that before prayer, they had a serious problem. After prayer by a Spirit filled believer or believers, they were healed without medical intervention, and they went on healed. It's up to you to believe or not. Nobody can force you to believe in God, any more than any skeptic. But God is still at work. If you choose to not associate with Christians or go to Spirit filled churches, you are unlikely to hear about God's work, because the news media certainly aren't pushing the truth. If you want challenged, the seek out Spirit filled believers and get to know them. If you want a good discussion of some modern miracles, view 5 Modern Miracles that show Christianity is True which is a bit long and pedantic, but does talk about five individual cases that it's hard for a skeptic to discount. Search out other records that are on the internet.
On the Proud
So in John 9:28-41, the Pharisees give their closing statements, followed by Jesus. First, the Pharisees accuse the man of being a disciple of Christ, implying that he was making the whole thing up to glorify the leader he followed. They, of course, were Moses disciples. So they win, in their minds. They knew that Moses had a relationship with God, but they didn't know of what sort of relationship Jesus had. The man replies, in essence, that if Jesus weren't from God, he could do nothing. Certainly, they hadn't ever experienced someone being born blind and having sight restored.
Their prideful response was that the man was born in sin, harking back to the question at the first of the chapter as to why he was blind in the first place, and took offense at him daring to try to teach them anything. They cast him out of the synagogue. How many times does this happen today. Some Christian says or does something that ruffles our feathers and we cast them out or leave ourselves. How could that person teach me anything? I'm out of here. Pride is a tough thing to let go of.
When the man encounters Jesus, and He identifies Himself as the Son of God, the man who was blind has no problems at all worshiping him. Jesus goes on to say that He is come into the world to allow the blind to see, and to make those who spiritually feel they can see, blind indeed. The Pharisees take offense at His saying, and Jesus replies that if they were truly blind, that is ignorant of everything about the law and Jesus, they would have no sin, because the law is made it make clear what sin is. But because of their pride in believing that they could see perfectly, and knew the only truth that could possibly be, they indeed had sin which could never be cleansed, because they wouldn't accept the sacrifice He was going to eventually offer. We need to pray that we are instrumental in declaring Jesus to a sin filled world. We also need to pray for every Christian organization and denomination, that they will not end up like the Pharisees with spiritual blinders to truth, thinking they know everything, with destruction as their end.