Jesus Heals Two Blind Men and a Mute

Take Every Passage to Prayer - Volume 2, The Gospels
^{Wednesday July 17, 2024}

Matthew 9:27-34

Father, like the two blind men, help me to believe that You, the unseen God, hear my prayers and that You will heal me of whatever burdens my heart. Father, please take away spiritual blindness within me. I want the clarity of Your righteous light to guide my steps.  I thank You for the resources You have given me - possessions, skills, talents, etc.,. Please use them to advance the Kingdom of God. Use them in ways no one else may ever know about. Father, I want to have genuine belief in Your goodness. I don't want to "hope" or "think so" or "I guess" about who You are. I want to "know" who You are and have confidence in that knowledge. Father, wherever there is an evil foothold in my life, please get rid of it. Whatever joy for the gospel Satan has taken away, please bring it back. Please open my lips that I will share the gospel of Jesus Christ with confidence, courage, and enthusiasm. Father, help me to always tell the story of what You've done in my life in such a way that the focus is on Jesus and not on me. Finally, please help me to love people with messy and broken lives. Please help me to look past their brokenness and into the future when they will model the fruits of the Holy Spirit. With that perspective, please then use me to bring them to Jesus. Amen.

Father, Jesus left the rejoicing family so that He could continue on His journey of ministry. Two blind men were in the vicinity, having been informed that Jesus was at Jairus’ home. The crowd surrounding the home had just received word that the 12-year-old girl was alive. The people were stunned and amazed, awed by what Jesus was able to do. When the two blind men heard what everyone was breathlessly talking about, they knew this was their opportunity for healing. They might never cross paths with Jesus again.

As Jesus and His disciples began to walk away, the two men must have begged someone to lead them to where He was on the road. Unable to see Jesus, they cried out to Him, begging for mercy, believing He would hear them and that He would answer their cry for help.

What does that sound like? Prayer. Like the blind men, we also cannot see Jesus. Like the blind men, we too cry out to Him in prayer, begging for mercy to deliver us from our adversity. Like the blind men, we also believe He will hear us and answer our cry for help.

The text tells us that Jesus must have led the two blind men indoors. While we do not know what building they were led into , we do know that Jesus desired to minister to the two men privately. Jesus desires a personal relationship with each individual. He wants alone time with us, where He can fellowship with us and converse with us one-on-one. Like a best friend, Jesus wants to spend time with us apart from the crowd. He knows that each one of us is fearfully and wonderfully made. He knows that each one of us was knit together in the womb by You. Each individual is precious in His sight. Therefore, Jesus loved these two blind men for the unique treasures that they were and wanted to minister to them privately.

Jesus wanted to know if the two blind men genuinely believed that He could heal them of their blindness. Did they have doubt? Were they rolling the dice in hopes Jesus might be able to heal them? Or, were they certain that Jesus could heal them? Father, how many prayers go unanswered because people are not convinced You can or will answer prayer? The text implies that if the men had expressed doubt that Jesus could heal them of their blindness that Jesus might not have healed them. He might have excused Himself and gone back outside and resumed His journey. As the text states, “according to your faith let it be done to you (NIV).”

The text tells us that Jesus touched their eyes, and their sight was restored . What a wonderful moment that must have been for these two men. Vision. Clarity. Light. What does Jesus do for us when we come to faith in Him? He gives us spiritual eyesight. He removes from us our spiritual blindness. We can see life with more clarity. We can walk in the light of righteousness, no longer lost in darkness.

Once more, Jesus tells those who He has healed to keep their healing a secret. It is again a challenge to understand why. It is obvious that when these men left the building it would be clear to their friends, neighbors, and loved ones that their eyesight had been restored. Jesus could not have meant for the men to pretend they were not healed. That would be a violation of the Ten Commandments to not bear false witness. How do we make sense of what Jesus is sternly asking of these men?

Father, I know that Jesus did not want to be a celebrity. He wasn’t in the business of doing “tricks” in front of an audience. He didn’t heal people as some form of street performance art meant to draw a crowd and to earn coins thrown into a cup. The healing of souls was not about worldly materialism or the pedestrian goal of making this life easier for those who were healed. The healing of souls was about the Kingdom of God: enabling the healed to spend eternity in Your Kingdom and empowering the healed to serve the advancement of the gospel.

I believe there is another way to state what Jesus commanded these two men:

“Everyone is going to know you can now see. They’ll be able to figure out I did it. We cannot hide that truth. Fine. However, I don’t want you going around talking about your new eyesight. If so, your eyesight becomes the focus of everyone’s attention. You become a celebrity because of My act of grace and generosity. That is a recipe for pride and sin as well as false doctrine. I don’t want people thinking about how I can solve problems in this life. I want them to think about life after death; their eternal destiny. If you must talk about what I’ve done for you, talk about the forgiveness of sin, repentance, and the Kingdom of God. Talk about the power of faith in Me.”

The text instructs us that the men ignored Jesus’ instruction. They went out and told everyone about how Jesus had restored their eyesight and news about the healing spread throughout the region. I gather that the men didn’t talk about forgiveness of sins, repentance, or the Kingdom of God. That is a less popular message that would have not gone viral. They talked only about how Jesus could make this life better.

As the men departed from the building, a demon-possessed mute was brought to Jesus. His condition was apparently well known to the people of the surrounding community. We know this because the text tells us that the crowd was “amazed” when the demons were driven out and the man could speak again. They said that “nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel (NIV).”

Not everyone was amazed. Metaphorically speaking, the text tells us that the Pharisees thumbed through their various talking points of criticism of Jesus and chose the worn-out accusation that Jesus healed because He was in league with Satan. Their accusation was a yawner. It was weak and ineffective. Apparently neither Jesus nor the crowd gave it any consideration. There is nothing in the text that implies any discussion followed their accusation. It was a ludicrous suggestion, even to the non-believers in the crowd, that Satan would use Jesus to defeat the work of Satan. I suggest the Pharisees were left behind as Jesus and the crowd dispersed, stunned that their attack upon Jesus was so completely powerless.

Father, I have a few thoughts about this healing:

1. This healing took place because people loved the man enough to bring him to Jesus. A demon-possessed man is probably not a fun guy to be with. The vast majority of people would stay clear of him. He was probably exceedingly obnoxious and abusive. He was probably quite difficult to control. However, somebody loved this man enough to imagine what he could become once Jesus healed him. They put up with all of the abuse suffered in ministry in the belief that it will all pay off – that this man will be transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
   
2. We know nothing about what happened to the formerly demon-possessed man after Jesus healed him. Why not? I believe the answer to this is that the focus of any of the miracles that Jesus performed needs to be on Jesus and not the person who was healed. If scriptures had told us that this man went on to become a great leader of men, we might be celebrating that man today. If his name had been Joe Schmoe, he might be venerated today as perhaps Saint Schmoe and people might make a pilgrimage to Schmoe’s tomb. I believe the man disappeared from the pages of scripture after his anonymous 15 minutes of fame because all that matters in his story is what Jesus did for him. The same is true for us. Whatever good things Jesus does for us is all about Him and not about us.
   
3. What is Satan’s desire for each one of us?  If not to kill us, then he desires to shut us up. To silence us. To keep us from talking about the gospel of Jesus Christ. How does he do this?
   
1. Takes away our joy so that we have no desire to share the love of Christ with others.
2. Gives us fear of man, so that we will be terrified of rejection or persecution if we share the love of Christ with others.

Many believers have been silenced by Satan. They too have become mute. They too need to be freed from any foothold Satan has in their life so that they can boldly proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ for others. Father, open up the mouths of believers across this land so the gospel will be proclaimed boldly. Amen.