Passage: Mark 8:22-26. Two stages? What does this mean?
It encourages me that Jesus had to pray twice for a man. Ministry to the sick has a mystery to it. But in the end the man was healed.
The translations are mine, but if you would like to see many other translations, please go to biblegateway.com. I include the Greek text to bring out the nuances, but readers may ignore the left column, if they wish.
Let’s begin.
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Jesus Heals a Blind Man with Spit and in Two Stages (Mark 8:22-26) |
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| 22 Καὶ ἔρχονται εἰς Βηθσαϊδάν. Καὶ φέρουσιν αὐτῷ τυφλὸν καὶ παρακαλοῦσιν αὐτὸν ἵνα αὐτοῦ ἅψηται. 23 καὶ ἐπιλαβόμενος τῆς χειρὸς τοῦ τυφλοῦ ἐξήνεγκεν αὐτὸν ἔξω τῆς κώμης καὶ πτύσας εἰς τὰ ὄμματα αὐτοῦ, ἐπιθεὶς τὰς χεῖρας αὐτῷ ἐπηρώτα αὐτόν· εἴ τι βλέπεις; 24 καὶ ἀναβλέψας ἔλεγεν· βλέπω τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ὅτι ὡς δένδρα ὁρῶ περιπατοῦντας. 25 εἶτα πάλιν ἐπέθηκεν τὰς χεῖρας ἐπὶ τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτοῦ, καὶ διέβλεψεν καὶ ἀπεκατέστη καὶ ἐνέβλεπεν τηλαυγῶς ἅπαντα. 26 καὶ ἀπέστειλεν αὐτὸν εἰς οἶκον αὐτοῦ λέγων· μηδὲ εἰς τὴν κώμην εἰσέλθῃς. | 22 They came to Bethsaida, and they brought to him a blind man and pleaded with him that he would touch him. 23 Taking the blind man’s hand, he brought him outside the village. And spitting on his eyes and laying hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” 24 He looked up and said, “I see people; I see them as trees walking.” 25 Then he laid hands on his eyes again, and the man looked intently and was restored and saw everything clearly. 26 He sent him to his home and said, “Do not even go into your village.” |
Comments:
This is a remarkable pericope (pronounced puh-RIH-koh-pea) or section of Scripture, for it shows that Jesus had to pray again for the complete answer for a healing. This two-stage process should encourage everyone with a healing ministry. Sometimes you have to stay with a person and pray again. Or you can tell him to come back next time and get prayer again. If so, instruct him to read the Scriptures about healing and faith. The Scriptures build up one’s faith.
Commentator Lane writes that Jesus’s use of saliva is cultural, just to relate to the blind man’s “thought-world.”
The application of spittle to the eye and the laying on of hands in healing have significant parallels in Jewish practice and on the Gospels (see on Chapters 6:5; 7:33). By these actions Jesus entered the thought-world of the man and established significant contact with him. The report of the healing, however, contains three elements which are parallel in the evangelical tradition: (1) Jesus’ question if his action has been effective (“Do you see anything?”); (2) the explicit reference to only partial healing (“I can actually see people, but they look to me like trees—only their walking!”); (3) the laying on of hands a second time, resulting in complete restoration of sight (“I see everything clearly—even at a distance”). These features distinguish this incident of healing from all of the others and suggest that the man’s sight was restored only gradually and with difficulty. It is impossible to recover the larger context of the situation which would shed light on many questions prompted by these unique features (p. 285)
It is important to realize, further, that Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd, to administer his unusual healing method. This confirms Lane’s belief that Jesus was merely entering the man’s own belief about healing.
“Trees walking” indicates that his eyes were seeing people blurrily. He did not see them distinctly. The fact that he used the word “trees” indicates that he had seen before. Otherwise, he would not have had the vocabulary or words to know what a tree was.
So Jesus repeated the process again. He must have smeared the saliva again.
“restored”: it comes from the verb apokathistēmi (pronounced apoh-kathis-tay-mee). BDAG defines the verb: (1) “To change to an earlier good state or condition, restore, reestablish” (Mark 8:25; Matt. 12:13; Mark 3:5: Luke 6:10; 22:51; Acts 1:6); (2) “to return to a former place or relationship, bring back, give back, restore” (Heb. 13:9). The first definition fits. His vision was returned to normality. He lost his vision somehow to the point of total blindness and now it was restored back to normal.
In any case, after further prayer, he saw everything clearly. He had 20-20 vision.
Application for Ministry
We can learn many things from Jesus’s ministry. In this section I number the points for clarity and order.
1.. This two-stage healing is the most encouraging verse for us today who believe in healing and who have prayed for it, either for ourselves or others.
2.. Jesus used spit in Mark 7:33 and John 9:4-5, and in those two passages, Jesus also took the men aside, indicating that he was entering into their own belief system. This was not his universal healing practice. That is, there was a belief in the ancient world that saliva had a spiritual component to it, so Jesus was momentarily and occasionally fitting in to his culture. But please don’t build an entire healing system on spitting! This was unusual for Jesus’s ministry. Remember, the Bible was not written to us, but for us and for people of all generations, past and future, after proper interpretation and exegesis is done.
3.. Let’s bottom-line the use of spittle. Should we do this to heal today? I heard of a Scandinavian evangelist who did this once because God told him to. Hear from God first because spittle is not in our mental or cultural world, as it was 2,000 years ago. In today’s world, with smart phones with the camera app, you can bring reproach on the gospel with excessive literalism in interpreting these passages. So I would never say never to spittle, like touching your tongue with your index finger and then touching the sick person with the finger, but be careful. Use wisdom.
4.. Jesus did not command the man to be healed, or at least it is not recorded. But he did interview the man. We too should not be afraid to interview the person we are praying for.
5.. Strauss says that this two-stage healing may illustrate Peter’s partial recognition that Jesus is the Messiah. Like this blind man, he needs to be helped along, moving from one stage of understanding to the next. However, I take it as written. Jesus needed to persist in prayer. Very encouraging for me.
6.. As to trees walking, the man answered honestly. If you’re in a healing ministry, don’t be afraid to ask the person you’re praying for to answer your question honestly. So couldn’t Jesus heal him instantly the first time, as he did so many others? The bottom-line answer is that we don’t know because the text is silent.
7.. But for our part, we need to have faith. For your healing, press in to God’s power and love with faith. For a sovereign miracle, press in to God’s power and love with faith. From our limited point of view, we need faith. From God’s unlimited point of view, he acts as he wills. So we have a person’s faith and God’s sovereignty interacting in this one verse. It is difficult to sort out (for me at least). In the context of mira cles, faith is a gift of the Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians 12:7-11.
Pray that God would give you this gift when you need it most.
8.. But down here on earth, God requires us to have faith in him, and we get faith by hearing the word about Christ (Rom. 10:17). Get Scripture in you, and it will build your faith. Ask the Lord for faith. “I do believe! Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). That’s our part in the human-God interaction. Leave the results up to your loving and powerful Father.
Why Doesn’t Divine Healing Happen One Hundred Percent of the Time?
9.. In any case, as noted, this pericope encourages us to keep seeking the Lord for our healing. And if you exercise a healing ministry, please pray for some people more than once. Ask questions. And if they are not healed, pray again. If they are not healed, ask them to come back next time.
10.. As I write in all the healing posts:
Let it be noted that Jesus never went in for “decree and declare.” (Name one time he used such verbiage during his prayer for the sick.) Nor did the disciples use those formulaic words in Acts.
Instead, God the Father through his Son who was anointed by the Spirit performed miracles of healing. Jesus clarified that he does only what he sees his Father doing (John 5:19). He lives because of the Father (John 6:57). He speaks only what the Father taught him (John 8:28). He does what he sees the Father do (John 10:37). What Jesus says is just what the Father told him to say (John 12:49-50, 57). Perhaps the most important verse about miracles: “Many good works I have shown you from My Father” (John 10:32). (In John’s Gospel, “good works” = miracles, at a minimum.)
And so the Father through his Son who was anointed by the Spirit, performed all miracles during his Son’s ministry (Acts 10:38). The Son obeyed and followed his Father and also did the healings by the Spirit. The Trinity was working together.
11..We too should develop life in the Spirit (Gal. 5), so we can hear from the Father through the Spirit, in Jesus’s name and authority granted to us. We will never heal as Jesus did, because he is the Anointed One without limits (John 3:34). But after the cross and the Son’s ascension, the Spirit can distribute the gifts of healings (plural) as he determines (1 Cor. 12:11), not as we “name and claim” or “decree and declare.” Let the Spirit work, and you listen and obey, and then rebuke a disease (not the person) or pray for healing.
4. Gifts of the Spirit: Gifts of Healings
Kenneth Copeland Gets a Pacemaker
Is ‘Decreeing’ Biblical for Christians?
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Dr. Jim's Essential Bible Teaching 