John 9 opens with a man who has never seen. Born blind, he has a brief encounter with Jesus, washes in the pool of Siloam, and returns with his sight. What follows is one of the more remarkable exchanges in the Gospels: a formerly blind man calmly dismantling the arguments of trained religious scholars, one careful observation at a time. By the end of the chapter, the man who could not see is worshipping the Son of Man, while the men who watched it all happen are described as spiritually blind. The difference between them was not education, access to evidence, or intelligence. It was something else entirely.
Warning Sign One: Logic That Overrules the Evidence
When the Pharisees learned that Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath, their reasoning had a certain internal consistency: a good man keeps the Sabbath; Jesus did not keep the Sabbath; therefore Jesus is not a good man. The fact that a man born blind now had sight could not shake this. The conclusion was load-bearing and could not be moved.
records their verdict: “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” Others in the crowd reasoned in the opposite direction: only a man approved by God can perform a miracle; Jesus performed a miracle; Jesus must be approved by God. Same facts. Opposite conclusions. The difference was not the evidence but the direction of reasoning, whether you follow the facts to a conclusion or start with a conclusion and protect it.
Warning Sign Two: Hunting for Discrepancies
When the healed man’s testimony did not produce the result they wanted, the Pharisees summoned his parents (). The purpose was not to verify the miracle. It was to find a crack in it. If the man was not actually born blind, the sign collapses.
This is a recognizable pattern. Someone genuinely pursuing truth examines the evidence to see where it leads. Someone with a hardened position hunts for anything that will allow them to keep that position. God has arranged things so that the person looking for a reason not to believe will find something they can interpret as a reason. The person honestly following the evidence will find something far more substantial pointing the other way.
Warning Sign Three: Starting With the Conclusion
The Pharisees said with full confidence: “We know that this man is a sinner” (). How did they know? Jesus had asked them earlier: “Which one of you convicts me of sin?” (), and they had nothing. The conclusion predated the investigation. Jesus didn’t line up with what they expected, so he was disqualified before they looked closely.
The formerly blind man handled this differently. He didn’t argue about what he didn’t know. He started with the facts: “One thing I do know: though I was blind, now I see.” From there he reasoned forward, arriving at the conclusion in : God doesn’t hear sinners; God heard Jesus; therefore Jesus must be from God. “Never since the world began has anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind.” He followed the evidence. The Pharisees decided first and defended later.
Warning Sign Four: Selective Listening
By the time the Pharisees asked the healed man a third time to explain what happened (), his patience had run out: “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again?” They kept asking the same question not because they needed clarification but because they didn’t like the answer they kept receiving and were hoping the answer would eventually change.
gives a later example of this impulse at its most extreme: when Stephen’s defense before the council became too clear to dismiss, the crowd “cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears.” Active suppression. The truth was audible and they blocked it out. Most encounters with unbelief are less dramatic than that, but the instinct is the same: if you cannot refute what you are hearing, find a way not to hear it.
Warning Sign Five: Attacking What You Cannot Answer
When all else failed, the Pharisees attacked the man’s character: “You were born entirely in sins” (). It had nothing to do with the argument. They had lost the argument and they knew it. What they could not do was admit it. Instead, they dismissed him and expelled him from the synagogue.
Jesus had identified the root cause precisely. In he said: “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God.” Unbelief, as the Pharisees demonstrated across every scene in John 9, is not primarily an intellectual problem. It is a problem of the will. People do not refuse Jesus because the evidence is insufficient. They refuse him because they do not want to live the life he calls them to live.
The good news is that both conditions, spiritual heart disease and spiritual blindness, are treatable for anyone willing to acknowledge the problem and accept what God has provided for it. The man born blind knew that. He was worshipping before the chapter ended.