Day Three: Who Did Sin?

It comes at two in the morning more often than it comes at noon. What did I do? What did I miss? Is this the harvest of something I planted years ago and forgot about? And sometimes it does not come from inside you at all. Sometimes it arrives in the mouth of a well meaning believer who wants to know whether you have searched your heart, or whether there is unconfessed sin, or whether someone in your family line opened a door.

The disciples asked it out loud. “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” They were not being cruel. They were being ordinary. They had a framework that made suffering legible, and the framework had exactly two boxes: his fault, or theirs. Every sufferer gets handed that framework eventually, usually by someone who loves them.

Jesus refused both boxes. “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” He did not offer a third explanation in the terms they had asked for. He moved the question out of the courtroom entirely.

He did the same thing in Luke thirteen, and there He was more direct about it. People brought Him news of Galileans killed by Pilate, and He answered the question they had not quite asked. “Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay.” Then He reached for a second example, the eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell, and gave the same verdict. Nay. Not more guilty than anyone else in Jerusalem. He shut the door twice in one paragraph.

I want to be careful here, because Scripture is careful here. The Bible does not teach that suffering is never connected to sin. Sin has consequences that land on bodies, and sometimes a man knows exactly what he did. What Scripture forbids is the diagnostic assumption. It forbids reading backward from the wheelchair to the verdict. That is the specific work Job’s friends spent thirty chapters doing, with real eloquence and real conviction, and God’s assessment of their theology at the end was that they had not spoken of Him the thing that was right.

So what do you do with the question at two in the morning? You do the honest thing, and then you stop. If the Spirit is convicting you of something specific, He will name it specifically, because conviction is not a fog. It comes with an address. Deal with what He names, confess it, and take the cleansing that I John promises without arguing about whether you deserve it. But a vague, roaming, nameless suspicion that your body is a sentence being carried out is not the voice of the Spirit. It is the accuser, and he has been running that line since the garden.

And when it comes from someone else’s mouth, you are allowed to be kind and unmoved at the same time. You do not owe anyone a defense of your own body. Most people who ask that question are not interrogating you. They are frightened, and they are trying to find a rule that would keep the same thing from happening to them. Understanding that will help you answer them gently. It should not make you take the question home.