All Our
Yesterdays
"To the last
syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays. . ." (Macbeth V.v.)
A series of brief articles
dealing with Human Pre-existence
by Arthur & Rosalind Eedle.
1. The Man born Blind
John 9:1-3 "And
as Jesus passed by He saw a man who had been blind from birth. His disciples
asked Him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born
blind?' Jesus answered, 'Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the
works of God might be manifested in him.'"
It is easy
to pass by these words, without realising their implication. But when you
stop to think about it, the question posed by the disciples is distinctly
troublesome. Let us pass over the possibility that the parents' sin had been
responsible for the blindness. That's not the troublesome part. They said
"Who sinned, this man, . .?" How can a man be
responsible for his own blindness before he was born?
Based on
traditional evangelical thought, we might have expected Jesus to answer them in
this manner, "What folly is this? How can you ask such questions? Who
taught you to utter such absurdities? No man is responsible for blindness on
his own account. But in this case, neither were his parents responsible, but
that the glory of God should be revealed."
However, it
is manifestly obvious that our Lord neither reprimanded them of folly, nor even
questioned the propriety of their remark. Instead, He just said, "Neither
this man . . ."
What can be
learned from these brief fragments of conversation? Is it not manifest
that our Lord, and His disciples, had been instructed about
pre-existence? If a man had pre-existed in a spiritual body before being born
on the earth, then it might well have produced the question they had asked.
Perhaps in that pre-existent state this man might have sinned against the Lord,
and his blindness at birth be the result of divine judgment? Or so they were
thinking. But the Lord squashed this thought flat. In fact, it might be
construed that He gave final judgment on all such thinking, whether it
be this man, or anyone else born with physical deformity.
But the
question still lingers. Even though the disciples had digested some erroneous
ideas, probably from the Scribes and Pharisees, still the concept of
pre-existence remains. The Lord never denied that. He merely corrected
their assertion about pre-existent sin being the causative factor in the man's
blindness.
We shall
leave it at that for now. In a later article we shall see that pre-existence was
a doctrine well-established in the minds of Jewish doctors of the law. Hence
the teaching had permeated the minds of the common people, even uneducated
fishermen like the disciples. Otherwise they would not have posed their
question.