The Great Physican

As the Jews looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, there were three miracles that they had classified as being things which only the true Messiah would be able to do. The first was the cleansing of a leper. (Before the time of Christ, Naaman was the only one to be miraculously healed of leprosy.) The second miracle was that of casting out demons and the third was healing a man blind from birth. It is the last of these that I want to talk about.

Have you ever seen a child with a lazy eye wearing a patch over their good eye for a period of time? The reason for this is that neurological development continues well into childhood. As the brain is developing, it is receiving signals from both eyes and processing them into a single picture. However, if one eye is unable to focus, the image becomes blurred. As a result, the brain essentially ignores the lazy eye and processes information only from the good eye. The patch is placed so that the "bad" eye is the only one capable of seeing. Therefore, it is trained to focus on the image that the child is trying to look at and strengthens the extraocular muscles and establishes the necessary neuronal connections to be able to see normally out of both eyes. Without this intervention, the child's brain as it developed, would eliminate all connections to the "bad" eye and even though anatomically the eye was normal, the child would be blind in that eye.

A person that is born blind would, as they developed through childhood eliminate all neuronal connections to both eyes. The entire portion of the cortex that is responsible for sight would be absent. This brings to light a little more of what Christ was saying when his disciples asked him: "who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" Christ's response: "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him."

When Christ healed him, he not only healed his blind eyes. He completely remodeled his entire brain and established every neuron and every connection between them for the man to be able to see perfectly!!

I am reminded every time I pray for Christ's healing for someone that the God to whom I am praying is the Great Physician that has power to heal instantaneously and miraculously as He, in His infinite wisdom, sees fit. What a great God we serve!!