Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

In ancient Near Eastern culture, lots of people associated sickness and physical disability with sin.

And it's true that occasionally there can be a link, like with the demonic, but in many of the healing cases we've seen, there's been no mention with sin. And it's true that occasionally there can be a link, like with the

demonic, but in many of the healing cases we've seen, there's been no mention of sin at all.

Scripture doesn't lay out a direct, consistent cause-and-effect relationship.

It's normal to adopt cultural beliefs as our own and assume they're true, so the cultural

mindset of sickness being sin adjacent has impacted even

Jesus' disciples. When they meet a blind man, the disciples ask, who's to blame for this man's

blindness? Is he being punished for his own sin or for his parents' sin? And Jesus says,

guess again, he's blind because this situation is going to be used to glorify God. This is

probably challenging to them, because one of the

main reasons this whole way of thinking evolved was as an attempt to avoid blaming God for suffering.

But here, Jesus seems to put the onus on God. He's flipping the script again. This can be

especially hard if we still have a hard time trusting that God is doing what is good and best.

And frankly, it can still be hard even if you know that's true.

Fortunately, God is still at work in this man's story to heal and to redeem.

And guess what particular day it is when God chooses to do this work?

The Sabbath.

Remember back on day 281 when we talked about the rules the Pharisees add to God's laws?

They call it building a fence around the law. Remember how they made it illegal to spit on the dirt

on the Sabbath because that was cutting it too close to the job of brick mason. So of course,

Jesus throws his leg over that fence and decides that the best way to heal this man is not just

...