Many have attempted to
show the awe-inspiring unity of the Holy Bible. I intend to do the same here
but in my way. And my purpose behind this small exercise is to point out to my
readers that if we fail to grasp this unity, we may end up compromising the
meaning of countless mysteries of the Bible.
For the stated purpose, we
are going to make a study of a miracle that Jesus performed in Bethsaida. It is
recorded thus in Mark 8:22-26:
“Then He came to
Bethsaida; and they brought a blind man to Him, and begged Him to touch him. So
He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town. And when He had
spit on his eyes and put His hands on him, He asked him if he saw anything.
And he looked up and said,
“I see men like trees, walking.”
Then He put His hands on
his eyes again and made him look up. And he was restored and saw everyone
clearly. Then He sent him away to his house, saying, “Neither go into the town,
nor tell anyone in the town.”
As I was reading this
passage, it baffled me a little. Why Jesus spit on his eyes? And why the blind
man was not healed immediately and began to see things clearly when Jesus asked
Him what he saw? Why the blind man first saw men like trees and then, after
Jesus touches his eyes again, did he begin to see clearly? When I considered
this, I began to notice few more noteworthy details in this small episode:
1. Jesus
did not straightaway give command and healed the blind man’s blindness. It sufficed
for Him just to give command to heal the sick. That’s what He did on other
occasions. Why Jesus spat on his eyes, and when he was not able to see clearly,
touched his eyes with his hands? Why the blind man began to see on second
attempt and not at the very first?
2. Jesus
took him out of the town of Bethsaida. Why?
3. He
asked him what he saw. Why the blind man saw men like trees at first? Do men
looking like trees signify something? If it does, what?
When the blind man began
to see, Jesus commanded him, “Neither go into the town, nor tell anyone in the
town.” However, Jesus did send the blind man away to his house. It simply means
that he did not belong to Bethsaida. Neither was it proper for him to be in
Bethsaida in the same way that it was not proper for Lot and his family to live
in Sodom and Gomorrah. This fairly explains why he was taken out of the city before
he was healed. It also explains why Jesus forbade him to tell the people of the
town about the incident.
It is relevant here to
quote Matthew 11:20, 21:
“Then He began to rebuke
the cities in which most of His mighty works had been done, because they did
not repent: ‘Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty
works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have
repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.’”
The mighty works Jesus did
were meant to establish that He was the Messiah. When He comes to a person or a
people, it means the Kingdom of Heaven has come to him or them. Whenever the
Kingdom of Heaven comes, either we accept or reject it. That is the purpose why
it comes.
Repentance of sin and
acceptance of Jesus are the ways in which we may receive the Kingdom of Heaven.
Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum were the places where Jesus had worked so
much to make Himself known to them, and yet they rejected Him. Hence, He
pronounced judgment on them. Because they were already under the judgment, Jesus
distanced Himself from them.
When I considered these
issues further, it opened my eyes to how intricate and subtle are the inter-textuality
within the Bible. The problems I faced in understanding this miracle of Jesus
was because I could not see its relation to other texts in the Bible.
At first, it reminded me
of many servants of God who said they had healing ministry. Umpteen times I saw
them sprinkling water, anointing with oil, praying over the sick and doing many
other things that you may be knowing about. After prayer when they would ask
the sick, “How are you now?” their reply would be, “I am still the way I was
before.” Thereupon the minister would start praying vehemently, full of sound
and fury, yet to no effect. Therefore, I was troubled to read this episode.
I was sure of one thing:
that Jesus was God and could do anything He liked. That, exactly, why I was so
puzzled over what happened in this instance. I racked my brains for a long time
without finding answer to the problem. I realized that only God could help me
understand this, and so I prayed to Him. Always when I pray to God to seek His
help in understanding the Scriptures, He invariably answers my prayers. And
every time I receive answer from Him, it surprises me beyond limit. This is
what happened this time also.
When I finished praying to
God, suddenly a thought passed through my mind, “The key lies in men looking
like trees walking.” I decided to search the Bible to find out tree symbolism
from it. After sometime I came upon this passage from the Book of Judges,
Chapter 9.
It was about Abimelech, Jerubbaal’s
son, born of a Shechemite concubine. He, with the support of his Shechemite
brothers on the distaff side, conspired against the sons of his father and
killed them all, 70 in number. But one of his brothers, named Jotham, escaped
the slaughter, and thus he addressed the men of Shechem standing on top of
Mount Gerizim:
“Listen
to me, you men of Shechem,
That
God may listen to you!
The
trees once went forth to anoint a king over them.
And
they said to the olive tree,
‘Reign
over us!’
But
the olive tree said to them,
‘Should
I cease giving my oil,
With
which they honor God and men,
And
go to sway over trees?’
Then
the trees said to the fig tree,
‘You
come and reign over us!’
But
the fig tree said to them,
‘Should
I cease my sweetness and my good fruit,
And
go to sway over trees?’
Then
the trees said to the vine,
‘You
come and reign over us!
‘But
the vine said to them,
‘Should
I cease my new wine,
Which
cheers both God and men,
And
go to sway over trees?
Then
all the trees said to the bramble,
‘You
come and reign over us!’
And
the bramble said to the trees,
‘If
in truth you anoint me as king over you,
Then
come and take shelter in my shade;
But
if not, let fire come out of the bramble
And
devour the cedars of Lebanon!’”
This passage surprised me
a lot on several accounts but the important thing is that I learnt from it the
symbolic meaning of trees. They signify the kind of people who were fit to be
ruled by a leader like bramble that hurts anyone who touches it. The people of
Bethsaida belonged to this category. Jesus rejected them for the same reason
that the vine rejected the trees. He did not want to waste His new wine, which
stood for the New Testament in His blood, on the people who were not willing to
move forward from the Old Testament which guided them to the fulfillment of the
divine promise pertaining to salvation through Jesus – salvation that lay in
the atoning blood of His that He would shed on the cross.
They were blind people who
were forever willing to live in the promise of the coming of the Messiah but
not willing to accept the fulfillment thereof when the Messiah actually came to
them. They disowned Him! And they didn’t even know that by so doing they were
disowning the very tradition that they pretended to uphold. Such are the
spiritually blind. Jesus did not want them to see His work in the life of the
physically blind man. Therefore, He took him out of the city.
Secondly, He spat in the
eyes of the blind man to make him see the fact that He had rejected Bethsaida.
The act of spitting on someone is tantamount to his insult. Here, Jesus does
not actually want to treat the blind man insultingly so much as making him know
His view of the people of this city. What Jesus did for him required testimony
from the man who was cured. But these were certainly not the people before whom
he was expected to testify what Jesus did for him. What Jesus did for him
proved that He was the Christ.
Thus, the act of spitting
suggests rejection of the people of the city by Him. They neither believed in
the Old Testament nor in the New Testament. In this they weren’t in any way
different from the Church of Laodicea which is neither hot nor cold. I surely
do not mean to say that I consider belief in the Old Testament as a spiritual
state that is described as cold and the belief in the New Testament as a state
described as hot. It is the absence of commitment that is in question. Jesus underlined
this when He said in John 5:45-47:
“Do not think that I shall
accuse you to the Father; there is one who accuses you—Moses, in whom you
trust. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me.
But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”
God wants them to be
either hot or cold, and warns them that He would spit them out of His mouth for
their lukewarmness. His forbidding the blind man even from entering the city,
and telling them what had happened, is just a verbal expression of His symbolic
act of spitting in his eyes. In the eyes of the spiritually seeing blind man,
Jesus had rejected Bethsaida. That is the meaning of the act of spitting in the
eyes of the blind man.
But the surprise that
Jotham’s parable sprung on me did not stop here. I realized that it not only
represented reality symbolically, it also provided a paradigm to show what the
people of Bethsaida (Israel) were going to do after being rejected by Jesus.
Jotham’s prophecy was fulfilled in part when God sent a spirit of ill will between
Abimelech and men of Shechem. Abimelech did prove a bramble to the men of
Shechem whose fire consumed them. But it is the reference to the cedars of
Lebanon that extends his prophecy to include the rejection of the Messiah by
Israel, acceptance of the false one and the consequences of the wrong choice
that was willfully made.
It states that the trees
go to the bramble to ask it to rule over them. Significantly, the bramble not
only accepts their proposal but also demands something, which if they would not
fulfill, would have serious consequences for them. The whole situation reminded
me of Israel asking for a king to rule over them. They did have the king they
wanted, but he came as a package. God described it to the old prophet in the following
terms in 1 Samuel 8:
“And the Lord said to
Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they
have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over
them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I
brought them up out of Egypt, even to this day—with which they have forsaken Me
and served other gods—so they are doing to you also. Now therefore, heed their
voice. However, you shall solemnly forewarn them, and show them the behavior of
the king who will reign over them.”
So Samuel told all the
words of the Lord to the people who asked him for a king. And he said, “This
will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you: He will take your
sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some
will run before his chariots. He will appoint captains over his thousands and
captains over his fifties, will set some to plow his ground and reap his
harvest, and some to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He
will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. And he will take
the best of your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them
to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give
it to his officers and servants. And he will take your male servants, your
female servants, your finest young men, and your donkeys, and put them to his
work. He will take a tenth of your sheep. And you will be his servants. And you
will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for
yourselves, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.”
And it was just as God had
forewarned them. Nevertheless the attitude of the people remained unchanged,
and will remain unchanged as the prophetic utterance of Jotham will go on to
prove.
Interestingly, what Jotham
had to tell to the people of Shechem was directly related to the people of
Israel who would come to live in the time of the Antichrist. Let me quote what
Jotham said to the Shechemite again for good measure:
“Then
all the trees said to the bramble,
‘You
come and reign over us!’
And
the bramble said to the trees,
‘If
in truth you anoint me as king over you,
Then
come and take shelter in my shade;
But
if not, let fire come out of the bramble
And
devour the cedars of Lebanon!”
The question, here, is:
What the Shechemite had to do with the cedars of Lebanon? If fire would come
out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon, how it would hurt the
Shechemite? Shechem did not belong to Lebanon!
We have the answers to
these questions if we ask: What is meant by the cedars of Lebanon? We know the
symbolic meaning of the trees; now it is time to know a little bit about the
cedars of Lebanon.
In Ezekiel 31, Lebanon is called
the Garden of Eden and the Garden of God. To be more precise, it is the name
given to those trees (angels) whom God threw out of His Garden. The same
chapter describes the cedar of Lebanon as the greatest in glory of all the
choice and best trees of Lebanon. The same cedar is also called the Assyrian whose
descriptions in different passages refer both to Lucifer and the Antichrist. That
these are the spirits and not humans can be known from the following verse:
“Therefore thus saith the
Lord God; Because thou has lifted up thyself in height, and he hath shot up his
top among the thick boughs, and his heart is lifted up in his height;
I have therefore delivered
him into the hand of the mighty one of the heathen; he shall surely deal with
him: I have driven him out for his wickedness….To the end that none of all the
trees by the waters exalt themselves for their height, neither shoot up their
top among the thick boughs, neither their trees stand up in their height, all
that drink water: for they are all delivered unto death, to the nether parts
of the earth, in the midst of the children of men, with them that go down to
the pit.” (Ezekiel 31:10-11, 14)
Clearly, what the
emboldened text means to say is that the spirit beings who were cast out of the
Garden of Eden ended up in the same place where the children of men do. That
place is called the Pit. These fallen angels are called the choice and best of
the trees of Lebanon. The Antichrist is also a spirit but in body form.
While it is difficult to
say with any degree of certainty that other trees cast out along with the
Assyrian are also cedars, we can fairly say that those who dwelt under the
shadow of the cedar of Lebanon (the Assyrian) are also cedars from verse 17
which says,
“They also went down into
hell with him (the Assyrian or the cedar of Lebanon) unto them that be slain
with the sword; and they that were his arm, that dwelt under his
shadow in the midst of the heathen.”
If they were his arm, then
they were also cedars…Arm of the cedar is bound to be cedar. Therefore, the
cedars of Lebanon indicate those who dwell under the shadow of the Assyrian. It
is significant that the bramble in the parable of Jotham in Judges 9 asks the
trees, who go to it with the offer of becoming king over them, to take shelter
under its shade. Verse 15 words the reply of the bramble thus:
“And
the bramble said to the trees,
‘If
in truth you anoint me as king over you,
Then
come and take shelter in my shade;
But
if not, let fire come out of the bramble
And
devour the cedars of Lebanon!’”
The trees asking the
bramble to rule over them must dwell in the shade thereof. The bramble is the
status to which the cedar of Lebanon is reduced by the time the people of
Israel, who rejected Jesus, come to him to anoint him king over them. It stands
to logic that the people who reject truth are bound to turn to untruth. Jesus
spoke about this when He said in John 5:42-43:
“But I know you, that you
do not have the love of God in you. I have come in My Father’s name, and you do
not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive.”
These same people are
called a synagogue of Satan in Revelation 2:9; 3:9. The same are called the
cedars of Lebanon in Jotham’s prophecy and in Ezekiel 31:17. When they will
come to dwell in the shade of the bramble, they will face the consequences
thereof in full measure. That will be the time they will try to correct their
mistake with the result that the fire will come out of the bramble and devour
the cedars of Lebanon. When the Antichrist will break the covenant he made with
many for the period of 7 years, he will turn against Israel and set himself up
in the temple in Jerusalem as abomination that will unloose desolation on
Israel.
Now let us stop and
consider where we have arrived from where we had started! When we read the
Bible, we must always be prepared for this. To the spiritually blind, it might
seem simple to the extent of being intellectually dissatisfying. But when seen
with one’s spiritual eyes open, it would just blow his mind with the explosion
of divine revelations contained in it. It
would greatly benefit us if we humbly draw near to it with the purpose of having
our spiritual eyes open. It is vain to read it with the purpose of mastering
its mysteries.
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