Psalm 146.7c-8a:
The LORD sets the prisoners free;
the LORD opens the eyes of the blind. (ESV)
Isaiah 42.6b-7:
I will give you as a covenant for the people,
a light for the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness. (ESV)
The verses above teach us that it is God alone who opens the eyes of the blind. There was no prophet in the Old Testament who made a blind person to see. Moses didn’t do it. Nor did Joshua, Elijah, or Elisha. And moving to the New Testament, none of the apostles made a blind person to see. Only Jesus healed blind people and gave them their sight. And there are numerous accounts of Jesus doing this. From all of the verses above, it is understood that the healing of blindness and releasing captives from the prison are connected and related directly to the Messiah. And the Messiah, therefore, is God come into the world as a person. There is an apparent connection built into blindness and bondage, because a person who is blind is captured by the darkness, and this looks to be symbolically connected to to a dungeon or prison cell. And only the Messiah can set someone free from this bondage, either physically or spiritually.
In the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John it is recorded that Jesus healed a man who was blind from birth. The religious authorities fought strenuously to repudiate this miracle. These leaders opposed believing in the miracle for more than one reason, but one of their primary issues was that they didn’t want anyone to confess Jesus as the Christ (Messiah). The intensity of their actions in attempting to prove that it didn’t happen indicates they might have known the significance of this healing, yet they were unwilling to accept and embrace Jesus as the Messiah. In fact the man who had been healed pointed out to them in John 9.32: “since the beginning of time it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind” (NAS).
And so from the Biblical record it is God the Son who heals the blind. I am not saying that a blind person can not be healed today. But the healing of the blind was set forth in the Old Testament as a specific, identifying characteristic for recognizing the Messiah. And according to the Biblical record, this type of healing was only done by Jesus.
This song is about Jesus healing a blind man named Bartimaeus, taken from the account of his healing set forth in the Gospel of Mark 10.46-52.