Wrong Question, Right Frame
A devotional from Undeserved Favor Ministry inspired by the preaching "Whose Fault is It?"
“His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.’”
John 9:2–3
Beloved, some wounds did not come from anything you did.
You did not choose the family you were born into. You did not author the childhood that shaped you. You did not write the chapter where someone else’s decision became your consequence — the parent who left, the friend who betrayed, the person who should have protected you and did not. The fault in those stories does not belong to you. And yet here you are, living in the aftermath of someone else’s trespass, carrying weight that was never yours to carry, and somewhere underneath it all, the question is still running — whose fault is it?
It is a fair question. And Jesus does not dismiss it.
What He does is far more powerful. He reframes it entirely.
In John 9, the disciples encounter a man who has been blind from birth. And their immediate instinct is the same instinct that runs in all of us — find the fault, assign the blame, trace the suffering back to someone’s sin. Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents? It is a theological question but it is also a very human one. Because if we can locate the fault, we feel like we understand the suffering. And if we understand it, maybe we can control it. Maybe we can make sure it never happens to us.
But Jesus refuses the premise entirely.
It was not that this man sinned, or his parents. He does not reassign the blame. He does not conduct a more thorough investigation and arrive at a better verdict. He steps outside the frame of the question altogether and offers a completely different one. This happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. The Greek word for displayed is phaneroō — to make visible, to bring into the light what was previously hidden. Jesus is not saying the blindness was good. He is saying it was not the end of the story. And the next frame — the frame of purpose — is bigger than the frame of fault.
This is the lens of grace applied to the wounds you did not cause.
Beloved, grace does not require you to pretend the fault does not exist. It does not ask you to minimize what happened or rush past the reality of what was done to you. Jesus looked at that blind man and did not tell him to be grateful for his suffering. He healed him. Completely. Publicly. In a way that made the works of God impossible to ignore. The very thing that had been a source of shame and unanswered questions became the stage on which God’s glory was most visible.
That is what God intends for the painful chapters of your story too.
Not to excuse the one who caused them. Not to skip past the grief of what was lost. But to say — this is not the final frame. The fault has already been taken to the cross. Jesus bore it there — the sins committed against you as surely as the sins you have committed yourself. And what remains, what is being worked out in the life of the believer who keeps saying yes to grace, is not the echo of someone else’s trespass.
It is the display of God’s glory.
Stop asking whose fault it was, beloved.
Ask instead — what is God about to make visible through this?
The works of God are still being displayed. And one of them is you.