<TITLE>08. Par 22-25</TITLE>L-22 The first place, he was shut off in a blind world, dark never seen daylight. That's a horrible condition. And another thing, if he--if the doctors of the city would've had any way to have done work for him, they--he couldn't have had it done because he was a beggar. He was penniless.
Now, to be poor and without money, is a bad thing, but to be shut off in a blind world without hope and without mercy, that's a tragic scene we have. Poor man, ragged, and his odds was against him. Perhaps, if he could've--if the doctors could've operated, he didn't have the money to do it.
I have great respects for doctors, for I believe that God sends them to the earth to do certain things. But I just wondered if they ever put a doctor on free will basis, like a minister should be or dares...

L-23 I was looking at your telephone directory, this afternoon, and find out that you got around a thousand doctors in this city. Well, I just wonder if these operations that cost from fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars for a hour and a half's work, if he got a love offering for it. I wonder how many doctors we would have. Well, that's the way it should be. It should be mercy, because you're working on your fellow man, the citizen, brother, sister.
And I thank God for good doctors. If you need the operation, and they thought you needed it, you could give them a penny, they'd do it anyhow. That's the kind of doctors that every city needs.

L-24 And perhaps, this wicked, adulterous, city that this blind beggar lived might have had some of them kind of doctors, and again, they might not have had the knowledge at that day to know how to operate on him.
However, he was shut off in darkness, and was blind, and was poor, and was begging. And in those days, beggars strolled the streets everywhere. Lepers that couldn't work, blind, lame, halt, everything laid on the street. And a beggar had a slim chance of getting anything to eat. Maybe, the man had come out of a morning had had one coin he could give to the poor. The first one he met, he flipped it to him; that settled it. They probably didn't pay any attention to the beggars, they were so a--a--numerous, so many of them around that they didn't even pay any attention.

L-25 He was really in a--an awful condition. And here he is. Let's picture him now and take just a little drama. I can imagine being in the cool of the day, maybe, the poor old fellow hadn't eaten for a couple of days, a cup of soup or something that somebody had give him a coin. And he was setting out at the gate. It's still very common through the oriental countries to find those beggars everywhere, still there.
And there he was setting at the gate, perhaps, in the afternoon, of a hot day it'd been, crunched down in the shadows. The crowds seat, the polished stones where many people coming from different parts of the country coming around Jericho... Let's just think of the old beggar setting there now in his ragged clothes, shivered down into the shadows. He didn't know how far he had to go to get in the sunshine. Maybe, get run over by a horse, if he got out any farther, setting there in that hopeless, helpless condition, and not knowing that just right down the road, come salvation.


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