Good morning. Today is Saturday, August 8th!

🥳 Congratulations on starting today with God, and thank you for letting us be a part of it.

📖 Verse Of The Day

— Isaiah 35:5

🧠 Devotional

Why Did Jesus Use Spit?

Jesus healed people in all kinds of ways. Sometimes He simply spoke. Sometimes He touched them. Sometimes people touched Him and were healed.

But three times, Jesus did something that sounds strange to us today.

He used spit.

In Mark 7, Jesus heals a man who was deaf and could hardly speak. He puts His fingers in the man’s ears, spits, touches his tongue, looks toward heaven, and says, “Ephphatha!” meaning, “Be opened!”

In Mark 8, Jesus spits on the eyes of a blind man and places His hands on him.

Then in John 9, Jesus spits on the ground, makes mud, puts it on the eyes of a man blind from birth, and tells him to wash.

The Bible never directly tells us why Jesus used saliva, but there are some fascinating similarities.

Every time Jesus uses spit in a healing, the miracle involves sight, hearing, or speech. Deaf ears hear. A struggling tongue speaks clearly. Blind eyes see.

That becomes especially interesting when we read Isaiah 35:5–6. Long before Jesus’ ministry, Isaiah described God’s coming restoration by saying that “the eyes of the blind” would be opened, “the ears of the deaf” unstopped, and “the mute tongue” would shout for joy.

Those are the very kinds of things Jesus is doing.

John 9 adds another layer. Jesus takes saliva, mixes it with the ground, and places the mud on the eyes of someone who had been blind since birth.

Genesis 2:7 says God formed man from “the dust of the ground” and breathed life into him. John 1:3 tells us that through Jesus, “all things were made.”

Because of that, some Christians have seen an echo of creation here. The One through whom humanity was first made takes material from the ground and restores something that had been missing since birth.

The Bible never says that is definitely why Jesus made mud, but the connection is worth noticing.

There is another contrast too.

Elsewhere in Scripture, spitting is repeatedly connected with disgrace and humiliation. Isaiah 50:6 mentions spitting alongside mocking, and before the crucifixion, people actually spit in Jesus’ face.

Yet when Jesus uses spit, the result is the opposite.

Instead of humiliation, there is restoration. Blind eyes open. Deaf ears hear. A tongue is made whole.

Something lowly and associated with shame becomes part of healing in the hands of Jesus.

The spit itself was never powerful.

But in the hands of the Creator, even something ordinary and lowly could become part of making what was broken whole again.