How Blind Are You?

Consider the Jews of whom Jesus said:

John 5:39-40 You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

Some of these students of the Word wanted Jesus dead. Even after the resurrection, many of them could reverently read the Old Testament and not realize that it points to Jesus, their Messiah. We tend to feel as spiritually superior to them as they felt superior to those who murdered the prophets. In reality, despite our claims to being Spirit-filled, if we had our memories stripped down to the information these Jews had – the Old Testament and the bare facts about Jesus, without any explanation – most of us, like them, would have missed many of Jesus’ fulfilments of Scripture.

How many of us, for example, would have seen Herod’s slaughter of babies in Bethlehem or little Jesus’ time in Egypt or him growing up in Nazareth as fulfilment of Scripture (Matthew 2:14-23)? Had we been trained in modern hermeneutics, it is even more certain that we would have missed most Old Testament allusions to Jesus. We are not as different to those spiritually blind Jews as we suppose.

The Holy Spirit might be our Teacher, but that means the end of spiritual ignorance no more than turning up at Medical School makes one a top surgeon. How much do we listen to our Teacher? To what extent do we follow his instructions? How much do we do our own thing or fill our minds with the instructions of lesser teachers? Correctly interpreting the Word of God is as supernatural and as dependent upon the Holy Spirit as the original writing of the Bible.

2 Peter 1:20-21 First of all, you must understand that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (RSV)

The Bible is a book with supernatural origins divinely intended to be understood only by people who can tap into the supernatural.

Without good hermeneutics we would be off with the fairies but without personal divine enlightenment we would be equally lost. The Bible is our map; the Holy Spirit is our guide. The scale of the map is so large that we need the guide. The guide is so softly spoken that we need the map to confirm that we have correctly heard. Without close attention to both we’ll get lost. This is not because of any deficiency in either of them. It was always intended that they would work together.

“You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God,” chided Jesus (Matthew 22:29). We swell with pride. Jesus’ rebuke does not apply to us! He then went on to say that God telling Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” proves that the dead are raised. Who of us would have gleaned that from this Scripture?

About those Jews whose intense Bible study actually stopped them from becoming Christians, Paul wrote:

2 Corinthians 3: 14-16 But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant [the Old Testament] is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Those who were so tragically mistaken in their understanding of Scripture lacked neither intelligence nor knowledge. In fact, they were superior in both departments to most Christians. As Paul wrote:

1 Corinthians 1:19-29 For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. . . . Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential . . . God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise . . . so that no one may boast before him.

It wasn’t intelligence or knowledge, but a spiritual blockage that kept these Jews blinded to the truth. 1 Corinthians 2:9-14 However, as it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived . . . but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. . . .” We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. . . . The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. (Emphasis mine)

We have just noted that the Spirit is given “that we may understand” (1 Corinthians 2:12) and Acts 5:32 tells us that the Spirit is given to those who obey God. These truths combine to form something close to what I consider to be a key insight from Jesus:

John 7:17 If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.

Jesus is saying that whether God gives someone the supernatural insight to discern the divine origin of Jesus’ teaching hinges on that person’s willingness to do God’s will. We find this strongly hinted at elsewhere:

Ezekiel 12:2 Son of man, you are living among a rebellious people. They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious people.

Note the strong connection between rebelliousness (resisting God’s will) and an inability to see and hear spiritual truth. This explains many a blockage to spiritual understanding. Are we willing to pay whatever it costs to do God’s will? To what extent do we choose to deny ourselves, sweating as it were drops of blood, while we sob “Not my will but yours,” then take up our cross and follow our Lord to a torturous death for God’s sake? That, to a large measure, determines how closed to spiritual truth God will keep us.

It is because correct Bible interpretation is a product not of intellectual skills but of divine revelation, that we have such Scriptures as:

Deuteronomy 29:4 But to this day the LORD has not given you a mind that understands or eyes that see or ears that hear.

Isaiah 29:10-11 The LORD has brought over you a deep sleep: He has sealed your eyes (the prophets); he has covered your heads (the seers). For you this whole vision is nothing but words sealed in a scroll. . . .

Matthew 13:10-16 The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” He replied, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.’ In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. . . .”

We are continually tempted to dismiss Scripture’s warnings as applying to someone else, not us, as if becoming a Christian renders us immune to deception or spiritual blindness. On the basis of what Jesus said above, we might think the disciples would never develop a hardened heart. After all, they were Christ’s chosen; the privileged few to whom “the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given.” It was the others who had eyes that cannot see and ears that cannot hear spiritual truth, right? Well read this:

Mark 8:17 . . . “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? . . .” Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? . . .

No matter how close to Jesus and spiritually privileged we might be, we are not beyond falling into spiritual blindness that stops us from seeing spiritual truths that we desperately need to know.

To be “ever hearing but never understanding” is a terrifying predicament, when it is talking not of trying to operate a DVD recorder but of spiritual truth. And it applied not to the intellectually disadvantaged but to many of Israel’s top Bible scholars. Training one’s mind is important, but Bible interpretation is such an intensely spiritual exercise that one’s heart and spirit are even more critical than one’s mind. Consider, for example, the implications of these Scriptures:

Mark 6:51-52 Then he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down. They were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened. [In other words, their hardened hearts prevented them from discerning from previous revelation who Jesus really was.]

Luke 24:45 Then he opened their minds [ie, it took an act of God] so they could understand the Scriptures. John 16:13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. . . . He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you.

Jesus taught in parables that bamboozled listeners. As if that were not enough to lose followers, he even did things that offended people who were seeking to uphold Scripture. For instance, in the eyes of many he seemed to deliberately break one of the Ten Commandments by repeatedly choosing to heal on the Sabbath (which ended at sundown) rather that say, “Come back in a few hours.” He knowingly said offensive things without bothering to explain himself, such as “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).

Jesus’ approach was not a one-off for God. Jesus came to reveal the heart of the Father and he did this even in his choice of teaching methods. Like Jesus’ teaching, the Almighty has deliberately made the entire Bible offensive to intellectuals and easy to misinterpret and hard to understand. In fact, the very heart of Christianity – the cross – is like that:

1 Corinthians 1:23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles Our Lord purposely makes spiritual truth and even salvation an offense to people who pride themselves in their intellect or piety. He does this because he longs for us to be genuine – as manifested by our sincerity and humility – and he craves intimacy with us. It is faith, sincerity and humility, not native intelligence or prideful self-sufficiency, that he honours.

When Peter declared that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, Jesus said that this revelation came to Peter not from people but from God himself (Matthew 16:17). That is the nature of revelation. It comes not from flesh and blood, nor from intellect and study but from God. True revelation is always consistent with Scripture and usually comes through Scripture – often the rigorous study of Scripture – but it comes from the Spirit’s interpretation of Scripture, not from our human attempt at interpretation.

Since the Bible is God’s Word, not ours, it is his prerogative to use it however he wishes. It would be typical of our Lord – you could almost call it his sense of humour – to reveal to a simple person a precious truth that a theologian has utterly missed, and to flabbergast – perhaps even deliberately offend – the scholar by letting that simple person discover the truth by taking a Scripture out of context.

We might not worship idols of stone, but to how many intelligent and/or mature Christians does the Scripture apply, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools”(Romans 1:22, RSV)? Before such a God, I can only fall in adoration, declaring:

Romans 11:33-34 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor?”

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