SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

 I never understood how profound and life-controlling that spiritual blindness could be. Let me try to illustrate this by using the account of Jesus' miraculous feeding of the multitudes. They weren't so blind that they failed to see that a great miracle had just taken place:

• When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!” (John 6:14 ESV)

They even recognized Jesus as the Prophet that Moses had prophesied would come (Deut. 18:15-18) and even wanted to make Him king! 

So far, this seems reasonable. However, after they had time to think and had found Him on another side of the Sea of Galilee, their thinking had radically changed. After Jesus instructed them to believe in Him instead of another free meal:

• So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” (John 6:14, 30-31)

Jesus had just performed a great sign! Had they forgotten that they had declared Him the Prophet and wanted to make Him king? Demonstrating their near-complete blindness, they demanded the sign of Moses and his feeding the people with manna from heaven! However, this had been the very sign that Jesus had ALREADY performed in the miraculous feeding of the multitudes!

Then, they degraded Jesus from Prophet-hood to a mere Galilean:

• They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (John 6:42)

Eventually, they rejected Him entirely and wandered off. 

As perplexing as this biblical account might seem, there are many like it highlighting spiritual blindness. They are jarring because, ordinarily, we don't think of our peers, especially the educated ones, as blind. We tend, instead, to regard them as reasonable. 

Therefore, I had been troubled by these many accounts of irremediable evil and blindness, especially in the Psalms. I was convinced that their view of humanity was a little too dismal. Even Jesus' teachings were troubling:

• “They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.” (John 16:2)

How could people kill the righteous and believe that they are serving God? Spiritual blindness! And it seems that we are now surrounded by it. Our world leaders continue to call Islam a "religion of peace," while all of the evidence - Koran, Hadiths, history, and nearly everywhere Islam has gone - proclaims otherwise. 

Even now, as Islam rapes and beheads its way across the West, our leaders - the ones elected to protect us - continue to chant the same mantra, a reflection of spiritual blindness.