Spiritual Blindness

I was browsing a book entitled, "In His Image" by Dr Paul Brand and Philip Yancey and learned something that fascinated me. He speaks of people who had recovered their sight after living their lives in blindness. The process of learning to actually make sense of what they saw is a long and tedious process. Indeed, some of his patients even (sadly) expressed a preference to being blind.

He relates how depth perception and other kinds of spatial dimensions present real problems to the newly sight-recovered. Some were not able to distinguish shapes, such as the difference between forks and spoons. Another experiment revealed that some could not distinguish between circles, squares and triangles. One spouse could not recognize his wife by sight. He had to touch a small area of her cheek before he recognized her as his wife.One patient walked off the edge of a building, not having any depth perception.

This brought to mind an incident in a most powerful way in the Gospels. Jesus heals a blind man. The Blind Man is miraculoulsy healed; his eyes are opened but he says he sees men like trees walking. He could not distinguish between the shapes of humans and trees.

Something else I learned from Paul Brand is that size differentiation is very difficult for such a person. One blind person saw no difference in size between his mother and a book.

So it is no wonder that Jesus touched the Blind man a second time. As some commentators have observed, Jesus' first touch was not an imperfect healing. His first touch healed his eyesight. His second touch healed his brain so that he could make sense of the optics that were making its first impressions through the optic nerves. The blind man had no referents nor previous knowledge to differentiate between men and trees.

The implications of all of this on spiritual blindness? How necessary it is to follow through on discipleship. Young Christians who are first enlightened by Jesus Christ need to learn to understand what they see. They acquire a new world view that comes with the new birth and everyting looks differently.
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John 1:4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

If the physical analogy carries over into the spiritual, it is no wonder that God has to bring life to a person by instilling faith in the heart. In the real world, the images that are seen by a newly healed sighted person don't make any sense. It must be similar in a spiritual sense. Here a passage from 1 Corinthians2 to think about.

The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12We 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. 13This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.[c] 14The 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.