Thursday, October 13, 2022

Spiritual Blindness

Thursday, October 13, 2022

So Paul, standing before the council, addressed them as follows:  “Men of Athens, I notice that you are very religious in every way, for as I was walking along I saw your many shrines.  And one of your altars had this inscription on it: ‘To an Unknown God.’  This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I’m telling you about.  “He is the God who made the world and everything in it.  Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need.  From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth.  He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.  “His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us.  For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’  And since this is true, we shouldn’t think of God as an idol designed by craftsmen from gold or silver or stone.  “God overlooked people’s ignorance about these things in earlier times, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and turn to him.  For he has set a day for judging the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and he proved to everyone who this is by raising him from the dead.”  Acts 17:22-31

With deference (and no disdain) to the struggles faced by the many who face the challenge of blindness, I wish to point to what Paul described as a universal blindness worse (by far), than not having physical eyesight.  He points to spiritual blindness, a malady so consequential, there is nothing worse in the universe.  Unsighted physically, we might stumble; blinded spiritually, we are a total loss.

As a child I had no clear understanding of God’s image stamped on my soul.  I felt, but could not articulate an inkling of being special – that there was something not-quite-me, yet defining me as unique, but not quite where I was meant to be.  That was a child’s innocent understanding of longing to be connected to God, who created me.  I understand now that was His image and purpose, because of loss.  With each step away from that image it dimmed just a little more. 

The apostle was trying to help the citizens of Athens understand that their  religious “bent” was like a blind man feeling his way to find God.  They knew God was there, but they couldn’t see Him, much like I felt the presence of His image stamped on my soul, but only vaguely suspected it was something holy and good; I was on the verge of spiritual blindness.

Paul could help the Athenians because he knew what it was like to be spiritually blind.  He blindly flailed-away at Christ’s church, attempting to stamp out the darkness by persecuting the Son of Light.  When he met the true light on the road to Damascus, Paul’s physical vision ended temporarily, while his spiritual vision was undergoing surgery at the hand of the Great Physician.  When all was said and done, Paul could say, along with John Newton:  Once I was blind, but now I can see.

For You Today

You were created for that which is much greater than any of us experience in this life, complete fellowship with God.  We move in a training ground for 70 or so years, sometimes stumbling in the darkness of a wandering soul.  But Jesus Christ opened to us the bloody pathway to spiritual sight.  His blood cleanses us from sin when we confess His Lordship.  It’s the exchange of our sin for His sight!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

The End of Sacrifices   and   The Patience of God with Spiritual Blindness

[1] Images:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©   

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