Psalm 19:8
The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.
Ephesians 1:18
I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order
that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his
glorious inheritance in his holy people.
Romans 1:28
Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking.
Demanding autonomy from God –demanding to live our own lives without the benefit of His wisdom and goodness and blessing is foolish. Yet we do this very thing all the time. Even those of us who have trusted Jesus for forgiveness of sin still often have little areas, little compartments of our lives that we have closed off from God. We have little areas that we have refused to surrender. It is our sinful human nature to want to hide things from God –to want to retain power and control.
The problem is that to whatever degree we deny the authority and sovereignty and wisdom and goodness of God –we are in rebellion against Him. Rebellion against God is not a matter of any specific sin –it is a heart attitude. It is the opposite of loyalty –it is the opposite of surrender, it is the opposite of brokenness before God. Rebellion is the little voice inside of us that says, “Why can’t I do it my way? What about what I want? I just want to live how it seems right to me. I trust only myself.”
Choosing to live by any other agenda other God’s Kingdom is rebellion. Rebellion against God –living as if God has no say, is a dangerous and hurtful way to live. Bad things happen.
Whether we make a conscious choice to reject God’s Kingdom, or the more passive choice to ignore God’s Kingdom, the end result is the same. Rebellion leads to spiritual blindness and ultimately to spiritual death.
Rebellion leads to spiritual blindness. The problem with blindness is that if we are blind we can’t see. The problem with spiritual blindness is that we can’t see truth –we can’t see reality. And if we insist on living by our own agenda instead of God’s agenda, but we can’t actually see reality –we are always going to be in worse condition than we realize. We don’t realize how bad off we are because our perceptions are clouded by spiritual blindness –we don’t realize the danger we are in.
One night a long time ago when my children were very young, Luke must have been about 5 or 6 and Lee was a year or two old, I was suffering from allergies. We had just gone to bed, but my eyes began itching so badly I couldn’t stand it. So I asked Sarah where the eye drops were. She told me that she thought they were in the living room on top of the computer monitor. So I got up out of bed and groped my way to the living room–all of the lights in the house were out, and it was very dark. But I found my way to the living room, and located the computer monitor, and found the little plastic bottle sitting on top –all in the dark. And I tipped my head back and let a drop fall into my itchy eye. And I quickly realized that what I had was not a bottle of eye drops. As it turned out, what I had actually picked up in the dark was a little plastic bottle of tape recorder head cleaning fluid –mostly alcohol. And it did not sooth my eye –it burned my eye more than I can even describe. It was horrible. My eye felt like it was on fire. And I yelped, and I started jumping around in the dark yelling. And while I was jumping around, I managed to bang my shin into a chair, which caused me stumble, which wrenched my back. All the commotion got Sarah out of bed to see what the problem was. And as I remember it, when she turned on the light and saw what had happened, she thought it was kind of funny. I, of course, did not.
Basically, I had burning eyes, a wounded shin, a wrenched back and a bruised ego –all because I was trying to operate blindly. This is a perfect metaphor for a spiritual reality. Just as my physical blindness caused all sorts of problems for me –problems that I had not anticipated, spiritual blindness also causes repercussions and consequences all throughout life that we don't anticipate. The only way to see reality is to see life from a Kingdom perspective. We only gain a Kingdom perspective as we live in surrender and submission to Jesus, our King.
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