STRENGTH FOR THE WEEK: Flood Church’s Weekly Devotional

SERIES 2: The Sin Also Known As

The Blindness

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“The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” – 2 Corinthians 4:4

 

The term “blindfolding” is misleading. It suggests that by folding or wrapping a cloth over your eyes, you can experience something akin to blindness. On other occasions, we similarly imagine that walking through a pitch dark room or walking around with your eyes closed is what it must be like to walk blind. There is nothing blinding about a blindfold and walking in the dark or having your eyes closed because in all these situations you can still see. A blindfolded person and a person whose eyes are closed still sees the darkness inside their eyelids, and a person walking in the dark still sees the darkness around him. These are poor caricatures of the terrible plight of those who are truly blind either from birth or injury or disease. A truly blind person cannot see anything, not even the darkness.

 

Therefore, consider carefully what the Scriptures are saying here: “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers”. This world has its own god who is on a mission to use the sin of unbelievers against them by reducing them to a state of spiritual blindness. To be sure, we see the blindness of sinners who do not believe in Jesus Christ even after being told about him in that they refuse to see, but the true nature and extent of their blindness is that they actually cannot see. They cannot see that they are blind, nor can they see how or by whom they have been blinded, nor can they see the severity or consequences of their blindness. Have you not wondered why a sin looks so much more terrible when someone else commits it than when you do it yourself; or why a sin looks so much more terrible when committed by someone with a good reputation than it does when committed by someone whose reputation is already damaged?

 

Our perspective on sin is always shifting with the nature of our circumstances, our relationships, our mood, and our culture because we have a bias, nay a blindness, when it comes to sin. As sinner, our instinct is to measure sin by how it makes us feel, or how it affects others, or how well it is known to others, or how it compares to the sins of others. Our instinct is to see sin from a human perspective, a sinners’ perspective. But no credible court in the world would ever allow a convicted criminal to sit in judgment of his own indictment, or verdict, or sentence. To ask a sinner for a true perspective on sin is an exercise in futility, for to be a sinner means to stand on the wrong side of sin where it is no longer possible to see sin as it really is in all its horror. All true conviction of what sin is, or of how severe it is, or of how it can be rectified comes not by experience or intelligence, but by revelation from a good and holy God. Repentance is a miraculous gift, not a manufactured emotion. We must count ourselves fortunate and blessed to have our sin uncovered or exposed, for no matter our shame in our own eyes or our embarrassment in the eyes of others, to have our blindness removed by God is always an divine act of mercy. Do you see?