July 13, 2015
Ever Hearing
Suffering animal noises came
from behind my neighbor’s six foot high solid wooden fence. My back deck overlooks
their yard, but nothing was visible. The sounds went on for some time and when I
could no longer contain my worry I caught the attention of one of the preteen boys
who was on his way into the house. I asked if an animal was hurt and somewhat sheepishly
he said, “Oh, it’s an elk call.” Just as I could not identify the elk call, there
are people who will never identify the sound of the Gospel message. “He said,
“Go and tell this people: “‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever
seeing, but never perceiving”” (Isaiah 6:9 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----There are two different forms of not hearing. One is only less condemnable than the other.
-----God made this world out of His chosen substances and determined laws of physics. They were all perfect until the snake introduced Eve to the apple. That event did not make the perfect substance of things or the sense of physics go away. It merely distorted and twisted them. Things are yet fashioned of the perfect substance for the perfect sense God chose. Though their perfection has been ended by the bite of an apple, their substance and sense yet sing forth the praises of God. Everything that can be known, when all of it is known as it truly is, shouts the truth about God crystal clearly. And the more knowledge of His Word and created things and their history and man’s philosophies are truly known, the more the truth of everything points to what you need to learn next. I like to say of it, “Truth has awareness.” It calls you down a learning path leading to Jesus, then on from there to what He has specifically for you to know (truth is also personal - come as you are, but don‘t stay as you are.)
-----Following that path requires, well, following. People don’t like following. People like leading, making the decisions, being in control, doing their own thing. Following is humbling. And humble isn’t great. So rather than searching out pieces and parts of reality and letting those fall together into their own natural fit, which requires following, people search out the parts of reality that bolster what they themselves are, or are making themselves to be, or that they think they are but really aren’t. And you get the drift. Rather than falling together, the pieces are jammed together into a bias destructive to truth’s awareness, yet bolstering to the self. This is the more condemnable form of not hearing. It is an active participation in misassembling concepts to create better effects for the self. But it is the fool’s choice. Because when all the pieces are jammed together into a jumble, their true picture isn’t emerging. Rather, a misleading mess emerges without showing even any correctly shaped empty spaces to beckon certain shapes. The deceit of jamming concepts together destroys truth’s awareness, and when done deliberately, one makes himself truth’s enemy.
-----The less condemnable way of not hearing is indifference to truth’s awareness. It is not an active misassembling of pieces and parts into distorted knowledge, it is the lackluster getting by with as little effort as possible. Too many concepts are considered irrelevant and left to drift out of the stream of consciousness without analysis, investigation, or even a basic curiosity. A properly assembling picture does not suggest any shapes or colors of the next pieces to find unless effort is made to retain previously discovered pieces correctly assembled. It takes too much work to do that. So the part of what truth must speak from the emergence of a picture never gets heard. The pieces of the puzzle heard in their moment are not recognized, and thus, they are dismissed as irrelevant. And why they are thought to be irrelevant is even dismissed as irrelevant. Hearing just does not happen because there is no call for it.
-----The second chapter of Proverbs indicates that hearing requires effort. But even before the effort, hearing requires a desire. The desire is more than just, “Mommy, I want an ice cream cone.” It is a crying out and a search, a longing quenchable only by the truth, a craving for only the truth. Nothing else produces hearing.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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