November 19, 2015
Eyes That See
I get irritated when my grandkids
get in my car and start poking buttons. Occasionally my husband Bill will also
change some settings and forget to put them back — rearview mirrors, seat position,
radio station, dash lights. When I hop in the car and start down the
road I either have pull over and do some resets, or just continue driving with a
bad attitude and things out of kilter. Last night I had an evening meeting and
as I drove out of the driveway I realized Bill had dimed the intensity on the
dash board and I could hardly see the speedometer, much less any of the other controls.
It took me about three blocks before I realized that even the street lights and
house porch lights were not as bright as they should be. It’s amazing how
things look when you’re driving at night with your sunglasses on! “Ears that
hear and eyes that see— the LORD has made them both” (Proverbs 20:12).
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Gail;
-----The 1960’s were full of Western movies. Almost invariably, somewhere in the story, a tracker would be crouching in the wilderness, sifting a little dirt through his fingers, examining a twig, especially if it had been snapped, or finding a leaf on a nearby bush out of order and somehow knowing by one or a combination of several of these type observations that the bandit he’s pursuing came this way. Not too long ago tracking was the theme of a reality show. And any hunter worth his beans knows animal tracks and the other signs his chosen game leaves and the sounds they make. These are all from eyes to see and ears to hear. It wasn’t very bright of me to require over forty years of pondering to figure this out.
-----But maybe I’m too hard on myself. Eyes to see and ears to hear are an irreducible complexity. That means they are made of parts any one of which being not present would render the eyes blind and the ears deaf. Until this perception came so late to me, I always had to fend off the sense that the Lord was being a little elitist by packaging His message in a form which only seeing eyes and hearing ears could understand.
-----Now, this is speculation on my part, but it has really calmed my heart about much of the “relationship with the Lord” thing. If this seems useful, think about it some. I think the first component of seeing eyes and hearing ears is desire for righteousness, a Psalms 1:1-2 kind. Similarly, both the outlaw tracker and the hunter have a desire to catch their game. You don’t find them sipping a beer in the swimming pool or hooting and hollering at a ball game or cramped up in an office room 24/7. That’s because the second component of seeing eyes and hearing ears is focus -attention directed by evidences the things they desire make; it’s kind similar to Ecclesiastes 10:2, an inclination of the heart to what is right. The third component is effort. You can aim your car out the garage door. But it will just sit on that garage floor until you start it up, put it in gear, and give it the gas. The bandit tracker rode for hours on a hard saddle in the hot sun to find his broken twig. The hunter trudges up and down mountainsides through thickets, brush, and thistles following his game tracks. These are kind of Proverbs 2:3-5 things. Yet, you can have all the desire and allow your attention to focus and drive yourself hard to get there, but you won’t find unless you put to use the knowledge you’ve been gaining. Tracking down Billy the Kid took a seasoned hunter, the novice bags the royal bull elk only by shear luck. The experienced trackers have all the trophies because they sum up what they’ve learned by applying it to their plans for doing more of what they desire. This is kind of a Psalms 32:8-9 thing. But the most important thing of seeing eyes and hearing ears is the hardest to explain. It’s abstract. We don’t see, hear, smell, taste, or touch it. Like the bandit tracker and the hunter seem to have a nature for what they do, the truth calls those the Lord has chosen. They have an inclination towards the truth from a desire for it driven to find it by a hope of finding it continuously replenished from faith in its ability to be found answered by God’s gift of His guiding Holy Spirit. Eyes to see and ears to hear are an irreducible complexity. God has packaged His knowledge in a manner that only His genuine seekers can track down.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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