Get A Revelation

Here’s a thought experiment that dismantles most of the self improvement industry in one sentence: if transformation came from effort, everybody would change.

Think about it. Effort is not scarce. Factories and warehouses and businesses are full. Most people work pretty hard.

Or take the whole fitness industry. Gyms are full in January. The planners get purchased. The apps get downloaded, the resolutions get declared, the Monday morning regimes get launched with genuine sincerity — and by March the gym is empty and the planner is a coaster. The standard diagnosis for this — the one we’ve all preached to ourselves at 11 p.m. — is laziness. Not enough discipline. Not enough grit. Not enough David Goggins energy.

Try harder, you fat piggy.

But I don’t buy it anymore, and here’s why: I’ve watched myself find superhuman energy for the things I could see. My problem isn’t that I’m lazy.

My problem is that I’m blind.

Spiritual blindness is a massive theme in Scripture — far bigger than we treat it. It’s not a minor malady in the biblical world; it’s a judgment. When Israel hardens herself against God, the sentence God pronounces isn’t plague or exile first — it’s Isaiah 6: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.”

When Jesus finally shows up, He executes on that passage in the strangest way imaginable: He speaks to them in parables. We sentimentalize the parables as folksy illustrations for simple people, but Jesus says the opposite — He speaks in parables “so that seeing they may not see” (Luke 8:10, citing Isaiah 6). The parables are simultaneously revelation to the hungry and a veil to the hardened. Paul will echo this, writing, “to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.”

Paul extends the diagnosis to the nations: “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” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Notice the battlefield: not the will. The eyes. Satan’s whole strategy against the human race is optical. He doesn’t need to make you wicked if he can simply keep you from seeing.

And David — the man after God’s own heart, the man who already had the Scriptures — prays the prayer that should reorder all of ours: “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18).

A thought I had was this: David isn’t necessarily asking for more Bible. He knows the Law — he‘s memorized it, put it to memory. The dude sings the story of his people, of Moses, of Egypt, of God’s triumph over His enemies. He’s asking for sight — because you can have the wonders directly in front of you, in the text, in your own life, and walk past them every day, blind as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder in a cave.

The definitive case study is 2 Kings 6. Elisha and his servant wake up in Dothan surrounded by the Syrian army — horses, chariots, and bloodthirsty men that have only had ‘maggoty bread for three stinkin’ days’. The servant panics, and here’s what makes his panic so instructive: he isn’t seeing anything false.

Count his facts. Horses? Yup. Soldiers? Yup. Encirclement by poorly bathed Syrians (is there any other kind?), probable death by tickling with something sharp and pointy? Check, check. His eyes working pretty good.

Accurate — but not complete. Here’s where the plot thickens: