Head up is blind. Love is blind. Justice is blind. Those blinds are closed. Daredevil is blind. Blind can just mean a lot of different things. And one of the things that happens when you get a really metaphor-dependent passage in the Bible is that whichever one of those we just immediately happen to latch onto when we read it, whatever triggers because of the burrito we had earlier in the day or an experience we had yesterday, that can become the thing that locks us into this sort of calcified interpretation of that passage, when in fact it may be trying to conjure something quite different, and it might have conjured something quite different for the original audience. So what we're doing yesterday and today is doing a bit of a deep dive into the concept of blindness and other limiting factors in the use of people's five senses throughout the Bible to try to understand what the metaphor meant, what it would have meant to the original audience when they saw Jesus healing a couple of blind guys who were able to rightly identify who he is in Matthew chapter 9, which went like this. When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him and he asked them, Do you believe that I'm able to do this? Yes, Lord, they replied. Then he touched their eyes and said, According to your faith, it will be done to you. And then in the next passage, there's a demon-possessed guy who couldn't talk. He gets brought to Jesus and Jesus heals the guy and then he can talk. And a bunch of people are impressed, and also a bunch of other people are like, That's Satanism, and they're irritated. We'll break that down more later. Obviously, these stories are in Matthew, not just because they're amazing. I mean, that's part of why they're there, not just because they demonstrate Jesus' authority. I mean, that's a big part of why they're there. But there's some deeper level of theological meaning and imagery here than just these guys had this particular malady and Jesus fixed it. And that's what we're digging into right now. Yesterday we looked at Matthew 6, 22, where Jesus talks about the eyes being some kind of lamp or portal into the body. What you see and take in, if your eyes are good, it puts good things inside. If your eyes are bad, it puts bad things inside. Then we looked at Matthew 11, where Jesus thought it was self-evident that the stuff he was doing, fixing blindness, muteness, deafness, dead people, things like that should be signs of the Messiah that everybody should be able to identify. And he goes on in Matthew 11 then to suggest that maybe the ability to hear sometimes is obscured, maybe even by God, he intones subtly. And then in chapter 13, we looked at the disciples asking Jesus about what the deal is with the parables. And he suggests that some people have calcified ears and calcified eyes. Jesus says, quoting Isaiah 6, you'll be ever hearing but never understanding, you'll be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people's heart has become calloused, they hardly hear with their ears, and they've closed their eyes, otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them. And you flip over to Isaiah 6 that Jesus is referencing, and you get a better picture of the stuff that he's drawing on that he assumes his disciples can also draw from in terms of what blindness and deafness means. And Isaiah 6 is a very famous passage for the original audience. This is where the great, maybe greatest of the major prophets, Isaiah, gets signed up for the job. So God is looking at what's going on with his chosen people and what's going on during the reign of this ancient king named Uzziah. And there's some crazy imagery that happens, and Isaiah sees things that he doesn't know what to do with. He apparently has some kind of encounter with the amazingness of God, and he says, Woe to me, I'm ruined, I'm a man of unclean lips, I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the king, the Lord Almighty. And so his response to the awesomeness of God is like, I just, I'm I'm broken, I'm terrified. It's kind of like when Peter saw the miraculous stuff that Jesus did, and he was like, Depart from me, I'm a sinner. And then one of the angels flies over with a live coal in his hand, which he'd taken from the altar that is in what Isaiah is seeing, and with it he touched the mouth of Isaiah and said, See, this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for. And I think it's like a drawing on the imagery of like cauterizing a wound or cleansing a wound with heat or with fire. And then it says in verse 8, Then I heard the voice, so Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and whom will go for us? Us, Trinity, interesting. And I said, Here am I, send me. So Isaiah volunteers. He signs up with these freshly purified lips that he has. And then God said, Go and tell this people, be ever hearing but never understanding, be ever seeing but never perceiving, make the heart of this people callous, make their ears dull and close their eyes, otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed. It is so interesting to look at how this relates to the way Jesus framed the pitch and how he quoted this particular passage versus how God said it initially to Isaiah. When you look at the two together, you see that Jesus is framing it as though you are choosing to have your hearts hardened, or you have the impression that you hardened your hearts and closed your eyes and shut your ears. But here the suggestion is more like what we saw back over in Matthew chapter 11 when Jesus was talking to John the Baptist disciples, that maybe that closing of ears and shutting of eyes is in part the work of God. Well, why would he do that? There's so much to break down there. And we are going to break that down in both chapters 11 and chapters 13 of Matthew. But at the most basic level, the principle all the way through the Old Testament and the New Testament is if your eyes and ears are open and working properly, that is the result of God's grace and God choosing to make them work properly. I understand that that might be off-putting and threatening to people for a litany of different reasons, and off-putting and threatening to a litany of different people from a litany of different perspectives. Again, we'll process that more and more delicately down the road, but in the meantime, that seems to be the reality of what's being said. God opens and shuts eyes, God opens and shuts ears. And that means that the miracles we're seeing with Jesus involving opening and shutting eyes and opening and shutting ears are more than just a statement of look for these miracles. If that kind of miracle happens, then that means it's time. In a way, that's a little bit more like looking for an omen. When you see this thing, that's the omen, that's the sign that now this next thing is going to happen. And the Bible does that a little bit in places for sure. But I think Jesus' answer to John the Baptist's disciples is much deeper than just did you see the omens? There's a spiritual level to this that says God alone is responsible for opening and shutting eyes, opening and closing mouths, opening and closing ears. He directs everything like a water course. And so if you were seeing all of these things blossoming, all of these things opening up, guys, think back to what you know from your scriptures, from prophets, from the law, from Isaiah chapter six. If that opening and shutting is happening at a faster rate than what you've been seeing recently, there's a pretty decent chance that the kingdom of God is at hand. But it's kind of a bummer here in Isaiah chapter six, in a very well-known passage that almost everybody in Matthew's original audience would have known that all this language is about God shutting eyes and shutting ears at this time. Yeah, that's kind of a bummer. But then it flips around and Isaiah asks the logical question, like, well, that doesn't seem like how God works forever all the time. So obviously that's going to flip. When is that going to flip and what's the plan? Verse 11. Then I, Isaiah, said, Well, for how long, O Lord? And he answered, Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted, and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken. And though a tenth remains in the land, it will again be laid waste. But as the terebinth and the oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land. So unfortunately for Isaiah, God's answer is, I'm going to bring judgment on my own people right now, in part for stuff they've chosen, in part for my own grand purposes, in part in the name of justice. But as much as it might not sound like it to you and I in the 21st century, that little tag at the end is God saying to Isaiah, But there's a glimmer of hope. This isn't over, it's going to get better. So that language here at the end about stumps being left, but this holy seed, the data packet of the people of God, the kingdom of God still being there and present, is reiterated later in Isaiah with the language about the stump of Jesse, and it looks like it's all burnt out and done and dead, but there's this little shoot that's coming out of it, and it's going to come alive again, and it's going to be better than ever before. And ultimately we come to figure out that Jesus is the one who is the fulfillment of that prophecy about the stump and the shoot. In other words, what I'm saying is this is unbelievably layered and fascinating. And look what's happening to us. Did two blind guys get healed in a rather pedestrian miracle compared to a lot of the other miracles we've seen over the last couple of months or whatever, looking at this stuff together. And then we just start pulling on that thread a little bit, like, oh, well, the blindness doesn't just mean like, oh, the ump is blind or love is blind. Blind means something much bigger here if we look at the other things Jesus says about blind and what he assumes his hearers associate with blindness. And then we go and look at one of the big, gigantic, hyper famous passages in the Old Testament that everybody would have known about blindness. And all of a sudden we discover that not only is this thing many layers deep in terms of the motif and the imagery, but we also discover that the whole blindness and not blindness is something that points to the Messiah, completing the circle of this whole thing in an utterly fascinating way, where he is implicitly reminding his audience and his disciples that I am the completion of what started with the kingdom of David. I am the completion of this eternal kingdom and this eternal king and this eternal throne and all of this stuff that was promised to David that everybody is theoretically looking forward to. Who is looking forward to this? Whose chief ambition in that original audience is to see this kingdom realized and this king, this descendant of David, they shoot from the stump that is the family of Jesse and David. Who is anticipating this the most? Well, the very people who can't see it when it's right in front of their eyes. The very people who Jesus sits there and explains it to overtly and then in parables, and they miss them both. Which makes those two blind guys Jesus healed all the more impressive and meaningful because, like Matt Murdoch, Daredevil from Marvel Comics, though they couldn't see, they seem to have been able to see better than just about everyone else around them. My friends, the blindness thing is a profound metaphor on multiple levels. And I think this is a good reminder for me as to why from time to time I need to pump the brakes and step back and do my homework and think carefully about the imagery and the language that's being employed, not just from my modern perspective, but from the perspective of the original audience. We didn't get to everything I wanted to, but I got to cut it off there anyway. Maybe I'll touch on like two more little bonus ideas that come with this, but mostly I want to get on to the accusation that Jesus is Satan or in league with Satan or Beelzebub or something like that that comes up in the next passage because it's kind of juicy and fun. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.