“And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.” (Matthew 13:14-15 KJV)
One of the attributes of one of the enemy’s finest super heroes, Superman, is x-ray vision. Truly many of those who follow the model that super men must be able to accentuate all that is valuable in Man for the better management of mankind will find the ability to see through objects as essential. We do it all the time. When we listen in conversation, especially to those we feel inferior to us, we do not listen to the words they are using, but rather we are leaping ahead of them to what they are “really” getting at and what are their “real” points. Sometimes we have a fixed amount of time where we need to get the essentials of what needs to be communicated, and rather than listen to what is being said we skim through it to get to the nuggets that we are looking for. For some people, it is like they have installed the latest Google desktop program in their own brain. They search through conversations only to pick out what they think is valuable. By the way, if you are finding yourself skimming through this very article, you may check yourself before you move on.
Note what the very next verse in the same passage from above says, “But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.” (Matthew 13:16 KJV) In what way are the eyes and ears of the second group of people different from the eyes and ears of the first group of people? Is it possible that they are listening to the exactness of what Jesus is saying without constantly questioning how He can say that or with what authority He makes these statements? You may notice that in the process of a changing heart, even though the heart leads, that the mind must let it. If your mind is constantly unsurrendered then your heart is like the seed that is growing up among weeds. It is to the glory of Jesus that when He taught that He used many parables. This enabled the listener to hear the story and remember the story and to re-contemplate the story as they continued their walk in life such that at least the story would be remembered for it’s exactness and God’s word could be unpacked to them over and over again. So often when our church leaders teach us plainly the meaning of a passage in God’s Word we are so busy trying to have x-ray vision to see through them or to see around them or to see what they are “really” getting at that we miss the beauty of what they are actually saying. Sometimes we must be still to let Jesus open our eyes and unstop our ears so we can receive the daily bread that He has provided.
“Give us day by day our daily bread.” (Luke 11:3 KJV)