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HEARING and SEEING
Do you always “get it,” as we say about a joke or pointed story? All of us sometimes fail to “catch on” due to a number of possible reasons. The Word of God says, “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them,” (Proverbs 20:12). God caused babies to be formed the way they are before their birth. God said to the prophet, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations,” (Jeremiah 1:5). We ask the question, did God not also make those physical ears that cannot hear and those eyes that cannot see? Did He not make the deaf and the blind also? Consider again the statement concerning the hearing ear and the seeing eye. Hearing and seeing are here spoken of referring to the ability to understand spiritual things in a profitable way? Paul, in writing about man's natural inability says, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned,” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Paul said two things about sinful man as he is born naturally: he (1) will not receive God's truth because it is foolishness to him, and furthermore, (2) he does not have the ability to know these things. He does not have the spiritual equipment to be able to understand the Bible in a spiritually profitable way. God has not given hearing ears and seeing eyes to the natural man. This inborn unwillingness and inability to “hear” and “see” spiritual things is to be expected when we remember that men and women are born spiritually dead. Of born again folk Paul wrote: “Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;),” (Ephesians 2:5). This is being “born again” as spoken of by the Lord Jesus, in John chapter three. Only when God the Holy Spirit supernaturally intervenes in His sovereign power by coming into the sinner to indwell him does the sinner have life. Only then can he hear and see spiritually speaking. Men have devised what they call 'plans of salvation' thinking that they can do one thing or another which will cause God to birth them anew. Thus they think it is by their doing / works to gain the favor of God and so by works to escape punishment for their sins. But notice the first quotation in the paragraph immediately above: “by grace ye are saved.” Thus deliverance from sin and its punishment comes not by man's doing, but by God's unmerited favor. We, then, as sinners have only one hope: God Himself and the sacrifice of His Son. So, hopeless and helpless in ourselves, we need Jesus Christ. “Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his,” (Romans 8:9).
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