The Blindness of Disobedience
When I began to write this blog I was torn with what to write because there were several things on my heart. As I went before God in prayer I began reading certain passages of scripture, which took me to the place that He wanted me to be. That is the amazing thing about God, when you truly seek His face, He reveals it to you. I knew that this scripture was were He wanted me because it encompasses the topics that have been discussed and leads into what I had felt He wanted me to talk about. Further confirmation is that it depicts the very reason that we are in the condition that we are in, not only in the church but the world. As others reveal the things that we allow our children access too, one can’t help but wonder why we do this. I believe that the question is the reason why God brought me to this passage of scripture. Even though I am going to provide you with these passages I am going to ask you to get your Bible out and turn to them also. If you highlight or underline in your Bible, please do so with these passages. Now turn in your Bible to Isaiah 29:9-16; as we go through them I am going to stop and provide some insight on each of the verses.
Isaiah 29:9 Pause and wonder!
This is not the entire verse but it is amazing how it begins so I felt that we needed to do exactly what it asks us to do. When we look at not only the condition of the church but the world as well, God asks us to pause and wonder. Take a moment to stop and take a look around you. Take in the happenings around you and then wonder why it is happening. This also applies in our own lives when we feel as if our prayers are not making it past the ceiling, we need to pause and wonder why it is happening. Perhaps there is some habitual sin that is keeping Him from us. Perhaps we never really felt His presence in the first place. Maybe all we did was say a prayer without the repentance of sin against Him; therefore we never had a relationship with Him to begin with. Maybe we have allowed things in our home that are not pleasing to Him and therefore it is causing that separation between us and God. In any case we need to pause and wonder! Let’s continue with the verse.
Isaiah 29:9 Pause and wonder! Blind yourself and be blind!
While I did not stop here in my notes I felt led to pause again here as I am transferring my notes. Blind yourself and be blind. I feel that as we attempt to justify our wants and desires we are blinding ourselves and therefore we don’t mind overlooking the things that are damaging our relationship to God. When we compromise in one area it makes it easier to compromise in another area. This is what causes the blindness and what makes it incurable is the failure to repent and to turn from it, as we will soon see in this group of verses.
Isaiah 29:9 Pause and wonder! Blind yourself and be blind! They are drunk, but not with wine; they stagger, but not with intoxicating drink.
Now again pause and wonder! The signs are everywhere and yet we wander about aimlessly. Refusing to see them; we busy ourselves with the things of the world and yet never accomplish anything. Oh, we may accomplish worldly things but these will soon pass away. We will sit in church and say our amen’s in the right places, yet once we leave the church we blindly stagger around without any true direction, never reaching our destination just like the drunk walking down the street. We readily use the excuse that we aren’t perfect and never will be till we reach heaven, when all it is, is an excuse to never accomplish anything for God while we are on this earth. Do you not realize that the only opportunity we have to accomplish what God has left us here for is now? Once we go before Him we will never be able to redeem the time that we wasted.
Isaiah 29:10 For the Lord has poured out on you, the spirit of deep sleep.
Let’s stop again. I believe this is the answer that eludes us as to the condition of the church and the world, especially in the United States. Since we refuse to repent; since we insist on being blind, justifying our actions; He has poured out the spirit of deep sleep. He didn’t just sprinkle it on us, He poured it out.
Isaiah 29:10 For the Lord has poured out on you, the spirit of deep sleep. And has closed your eyes, namely the prophets;
The prophets here are those who speak the truth. They are the ones who provide us with the gospel of Christ. They speak the words given to them from God and you can tell this to be so because they are in direct correlation with the bible. They are not just reinforced with the passage they are using but with the entire word of God, just as this passage is reinforced in the New Testament. It is shown throughout the entire bible in the examples of disobedience from Genesis to Revelations. ‘Closed your eyes’ speaks of the inability to hear them or to see the truth in what they are saying.
Isaiah 29:10 For the Lord has poured out on you, the spirit of deep sleep. And has closed your eyes, namely the prophets, and has covered your heads, namely the seers.
The seers depict the false prophets. This verse explains why there are so many of them today not only on TV but also in the church. This could be the reason why some of our once great denominations have become weak and full of apostasy. It is why we have these denominations approving homosexuality. Look at that section of the verse. He has covered your heads. This does not imply a small covering but a large covering. He takes those who are speaking the truth and replaces them with the false prophets because of our blindness, which we caused because we refuse to repent and turn away from our sin. It amazes me at the similarities between this and the passages regarding the church in the book of Revelations where we are commanded to repent or God will remove the candlestick from the church, the candlestick is referring to the pastor, the pastor being the one who sheds light to the congregation. He is referring once again to the one who speaks the truth that God has for the church.
Isaiah 29:11 The whole vision has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one who is literate, saying read this please. And he says. ‘I cannot, for it is sealed.’
The vision being spoken of here is the Word of God. The literate refers to someone educated and sealed means that it can’t be comprehended. We are being told that the educated can’t comprehend the word of God therefore they refuse to read it. When they do read it they can’t see the truths that are in it because they are reading it with spiritual blindness.
Isaiah 29:12 Then the book is delivered to one who is illiterate saying, ‘Read this please.’ And he says I am illiterate.
Isn’t it funny that with all the new translations we still have people who do not understand the word of God? I will tell you now the problem is not in the language of the Bible; the problem is with the heart of the people reading it. You can sit there and read two chapters a day and you will be doing nothing more than reading a book. Unless your heart is right you will not understand what God is saying in His word. It requires a heart that is surrendered to Christ. Education will not give you understanding of the scriptures. The only way that you can understand the scripture is by surrendering your heart to God and seeking His will for your life. This passage here claims that the illiterate or the uneducated refuse to read it because they claim they are illiterate. Why do they feel as if they could not understand it? It is because of the educated who claim it to be difficult to understand so the uneducated refuse to even attempt to read it. Why does the congregation fail to read their bible every day? Is it because many pastors stand in front of them expounding the meaning of the Greek words that the bible was translated from causing them to believe that they are uneducated and if they were to read the bible they would probably get something wrong? Listen to the educated in the world and they claim the bible is full of death and destruction and that if God was a loving God, He wouldn’t have destroyed these people. They use it as their example to prove that there is no God. The uneducated sit back and say, ‘well, they are professor of this or a doctor of that so they must know what they are talking about and I probably couldn’t understand it anyways, but the one who is surrendered to Christ say’s, ‘Who am I that He would spare me, when He did not spare Ananias and Sapphira?’ We say this because when we look at Him through His word we not only see Him as a loving God but a just God as well.
Isaiah 29:13 Therefore the Lord said. “Inasmuch as the people draw near with their mouths and honor Me with their lips, but have removed their hearts from Me and their fear toward Me is taught by the commandments of men.
This speaks of the empty ritualism that is filling the church today. We go to church because it is what we have grown up doing. We shout hallelujahs, and amen’s in the right places yet with our lives we prove whose child we really are. We preach the prayer but not repentance of sin. We create false converts who believe that they can live as they want as long as they go to church on Sunday. They don’t fear God because after all they said the prayer and we all know that we don’t have to be perfect. They have their get out of hell free card and they feel as if they are all set to go and yet the day they stand before their creator what do you really think they will hear Him say? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. When you are surrendered to Christ the fear that you have is not one of eternal punishment but one of disappointing the One who provided you with eternal live. It is the fear that pushes you to obedience to Him because how dare you consider the sacrifice to be anything less than worthy of complete obedience.
Isaiah 29:14 Therefore, behold, I will again do a marvelous work among this people, A marvelous work and wonder, for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hidden.
How else can you explain the illogical reasoning of many of our so called great minds today? They have the facts in front of them but they still deny them. Every time their hypothesis is proven incorrect they devise a new reason why their thoughts are accurate.
Isaiah 29:15 Woe to those who seek deep to hide their counsel far from the Lord and their works are in the dark; they say, “Who sees us and who knows us?
I believe the premises behind the show ‘Survivor’ epitomized this verse. It applauded this behavior and approved it by saying that it is okay to do whatever is necessary to survive. These things have destroyed more churches than anything else. The creation of alliances and then working them against each other just so one person can achieve their own desires. We do it in the work place to gain promotions and we see it in our homes with one child pitting us against the other.
Isaiah 29:16 Surely you have turned things around! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? For shall the thing made say of him who made it, He did not make me? Or shall the thing formed, say of him who formed it, He has no understanding?
Yet we hear these things and say these things every single day. As I read this verse it tied the rest of them together for me. It showed not only the state we are in today but how we got there. Pause and wonder for a moment about the way we are told to raise our children today. We are told to allow them freedom of expression. We are told that if we correct them then we are going to cause them to have emotional scars and the worst thing is that we listened to them. We say this verse to God and our children repeat it to us. Is it any wonder Hip Hop is a multi billion dollar industry when it promotes rebellion towards authority? Is it any wonder that homosexuality is increasing as is bisexuality and I am not just talking about adults but it is being encouraged in children as young as middle school.
As you reread these verses you can see how we blinded ourselves to the point that God allowed us to be put into a deep sleep. We closed our minds to His word and claimed it was impossible to understand. We practiced a surface worship of Him to the point He removed the wisdom of the learned. We compromised our principles for gain, seeking the approval of men rather than God and then we sat back and spit in His face claiming He was not our creator. We change His word to fit into today’s world because after all things are different now. We are more advanced then they were back then. We know more than they did.
Have you paused to wonder why the prison population has greatly increased over the last several years? Could it be because their method of child rearing doesn’t work? Could it be because of all the garbage that we allow our children access too? You know things like violent video games, music promoting sex, drugs, rape, and murder. Have you paused to wonder why more children are selling drugs and joining gangs than ever before or dressing like them and talking like them? Could it be because the very parenting techniques that we have been taught by the world promote these things? You know, things like self expression, being their friend and not their parent and not limiting them by boundaries. Could it also be the fact that we promote these same things in the music we listen to and the movies we watch or the websites we visit? It is not up to the world to change the way they are but it is up to us to begin being the parent that God expects us to be. When we deny Him complete control over our lives how can we expect any less from our children? After all they are merely following our example. The problem is that we allow the alluring pleasures of the lusts of the flesh to reign supreme in our lives and if we surrender to God than we might actually have to accept the fact that we are responsible for our own children, we might have to take the blame for their behaviors. The wonderful news though is this, it is not too late. There is still time. Just as the children of Israel wondered in the desert for 40 years there was a time when they were finally allowed to enter the Promised Land. It does not come though with out a cost and like the rich young ruler that cost may be too great for some of you. The cost is sacrifice; sacrifice of your will for His; it is repentance and surrender to Christ that will deliver you. I am not saying that everything will become wonderful after that but it will provide you a way to bear it. It requires commitment; you must stand by your convictions regardless of the conflict that you will receive from your children but when they see you standing firm and living by your convictions it will make a difference. I was grown and out of the house when God truly got a hold of my parents so I did not witness their day to day activities but what I did see was their change in attitude and that is what God used to bring me back to Him.
The question now is, are you willing?
8/9/08
No comments:
Post a Comment