Why We Struggle to See

Introduction

(2 Kgs. 6:15-17).

Believing But Not Seeing

This is generally not a matter of believing true things.

Christians don’t have a problem affirming:

God is omnipresent.

Angels exist.

Satan is real and active.

Demons are real.

Prayer is important and effective.

That Christ reigns in heaven.

The church is to be engaged in spiritual warfare.

The issue is not talking and living like we believe it.

Is all of your speech guided by an awareness of God’s continual presence in the room with you.

When you are tempted, do you think in terms of psychology and hormones or do recognize and identify the enemy with whom you are at war.

When we worship, how do we evaluate the effectiveness of that worship? In ways rooted in our physical senses or with spiritual eyes and ears?

When nations are successful or they fall, how do you explain that? What do you say about what it takes for a nation to prosper?

A Divided Mind

Modernist materialism narrows our field of vision.

We give the greatest weight to empirical evidence:

Observable: It is detectable by the five senses or quantifiable through scientific instruments.

Verifiable: Because it is grounded in facts, other researchers can repeat the experiment or observation to test and confirm the results.

Objective: It seeks to eliminate personal bias by relying on structured data collection.

We emphasize the practical over the spiritual principle.

This is some of the limitation of the Restoration Movement.

It’s focus was/is often on correct forms rather than the spiritual foundations of those forms.

This leads to ignoring passages that aren’t clear as unnecessary.

We place the unseen realm outside of our own context.

It is in the distant past.

It is in the distant future.

Now it is just a personal belief.

Even in the past we fail to see past the material.

We look at miracles and make surface observations.

We fail to see what is being communicated about the spiritual realm by those miracles (like the manna).

Superstition makes us embarrassed to accept spiritual realities.

What is the difference between a superstition and a belief in God’s ongoing interaction with the physical world?

One is true and the other is not.

I once heard a man reject the Apocrypha because of the fantastical stories it contains.

We have a low opinion of our audiences (Heb. 5:12-6:3).

How Can We Recover a Spiritual Mind

Root our views of reality in scripture.

Use more clear texts to guide our understanding of less clear texts.

Pursue what is true even when you cannot see the immediate practical application.

Conclusion