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Willfully Blind
There’s a psychologist named Margaret Heffernan, who has developed a theory called Willful Blindness.
Willful blindness answers the question of how can people deny what is obvious.
There is a clear danger, they see it, and yet people run towards it.
Something is wrong, and a group of people do it anyway.
Heffernan theorizes that willful blindness is one of the biggest threats and dangers to humanity.
Willful blindness is what causes you to grab the plate from the waitress wearing the oven mitt, even after she says it’s hot.
You know it’s hot.
You can hear it sizzling.
But you convince yourself that it’s not as hot as she says it is.
You are willfully blind.
You
Willful blindness is dangerous because it can cause us to not see the dangers in others, especially those that we love.
To be overly defensive of them.
Parents see this in their children.
They are around other kids that are bad eggs.
And you warn your children of the dangers of hanging out with these friends.
Bad company corrupts good morals.
But they are willfully blind.
Not seeing the bad morals and the harmful affects of their friendship.
Maragert Heffernan thinks on a national level it can be dangerous, promoting a mob mentality.
She thinks it is what moved normal Germans to get caught up in violent acts during World War II.
They were willfully blind to the direction of the nation.
Today in our study through Luke, we encounter two disciples of Jesus who are willfully blind.
We learn about:
Our blindness to truth.
How we learn truth.
And how we are to respond to truth.
Please open your Bibles to
Read :13-35.
First we learn about how people are naturally Blind Truth
We begin just outside of Jerusalem.
There are 2 disciples of Jesus.
These aren’t 2 of the 12 disciples.
The 12 were special disciples, you could even classify them as apostles.
These were 2 of the many people who followed Jesus.
We don’t know anything about them.
One of them was named Cleopas.
The other was unnamed.
They are returning home to Emmaus, which is about 7 miles away.
It’s a long walk, through some hills.
But they are also willfully blind.
They are sad, dejected, and disappointed because they’ve made up their minds that their hope in Jesus was wrong.
They had hoped that Jesus would be the Messiah.
They hoped that He would free them from the Romans.
Not realizing that He actually came to die.
And when He died, their hope of deliverance from Rome died as well.
Here’s what makes them willfully blind, they know the truth, at least they should.
When the waitress from Chili’s brings you that sizzling plate of fajitas and says, “Careful, it’s hot!” you know it’s hot.
The evidence is there.
You see.
You hear.
You smell it.
These disciples know the truth.
Down in verse 19, they describe what they know about Jesus.
“Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people ...”.
They acknowledge:
He was a prophet.
They know that He spoke the word of God.
They know He was from God.
They saw Him do miracles.
Now it’s Easter Sunday, and they’ve already heard the news from the women who went to the tomb earlier in the day.
But up in verse 11, it says that the disciples of Jesus thought the women were telling an idle tale.
Make believe.
Crazy talk.
A fairy tale.
They made up their minds it wasn’t true.
They are willfully blind, because they have made up their minds, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else says, “Jesus is dead.”
They have just begun their 7 mile hike to Emmaus, they are talking about everything they have seen and experienced, and all of a sudden in verse 15, Jesus shows up.
Verse 16 says, “But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”
There’s a couple of reasons for this.
First, they are willfully blind.
They’ve made up their minds, Jesus is dead.
Something we don’t think about when we picture Jesus in our heads, but he looked very ordinary.
He wasn’t a blonde haired, blue eyed instagram model.
He wasn’t memorable.
He had a face that was forgettable.
says, “… he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.”
He was the type of person that could get lost in a crowd.
In , Mary Magdalene thought he was the gardener.
What do gardeners look like?
Normal people.
Let’s combine these things.
Jesus has a normal, forgettable face.
The disciples think that Jesus is dead.
Someone shows up as they are leaving Jerusalem, they assume he’s just a normal traveler on the road.
They see don’t Him as the Christ.
There’s another reason why they don’t recognize Jesus, that’s more of a spiritual condition; man always rejects Jesus.
This falls under the doctrine of Total Depravity.
These people are a great example of Total Depravity.
Total Depravity doesn’t mean everyone is running around as bad as they can be.
It doesn’t mean that they are little Hitlers.
Total Depravity says that man is fallen.
Man in his natural state, does not accept Jesus.
These disciples are great examples, because they are the best example.
They have the evidence.
They’ve been with Jesus.
They’ve heard Jesus.
They heard Jesus say he would lay down his life, and that in 3 days he would take it up again.
They aren’t ignorant.
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