[1]
Luke 4:16-17, 28-30 Good News Translation
16 Then Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on
the Sabbath, he went as usual to the synagogue. He stood up to read the
Scriptures 17 and was handed the book of the
prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it is written,
…
28 When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were filled with
anger. 29 They rose up, dragged Jesus out of town,
and took him to the top of the hill on which their town was built. They meant
to throw him over the cliff, 30 but he walked
through the middle of the crowd and went his way.
Ever since I was a
kid, this story has intrigued me. Here Christ preaches to His home town crowd
in the familiar old synagogue. What He says riles them up so much that they
grab Him, and the whole mob drags Him over to the edge of a cliff intending to
throw Him over. Standing momentarily immovable there on the edge of the cliff, He
simply starts walking right through the midst of the mob and away from them.
Suddenly those who
were clutching Him all lose their grip on Him. He disappears from their view,
although He is still right there. A ripple occurs in the mob as they temporarily
move aside to let Him pass—but they don’t see Him and cannot feel or sense Him.
They see someone enough to make way for him, but they don’t perceive that it is
He. He casually walks back though the village and doesn’t visit again until
their anger is forgotten, maybe never.
That reminds me of
Lot’s experience in Sodom, told in Genesis 19. All the depraved men in Sodom
were trying to beat down Lot’s door to get at two strangers they had seen enter
there. Suddenly the angels inside the house strike these perverts “blind.” But
the blindness is more than a lack of sight. They can’t even find the door that
they were trying to beat down immediately before. They apparently can’t even
feel the door. The fact that they were still trying to get at these strangers
indicates that they were seeing everything except their goal. If they had been
truly blind—as in unable to see anything—they would have been crying out in
terror.
Another occasion occurred
in Acts chapter 12. Four quaternions, or 16 guards had been assigned to keep
Peter in prison until he could be executed the following day. Their very lives
depended on his not escaping. An angel marches Peter past all of them
undetected. Evidently, they didn’t discover his absence earlier, or they would
have fled, or tried to fall on their swords as the jailor in Philippi attempted
to do—see Acts 16:27.
In my blog published
on January 22, 2022,[2] I told the story of Mrs.
Wangai who escaped death at the hands of the Mau Mau
freedom-fighters/terrorists in the decade of the 1950s because her captors
didn’t see her leave their clutches.
Apparently, God
still employs this selective blindness in modern times to benefit his children.
In Matthew 13:14 (GNT) it says the following: “They will look and look, but
never perceive.”
You are still
willing and able to strike Your children’s enemies with selective blindness, Lord,
to protect Your children. Thank you!
[2] http://wils-thoughts.blogspot.com/
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