Selective Blindness

[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!

 

 

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[1] https://www.holyspiritcathparish.org/throwing-jesus-off-a-cliff/

[2] http://wils-thoughts.blogspot.com/ 

Dimensions and Trust

[1]

Proverbs 29:25 King James Version

²⁵ The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe.

 

While I was teaching at Ikizu in Tanzania, they held a camp meeting on campus. There were far too many people to use the large campus church for meetings. So, they stretched ropes between several trees and then covered an area with thatch grass to shield attenders from the equatorial sun. By this time, I understood Swahili well enough so that I could attend the meetings and understand what the presenters were saying. One was Bekele Haye, an Ethiopian who spoke in English because he didn’t speak Swahili, and his message was translated, so I heard it twice.

He told the people who wished they had been born white that that was a foolish wish. “I went out one day with a white missionary and worked in the fields all day. The next day, all of the white man’s skin peeled off, so he was in bed in great pain. I was out working in the fields again.” Then he went on and told the people that Africans had been Christians long before Europeans. They got the message of salvation from the Ethiopian whom Phillip baptized. “We should be missionaries in Europe and America, rather than they being missionaries to us. Christianity is really an African religion. We failed to carry it to the world, so the Europeans are doing our work.”

Another speaker was Mrs. Wangai. I have forgotten her first name and her maiden name. She was a Kikuyu from Kenya. She told the people about her experience as a teenager during the British control of Kenya. The Kikuyus are the largest tribe in Kenya. During the 1950s many people of the Kikuyu tribe started guerilla warfare against the English. They were called the Mau-Mau and were fighting for the freedom of their country. They also distrusted anyone who was a Christian because they saw them as being supporters of the colonial regime. To gain followers, a Mau-Mau group came into her village. They lined up all the people and then one-by-one demanded that they swear an oath, denouncing Christianity and pledging allegiance to the freedom fighters. This pledge often demanded sexual favors and drinking a strong native beer that had several opioids in it. Those few who refused were put into a hut with no windows and with guards at the door instructed to kill anyone who tried to escape.

She refused to take the oath and was sentenced to death. They bound her and put her into this prison hut to await her death in front of the whole village. She lay on the floor and prayed for deliverance. After a while her bonds dropped off of her, and she felt herself being lifted up and moved towards the wall away from the guards at the door. She told how a hole appeared in the wall and she was passed out through the hole. Looking back from the outside, she could see that there was no hole. A voice told her to flee into the bush and await the departure of the Mau-Mau from her village. She fled into the bush and hid for several days. When she returned about three weeks later, she found out that everyone in that hut had been executed. She went to the hut and examined it. There was no evidence that there had ever been a hole in the wall.

At the time, there was enough evidence of the truth of her story that I believe her. As I mentioned in a previous blog, if our three-dimensional universe is part of a higher dimensional space, then an angel—who lives in this space—could easily have picked her up in his space. The knots on her bonds would have disintegrated, as I mentioned in my blog. She could be moved slightly out of our universe and transferred past the wall. To her eyes, it would look like she was passing through a hole in the wall. After all, our eyes can only see in three dimensions. She later finished high school and married a Christian man who became a pastor.

Does my explanation change her story of the miracle of her survival? Does it lessen the miraculous nature of her experience? Not at all. We have absolutely no physical access to anything outside of our universe, of course. Does it support my spatial concepts? Maybe.

Needless to say, God fulfilled His promise that if she put her trust in the Lord, she would be safe.

Lord, help us to place our trust in You and keep it there.

 

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[1] https://civilianmilitaryintelligencegroup.com/5652/the-mau-mau-rebellion