Selective Blindness

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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/ 

Bonds Fall From Prisoners

[1]

Acts 12:9-11 Good News Translation

⁹ Peter followed him out of the prison, not knowing, however, if what the angel was doing was real; he thought he was seeing a vision. ¹⁰ They passed by the first guard station and then the second, and came at last to the iron gate that opens into the city. The gate opened for them by itself, and they went out. They walked down a street, and suddenly the angel left Peter.

¹¹ Then Peter realized what had happened to him, and said, “Now I know that it is really true! The Lord sent his angel to rescue me from Herod's power and from everything the Jewish people expected to happen.”

 

You may not remember the first time you heard this story. I don’t. I encourage you to read it again in Acts 12.

Herod Agrippa, son of Herod the Great who slaughtered the babies in Bethlehem after Christ was born, was as conniving as his father. The Herods were descendants of Esau, not Jacob. So, they were not Jews. This made the extremely nationalistic Jews hate them. The Herods always felt insecure in their position as rulers over the Jews.

Agrippa sensed the hatred the Jews felt towards the followers of Christ, so he arrested James, the brother of John, and in a public execution he killed James. For once the Jews applauded his action. Being no dummy, he arrested Peter and planned a great festival to kill Peter. On the day of Peter’s execution, Agrippa sent his men to fetch Peter and bring him before the huge crowd gathered for the spectacle. They came back empty handed. The standard Roman penalty for losing a prisoner was death. Agrippa was disgraced, and for revenge he ended up killing four quaternions of guards—16 guards. This did not, of course, increase his favor in front of the Jews.

How did Peter escape? Was there magic involved? The Angel materialized in the inner dungeon where Peter was. Chains fell off of Peter, and he walked out of the prison. For an analogy consider a two-dimensional maze like the one above. The object is to draw a crooked line that enters the maze at the red arrow and exits the maze at the green arrow without crossing any of the black lines. However, if you were to cover the maze with a thin strip of transparent plastic, you could simply draw a straight line from the red arrow to the green arrow on the plastic and it would not touch any of the black lines. What just happened? Since you are three-dimensional, not two dimensional, you simply made a line above the paper. This line is out of the two dimensions of the paper—the black lines no longer existed. It was extremely close to the paper, but didn’t touch the paper except at the arrows.

If angels are in four-dimensional space, they could be as close to Peter—in the 4^th-dimension—as a thin sheet of transparent plastic, yet be totally undetectable by Peter and unrestricted by the prison walls and doors. The angel would simply slide Peter out of his three dimensions onto this miniscule thickness of the plastic sheet. He would not slide Peter’s bonds with him, so they would no longer be around his wrists, neck, and ankles, and they would fall to the floor. The bonds and walls and guards are now gone. The four guards in Peter’s cell with him might hear the chains fall and see Peter disappear, but they would be so shocked, they couldn’t respond immediately. Peter was simply there one instant and had totally disappeared the next. The other guards would be completely oblivious to Peter and the angel. Even Peter would be mystified: he “thought he was seeing a vision.” Peter follows the angel out onto the street, and suddenly he’s back in his own three-dimensions, and the angel has effectively disappeared.

I’ll let you fill in the details. How did you imagine this event happening? Again, this whole scenario as I have described it may be totally wrong. There may be no fourth dimension. We need to re-examine the whole concept of our existence. It may be that the angel drugged the guards into a deep sleep like we see in movies, but this would not explain how the bonds fell off or the locked doors opened. 

Thank You, Lord, that You have ways of providing for us that are totally beyond our ken.

 

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maze_simple.svg