“Then He opened their mind so as to understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:45).
Jesus had to open the mind of those disciples he met on the road to Emmaus; the uncomprehending mind is unaffected by truth; the intellect of the hearer may grasp saving knowledge while making no moral response to it in his heart. To know the Word is one thing; to see the Light in the Word is something else and requires an act of inward enlightenment that must be wrought by the Spirit.
Why do men reject the gospel and refuse to listen to the one speaking from heaven? Because God’s message is a moral pronouncement and men do not wish to be under the moral authority of anyone; they reject transcendence as a matter of course, preferring to be their own source of moral wisdom. For a Christian, this is what Jesus described as “hypocrisy”, a charge leveled repeatedly against the religious rulers of His day. The final test of what is moral, the ultimate arbiter of Christian ethics, is the Word of God.
Against that, we have the enemy, “…..the god of this world who has blinded the minds of the unfaithful so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4).
He does this by inducing believers to question the veracity and inspiration of the scriptures. When that happens a demonic inversion takes place; man judges the Word rather than the Word judging man; man determines what he will believe in the Word and what he will reject, always sitting above the Word and making it more amenable to him, rather than surrendering absolutely and becoming himself more amenable to the Word. Whole Churches conduct themselves on this basis, but their worship is a bit like spinning the wheels; making a noise but getting nowhere.
Strangely, those caught in this trap don’t give up their “faith” but cling to the tattered relic of their religion; this is rather like killing the tree and yet remaining in the orchard waiting for the fruit that never will come. Christian believers must know that any true understanding of the Word of God cannot be obtained from men but must come from the same Spirit who provided the original inspiration to the writers.
Leave a Reply