Wholeness: Spiritual Eyes Must Be Keen

Seeing a larger world
The Great Physician seeks not only to heal lameness and leprosy, but also the whole person. Most significant is His operation on the inner eyes, enabling them to observe not only the world of sensory perception, but also the more essential though invisible world of the spirit.

Jesus speaks of this in the Sermon on the Mount:

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, you whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! --Matthew 6:22-23).

Eliminate the "evil eye"
Our Lord said this in a context of the use and misuse of money, drawing on the Jewish terminology of greed as 'the evil eye.' His description of the effect of the eye on the rest of the body certainly has a financial application. How you spend your money is determined by your perceptions--what you see is important and what is trivial.

But there is a broader application as well, and in fact it embraces all of life. You could use people's financial transactions as one indicator of their basic approach to life, as their outlook or worldview.

Spiritually myopic
It's our spiritual insight or blindness that directs how we live, what we do, how we treat other people. If your "eyes" are good, your whole being will be flooded with light. If, however, you are spiritually myopic, too short-sighted to see beyond the here and now, then you are engulfed in a darkness that is both profound and terrifying.

Paul puts it this way:

The natural man does not perceive the things of the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him. Neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things. --1 Corinthians 2:14-15a

Only half a universe
In other words, those not enlightened by the gospel to see the world as God sees it live in only half a universe, regarding only the things of the sensory world--what can be measured with the telescope and the transit and the microscope--as being real. All else beyond the empirical is at best an artificial, human construct.

It's as if such a person is a fish in the ocean with no conception of life above the water, or a lizard living beneath the rain forest canopy. How different the fish would see the world if it could jump above the surface if only for a moment! How different the lizard would view the jungle if only it could climb the tallest mahogany tree and poke its head past the highest leaves!

"The mind of Christ"
Paul says Christians have been granted that perception, not as an achievement of human endeavor, but as a gift from a gracious God. "Who can know the mind of God?" he asks, confidently expecting the answer, "No one." Then he adds, "But we have the mind of Christ." And that makes all of the difference.

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Copyright c2006 Steve Singleton

Steve Singleton has written and edited several books and numerous articles. He has been an editor, reporter, and public relations consultant. He has taught college-level Greek, Bible, and religious studies courses and has taught seminars in 11 states and the Caribbean.

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