A while back I had to go to a new eye doctor. Because of so many years of wondering whether or not I have glaucoma, my optician decided to send me to the place in town with the most high-tech equipment and eye doctors who specialize in glaucoma. He sent me to Southeast Eye Specialists. Wow! Talk about a set up! They had some cool gadgets, I must say.
While waiting in the exam room for the smartly dressed, highly intelligent Dr. McDaniel to greet me, I did what any bored, adult male would do…I started playing with the equipment.
In the process of flipping levers and turning dials on very expensive stuff, I began to have a thought (which must imply that I was not thinking when I was playing with things that I couldn’t afford). With all the different prescriptions for glasses, and all the different lenses one could look through, how could anyone say for sure that what we see when we look at things is exactly the way it really is? Just look at all of those dials!
Some people would say this is the reason for believing that everything is relative. You know, they get all philosophical-like and say, “There’s no such thing as right and wrong,” or, “Perception is reality.” The only problem is that what we think we see may not be what is actually there, but what is actually there IS there, whether we see it for what it is, or not. Just like the chart on the wall with the jumbled letters that start big on top, then get smaller as they go down, we can call the letter “e” an “a” or a “c,” but it is still an “e“.
We may think what we see is correct, but that doesn’t change reality.
The only way we can know for sure if we are seeing things correctly is to go to a doctor of optometry and let him evaluate our sight. He is qualified to turn the knobs and do the tests. He knows what the letters on the wall really are. He can be objective. Only a fool would go into his exam room and argue with him over the “rightness” or “wrongness” of his letter chart. Maybe it was those type of people that God had in mind when he wrote the following verse:
- Acts 28:27 For the heart of this people is stubborn, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.
Some people insist that they can be the judge of what is right and wrong. Some people are so convinced of their own understanding of things that they will attempt to belittle other’s opinions and claim that what they see has to be incorrect, especially if it is any different. How sad!
You see, all of us are born with faulty eyes that want to see things in the most favorable way, like with “rose colored” lenses. The only problem is that only God knows exactly what is on the wall. And what is cool is that each one of us is different, so we may need one kind of lens, while someone else may need another.
God, our heavenly doctor, wants us to see the Truth for what He is; not through faulty eyes, but ones He has healed.
But the thing that stood out this time as I read through the verse was that when given the opportunity, Philip didn’t ask the eunuch to flip over to another passage; he began right there in Isaiah 53 and began to share Jesus.
How often have you heard it proclaimed, especially by athletes and motivational speakers, “I can do all things through Christ”? I’m sure you’ve probably seen Philippians 4:13 written on the sleeves and foreheads of runners; tacked on the end of messages to struggling college students; or heard from friends before you accepted that challenging new position. For the most part, Philippians 4:13 has been used as a tool to soothe our fears of failure and encourage us to greatness, because, after all, “we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.”
