Mk.8:11-27 The Blindness of Little Faith

	Our text this morning appears at first to be a strange anomaly among Jesus’ miracles.

22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23 He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man's eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, "Do you see anything?"  24 He looked up and said, "I see people; they look like trees walking around." 25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man's eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus sent him home, saying, "Don't go into the village."  

What is this?  Jesus needs a second try?  Every other miracle Jesus does is complete and instantaneous, and we never see Jesus fail at a miracle attempt.  What’s happening here?  I’ve told you many times that when Jesus healed. He healed instantly and totally.  So what about this?  Is Jesus struggling to get this guy healed?  Is Jesus’ healing power waning?  Is Jesus in a slump?  What kind of a half-baked miracle is this?  

Most people, when they first look at this miracle, are just like the guy in v.24.  We see what’s happening but can’t make sense of it.  But once I show you the context, I trust you will be like the guy in v.25 and will see everything clearly.

Introduction: Only God Opens Eyes

There is a fascinating statement in Jn.9:32 -  "Since the beginning of time nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind.”  At first that sounds like an overstatement, but as you read through the OT you find it’s true.  In the OT there are a lot of amazing signs and wonders and miracles.  But there is one miracle you never see in the OT – the giving of sight to the blind.  It never happens.  The giving of sight to the blind is mentioned, however, about a half a dozen times in the OT.  It never actually happens, but it’s mentioned – and always as something only God can do, and as something that someday He will do.

Ex.4:11 

The LORD said to [Moses], "Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD?

Ps.146:8 

the LORD gives sight to the blind

Isaiah 29:18 

In that day…out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see.

Isaiah 35:5 

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened 

Isaiah 42:6,7 

"I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness…I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind.

It’s promised, but it never actually happens in the OT.  Anyone care to guess, of all the different kinds of miracles Jesus performed, which miracle He did most often?  It was giving sight to the blind.  That was Jesus’ favorite kind of miracle.  John 1 says Jesus came into this world as the light, to bring spiritual perception and understanding.  

Every one of us is born into this world spiritually blind.  In this life we cannot perceive spiritual things.  The only way we can know about them is if they are revealed and we believe that revelation.  And to illustrate that, God uses the figures of blindness, sight, darkness and light.  We very often think in different terms.  We say the spiritual world is invisible.  There is a difference.  If we think of the spiritual world as being invisible, that makes it seems like it’s imaginary.  A better way to think about the spiritual realm is as a very real, visible world that we are traveling through at night.  When you travel down a road at night, you can’t see anything beyond the shoulder, but you don’t have any doubt that there are very real things on the side of the road.  Don’t think of the spiritual realm as being invisible.  Think of it as being as real as anything else, but you are passing through it on a road at night.  And God has given you a Book that tells you exactly what is off the side of the road.  If you life your life as if the edges of the road are all the reality that exists, you will waste your life, you will miss the glorious things that you can be involved in on the one side of the road, and you will be vulnerable to the hideous dangers lurking on the other side.  Soon it will no longer be night.  The sun will come up, and you will see everything clearly.  Don’t live in a way now that you will regret then.

Last week we focused on…                   

The Blindness of Unbelief

The Pharisees and Sadducees come to Jesus demanding a sign from heaven.  Jesus has already done thousands of miracles.  
Healed the sick, 
•	Raised the dead, 
•	Stilled the storm, 
•	Commanded the creation, 
•	Cast out demons, 
•	Created bread, fish and wine, 
•	Read minds and hearts – all at will and without a single instance of failure or even difficulty.

But that’s not enough. They claim they need just a little bit more evidence.  That’s the blindness of unbelief.  When deep down in a person’s heart he is unwilling to believe, no amount of evidence will convince him.  Jesus never responds favorably to unbelief.  

People who are into constantly seeking miracles pass themselves off as spiritual, but actually the opposite is true.  They are not spiritual.  They are sensual – dominated by the physical senses.  These people can only see God in the dramatic (which means they rarely see God, because no matter how great something is, if it happens every day, it loses its dramatic appeal very quickly).  If you can only see God in the unusual, you will usually not see God.

The church today needs to give up sign seeking.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t pray for miracles.  Miracles are wonderful and there is nothing wrong with asking for them, but we don’t need signs.  We have our signs – the miracles of Christ, His death and resurrection.  That’s all we need to prove the truth of our faith.  It’s not wrong to ask God for a miracle, but it is wrong to demand a miracle for the purpose of proving God’s power.  It is arrogant to demand that God prove Himself in some other way beyond what He has already done.

12 Jesus then left them and went away

What a tragic statement, Jesus turning His back and sailing away.  It’s a horrifying thought, but it happens.  There comes a time, after someone has rejected enough times, when Christ turns away, and you are given no more chances.  Don’t close your eyes to the truth, because after a while God may seal them shut, and you will be truly blind.  But that’s not the only kind of blindness we need to watch out for.
The Blindness of Little Faith

There is another kind that’s much more of a threat to us.  My guess is there are very few if any in this room right now with the blindness of hardened unbelief.  All of us who are believers have eyes to see.  But there is another kind of blindness that attacks those who can see.  The blindness of unbelief is without remedy – because those people, in their refusal to believe, don’t have eyes to see.  

The blindness of little faith is different.  They have eyes to see, but still can’t understand.  That was the problem with the disciples.  Last week we saw Jesus hook up the jumper cables to the disciples’ minds and try to get them jump started into thinking about eternal things.  He warns them to watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.  But they were so focused on the physical that they were oblivious to what Jesus was trying to do.

16 They discussed this with one another and said, "It is because we have no bread."
That is not a good translation.  Literally it says, “They discussed with one another the fact that they had no bread.”

I always get a kick out of these guys having their little discussions while Jesus is standing right there.  I don’t know if Jesus made His comment about the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod and they just stood there silently for a moment and then said, “Excuse us for a moment” and then huddled together a few yards away… - or if they just talk this over right in front of Jesus.  But they have their discussion – trying to make heads or tails out of what Jesus just said.  It shouldn’t have been that hard.  Once before Jesus had used this same figure of speech:

Luke 12:1

"Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

He’s explained this to them before.  But they don’t seem to remember.  So they have their discussion group.  This might have been the first one of those Bible studies where 12 ignorant guys sit around looking at Jesus’ words, each one saying, “Well, here’s what it means to me…”  We don’t know what all they said, but just from our knowledge of human nature and of these men, I’d say it’s a safe guess that a big part of it was over whose fault this was.  Someone was in charge of packing food for a trip.  Can you imagine this discussion?  They get two thirds of the way across the lake and all of the sudden…
“Oh no – the food!”
“We don’t have any food?”
“That whole deal with the Pharisees and Sadducees had me so flustered, and then Jesus rushed us into the boat…
“…and James wasn’t doing his job with the rigging, so I had to do that…
And Nathaniel kept distracting me with questions…” 
“You blockhead – how could you forget the food?  Don’t blame it on us…”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll have to go back.”
“We’re not going back – Didn’t you see what happened with those Pharisees?  We could get killed.”

Whatever the discussion, one thing we know is that it was completely focused on bread.  Jesus says, “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod,” and they interpret that to mean, “I’m upset with you for forgetting the food.”  How do they get that?  These guys really, really need to take a class on hermeneutics.  How could they be that far off in interpreting Jesus’ words?  

The answer is, when your mind is set on earthly, fleshy things, it disables your ability to properly interpret and respond to spiritual things.  If you come to church on Sunday morning completely preoccupied with the constant problems you’re having with your car (or husband or lower back or budget).  You might hear the Word of God preached, and eternal truths proclaimed, and you won’t be able to apply them too much other than those inane circumstances that are on your mind.  I might be up here preaching, “The omnipotent Lord Jesus Christ, in His mighty power can do all things!”  The person on your right is thinking about the souls of lost loved ones being saved and wonderfully transformed.  The person on your left is thinking about the new heavens and new earth and the glories of the kingdom.  And the best you can do is think, “God, if you’re so powerful, please help me figure out why my e-mail program keep crashing.”  When all your attention is focused on the unimportant, you become oblivious to what’s eternally important.  This is another reason why felt-need preaching is so counterproductive.  It just reinforces the lowly, temporal perspectives that people come in with.

So Jesus begins to sound frustrated with these guys.  Jesus had such an acute sense of the eternal and the brevity of life, and the potential for impact on the Kingdom, and so it pained Him to see time wasted on the unimportant.

Misunderstanding = A Hard Heart
(Voluntary Blindness)

17 Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: "Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened?

At this point in Matthew’s account Jesus says to the disciples: You of little faith.  The Pharisees and Sadducees can’t grasp the truth because they are blinded by their unbelief.  The disciples can’t because they are blinded by their hard hearts and little faith.  

How could they spend so much time with Jesus and still be that dense?  It may be precisely because of the time spent with Jesus.  We can become over-familiar with the truth.  If you are repeatedly exposed to the truth again and again, and you never take the time to reflect on it, and you never take the time to act on it, you will actually become blind to it.  As they say, use it or lose it.  That is a biblical concept.  Jesus said whoever has will be given more, and he will have in abundance, but whoever does not have, even what he does have will be taken away from him.  (Mt.13:12)  So, just as we saw with the walking on the water, Matthew points out their little faith.  Mark points out their hard heartedness. (Mk.6:51-52).  

Now, months later, Jesus feeds another multitude and still the disciples are in a fog, because their hearts are hard against the truth.

18 Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?

They know the truth.  And He’s given them the ability to perceive it.  But they still can’t seem to.  Jesus is quoting from Jer.5.  Jer.5 is a chapter about the disaster that comes on Israel because of godless leadership.  

30 "A horrible and shocking thing has happened in the land: 

3 things:
1.	31 The prophets prophesy lies

The men who are entrusted with the task of passing on God’s Word to the people are not accurately communicating God’s Word.  They are telling people God said things He didn’t say.  They are substituting their own ideas and telling the people “Thus saith the Lord.”  It is a very, very serious sin to stand as a spokesman for God and tell people things that aren’t true or to pass off your own ideas as God’s Word. 

2.	The priests rule by their own authority

The authority of a spiritual leader comes only from what God has given.  The moment a spiritual leader begins to add things to God’s Word and expand his authority in that way, he has just given up whatever true authority he had.  So the leaders are replacing God’s Words with their own, and operating on human authority.   

Then, the worst part of all…

3.	And my people love it this way. 

No teacher can make himself widely heard.  False teachers flourish and have influence because the people want to gather around themselves teachers who will tell them what their itching ears want to hear.  And then, in v.20 comes a call for discernment (and this is the part Jesus quotes):

"Announce this to the house of Jacob and proclaim it in Judah:  21 Hear this,  you foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear:  22 Should you not fear me?" declares the LORD. "Should you not tremble in my presence?  

Jesus’ simple question to the disciples is full of meaning.  By quoting Jer.5 He is making a strong point.  If the disciples gave this any careful thought they would realize the significance of what Jesus is saying here.  He’s recalling a time when people who should be able to know better and should be able to see are instead choosing blind men as their leaders.  And the result was devastating judgment on everyone.  

Think of the context.  Jesus had just sharply rebuked the spiritual leaders of Israel, and then He makes this remark to the disciples from Jer.5.  He’s warning them: Don’t be like the people of Jeremiah’s day.  You have spiritual eyes – use them.  And that’s part of the reason why He uses the imagery of yeast.  Yeast, in Scripture, represents influence.- influence that seems small and barely visible, but that eventually become pervasive.  When the Israelites left Egypt, there were to take no yeast.  That’s why the Passover is celebrated with unleavened bread.  They way they made their bread rise was by taking a little piece of starter from the last loaf and mixing it in with the new lump of dough.  The yeast in that little bit of starter would eventually pervade the whole lump and make it rise.  So yeast came to represent a tie to the past.  In fact, mothers would sometimes give their daughters a piece of starter to take home when they got married to represent her heritage.  So when God told them not to bring any yeast from Egypt, He was telling them that He didn’t want them to bring any lingering influence from Egypt. He wanted a clean break.

So the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees is not only their teaching, but the subtle, pervasive influence of their teaching.  Stay away from the influence of hardened unbelief.  Your heart is like a lump of dough, and that influence is like yeast.  You take in a little bit, and it seems harmless enough, but eventually it worms its way all through your heart.

 	Jesus wants them to think through these things – to get their minds on a spiritual mindset – and off the unimportant things.  They have eyes to see, but they aren’t using them.  They are still failing to understand.  

The reason Jesus warns them about the influence of the Pharisees is because they are doing exactly what the Pharisees were doing – failing to believe even in the face of tremendous evidence.  Then in v.19 Jesus helps them along.  

And don't you remember? 19 When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many kophinous (kofi,nouj) of pieces did you pick up?" "Twelve," they replied. 20 "And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many spouridon (spuri,dwn) of pieces did you pick up?" They answered, "Seven." 21 He said to them, "Do you still not understand?"

(BTW, if the liberals want to say there was only one feeding event, what are they going to do with this section?  Jesus Himself referred to two separate events, and reported all the right numbers and referred to the right kinds of baskets).  Jesus calls to their attention the two feeding miracles.  He gives them a pop quiz, and they ace the first two questions.  How many lunch pails were left over after the first feeding?  12 How many garbage can-sized loads were left over after the second feeding?  7 The next question Jesus leaves unsaid: How many boatloads of bread do you think I’m capable of creating?  And I try to give you an important lesson about false teachers and spiritual blindness and you think I’m worried about a cracker for lunch?
	
Mt.16:11-12

How is it you don't understand that I was not talking to you about bread? 

They are blind.
The Cure for Blindness

But there is a cure for spiritual blindness.

22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him.

Nothing elaborate – just a quick, simple touch, fix his eyes and we will be on our way.  Well, Jesus decides when something will be quick and simple and when it will be elaborate.

23 He took the blind man by the hand

That is a very personal thing to do.  It’s one thing to shake someone’s hand, but for a man to take another man’s hand and keep holding it is personal.  You can communicate a tremendous amount just by they way you hold someone’s hand, especially to a blind person.  When someone is blind, the portion of his brain that would normally be devoted to vision is devoted to interpreting sound and touch.  Jesus always communicated with people.  Last time He healed a deaf man, so He used sign language.  This time He communicates love to a blind man through touch and led him outside the village.  “Rock.  OK, good, step over.  OK now this way.  Here we go.  Good.”  And Jesus was just leading this blind man along – holding his hand.  

My first day at Moody Bible Institute they wanted us to get to know our sister floor, so we did an activity together – a trust walk.  So they blindfolded us and assigned one of the gals on the sister floor to lead us through downtown Chicago to the beach.  The girl who was assigned to me turned out to have exceptionally poor communication skills.  Every sentence she said started with the word, “Sorry.”  “Oh – sorry, I forgot to tell you about the curb.”  “Sorry about that sign post – I wasn’t paying attention.”  “Oh – sorry about your head, I thought you would fit under that.”  I was like one of the bruised and bleeding Pharisees by the time we got to the beach.   I kept thinking about Mt.15:14 where it talks about blind guides.  I thought of that when I read this.  

I’m sure Jesus was a much better guide.  (It’s really a striking image if you think about it.  That would make a good painting – wouldn’t it?  What a metaphor of the Christian life.)  When he had spit on the man's eyes and put his hands on him.  This is more communication.  Jesus enters into this man’s thought life.  It sounds disgusting to us, but in that time saliva was connected, in people’s minds, with healing.  So was the laying on of hands.  They didn’t know about germs, and so this isn’t something that would have been interpreted as something gross or unsanitary.   Anyone would take note if this happened to them, but blind people are especially attuned to touch.  

Jesus now had this man’s undivided attention.

Jesus asked, "Do you see anything?" 24 He looked up and said, "I see.  Just like that, his vision is restored.  I don’t know exactly what Jesus did – reattached his optic nerve, repaired some brain cells, recreated a cornea, removed cataracts.  But however He did it, Jesus has just performed a miracle that no miracle worker had ever performed – not Moses, not Elijah, not even Elisha. Jesus just gave this man eyes to see – just like He had done spiritually for the disciples when He gave them eyes to see.

 	But there is a problem.  I see people; they look like trees walking around".  Again, like the disciples, he has eyes to see, but they don’t seem to be doing him much good.  Why the partial miracle?  

25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man's eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 

Every single commentary I read makes some effort to explain why this guy’s vision is so blurry after Jesus’ first attempt.  But take a careful look at the text.  Do you see anything there about blurriness?  It doesn’t say that he thought men looked like trees because they were blurry.  And not only does it not say that, but I would suggest that it’s very unlikely.  In fact, it strikes me as kind of a silly explanation. I say that because I can make my eyes go out of focus, and when I do that, and look at men walking around, they don’t look any more like trees than when I see them in focus.  No amount of blurriness makes a man look like a tree.  Generally speaking, trees are very tall.  They are relatively narrow at the trunk, and then they have expansive branches on top that can be anywhere between 5’ across to 30 or more.  Men, on the other hand, are rarely much over 6’ and just have a little round ball on the top – rarely more than 6” wide.  

Visual Agnosia

Oliver Sacks is a scientist who studies neurology and writes books about brain disorders.  (He’s the author of the book “Awakenings”).  He wrote another book entitled, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which is a book about a condition known as “visual agnosia.”  That’s a fascinating term in itself.  gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, and the “a” at the beginning negates it.  So it literally means “inability to understand.”  

Sacks tells the story of Virgil Adamson, who after being blind from the time he was a young child, regained his sight in 1991 after 45 years of blindness.  It’s an amazing story.  He had surgery to have cataracts removed, and after some recovery time, the moment came for them to take off the bandages. The doctor and Virgil’s fiancé were in the room, and he opened his eyes.  And he just had a blank stare.  He looked like he was still blind.  There was no indication that he could see anything.  Then, after a long silence, the doctor finally said, “Well?”  Then his face lit up and he realized he was seeing.  Up to that point he had no idea that the sensation he was experiencing was sight.  But when the chaos of colors and shapes in front of him said, “Well,” he realized, “I’m looking at the doctor.” 

You would think a man who had been blind for 45 years and then regained his sight would be ecstatic with joy.  That wasn’t the case.  Virgil Adamson had a good life as a blind man, but was miserable after receiving his sight.  It ruined his life and brought him to the brink of suicide.  
He had visual agnosia – he could see fine, but he couldn’t understand what he was seeing.  He couldn’t understand movement, space, distance, color, shape, perspective.  He couldn’t imagine how his dog when viewed from the side was the same as the one viewed straight on.  It made no sense to him.  Stairs were just a confused jumble of crisscrossed lines.  He couldn’t understand space.  Blind people don’t think in terms of space, because the only way the human mind can understand the concept of space is through sight and experience.  (You see something, and walk over to it, see something and walk over to it, etc.)  Sighted people think in terms of space and distance.  Blind people think in terms of time (it takes a certain amount of time to get to the door, etc.)  They can’t understand distance.  In fact, one study of people who lived their whole lives in a rain forest and never saw an open space demonstrated that.  They couldn’t understand the idea of something being far away.  They took some of them to a place where you could see mountains off in the distance, and they would reach out to try to touch the mountains from were they were standing.  He had no idea about perspective either.  He would stand in the middle of the street and see a car (of course he had no idea what it was).  And it would keep getting larger and larger, and he had no idea that that was because it was approaching him.  That’s not something you can learn in an afternoon.  Your brain has to memorize thousands of different things.  That’s why a newborn won’t flinch if it sees something rushing toward its face.  It sees it, but doesn’t know how to interpret the fact that it keeps getting bigger.

Another thing he couldn’t do is look at a bunch of parts as a whole.  He could look at your eye, and then your mouth and your nose, but his mind had no ability to put it all together and understand that it comprised a face.  And so he couldn’t learn to read, because it was all just individual letters.  His eyes couldn’t flow in sequence from one thing to the next, so he couldn’t do something as simple as count fingers.  To look at one thing, then stop, focus, interpret, then shift, stop, focus, shift, stop, focus, etc. was too hard.  It took so much concentration that he couldn’t do that and count at the same time.  

The fascinating thing they have discovered about people with visual agnosia is that they do not see blurry – they see clearly like you, but can’t understand.  Sacks tells of one visual agnosia patient who could see clearly enough to copy intricate details of a bird from a picture onto a piece of paper, but then afterward, when asked what it was, guessed that it was a tree trunk.  It’s not that the bird was similar to the tree in the way it looked.  His mind just couldn’t interpret what it was seeing.  The book was full of examples of that – like the title of the book: “The man who mistook his wife for a hat.”  He saw his wife as clear as day, and thought she was a hat.  

If you think about it, vision isn’t something that takes place in the eyes.  They eyes are required, but vision is a function of the mind.  When you look at Chinese sentence and a Chinese person looks at the same sentence, what comes in through your eyes is exactly the same.  You both see the same marks on the paper.  But there is a tremendous difference in what you see.  He sees words you see random lines.  Virgil Adamson’s life was ruined when he received his sight.  It was unbearable.  It took him a whole month of practice just to learn how to open a door while his eyes were open.  So the temptation for him was to just close his eyes.

 	When you are blind, the portion of your brain that is normally devoted to vision is used for touch and hearing.  They interpret their whole world in those terms, and so it’s extremely difficult to retrain the brain.  It would be like if you were training yourself to interpret the world through touch.   Think how tempting it would be when you couldn’t figure out what something was to just open your eyes.  For Virgil Adamson that’s how tempting it was to just close his eyes and feel something.  He would get 2 minutes into eating a meal, and finally just have to close his eyes to rest him mind.  

The ability to see without the ability to understand is a curse.  It’s interesting to me that Jesus led this guy out of town.  I wondered why Jesus did that.  At first I just assumed the same thing everyone assumes – He wanted this to be private.  The problem with that is it wasn’t private at all.  What does the guy see when Jesus heals him?  He sees men walking around.  (He thought they were trees at first, until he saw them walking, but they were men.)  So they weren’t alone.  People were there.  

So why did Jesus take him out there?  We don’t know, because the Bible doesn’t say.  But let me read you something interesting:  In the book there is an account of a time when Virgil Adamson was in a grocery store.  He sees the shelves, and fruit cans, and people, and isles, and carts.  And finally it got to be so much sensory overload he got scared.  Everything ran together, and he had to get out of the store and close his eyes for a bit to recover.  Then it says this: “he enjoyed uncluttered views of green hills and grass.  Especially after the overfull over-rich visual spectacles of shops.”  It seems to me that there is just as much to see out in the country as in town.  But for some reason it was much more soothing for him to be out in the country.  It struck me when I read that, that Jesus took this man by the hand and let him out of the village before stealing his eyes and leaving him with visual agnosia.  

Adamson’s story is a sad one.  He eventually went blind again, but it wasn’t because anything was wrong with his eyes.  What happened was the sensory overload was just too much and he mind just shut it off – and he went totally blind again.  They tested his eyes and found they were working just fine.  Light was coming in, signals were going from the optic nerve, but his brain was just saying, “I refuse to pay attention.”  His eyes sent signals to the brain, and his brain just ignored them.   (Actually it happened in stages.  First his mind shut off everything but colors, so he could see colors but no lines or boundaries.  But finally that was too much too, and his mind just went black.)

This man saw men and thought trees not because of a focus problem, but because he had visual agnosia.  He didn’t know how to interpret what he was seeing.  It’s not a two-stage miracle, or two halves of a miracle.  

It’s two full-blown, complete miracles:
1.	The miracle of restoring sight
2.	The miracle of giving understanding

Usually when Jesus healed a blind person He just did both simultaneously, but can you see why He did it separately here?  The Pharisees’ and Sadducees’ problem was blindness.  The disciples’ problem was visual agnosia.  Both problems require Christ’s touch. Vision doesn’t do any good to see if you can’t understand.  That’s why Scripture so often warns us against having eyes but failing to see.  

The Disciples See and Understand

27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, "Who do people say I am?"  
28 They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." 29 "But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "You are the Christ." 

Matt 16:16-21

Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."  17 Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 

Ever wondered why Jesus throws in that comment about that being revealed from the Father and not by man?  Now that we have studied this whole section, it becomes clear.  Go way back to the feeding of the 5000.  Jesus does that miracle, and the disciples are unable to interpret it because of little faith and hard hearts.  The crowd is completely blind.  

Then He feeds the 4000, the Pharisees and Sadducees are completely blind to what happened, and once again the disciples are blind as well.  But you don’t get the feeling from the text that they are in the same category as the Pharisees and Sadducees, even though Jesus rebukes them for their hard hearts and lack of faith.  However they do seem very similar – they don’t understand what Jesus has done or who He is.  Both seem to be blind, but in different ways.  The Pharisees have no eyes, and the disciples have eyes but they suffer from spiritual agnosia.  Either way, they can’t seem to comprehend who Jesus is.  Then, suddenly, out of the blue they are confessing confidently that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  What happened in between?  The event when Jesus healed the blind man twice.  

Jesus teaches the fact that both the ability to see and the ability to understand come from God.  That’s why Jesus said, “This understanding you now have didn’t come from man.  It came from God.”  Spiritual understanding is a miracle of God.  There are probably few if any who are here today who are completely blind spiritually.  But every one of us suffers to some degree from spiritual agnosia.  We all struggle to understand at some point.  Spiritual agnosia is dangerous.  If you keep taking in the light without correctly interpreting it, your spirit will eventually do what Virgil Adamson’s brain did – shut itself off from the light.  And the only solution to that is divine intervention.  It does require a willingness to accept the truth on our side, but apart from a work of God, spiritual understanding is impossible.  That’s why it’s so important not to allow the vision you do have to go bad.  We weep over the spiritual blindness of unbelief all around us.  But while we do that, let us beware of the blindness of spiritual agnosia.  

The causes are: 
1.	Hard heart
2.	Little faith

And only a miracle can cure it.

BENEDICTION:

Eph 1:17-20

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. 18 I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe.