What a Blind Man Sees...

In Scripture a Christian is called a "believer." Yet, before my conversion, I believed in God. I believed that Jesus was the Son of God, and I believed that He rose from the dead. But I was not a believer in the biblical sense. This is because a believer is someone who has trusted Jesus for his eternal salvation. I hadn’t taken that step of faith. A sky-diver can’t rightly be called a sky-diver until he takes a leap of faith out of the plane, and a sinner can't be called a believer until he entirely puts his faith in Jesus Christ, through the new birth.

An unbeliever is called an "unbeliever," not because he doesn’t believe in the existence of God, but because he lacks "saving" faith. He lives in what the Bible calls the "natural" world. He is like man who was born blind, who is reading a brail book called, Amazing Color! As he runs his fingers over the raised lettering, he whispers the words he is reading:

"The sky is a beautiful blue. Luscious green grass fills the landscape as far as the eye can see. Two color-filled gardens on each side of the grass area. On one side bright yellow flowers burst with wonderful color, and on the other side vivid red roses explode with amazing energy, each one cupped in a cradle of wonderfully intense green leaves. The recent refreshing rain has left drops on the plants sending streams of white light in different directions. A stunning rainbow, with its amazing seven colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, arches in all its glory across the massive blue heavens."

The blind man closes the book and thinks, "This makes no sense? I believe in science. I believe in logic and what can be proven, not in this thing called 'color.' I don’t believe it exists, and anyone who does, is a fool."

He is right. His world does lack any semblance of color, so what could you say to such a closed-minded man? You could tell him that color exists, no matter what he does or doesn't believe about it. Reality isn’t dictated by his belief. Then you could explain what color looks like. But how would explain "blue" or "red"? You can’t say that blue looks "like" anything because the blind man hasn’t anything in his mind to which he can compare it. What he needs is something you can’t give him. He needs light and that would take a miracle.

The Bible says that the unbeliever is blind. He is enclosed in his own "natural" world-view. He cannot see, and he will often mock any thought of another dimension: "But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14).

Every unbeliever is "alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart..." (Ephesians 4:18). And there's nothing you can do to help him to see, if he is not willing to be honest. He needs the "light":

"For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life" (Proverbs 6:23),

"In whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them" (2 Corinthians 4:4).

If he is prepared to look at the Ten Commandments with an honest heart, they will illuminate him to his need and help him to understand the light of the glorious gospel of Christ. Jesus is the One who said, "I am the light of the world: he that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life" (John 8:12). There's the miracle.