Blind Eyes and Deaf Ears

There are certain things about the character of God that the unregenerate person simply can't see. I mean, have you ever wondered in the midst of your enjoyment of the beauty of Christ, why your unbelieving friends seem to be so indifferent toward that which is the most important, precious thing in all of your life? Well, I know I've wondered that, and perhaps you have as well.

Why would my friend or family member pass up the free gift of eternal life with the God of the universe? Welcome to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Lee Webb, and today we continue our look at the hard sayings of the prophets. One of those hard sayings is found in the book of Isaiah, where God sends the prophet to preach to people who don't have eyes to see and ears to hear the message. And why are the people spiritually blind and deaf to begin with? Here's Dr. R.C.

Sproul. As we continue now with our study of the hard sayings, I want to go back again to the prophet Isaiah and look at one of the difficult sayings that comes from his writings. And I want to turn your attention to the sixth chapter of Isaiah, where we have the record of Isaiah's call. Now, you may be thinking, oh no, don't tell me that R.C. is going to give us another lecture on Isaiah chapter 6, where we have the record of his vision in which he sees the presence of God on his throne surrounded by the heavenly angels, the seraphim, who are singing the three times holy, holy, holy, holy.

We've looked at that. We've had a whole series of lectures on the holiness of God, and certainly Isaiah 6 is one of my favorite passages in all of the Bible. But today I want to focus our attention on the words that come subsequent to this vision that Isaiah has of the holiness of God.

We remember Isaiah's initial response to this vision, where he curses himself saying, woe is me, I'm a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the king, and so on. And then we remember how God instructs the angel to go to the altar and bring a live coal from the altar and cleanse Isaiah's mouth. And after that, God then speaks and says, whom shall we send, and who will go for us? And it's at that point that Isaiah volunteers for ministry.

This is the occasion of his call to the office of profit. This is the moment in time when Isaiah is set apart by God, consecrated to this sacred task, and is anointed spiritually for this mission. When God says, whom will I send, who will go for us? Isaiah answers by saying, here am I, send me. Now the moment that Isaiah volunteers for this mission of representing God as God's spokesman, now God delivers to Isaiah a hard saying. Let's look at that hard saying that God makes. He says to Isaiah, go and tell this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand.

Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes. Lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and return and be healed. What an enormous burden God places upon Isaiah. He sends Isaiah to a people who are rebellious, who are obstinate, and who have no inclination whatsoever to turn themselves to the things of God, or to delight in the Word of God. And so God sends Isaiah not to open their eyes, but to shut their eyes. Not to open their ears, but to close their ears.

Go and make the heart of this people fat. Now what are we to make of this? We usually think of the mission of the preacher as a mission designed for spiritual renewal and spiritual awakening. But here Isaiah is being sent not to awaken people, but to put them into a stupor, stupor, a torpid state by which they will not be awakened to the things of God.

How strange indeed is this. Well before I comment further on this experience in Isaiah, let me turn quickly and briefly to the New Testament where we hear a similar type of message. Here we connect a hard saying of the prophet, the prophet Isaiah in this case, with a hard saying that comes to us from the lips of Jesus Himself. If we go to the thirteenth to the thirteenth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, we read at the beginning of this chapter Jesus' parable of the sower. You remember the story of the sower. But we're not looking at that parable as such, but rather at the end of the parable in verse 8 of chapter 13, the last concluding portion of this parable of the sower where some of the seed fell upon the good earth and some on stony places and so on, verse 8 reads, but others fell on good ground and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. And then Jesus says, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

There's a kind of particularizing here, a particular delineation. When Jesus said, He who has ears to hear, let him hear, He suggests that there are those who don't have ears to hear. And those who do not have ears to hear, our Lord does not invite or command them to hear. Now that provokes a question. It provokes a question with us. It provokes a question as soon as we hear it, and it certainly provoked a question in those who heard Jesus make that statement originally. In verse 10, we read this, And the disciples came and said to Him, Why do you speak to them in parables? In parables. Now, how would you answer that question? Why did Jesus speak in parables?

What's the normal common assumption that we make in trying to answer that question? Well, we say, well, why does any speaker use illustrations? He uses illustrations to clarify his message, to make it easier for people to understand what he's trying to communicate. And the obvious assumption we have about these stories that Jesus throws alongside His teaching, that's what a parable is, parabole, which means to hurl or throw something alongside. Jesus is teaching some truth, and then He throws in these little stories drawn from human experience that we call parables, and we just assume that their purpose is illustrative, that is, to make plain, difficult notions or ideas. And so when the disciples say, Why do you speak to them in parables? We would expect Jesus to say, I speak in parables, so that you can have an easy way to understand My teaching. But that's not what He says.

Well, listen to His answer. Verse 11 of chapter 13 of Matthew, He answered and said to them, Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance.

But whoever does not have, even what he has, will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which he says, Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive. For the hearts of this people have grown dull, their ears are hard of hearing, their eyes have been closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, so that I should heal them. And now Jesus, after finishing this quotation from Isaiah, adds, But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For assuredly I say to you, that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it.

And to hear what you hear, and did not hear it. This is an amazing teaching from our Lord. He answers the question, Why do you teach in parables? By saying, the parable enlightens, illustrates, illumines, elucidates, clarifies the truth of what I am teaching, for those to whom it has been given to understand. That is, to my elect, whom God has given to me, whom God has given ears to hear, and eyes to see, I speak to them in parables, because it has been given to them to understand these spiritual things.

How many times does the Bible say that there are certain spiritual truths that can only be discerned spiritually? And it is only through the persistence of the Holy Spirit as the supreme illuminator that certain truths are understood. We remember again Peter's Caesarea Philippi confession when Jesus said to him, Who do you say that I am? And he said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Peter said, Blessed thou, Simon bar Jonah, flesh and blood hath not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. Now that's a hard saying, because it's tied to the most hard saying of all, the saying of the doctrine of election, that God does give to some a special grace by which He changes the disposition of their hearts. He gives us ears to hear and eyes to behold what naturally we would not see or would not hear. Again, we remember Jesus speaking to Nicodemus when He said to Nicodemus, Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God, that there are certain things about the character of God that the unregenerate person simply can't see.

He doesn't get it. And have you ever wondered in the midst of your enjoyment of the beauty and the sweetness of Christ why your unbelieving friends seem to be so indifferent or even hostile toward that which is the most important, meaningful, precious thing in all of your life? I got a letter from a dear friend, John MacArthur, that many of you also listen to on the radio. And in that letter, he told me personally of a lengthy conversation he had with one of the most famous people in the media in America, and I won't mention the man's name. This man had been critical of Dr. MacArthur for some of the theological stance that he had taken, and the man didn't understand it. And so he came and met with John, and they had a long conversation. And what came out of this conversation was this man, after listening to John, said, I never understood that before. He didn't grasp the fundamental message of the New Testament, but now in this conversation his eyes seem to be open to it.

And that's an exciting thing and a marvelous thing, but the world is filled with people who don't understand it, and they don't see it. They don't hear it. They can sit in church on Sunday morning and hear it preached week after week after week and not get it. I remember once doing an evangelism call at a home where there were two young ladies there, and the one was openly hostile to Christianity, and I was trying to go through the Scriptures with her and explain the basic essence of the gospel to this woman. And she kept interrupting and saying, look, I've heard that a thousand times.

My uncle was a minister. And I said, well, if you've heard it a thousand times, could it possibly harm you to hear it just one more time? And I asked her permission to finish, and she said, okay. I said, just let me finish, and I'll get out of your life.

And I finished it and left. Six months later, this woman shows up in a new members class at the church where I was working, and the other minister asked her, what led you to want to come and become a member of this church? And she told the story of our visit to her home that night.

To be honest with you, I'd forgotten about it. And she told how she was hostile, belligerent, and totally closed to the hearing of the gospel. And she related how I had asked her to let me finish it, and I did. And then we left, and she said, as soon as we walked out the door, she went back to her bedroom and burst into tears, got on her knees beside her bed alone, and embraced Christ as her Savior. And she said, I thought I had heard it, but I never heard it before.

I'd never penetrated before. That's because, not because I was more articulate or more persuasive than her uncle or the other people who had told her these things, but that seed had been planted before on stony ground. It had been tossed among thorns. But in the meantime, God had done a work in this woman's heart that prepared the soil for the seed to be planted and to bring forth its fruit to germinate into life. She had been given ears to hear. So what Jesus is saying here, and this harks back to Isaiah, is that the gospel, the preaching of the Word, is a two-edged sword. Nobody can hear the Word of God and remain neutral. Nobody can be indifferent to the truth of God. You either hear it and respond to it willingly, being pleased by the sweetness of it, or you stiff-arm the Word of God and shut it out from your life. And what Isaiah is called to do is to deliver the message of God to a nation that had heard His Word proclaimed over and over and over again.

They had the oracles of God, and they despised the truth of God. And God said, okay now, Isaiah, you go out there and you preach, but I'm sending you to deaf ears and to blind eyes. And the message that you preach will actually have the effect on these people of hardening their hearts.

I'm sending you out on a mission of judgment, not a mission of rescue. And the coming of Christ provoked the same kind of crisis when He came for those who were not having ears to hear, those who were indisposed towards the things of God. The parables hid the kingdom of God from them, because it wasn't theirs. The kingdom of God was being offered now to Christ's people, and in a sense in which the same parable that disclosed the mystery of the kingdom of God to those people was at the same time hiding the kingdom from those who were indisposed for it. That's the crisis of the Word of God. Well, what was Isaiah's response to that? It's the same response you would have. When Isaiah hears that he's supposed to go on a mission like this, he says, Lord, how long?

How long do I have to do this? This isn't any fun. And God says, until the cities are laid waste and without inhabitant, the houses are without a man, and the land is utterly desolate. The Lord has removed men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.

But yet a tenth will be in it, and will return and be for consuming as a terebinth tree or as an oak, whose stump remains when it is cut down, so that the holy seed shall be its stump. Do you see the message here that now God is saying, Isaiah, I know this is tough. I know that most of the people, the vast majority of the people to whom you declare the things of God will reject them. The message will fall on deaf ears, but I have reserved for myself a tenth, a tithe. And here we have the introduction of the Old Testament concept of the remnant, the holy seed that God has preserved for Himself. And my prayer, my friends, is that you are a part of that tenth, that you are a part of that seed, and that God will give to you ears to hear and eyes to see, that you may be awakened to the sweetness of the truth of God. No one can be indifferent to the truth of God.

You either hear it and respond to it willingly, or you stiff arm the Word of God and shut it out of your life. The message we've just heard comes from Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, The Hard Sayings of the Prophets. In five messages, R.C. addresses several difficult passages. For example, what did Ezekiel mean by saying that his message of judgment was like honey and sweetness to him? Why did Amos pronounce woe to those in his day who desired to see the day of the Lord?

And did Isaiah say that God actually creates evil? R.C. addresses all of those difficult questions in this series, and we'd like to send you the full digital download. Just request it when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343, or you can go online to renewingyourmind.org. Not only does R.C. address those questions, he also shows us the method for finding the answers.

As you'll discover, it's all about context. Today's the last day we're making this offer available, so again, request The Hard Sayings of the Prophets. Our number again is 800-435-4343, and our web address is renewingyourmind.org. You know, every time we take a look at one of these hard sayings of the Bible, grasping its meaning always boils down to how we interpret the Bible. Every channel of teaching here at Ligonier Ministries is designed to help you understand God's Word. That includes RefNet, our 24-hour internet radio station. When you tune in, you'll hear the biblically faithful teaching and preaching of men like John MacArthur, Alistair Begg, Steve Lawson, and of course, Dr. R.C. Sproul.

You can listen for free at RefNet.fm, or you can download the free RefNet app. Before we go today, here's Dr. Sproul with a final thought for us. We have an expression that we use often in our ordinary language. After we explain something to someone, we'll say to them, do you get it? And sometimes their answer is, no, I don't get it. What do we mean when we say, I don't get it? It means we don't understand it. We don't see it.

It's not clear to us. Let me ask you today, when you hear the preaching of the gospel, do you get it? Does it get through to you? Or does it bounce off you? Are you impervious to it? Does it bore you, make you yawn, or make you fall asleep? Can you not wait for the sermon to be over? Or are you the kind of person who delights in the Word of the Lord, can't get enough of it? Want to learn more and more, because it gets sweeter and sweeter by the moment? That's what I hope is your experience. Next Saturday, Dr. Sproul will address a question that arises early on in Scripture in Genesis 1. What does the text mean when it says the earth was without form and void? I hope you'll join us next week for Renewing Your Mind.