The Importance of Sight

Every good lie contains just enough truth to tempt you.  My friend Shane put it this way, "If truth were a hot dog, Satan would offer you a corn dog."

Let's consider Satan's first corn dog offering:

Gen 3:4 Then the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

I highlighted in bold the kernel of truth in the lie.  Adam and Eve surely had their eyes opened.  Take a look:

Gen 3:7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened...

Now, the Bible says that the immediate effect of eating of the tree was that their eyes were opened.  Yet the rest of the Bible talks about how we need our eyes to be opened.

Psalm 119:18 Open my eyes, that I may behold Wonderful things from Your law.

Isaiah 29:18 In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll, and out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see.

Ephesians 1:18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints...

So, what gives?  What does having their eyes opened to one thing have to do with being blind?  If humanity inherited the fall of man through Adam, then we also inherited the vision of Adam.  What he had his eyes opened to, we do to.  So how can we see one thing and be blind at the same time?

It has to do with citizenship, dominion, and the realms thereof.  Take a look back at what God said when He declared over Adam what the consequences were of his following the leading of his wife:

Gen 3:19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return

Dust?  Adam is dust?  Wait a minute.  I remember back when Adam was formed...

Genesis 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Come on God, you can't have it both ways.  Adam is either dust or he's a living being.  Wait, but didn't God say that there was one way in which Adam could die?

Gen 2:16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die

Yikes!  Was God saying that the tree itself was deadly to Adam and Eve?  I don't think so.  Look at this statement:

Gen 3:22 Then the Lord God said, " Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"— 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken.

If Adam and Eve had continued to eat of the tree, they'd have lived forever.  So the "death" God warned Adam about in Gen 2:16 was not physical death.  Eating of this tree would grant perpetual physical life.  So, what death was God talking about when He warned Adam about the tree?  What was it about that tree that caused spiritual death?  Maybe it wasn't the tree.  Read the specific warning God gave Adam again, "...for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die".  That sounds oddly prophetic.

Maybe what God was saying that it wasn't the tree that was deadly but the cause for eating it.  Why did Adam eat of the tree?  He followed Eve.  Why did she?  She followed the serpent.  Somehow following someone other than God gets you dead.

Look again at how God described Adam when He created him:  "and man became a living being".  What components made up this new being?  God made man out of "the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life".  So Adam was part dust, part God.  When Adam followed someone other than God, he lost the God part.  It wasn't because Adam's eyes were opened that he died, nor because he ate of the tree, but because he followed someone other than God.  In that day, he lost the God-part in him and was left with just the dust-part.

So, how does this relate to vision?  Remember that sin was following someone other than God.  The tree surely opened their eyes to the fact that they are flesh, but that's not what condemned them.  It wasn't that they ate the tree so much as why they ate the tree.  Paul reveals this dynamic quite skillfully here:

Romans 6:16 Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?

Satan knew that obeying him would cause 2 things to happen to Adam and Eve:

1. They would be awakened to their flesh -- the fact that they live in a physical reality.
2. They would die to God.

The third thing that happened was his ultimate goal.  When they obeyed him, Adam and Eve gave Satan all their authority.  Points 1 and 2 above were just icing on his evil little cake.  But for us, the ancestors of those two knuckleheads, points 1 and 2 became a life and death affair.  What was the first thing that happened when Adam and Eve ate the tree?  They suddenly knew they were naked.  They had a physical awareness that had previously eluded them.  This, coupled with their having lost their God-parts created shame.  In fact, it's entirely possible that simply losing their God-parts created shame.  However, after all was said and done they were little more than talking dust.  You could call it a fall from grace, a spiritual death, anything you like.  The result was the same. 

In a very real sense, Adam and Eve lost their vision of the spiritual realm.  Just as they had no awareness of their nakedness before the fall, after the fall they had no awareness of the spiritual.  They were, in a very real sense, blind.  They unknowingly traded one set of eyes for another.  I say eyes but it relates to all the senses.  A vision is the same as an awareness.  This awareness is something that Jesus won back for us.  He also preached on it regularly.

How many times have you read in the gospels, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."?  What Jesus is doing here is calling us to a spiritual awareness of what He is teaching.  He wants us to open our spiritual eyes and see:

Matt 6:22 "The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. 23"But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

Our experience is driven by what we see.  But more importantly, Jesus got us our real citizenship back!  But that citizenship is pointless unless we see always from that perspective.  We are no longer dust but dust+spirit hybrids!  Paul put it like this:

Eph 2:5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,

We are "seated in heavenly places" or another way to say it would be, "We exist both in the spirit realm and the physical realm but more so in the spirit."  Right now I'm seated at my office desk in my office chair, in the physical.  But my being, my consciousness, my awareness, the place I come from, is the spirit.  In a sense, I possess this body but I am not this body.  I have certain rights and abilities as a spiritual being or "living being" as God put it.  I can choose to be more aware of the spirit than the physical.  And I can choose to be more aware of darkness in the spirit.  Is there darkness in the spirit?  That's for another blog post.  Let's just say that I chose to flood my eye with light.  I look at God:  Jesus, The Father, The Holy Spirit, and His manifestations in the spirit.  This is a privilege and honor that Adam lost but Jesus regained for me.

Do not allow the cunning voice to persuade you that you have only one set of eyes or that there is nothing to see in the spirit.  God never tells us what is not.  God always tells us what is.  He never speaks lack and always speaks abundance.  Open your eyes.