Spiritual Blindness
Hello and thank you for joining us. And thanks for sending in your questions. You know, we love to get your questions and respond to them in these videos. And before I go any further, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who was so encouraging for my sermon in this last weekend. It was great to be able to have a different role on Sunday mornings and be able to share a little bit from God’s word with everybody.
And today we’re going to look at Acts Nine and respond to a question I’ve heard many times, something I kind of skipped over on Sunday morning. And that question is, what’s with the scales that fall out of Paul’s eyes in Acts Nine as Paul regains his sight? It says, and something like scales fell from his eyes. Other translations say that a film fell from his eyes or something along those lines. And I’ve often heard people talk about relating that to, well, are those the scales that represent the serpent?
Is that some evil force coming from his eyes? And I thought it would be fun to dig into that this week and I was disappointed. It’s actually nothing even near that exciting. It was actually hard to find in the commentaries, anyone writing about the scales. There’s lots of reference to Paul regaining his sight, and we’ll talk about that in a moment.
But the scales themselves, most commentators were silent. And then John Stott had one sentence in his commentary and he said this dr. Luke is using medical terms here. Remember, Luke, who wrote Acts, was a physician. And simply put, he was using medical terminology when he said the scales fell out of Paul’s eyes.
A common phrase that just meant something came out of his eyes. It was a film or they thought maybe it looked like scales. And then Paul regained his sight. So the scales themselves are not exciting, but really the point behind the passage is Paul, his sight is taken away and he receives his sight when Ananias puts his hands on him. And there is some significant implications in that.
The main one is this we are spiritually blind. Paul was spiritually blind. He thought he knew everything. He went to Damascus thinking that he understood and knew everything that God wanted for him. But he was blind.
And in order for him to regain his sight, jesus appeared to him and made him truly blind. That broke him of his arrogance. It broke him down and to where he can realize that he was not seeing God clearly. He had not seen Jesus for who he was, so he was blinded. And when Ananias lays hands on him, when Paul receives the Holy Spirit, he regains his sight and he gets a spiritual sight.
Tony Marita, author and pastor, puts it this way while 1 may not have the same blinding experience as Saul, the metaphor of blindness to sight, darkness to light, applies to every Christian theologically. Saul’s blindness pictured the spiritual darkness and ignorance in which he had been living. But God showed him the glory of the truth about Christ. Paul goes on to write in two Corinthians, chapter four these words the God of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we are not proclaiming ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’sake.
For God, who said, let the light shine out of the darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God glory in the face of Jesus Christ. See, we are all spiritually blind until we receive the Holy Spirit, until we respond to what God has initiated. As I talked about on Sunday, when we respond, we receive the Holy Spirit. When we become saved, we regain our spiritual sight. Well, thanks for submitting questions and we hope to continue these conversations with you.
So as Pastor Dan preaches this coming Sunday, we hope you listen to that sermon and think what you can ask him to answer next week. Thanks again.