The Macular Hole
“But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” Matt. 6:23.
This “evil eye” has been believed to be used for casting a spell. When some people have read this, a shiver has gone down their spine. But that is simply a superstitious misunderstanding of the scriptures, an age-old relic of the Dark Ages when the meaning of the Bible was destroyed. The evil eye is simply the physical disability of eyes that don’t train together. One eye looks at you but the other points away. Sometime this is barely noticeable, sometimes it is extreme.
Jesus, the Master teacher, used this condition to help us understand our sinful condition and, by comparison, what we can have, which is what He had. For centuries, the people of Israel appeared to be looking to God, yet their attention was toward the evil going on around them. Our fallen human natures have lost the luster of a heart wholly dedicated to goodness. This is due to a lack of surrender to the God of righteousness and holiness. We are helpless to ever bring ourselves to surrender. This is a problem deep inside the will. Philosophy, ethics, education, social refinement, human morality only waste our time and energies. Unless we drown ourselves with self-destructive pleasures, this inability to be consecrated to goodness and love will dig at us for life. That is, unless we can stumble upon the antidote.
Another eye disease exemplifies this even better, called “Macular Hole.” Macular hole is a problem that affects the very central portion of the retina. The symptoms are a blind or partially blind central spot in the vision. All that the victim has is his peripheral vision. This is so descriptive of our lack of spirituality because we all want to be moral. We all want to be happy, and happiness comes from being compassionate. We want others to recognize that we are good and trustworthy. We hate rejection by the group because they have lost trust in us due to misbehavior.
But we gravitate to self-indulgence; we gravitate to evil and misbehavior. It’s in our fallen, weakened natures. We can get involved in religion, even deeply so. This was Israel’s situation. We can align our lives with God like they did, yet their problem still persisted, as does ours. We can be looking straight at God, yet all that really catches our attention is from the world around us. How rude we are to Him! The distractions are abundant and constant, and He knows what’s happening inside us better than we do. But, to our undoing, we look directly at Jesus, and are blind to the principles and forces that molded His character and moved His heart and will. The secret of His power over the devil is unknown, a power that we can have, a power experienced by godly men and women of the past. We can spend our whole lives going to church, and still die ignorant of who Jesus was.
Our tendency for this is so deeply ingrained that even after learning of God’s love, submitting to its dominion over our heart and knowing the real consecration to the God of goodness, that we can lose that prized condition. And the slide away from God’s love is so subtle that rarely do we notice it. Peter, on the shore, seeing the bounty of fish and the love of God, prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet. That hardened fisherman acted the fool in public, oblivious of everyone on the beach that day, in response to a new concept of the eternal God that flashed through his deadened conscience. Yet, he was in and out of that original conversion during his whole time with Jesus’ ministry. Thus Christ’s words to him on the night before His rejection and crucifixion, “Peter, I have prayed for you. And when you are converted, strengthen the brethren.”
It’s God’s work to bring us to conversion, that consecration to divine love. We simply can’t make it happen. That would be like a doctor doing brain or open-heart surgery on himself. Faith and reconciliation to God is all His work, and not ours. Ours is to yearn for it, earnestly seeking God, and then to patiently waiting; ours is to fear and tremble when we notice it missing, to act on the conviction of the Holy Spirit that we have fallen away and aren’t right with God. Ours is to respond to each lesson He gives along the way; we must choose for Him and His righteousness at each test. But the heart transplant is really the transplant of a new principle in the conscience, which must be able to abide there long enough, and in the atmosphere of peace, that it takes root. Consecration, trust, submission to God’s will, is wholly a gift of God. We are His workmanship, through a knowledge of Christ and through His washing of water by the word.
Only as we are surrendered to Christ’s love and will, can we sympathize with His Law and methods. Then we will have a tunnel vision when we face Christ, in which peripheral vision is disabled. Only when we can continually have communion without any distractions of the flesh, can we walk with Him as did the holy men of old.
This “evil eye” has been believed to be used for casting a spell. When some people have read this, a shiver has gone down their spine. But that is simply a superstitious misunderstanding of the scriptures, an age-old relic of the Dark Ages when the meaning of the Bible was destroyed. The evil eye is simply the physical disability of eyes that don’t train together. One eye looks at you but the other points away. Sometime this is barely noticeable, sometimes it is extreme.
Jesus, the Master teacher, used this condition to help us understand our sinful condition and, by comparison, what we can have, which is what He had. For centuries, the people of Israel appeared to be looking to God, yet their attention was toward the evil going on around them. Our fallen human natures have lost the luster of a heart wholly dedicated to goodness. This is due to a lack of surrender to the God of righteousness and holiness. We are helpless to ever bring ourselves to surrender. This is a problem deep inside the will. Philosophy, ethics, education, social refinement, human morality only waste our time and energies. Unless we drown ourselves with self-destructive pleasures, this inability to be consecrated to goodness and love will dig at us for life. That is, unless we can stumble upon the antidote.
Another eye disease exemplifies this even better, called “Macular Hole.” Macular hole is a problem that affects the very central portion of the retina. The symptoms are a blind or partially blind central spot in the vision. All that the victim has is his peripheral vision. This is so descriptive of our lack of spirituality because we all want to be moral. We all want to be happy, and happiness comes from being compassionate. We want others to recognize that we are good and trustworthy. We hate rejection by the group because they have lost trust in us due to misbehavior.
But we gravitate to self-indulgence; we gravitate to evil and misbehavior. It’s in our fallen, weakened natures. We can get involved in religion, even deeply so. This was Israel’s situation. We can align our lives with God like they did, yet their problem still persisted, as does ours. We can be looking straight at God, yet all that really catches our attention is from the world around us. How rude we are to Him! The distractions are abundant and constant, and He knows what’s happening inside us better than we do. But, to our undoing, we look directly at Jesus, and are blind to the principles and forces that molded His character and moved His heart and will. The secret of His power over the devil is unknown, a power that we can have, a power experienced by godly men and women of the past. We can spend our whole lives going to church, and still die ignorant of who Jesus was.
Our tendency for this is so deeply ingrained that even after learning of God’s love, submitting to its dominion over our heart and knowing the real consecration to the God of goodness, that we can lose that prized condition. And the slide away from God’s love is so subtle that rarely do we notice it. Peter, on the shore, seeing the bounty of fish and the love of God, prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet. That hardened fisherman acted the fool in public, oblivious of everyone on the beach that day, in response to a new concept of the eternal God that flashed through his deadened conscience. Yet, he was in and out of that original conversion during his whole time with Jesus’ ministry. Thus Christ’s words to him on the night before His rejection and crucifixion, “Peter, I have prayed for you. And when you are converted, strengthen the brethren.”
It’s God’s work to bring us to conversion, that consecration to divine love. We simply can’t make it happen. That would be like a doctor doing brain or open-heart surgery on himself. Faith and reconciliation to God is all His work, and not ours. Ours is to yearn for it, earnestly seeking God, and then to patiently waiting; ours is to fear and tremble when we notice it missing, to act on the conviction of the Holy Spirit that we have fallen away and aren’t right with God. Ours is to respond to each lesson He gives along the way; we must choose for Him and His righteousness at each test. But the heart transplant is really the transplant of a new principle in the conscience, which must be able to abide there long enough, and in the atmosphere of peace, that it takes root. Consecration, trust, submission to God’s will, is wholly a gift of God. We are His workmanship, through a knowledge of Christ and through His washing of water by the word.
Only as we are surrendered to Christ’s love and will, can we sympathize with His Law and methods. Then we will have a tunnel vision when we face Christ, in which peripheral vision is disabled. Only when we can continually have communion without any distractions of the flesh, can we walk with Him as did the holy men of old.
posted by David | 4:06 AM
4 Comments:
That's what I say! When people say that they can't follow Him all the way, its because they have not tried or do not want to. But the flesh is such a pull and it leaves men and women to continually sin.
But the only victory is through Christ Jesus our Lord. And He CAN give it to us.
Ephesians 2:8-10
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
If He has laid out the plans... then it must mean we can follow Him.
Hello Kev,
Its been a long time since I heard from you. Thanks for your input and enthusiasm. I'm with you, longing for the day when all distractions are gone, through Jesus' workmanship, and we are never distressed by this life anymore. Thanks, again.
I recently took my oldest to his first eye appointment. Since I wear glasses, and so did my father and so forth....I decided it would be good to have his eyes checked, since he was blinking all the time.
I learned something interesting about preventive eye care. The "lazy eye" or "evil eye" you were talking about is something that can be detected early on, if the parents will take a child to the doctor. If caught in enough time, therapy and training of the eye can be done and the condition resolved. But the older a patient is, the more and more difficult it is to train the eye.
Jesus wants to give us preventive medicine. We need to go to Him before we feel out of control. It will be much easier for Him to apply the healing balm at that time.
That's so true, Sharon. The earlier we can get the remedy for our straying attention from God, i.e. balm, training, etc., the better we will be able to attend to His voice and example, and the closer we will come to normalcy in life. Christ constantly looked to His Father. Wouldn't it be good to have that? Thank you for that good addition to the post.
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