“No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you.”
Luke 11:33-36 NIV
“In essence, the phrase teaches that your perspective and what you cherish profoundly shape your inner reality and actions, influencing whether you live in clarity and goodness or in spiritual blindness and negativity.”
(Source: Google AI)
Why did Jesus inject this life lesson, in this context, between His rebuke of the people’s insistence on a sign and His rebuke of the Pharisees because of their hypocrisy?
It seems that both the ordinary people and their religious leaders were so prejudiced against Jesus that they had developed a warped perspective of who He was. Their interpretation of what He said and did was based on their own expectations instead of the real evidence of who He was. They demanded signs instead of recognising and believing truth. The Pharisees even attributed Jesus’ power to drive out demons to the devil!
Why were they demanding a sign when Jesus’ “works” confirmed who He was and that what He taught them was the truth from the Father?
What were they “seeing” that so badly warped their perspective? Why were they so suspicious of Him that they would rather silence Him forever than heed what He said? Perhaps the way we understand or misunderstand ourselves and other people might give us a clue.
Here is what the Bible teaches….
The sin of the first pair and their response to God’s questions in the Garden of Eden shows us one of the real human problems. They played “the blame game”. Adam refused to take responsibility for his disobedience so he blamed Eve for giving him the forbidden fruit. Eve, in turn, blamed the serpent.
The way we see things is the beginning of the great deception. When we are caught in our sin, we play the victim instead of the perpetrator. Our vision of our responsibility becomes so out of focus that we view all our wrongdoing as someone else’s fault.
Jesus was never afraid to speak the truth, however much He offended people, not because He enjoyed offending but because He knew that people would never be free until they faced up to their own guilt. To quote Bill Johnson of Bethel Church, Redding, USA, “Jesus offended the mind to expose the heart.”
The heart’s condition is revealed when it is closed to truth. When we blame others for our sinful behaviour and responses, when we refuse to accept guilt and take responsibility for our own sin, we deceive ourselves. Our view of ourselves and others becomes warped and out of focus. Our minds are darkened. We cannot receive and believe the truth. We would rather cancel the truth-teller that respond to what they say.
“If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth…If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
1 John 1:6, 8 NIV
Jesus loved to associate with “cancelled” people because they at least knew their real condition. For example, when a “sinful” woman gatecrashed a dinner party at a Pharisee’s house to seek forgiveness from Jesus for her sordid life….
“When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them…”
…Jesus’ response showed both His compassion for the woman and His disdain for His host. He affirmed the woman’s honest and repentant heart in contrast to Simon, both His host’s arrogant and hypocritical attitude towards the woman and his lack of common courtesy towards Jesus.
“When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”
Luke 7:39 NIV
Simon condemned the woman for her sinful life without a thought for his own hypocrisy. He revealed his arrogance by withholding from Jesus the common courtesies of a host. Jesus commended the woman for her repentance and her love and rebuked Simon for his neglect.
…”Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.” Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
Luke 7:36-38, 47-48 NIV
I submit to you, dear reader, that we “see” everything around us and evaluate everything that happens to us through the lens of self-evaluation. If we see ourselves as God sees us, guilty but forgiven, we will view others with understanding and compassion because we stand on level ground with them before God. If we view ourselves as above others, as did this Pharisee, our hearts will be deluded and dark.
It’s not about how good or bad we are as compared with others. It’s about how guilty we are before God and how much we need His mercy as others do. When we get this right, we will have clear vision to perceive who we and others really are before God.
When we think about it, blaming others often leads to something worse…retaliation! This leads to an ever-increasing cycle of one-upmanship…and this cycle of sin never ceases.
To be continued…