Latest / Reformed Thinking / Man's Natural Blindness in Things of Religion (Psalm 94:8-11) | Jonathan Edwards
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome to Reform thinking. This is the space where we stop
- 0:04skimming the surface of our faith and really try to drill
- 0:08down into the theological bedrock.
- 0:10We're not here to offer you fluff or, you know, easy
- 0:13answers. Our goal is to take significant
- 0:16works from church history and examine them through a
- 0:19distinctively Reformed lens, seeing how they apply to our
- 0:23lives right now. It's good to be here and we are
- 0:25dealing with some heavy concepts today, but there are concepts
- 0:28that I think clarify so much of the confusion we see in the
- 0:30world around us. Absolutely.
- 0:32And today we have a topic that addresses a Riddle that I think
- 0:35confuses almost everyone at some point.
- 0:37It's what I call the paradox of human intelligence.
- 0:40OK, you look around the world and you see that human beings
- 0:42are just, well, incredibly smart.
- 0:44We build these massive cities. We discover scientific laws.
- 0:47We manage global economies. We write symphonies.
- 0:50The capacity of the human mind is staggering, there's no
- 0:52denying it. Right.
- 0:54But then you take these same brilliant people, I mean people
- 0:58who can split the atom or perform brain surgery, and you
- 1:01put a Bible in front of them or you talk to them about the
- 1:03nature of God, and suddenly it's like a wall just comes down.
- 1:07They seem unable to grasp the most basic spiritual truths.
- 1:11They might even believe things that are, frankly, completely
- 1:13irrational. How can we be so smart in one
- 1:16area and so incredibly dull in another?
- 1:19That is the question, and the answer is not that religious
- 1:22people are smart and nonreligious people are stupid.
- 1:24That's a false dichotomy. Right, it's not an IQ test.
- 1:27Not at all. The answer, according to the
- 1:29Reformed tradition and more importantly Scripture, is that
- 1:32this is a spiritual condition. It is not a lack of brain power.
- 1:36It is a specific diagnosed condition of the heart.
- 1:39And to help us unpack this, we are looking at a sermon by
- 1:41arguably the greatest theologian America has ever produced,
- 1:44Jonathan Edwards. We are the sermon is titled
- 1:47Man's Natural Blindness and Things of Religion.
- 1:50Edwards preached this in February of 1739 or 1740, right
- 1:54on the cusp of the First Great Awakening.
- 1:56He's working from Psalm 94, verses 8 through 11.
- 2:00So this is interesting. Before the revival fires really
- 2:03broke out, Edwards was diagnosing the darkness.
- 2:06Precisely, he had to establish the reality of the disease
- 2:10before the cure could be appreciated.
- 2:12You don't seek a doctor until you know you're sick.
- 2:15Makes sense. So what's our mission for this
- 2:18deep dive? What are we trying to
- 2:19accomplish? Well, we want to understand
- 2:21Edward's diagnosis of the human heart.
- 2:23He argues that we are naturally possessed by what he calls an
- 2:26extreme and brutish blindness. That's a strong phrase.
- 2:30It is, and we're going to look at the evidence for this
- 2:32blindness, both in the broad sweep of history and maybe more
- 2:36uncomfortably, in our own private thoughts.
- 2:39We really want to answer that question you raised.
- 2:41If our reason is so great, why has the world for the most part,
- 2:44remained in darkness without Scripture?
- 2:47And this all ties into a core Reformed doctrine.
- 2:50It brings us face to face for the doctrine of total depravity,
- 2:53specifically what theologians call the noetic effects of sin,
- 2:56That is, how sin impacts the mind, our ability to think and
- 3:00reason about God. OK, let's get right into the
- 3:02text then. Edward starts with Psalm 94 and
- 3:05the verse is understand ye brutish among the people, and ye
- 3:09fools, when will ye be wise? That's, well, that's not a very
- 3:13seeker sensitive opening, is it? It is not.
- 3:15He's not pulling any punches. Edwards notes that the psalmist
- 3:19uses very specific, very aggressive language.
- 3:22He calls them fools and brutish. Let's break that down.
- 3:25Brutish. What exactly does he mean by
- 3:27that? He's not just, you know,
- 3:28throwing insults around. Brutish means being like a
- 3:31brute, like a beast. Like an animal.
- 3:33Yes, it implies a kind of stupidity and a lack of higher
- 3:37understanding. Edwards points out that this
- 3:39spiritual blindness is so severe it actually reduces men to the
- 3:43level of beasts, specifically when it comes to thinking about
- 3:48the nature of God. So what was the specific error
- 3:51they were making in that song? The wicked in Psalm 94 were
- 3:54thinking that God didn't see them.
- 3:55They were saying things like the Lord shall not see, neither
- 3:58shall the God of Jacob regard it.
- 4:01They lived as if God was oblivious to their actions.
- 4:03Which, as the Psalm points out, is completely illogical if you
- 4:06think about it for even a second.
- 4:08He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?
- 4:11He that formed the eye, shall he not see?
- 4:13Correct. And Edwards calls this
- 4:15soddishness. It's an old English word that
- 4:18implies a kind of drunken stupidity.
- 4:21Drunken stupidity. I like that.
- 4:23It's unreasonable to believe that the being who invented the
- 4:26very concept of sight cannot see.
- 4:29Yet this spiritual blindness is so powerful that it makes people
- 4:32believe God is unaware of their secret sins.
- 4:35It completely overrides their basic logic.
- 4:38Now I want to clarify something here because this is often a
- 4:40sticking point for people. When Edward says blindness, is
- 4:42he saying people are born without the ability to
- 4:45understand God? Like is it like a stone that
- 4:47can't do math? If I ask a rock to solve an
- 4:50algebra problem, it's not the rock's fault they can't do it.
- 4:52It just doesn't have the faculty.
- 4:54That is a crucial distinction, and Edward spends a good amount
- 4:57of time on this. He says this is not what he
- 5:00calls negative ignorance. Negative ignorance, right?
- 5:03A tree or a stone has negative ignorance.
- 5:06They have no faculties of understanding.
- 5:07They're not to blame for it. Edwards is also very clear that
- 5:11it is not a lack of natural faculty in man.
- 5:13God gave us noble capacities. We have intellect, we have
- 5:16reason, we have perception. So the hardware is there, the
- 5:19brain works. The hardware is fully intact
- 5:22and, as you said earlier, capable of incredible things.
- 5:26The problem, Edwards argues, is a positive cause.
- 5:29OK, what's a positive 'cause? It means there is a corrupt
- 5:32principle on the heart that actively hinders the exercise of
- 5:36those faculties. Edwards compares it to a
- 5:38spiritual disease. It's not that the eye is
- 5:41missing, it's that the eye is infected and diseased and it
- 5:44refuses to look at the light. He uses an analogy of an infant
- 5:48versus a sick person, right? I thought that was helpful.
- 5:50Yes, exactly. An infant is ignorant simply
- 5:52because they haven't had time to learn.
- 5:53That's an innocent kind of ignorance.
- 5:55But this spiritual blindness is a stubborn resistance to a cure.
- 5:59It's a dominant, active principle of darkness that take
- 6:02these brilliant minds we talked about and just shuts them down
- 6:05when it comes to the things of God.
- 6:07OK, so we've defined the disease.
- 6:09It's a moral inability and not a mental deficiency.
- 6:13Edwards then moves to, well, he basically moves to the courtroom
- 6:16of history. He says.
- 6:17If you don't believe me, just look at the open profession of
- 6:20mankind throughout history. This is where the argument
- 6:23becomes empirically devastating. For any view that says man is
- 6:26naturally good or naturally seeks God, Edwards leans heavily
- 6:30on Romans 1. Here he argues that the
- 6:33invisible things of God, his power, his divinity are clearly
- 6:37seen in creation. Any rational person looking at a
- 6:40sunrise or the complexity of the human eye should be able to
- 6:44infer a creator. The evidence is overwhelming.
- 6:47But that's not what happened historically is.
- 6:49It No, not all. Instead of worshipping the
- 6:51glorious Creator, humanity slid almost universally into the most
- 6:55gross and absurd forms of idolatry.
- 6:58Edwards just list the absurdities.
- 6:59Men worship the sun, the moon, and the stars.
- 7:01Which you can sort of understand.
- 7:03They're powerful. They're mysterious.
- 7:04Right, there's a certain majesty there.
- 7:06But then he says they worship gold, silver, wood and stone.
- 7:09And it gets worse than that, doesn't it?
- 7:10He mentions they worshiped animals.
- 7:12Yes, oxen, serpents, fishes. Edwards just pauses on this and
- 7:17points out the profound humiliation of a human being, a
- 7:20creature made in the very image of God, bowing down to a snake
- 7:25or a cow. It's a complete inversion of the
- 7:27created order. Man who was given dominion over
- 7:30the animals is now submitting to them.
- 7:32He brings up a specific passage from Isaiah 44 that I have
- 7:37always found to be the ultimate satire on idolatry.
- 7:40It's the story of the idol maker.
- 7:42It is such a powerful image, and Edwards uses it vividly.
- 7:46He describes the absolute irony of the situation.
- 7:50A man goes into the forest, he cuts down a tree.
- 7:52He takes half of that log and he burns it in the fire to bake his
- 7:54bread and roast his meat. Right, he says, Aha, I am warm.
- 7:57I have seen the fire. He's satisfying his physical
- 8:00hunger with it. It serves A practical purpose.
- 8:03A very practical purpose. And then comes the punchline,
- 8:05the punchline, the residue, the leftovers of that very same log.
- 8:08He takes it and he carves it into a figure.
- 8:10He falls down before and says, Deliver me, for thou art my God,
- 8:14you just. It's insane when you lay it out
- 8:16like that. It is.
- 8:17Edwards calls this out as supreme sottishness.
- 8:21That drunken stupidity again. Yeah, a rational man knows that
- 8:24a log cannot hear him. He knows he just burned the
- 8:27other half of it for fuel. But his spiritual blindness is
- 8:31so potent that it completely overrides his rationality.
- 8:35He is literally praying to a piece of firewood.
- 8:39And that really highlights that disconnect we started with.
- 8:41He's smart enough to bake bread, smart enough to use tools, smart
- 8:44enough to carve a statue. But spiritually, he's completely
- 8:47and utterly deluded. And Edwards points out this
- 8:50wasn't just some harmless confusion.
- 8:52The morality of these gods was just as twisted.
- 8:54That's the next layer of evidence.
- 8:56You become like what you worship.
- 8:57The heathens, as he calls them, worshipped gods who were
- 9:00notorious for drunkenness, for theft, for cruelty, for all
- 9:04kinds of debauchery. So they weren't even worshipping
- 9:06virtuous ideals. Not at all.
- 9:08In fact, Edwards that many cultures actually worshipped
- 9:11devils not because they thought the devils were good, but out of
- 9:14fear they built temples to evil spirits to appease them.
- 9:18And this, of course, degraded the entire society.
- 9:20Entirely, Edwards notes that vices.
- 9:23We would consider horrific things like revenge, cruelty,
- 9:27even incest were often accounted as virtues in these blinded
- 9:31nations because they're gods modeled that behavior.
- 9:34There's one section in the sermon that is particularly
- 9:37disturbing, but I think we have to talk about it because Edwards
- 9:40uses it to show just how strong this delusion is.
- 9:43And that's the worship of Mala. Yes, this is his argument from
- 9:47the suppression of natural affection.
- 9:50The strongest, most basic biological instinct in nature is
- 9:53the love of a parent for a child.
- 9:55Even animals will die to protect their young.
- 9:58It's hardwired into us. It's hardwired, but Edwards
- 10:00describes the worship of Moloch, where parents would offer their
- 10:03own children to be burned alive as a sacrifice.
- 10:06The details he gives are just, they're horrific.
- 10:08They are. He wants his congregation to
- 10:10feel the horror. He describes the brass statue of
- 10:13the idol heated red hot, and the parents would take their fair
- 10:16and beloved children, not the sick ones, but the best they
- 10:19had, and place them into those burning red hot arms.
- 10:22And they would do this while the child was screaming.
- 10:24Yes, he makes a point of that. They would have loud instruments
- 10:27playing to drown out the piteous cries of their own child.
- 10:30How does Edwards explain that? I mean, how does a human being,
- 10:34a mother or a father get to that point?
- 10:36He argues that it's the ultimate proof of the power of this
- 10:39blindness. The delusion of the mind becomes
- 10:42so powerful that it overcomes nature itself.
- 10:45It proves that this blindness is not just a little fog in our
- 10:48thinking. It's a force that can convince a
- 10:51mother to brutally destroy her own child in the hopes of
- 10:54pleasing a brass statue. It breaks the most fundamental
- 10:57laws of human nature. He also mentions other things
- 11:00like self torture. Yes, things like people cutting
- 11:03themselves, walking on fire, engaging in all sorts of painful
- 11:05rituals. We see this with the prophets of
- 11:07Baal in the Old Testament, cutting themselves with lances
- 11:10until the blood flowed. Edwards asks the simple
- 11:13question, why would human beings who naturally love, comfort and
- 11:17avoid pain drive themselves to such agony?
- 11:20It is the blindness. It turns their entire reality
- 11:23upside down. Pain becomes player and love
- 11:26becomes cruelty. Now one of the counter arguments
- 11:28you might hear is, well, OK, that was just a phase.
- 11:30Humanity was young and primitive, but Edwards says this
- 11:34darkness was incredibly persistent.
- 11:36That is a key observation he makes.
- 11:38This wasn't a 20 year fad. It's been thousands of years and
- 11:42it covered the entire globe, with a tiny single exception of
- 11:46the nation of Israel, and even there it was a constant battle.
- 11:49And he points out that every time light was introduced,
- 11:52humanity tried to extinguish it. Yes, he uses the example of
- 11:55Noah. After the flood.
- 11:56Right, you have the flood, a massive global divine reset.
- 12:00Noah is a preacher of righteousness.
- 12:03His family has seen the judgement of God first hand.
- 12:06You'd think they'd learn their lesson.
- 12:07And yet on just immediately, their descendants revert to
- 12:10idolatry and build the Tower of Babel.
- 12:12He has a really powerful analogy for this.
- 12:15He does. He says.
- 12:15The human heart is like a heavy stone.
- 12:18You could force it upwards with great effort, like during
- 12:20revival or a time of divine judgement, but the moment you
- 12:23let go, it just sinks. It naturally falls back into the
- 12:26mud and darkness. That is a depressing, but
- 12:29looking at history, a very accurate picture, he says.
- 12:33It sinks lower and lower with a swift progress.
- 12:36It completely dispels the modern myth of moral evolution, this
- 12:40idea that we are naturally getting better and more
- 12:42enlightened over time, Edwards says.
- 12:44The natural gravity of the human heart is toward darkness, not
- 12:47toward light. So that's the external evidence.
- 12:50You have history, idolatry, malloc.
- 12:53It's overwhelming. And it's pretty easy for us
- 12:55sitting here in the 21st century to look back at the ancient
- 12:58Canaanites and say, wow, those guys were really messed up.
- 13:01But Edwards doesn't let us stay there, does he?
- 13:03He pivots. He moves to what he calls inward
- 13:06experience. He brings it right into the pews
- 13:08of his church in Northampton and by extension, right into our
- 13:12earbuds today. This is where the sermon becomes
- 13:14surgical and frankly, very uncomfortable.
- 13:17He shifts his focus to the civilized or Christianized
- 13:20person, the person who isn't bowing to a statue of Zeus but
- 13:24is still, in their own way, suffering from this very same
- 13:27blindness. And he starts with our deception
- 13:29about God. Even if we have the right
- 13:32theology on paper, Edwards says, we naturally think God is all
- 13:35together such an one as ourselves.
- 13:37We project our own nature onto God.
- 13:39It's a fundamental human tendency.
- 13:41We underestimate His Holiness. We assume he doesn't hate sin
- 13:45that much because, well, we don't hate sin that much in
- 13:48ourselves. We doubt his justice.
- 13:50We absolutely doubt his justice. We secretly think, oh, he won't
- 13:53actually punish me for this, He's too loving.
- 13:55It's a subtle form of idolatry. We're creating a God in our own
- 13:58image who is comfortable with all our compromises.
- 14:01And then, after looking at our deception about God, he turns
- 14:04the mirror on us, the deception about ourselves.
- 14:06He uses the whited sepulcher imagery from the Gospels.
- 14:09That comes from Jesus, of course.
- 14:11Talking to the Pharisees, we see ourselves as lovely, we look at
- 14:14our external morality, our good deeds, and we think, you know
- 14:16what, I'm doing pretty good. But Edward says God looks at the
- 14:20heart and sees a grave full of rottenness and dead men's bones.
- 14:24We are blind to the inward vault of hell that exists inside each
- 14:27of us. One of the key ways we maintain
- 14:29this delusion is by renaming our sins.
- 14:33I thought this was so relevant to modern culture.
- 14:35It is incredibly relevant. It's something we all do.
- 14:38We call our simmering anger zeal.
- 14:40We say I'm just passionate for the truth when really we're just
- 14:44being malicious and proud. We call our covetousness
- 14:47frugality or ambition. We mask the rot with virtuous
- 14:51sounding labels. Edwards also brings up the Moat
- 14:54and beam principle here from the Sermon on the Mount.
- 14:56Yes, the fact that we could be hyper critical of a tiny fault
- 15:00in someone else, a Moat, a speck of dust.
- 15:02Say we noticed that someone is arrogant while being completely
- 15:06and totally blind to the fact that we ourselves are 10 times
- 15:09more arrogant. That's proof of this spiritual
- 15:12blindness. We literally cannot see the
- 15:14giant wooden beam sticking out of our own eye.
- 15:16I want to focus on one specific argument Edwards makes here that
- 15:19I just found brilliant. It's what you call the paradox
- 15:21of prudence. He compares how we act in our
- 15:23business lives versus how we act in our religious lives.
- 15:26This is one of his most practical and convicting proofs.
- 15:30Edwards observes that in secular temporal life, men are generally
- 15:34very prudent. A farmer plants in the summer so
- 15:37that you can eat in the winter. If you see a good business
- 15:40opportunity, you seize it immediately.
- 15:42If your life is in physical danger, you take immediate
- 15:45action. Right.
- 15:46We buy life insurance. We wear seatbelts.
- 15:48We save for retirement. We lock our doors at night.
- 15:51Correct. We understand cause and effect.
- 15:53We understand risk management. We are not fools when it comes
- 15:57to this present world, but when it comes to religion, which
- 16:01involves eternity, not just the next 30 years of retirement, we
- 16:05throw all that prudence right out the window.
- 16:06We delay. We delay, we procrastinate, we
- 16:09say I'll get right with God tomorrow or after I graduate, or
- 16:12once I'm married. We risk our eternal souls on the
- 16:15tomorrow that is not guaranteed to any of us.
- 16:18Edwards basically argues that if you used your religious logic in
- 16:21your business life, you would be bankrupt in a week.
- 16:23He does, he says. The very fact that you are a
- 16:26genius when it comes to your finances but a complete fool
- 16:29when it comes to your soul proves that the blindness is
- 16:33specific to spiritual things. It's not a general lack of
- 16:36intelligence. It connects right back to what
- 16:38Jesus said. Ye hypocrites, you can discern
- 16:41the face of the sky, but how is it that you do not discern this
- 16:45time? Exactly.
- 16:46You can predict the weather, you could read the stock market, but
- 16:49you cannot see the coming judgement of God that selective
- 16:52blindness is the evidence of the disease.
- 16:55That really drives home the point.
- 16:56Then Edwards targets the illusion of self-sufficiency,
- 16:59this very modern idea that we can fix ourselves.
- 17:02This is the death blow to the entire self help industry,
- 17:04really. Edwards compares a man trying to
- 17:07mend his own sinful heart to a dead corpse trying to raise
- 17:11itself to life. That's a strong image.
- 17:13It's meant to be. We rely on our good intentions.
- 17:15We think, OK, that was bad, but I'll do better next time we make
- 17:19New Year's resolutions. Edwards calls this a profound
- 17:23deception. We are trusting in future
- 17:25resolutions that never come to pass.
- 17:28We are, spiritually speaking, dead, but we're imagining that
- 17:32we're just sleeping and can wake up whenever we choose.
- 17:34So we've seen the disease in the macro of history, and we've seen
- 17:38it in the micro of our own hypocrisy.
- 17:40Now Edwards moves to what you've outlined to Section 4, which is
- 17:44a direct attack on a philosophy that was very popular in his
- 17:47deism. Right.
- 17:48And it's still very popular today, even if people don't use
- 17:50the name. Deism was the Enlightenment
- 17:53belief that human reason is sufficient to know God and our
- 17:56moral duty without the need for the Bible.
- 17:59The deists basically argued we don't need supernatural
- 18:02revelation. We have our minds, we can figure
- 18:05it out. That was the argument.
- 18:06And Edward says, OK, let's look at the data.
- 18:08Let's run the experiment. He loves these empirical
- 18:10arguments. He does.
- 18:11He asks if reason is sufficient, why did no nation in the entire
- 18:16history of the world ever discover the one true God on
- 18:19their own? History is the laboratory.
- 18:22The world had thousands of years.
- 18:23The Greeks and the Romans had the highest intellects, the best
- 18:26philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the most advanced
- 18:30governments. You would think if anyone could
- 18:32figure it out, it would be the Athenians in the age of
- 18:34Pericles. Right.
- 18:36If reason alone could climb the mountain to God, Athos would
- 18:39have built the city on the summit.
- 18:40But what was the actual result? They remain polytheists.
- 18:45They worship the furies. They had gods who were petty and
- 18:48immoral. Aristotle and Plato, for all
- 18:51their brilliance, could not deliver a single city, a single
- 18:54village, from a darkness of idolatry.
- 18:56That is a staggering point. All of philosophy failed to save
- 18:59a single town. It failed completely and
- 19:01utterly, and Edwards argues this proves the absolute necessity of
- 19:05divine revelation. Without the Bible, which Peter
- 19:08calls a light shining in a dark place, man just sinks.
- 19:12You cannot think your way to the true God.
- 19:14He must reveal himself to you. Edwards also makes a fascinating
- 19:17point about the learned age of his own time in Europe.
- 19:20With all the scientific advancements, you'd think things
- 19:22would get better, but he saw spiritual darkness increasing.
- 19:27He observes that the explosion of learning in the Arts and
- 19:29Sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries did not lead to a
- 19:33great revival of truth. Instead, it led to the rise of
- 19:36potpourri Arianism and the very deism he was arguing against.
- 19:41His point being? His point is that knowledge of
- 19:43the world does not cure blindness of the heart.
- 19:46In fact, without the work of the Holy Spirit, high intelligence
- 19:49often just makes you more creative in your heresy.
- 19:52You don't abandoned error, you just invent more complex and
- 19:55sophisticated errors. He mentions Arianism and
- 19:58Sicinianism, which were heresies that deny the full divinity of
- 20:02Christ. So very smart men were using
- 20:05their brilliant minds to dismantle the nature of Jesus.
- 20:07Spot on. The unregenerate mind is an idol
- 20:10factory as Calvin said, and a high IQ just means you build
- 20:13more elaborate and convincing idols.
- 20:15Wow, this paints a very bleak picture.
- 20:18I mean, we're blind. History proves we're prone to
- 20:21the worst kinds of idol worship, our hearts deceive us
- 20:24constantly, and even our best reasoning fails to find God.
- 20:27So we arrive at Section 5. What is the remedy?
- 20:32Is there any hope? Edwards does not leave his
- 20:34congregation in the dark. He's a pastor.
- 20:37After diagnosing the disease and excruciating detail, he points
- 20:40to the glorious remedy. And the logic is simple.
- 20:44If the problem is total darkness, the only possible
- 20:47solution is an external source of light.
- 20:50And that light is Jesus Christ. He points directly to Jesus
- 20:53Christ as the light of the world.
- 20:54He calls him the Sun of Righteousness.
- 20:56You can't just light a candle. You can't.
- 20:58You can't light a candle to dispel the night of the soul.
- 21:00You need the sun itself to rise. And crucially, it requires the
- 21:03work of the Holy Spirit. Edwards is very clear on this,
- 21:06quoting Paul. Human logic cannot perceive the
- 21:09things of the Spirit of God. They're foolishness to the
- 21:11natural man. The Spirit must be the one to
- 21:14open our blind eyes. He then talks about the misery
- 21:16of the blind. I mean, it's a tragedy to be
- 21:18physically blind, but Edwards says this is infinitely worse.
- 21:21Infinitely, because the consequences are eternal.
- 21:25And there is a terrifying warning here about what the
- 21:27Bible calls judicial blindness. This is the concept you see in
- 21:31place like Romans one and Isaiah 6, where God, after a person or
- 21:36a nation repeatedly rejects the light, finally gives them up to
- 21:39their hardness. That is a scary thought that God
- 21:42would essentially say, OK, you want darkness, you can have it.
- 21:45It is the ultimate judgement in this life.
- 21:48Edwards warns that this often happens to those who abuse the
- 21:51light. They have people who have the
- 21:53Bible, who sit in church and hear the gospel week after week,
- 21:55but ignore it. Eventually the capacity to see
- 21:59can be removed entirely. They are sealed in their
- 22:01darkness. So what do we do with all this?
- 22:03How does he apply this? Edwards ends with a very
- 22:06provocative application. He essentially tells his
- 22:08listeners to embrace being a fool.
- 22:10It is the great paradox of Christian wisdom from First
- 22:12Corinthians If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this
- 22:16world, let him become a fool that he may be wise.
- 22:20We have to stop trusting our own assessment of reality.
- 22:23We have to give up on our own wisdom.
- 22:24The book of Proverbs says he that trusteth in his own heart
- 22:27is a fool. Right.
- 22:28So the very first step to gaining true spiritual sight is
- 22:32admitting that you are blind. You have to come to God and say
- 22:35my perception is flawed. My reason is infected by Finn.
- 22:39I cannot trust my own heart. I need you by Your Spirit to
- 22:43give me sight. It is a posture of total
- 22:46humility and desperation. It completely destroys
- 22:49intellectual pride, doesn't it? You have to be willing to admit
- 22:52that without the grace of God, you are no better off than the
- 22:55man in the forest carving an idol out of a piece of firewood.
- 22:58Precisely. It levels the playing field.
- 23:01The PhD in astrophysics and the uneducated person are in the
- 23:04exact same boat without grace. Both are utterly blind until the
- 23:08spirit moves. Edwards then wraps up the entire
- 23:10sermon with one final, sobering thought about the afterlife.
- 23:14He suggests that for the unrepentant, their eyes will
- 23:17eventually be opened. They will, but it will be too
- 23:20late. They'll be opened only in hell.
- 23:22He references the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16.
- 23:25In his life, the rich man was blind.
- 23:27He didn't see the reality of eternity.
- 23:29He didn't see the Baker at his gate.
- 23:31But the text says in hell he lifts up his eyes, being in
- 23:34torment and saw Abraham afar off.
- 23:37So he finally saw clearly. He saw everything clearly for
- 23:40the first time. He saw the truth of God, the
- 23:42truth of judgement, the truth of his own terrible folly.
- 23:46But his vision was restored only to witness his own irreversible
- 23:50destruction. And Edwards uses this to plead
- 23:52with the listener. Do not wait for that moment.
- 23:55Ask God to open your eyes now, while there is still a remedy,
- 23:59while grace is still offered. That is the challenge of this
- 24:01deep dive. We've explored the brutish
- 24:03nature of the unregenerate mind. We've seen the historical proofs
- 24:06in idolatry and the personal proofs in our own mixed up
- 24:09priorities. And we have affirm that
- 24:11Scripture and the Spirit are the only lens through which we can
- 24:14see reality as it truly is. And the fundamental question for
- 24:18every person listening is, will we admit our blindness?
- 24:22Will we stop trusting our own common sense and our own hearts
- 24:26and instead submit to the revelation of God in Christ?
- 24:30A heavy but absolutely necessary diagnostic from Jonathan
- 24:33Edwards. Thank you for walking us through
- 24:35it. It's always a privilege to
- 24:36engage with these powerful truths.
- 24:38And thank you for joining us on Reformed Thinking.
- 24:40If this episode challenged you, maybe take a moment this week to
- 24:43read Psalm 94 for yourself. Ask God to show you where you
- 24:46might be trusting in your own understanding.
- 24:48Until next time, keep digging deep.