Blind to a Purple Towel
That’s my bath towel in the picture above. I’m sure most of you have no trouble seeing that it is a purple towel. I’ll have to take your word for it. It looks brown to me. You see, I am a bit color blind. Not the usual red/green color blindness that most color-blind people suffer from. I have what is known as Tritanomoly. Some shades of blue and green are too close together for me to tell the difference. Some shades of orange and pink give me the same trouble. And this particular shade of purple is indistinguishable from brown.
My inability to precisely see some colors is a source of endless amusement for my family. In fact, I had no idea this towel was purple until recently. My son was in our bathroom and I asked him to hand me my brown towel. My towel was hanging next to my wife’s yellow towel and so he was confused and started to hand me the yellow towel. My wife told him, “He means the purple towel”. Oh, they had a good laugh. I just shook my head in amazement.
My wife let me wear a pink shirt for two years that I thought was orange. Nothing against pink shirts, but I’m not really the sort of guy that can wear pink and get away with it. I can’t imagine what people thought. I had a pair of gray pants for several months that turned out to be olive green. There’s a really good chance that at some point I was wearing olive green pants and a pink shirt — sorry, coral is the specific shade of pink I’m told.
We Can’t Always Trust Our Senses
As soon as I was told the towel was purple, I accepted it as fact. I’ve sort of gotten used to this peculiar kind of blindness. This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when I would have argued the point. Now I know it’s a pointless battle I can’t win. Not that I don’t still kick back against it sometimes, but for the most part I’ve come to accept that I can’t always trust my senses when it comes to color.
The fact is, we are all born with another kind of blindness. Spiritual blindness. It is a sort of genetic condition we inherited from our parents. The Westminster Shorter Catechism’s 16th question puts it this way,
“Did all mankind fall in Adam’s first transgression?”
The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him, in his first transgression.
Adam had 20/20 spiritual vision. 1 Timothy 2:14 tells us, “…and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor”. Adam wasn’t fooled by the Serpent’s deception. He clearly saw that he was being lied to and chose to sin anyway. In that moment, he became the slave to sin (Romans 6:16), dead to righteousness (Ephesians 2:1), and blind (Ephesians 4:18). And every one of us descended from Adam in the ordinary way, i.e., not born of a virgin by God himself, is born guilty of that sin and so born with the same sort of blindness.
The Depths of Our Sickness
We can look around us and see the effects of spiritual blindness every day. Ephesians 4:19 goes on to describe those walking in spiritual blindness as callous, given up to sensuality, and greedy for every kind of impure act. When we cannot sin ourselves, we find it entertaining to watch others sin on television. Rather than loving our neighbors, we are callous about their hurts and needs. We crave evil and can barely restrain ourselves from giving in at every opportunity.
Be careful now, because I’m not writing this to sinners, but to Christians. Christ has touched our eyes so that we can see, but as the man in that one healing we see men “walking as trees”. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 that for now we see through a glass darkly. Praise God he has opened our eyes, yet Paul must still write to the Ephesians that they should no longer walk in this way. A warning I know I need daily as badly as the most depraved sinner to walk the streets.
All too often we are guilty of the same sort of reasoning as the sinner. Ask almost anyone on the streets whether they think they will go to Heaven when they die, and they will say yes. Why? Because they try to be a good person. What makes them think they are a good person? Because they compare themselves to other sinful people. I do that all the time, don’t you? It is so easy for me to be like the Pharisee at prayer saying, “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like those OTHER people”. As though the sanctification that God has worked in me so far makes much difference between me and whatever other sinners I might have in mind.
Rest assured, when God judges the world and reveals all the sin in my heart, it will be perfectly obvious that I am not worthy to enter the Kingdom of God. In fact, I won’t be a bit surprised if there aren’t people whose life is less sinful than mine who are denied heaven. Some nice old grandmother who was just the nicest person her whole life and lived to serve others, but who never trusted in Christ as her Savior. God will open up the books of her life and compared to mine, she’ll look great! But God doesn’t compare us to each other, he only compares us to the perfection of Christ. And apart from Christ’s perfection, we are putrid and stinking corpses.
Symptoms of our Disease
I noticed the symptoms of spiritual blindness in someone I was talking to recently. As far as I know, he is a Christian, but he is adamantly opposed to the Doctrines of Grace. People talk about “cage stage” Calvinists, but there’s nothing quite like a semi-pelagian for adamantly arguing about the subject at every opportunity.
At any rate, I had almost made it out of the conversation without the subject coming up for once. But then he took a shot at election and here we went. He accused Presbyterians of not reading the Bible literally, then explained that when the Bible says “whom he foreknew…” it means God foreknew a plan. The irony was thick enough to cut with a knife. We went a few rounds with me pointing out verses that are very plain on the subject and him explaining how they meant the opposite of what they say.
Ordinarily, this gets fairly frustrating for me in a short period of time. But I saw something this time. He was seeing brown verses. And for all that I was explaining that they were purple, he couldn’t get over the fact that all he can see is brown. You see, for all I accept it when my family told me my towel was purple, I can’t SEE the towel as purple. I can acknowledge the fact that it must be purple, but I will never see it for myself. And this man has the same problem spiritually that I have with color. I can explain that the verses really mean that God chose us apart from any good he saw or foresaw in us, but he cannot see it.
Spiritual blindness does this to us. Sure, the sinner out there is more blind than we are. They can’t see how the verses about sin and God’s wrath and their need for a savior apply to them. The semi-pelagian can’t see how verses about predestination, depravity, and the perseverance of the saints apply to them. And each of us has a blind spot somewhere in the Bible. I don’t even know what it is until someone points it out. (Another great reason to be a covenant member of a church.)
How to See Purple
First, God didn’t set things up for us to live on our own. He designed us to live as part of a covenant community. He put elders in the church so that we would be built up in maturity, not blown about by every wind of doctrine. (Ephesians 4:11–16) By humbly submitting to God’s pattern for growth, we are progressively enabled to better see Christ and his Word.
We have to pray for our sight as well. I know my Christian semi-pelagian reads the Bible daily, but somehow that’s not enough on its own to cure blindness. Only the Spirit working THROUGH the Word can give sight. The humility needed to acknowledge that we’ve been wrong about something our whole lives can only come from the Spirit. We should pray for this not only for ourselves but for each other.
We should also do more than simply read the Bible. The Bible commands us to meditate on the Word of God. You cannot simply read your 4 chapters per day and check off the next day of your reading plan (and few enough of us do even that!). You must think on the Word, chew on it throughout the day. In this way, the Spirit gradually makes clear to you things you didn’t see clearly on a first reading.
So, submit to a church, give attention to the preaching of the Word and the Sacraments, prayer, and meditating on the Word of God. That’s the ordinary means of grace. They work. God’s plan to open your eyes works. And when God does the work, he does more than simply TELL you the towel is purple, he enables you to see it as well.
