Men Like Trees Walking - Mark 7:24-8:26 Series

Introduction: Perception

The Mexican cave fish has eye sockets but no eyes. Where they live, it’s so dark, eyes are useless and so they lost them. Biologists have discovered that same species of fish who live in waters that have some light, and they do have eyes. Stay too long in the dark and your eyes go away.

That’s an accurate metaphor of the spiritual world. There are a lot of terrible consequences of sin, but one of the scariest is spiritual blindness. When you can’t hear what God is saying to you and you can’t see what he’s showing you, that’s one of the worst things that can ever happen because God communicates his grace to us. We get it through perception. He could have chosen any number of ways to give us grace. He could have designed us with a big funnel coming out of the top of our head where he just poured it in. But his choice was to give us grace in a form that requires perception—spiritual hearing and seeing... , and so if we become unable to make out what he’s communicating, it cuts us off from grace. On the other hand, the sharper your spiritual hearing and eyesight become, the more you’ll be able to receive grace from God.

So you have faculties of spiritual perception, and God has given you responsibility over those faculties. With your physical senses, if you stare at the sun too long you damage your eyesight. You fail to use ear protection while shooting (or you play the trumpet too many years) and you have to get hearing aids in your 40’s. It works the same way in the spiritual realm. You can do things that will damage your spiritual hearing beyond repair, so you can’t hear God. And you can do things that will destroy your eyes so spiritual insight becomes impossible.

But on the other hand, unlike the physical realm, on the spiritual side you can do things to improve your senses. You can do things that will give you excellent spiritual hearing and better and better spiritual vision. And Mark writes a long section of his gospel to teach us how to do that. We left off last time in ch.7 where Jesus made all foods clean. After that, Jesus leaves the country and goes into gentile territory where he will spend most of the rest of his life. From where we left off to the big, climactic center point in the Gospel of Mark where everything changes, six things happen.

1) The Syrophoenician woman (7:24-30)

2) Healing of the deaf mute (7:31-37)

3) Feeding of the 4000 (8:1-9)

4) The Pharisees’ demand for a sign (8:10-13)

5) Warning about yeast (8:14-21)

6) Healing of the blind man (8:22-26)

I’ve preached all those before, so if you want a full sermon on each one of those you can go to TreasuringGod.com. I would urge you to do that because they are all important events in the gospel. But I’m not going to re-preach all that. What I’d like to do tonight is to show you how all six of those events teach one crucially important theme that Jesus illustrates in what has to qualify as the strangest miracle Jesus ever performed, where Jesus spits on a blind man’s eyes and he sees men like trees walking around.

Only God Opens Eyes

When Jesus healed a blind man in John 9:32 the people said, “Since the beginning of time nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind.” That was true. There are a lot of signs and wonders in the Old Testament, but one miracle you never see in the Old Testament is giving sight to the blind. It’s spoken of numerous times, but only as a future promise for the glorious age to come.

Isaiah 42:6,7 I … will make you … a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind.

Isaiah 35:5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

So all through the Old Testament there are spectacular miracles: seas open, fire comes down from heaven, the dead are raised, a world-wide flood, manna from heaven, water from a rock to supply a whole nation—on and on and on, but never a blind man healed. Then along comes Jesus, and of all the different kinds of miracles he performed, anyone care to guess which miracle he did most often? Giving sight to the blind. It was his favorite miracle.

And in the section we’re looking at today, Jesus does both the miracles mentioned in Isaiah 35—healing of the blind and the deaf.

Mark 7:32 There some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged him to place his hand on the man.