All beautiful.
Ahhh. I just had the great privilege of spending some time away in the beauty of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters (and taking a month off from blogging!). It was so beautifully quiet and visually stunning! In the long, serene hours moseying around nature, I listened to a relaxing audio book. It focused for a bit on the theme of colorblindness, and that gave me an idea for this post. This one’s gonna be interesting!
I’m kind of ashamed to say that I never thought before how the eye test above would actually seem to colorblind individuals (I realize it’s not simply black and white to them). Why would any of them ever believe you when you said those random dots actually revealed a number or letter? Would you believe me if I said my name was actually written on your carpeting (presuming I’m not holding a can of spray paint)? How could people ever understand colors that they can’t see?
Humans can only think and act according to their perceptions. If it’s just me in my car at an intersection, I can’t think to stop at the red light if I perceive red the same as green. This realization becomes very important and helpful when we consider a concept in the Bible that is understandably confusing: the sinful nature. Christians commonly hold that we all have one. And that it makes us imperfectly unfit for heaven from the get-go. But I rarely hear an explanation of how. And when I do, it inevitably involves some sort of Mendelian morality mutation in our spiritual DNA passed down to us all from Adam and Eve. Honestly, that doesn’t make any sense to me, but what follows does.
If we do have a sinful nature, and if it was initiated by the first humans to sin, perhaps it’s more a matter of perception than pedigree. The Bible depicts the world as an experience of imperfection following human sin, and no one born into that world can either perceive perfection or perfectly perceive as a result. We can’t understand the perfection that we can’t experience, and we also can’t think and act according to the perfection we can’t perceive. Hence our sinful nature, our natural inclination to think and act according to what we can perceive…which has always been tainted by the imperfection that always surrounds us. We naturally see evil and hear evil, which naturally inclines us to do evil as well: our sinful nature (Click to tweet).
Adam and Eve initiated such a world of flawed perception, but we perpetuate the imperfect experience for ourselves and others by choosing to give into our sinful nature many times each day. How can we ever escape then? Only by being allowed to perceive perfection instead, enabling us to finally perfectly perceive. God himself enables both to happen; check out how in the Healing Hereafter e-book series. Read it free and instantly here, especially Booklet 3, Chapter 3 for this topic.
Oh, and to make sure we don’t leave our colorblind friends out, anyone ready for another perception challenge (and willing to cross their eyes in just the right way) will enjoy receiving this message from me… 🙂
