In his book The Mind’s Eye, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes the fascinating case of Sue Barry, who late in life learned to see in a whole new way. As a child she developed strabismus (crossed eyes), though surgery had corrected her misaligned eyesight. She had no idea there was anything still amiss with her 20/20 vison until she was in college, when an eye exam revealed that she lacked binocular vision. Her brain had never learned to merge the images from both eyes into one three-dimensional scene. It would ignore each eye in turn and rapidly shift between two perspectives. As a result, the world flattened, like a painting or television screen.
To Sue, this
seemed to be a minor inconvenience, because she had learned to estimate depth
and distance in other ways. Still, she couldn’t appreciate why others would
“ooh” and “ahh” when they peered through a View-Master or an old-fashioned
stereoscope. To most people, the dual images would merge to become strangely
real—objects would become solid and round, and buildings would stand out
against the skyline. But to her, the two pictures remained stubbornly separate,
refocusing to focusing into one.
It wasn’t
until her late forties that she began therapy to correct her gaze. For months
she did exercises to train her eyes to focus together, but noticed little
change. Then one afternoon as she was climbing into her car, a startling sight
greeted her – the steering wheel “popped out” from the dashboard. Over the next
few days she started experiencing the world in a whole new way. Grass spiked
upward from the ground, and flowers seemed “inflated” not flat as they used to
be.
At lunch
she’d stare at the grape she had speared onto her fork, how it hovered in the
air above her plate. “I had no idea what I was missing,” Sue said. “Ordinary
things looked extraordinary. Light fixtures floated and water faucets stuck way
out into space.”
Outside one
wintry day, she found a wet, lazy snowfall enthralling, the flakes slowly
swirling to the ground. She writes:
“I could see the space between each flake, and all the flakes
together produced a beautiful three-dimensional dance. In the past, the snow
would have appeared to fall in a flat sheet in one plane slightly in front of
me. I would have felt like I was looking in on the snowfall. But now, I felt
myself within the snowfall…as I watched I was overcome with a deep sense of
joy. A snowfall can be quite beautiful – especially when you see it for the
first time.”
The more we learn
about Jesus and His super abounding grace, the more our inner eyes need to have
the same “binocular vision” for reading our Bibles. The image we have of Christ
in the New Testament should overlap and fuse together with that of His Father,
the God who revealed Himself in the Old Testament. Didn’t Jesus proclaim, “I
and the Father are one” (John 10:30)?
If you grew
up reading the Bible the way I did, though, your inner “eyes” may keep them
stubbornly separate. Your mind may refuse to merge your perception of Jesus
with that of His heavenly Father, if you see Christ’s compassion for sinners as
an utter contrast to the harsh judgment of the God of the Old Testament.
This habit
of separating and contrasting the sternness of Israel’s God with the love of Christ
pervades Christian history. The practice harkens all the way back to a Turkish
churchman named Marcian, who lived only a century after Christ. His “double
vision” split the God of the Old Testament entirely away from Christ. He saw
them as two different entities and viewed Israel’s God as an inferior, warlike
deity whom Christ had defeated and replaced. Marcian wanted to throw out the
Old Testament entirely and purge the New Testament of all its influence.
The early
church condemned Marcian as a heretic, knowing that when Jesus proclaimed,
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9) and when Paul preached
that Christ is the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) they were
speaking the absolute truth. And nowhere is the absolute synergy between the
God of the Old Testament and Jesus Christ seen more than in Genesis 15 when the
very heart of God Most High is revealed in all its brilliance. You think Jesus
is full of compassion? Just look at the depiction of the God of the Universe in
Genesis 15. That’s where we will be this Sunday in a message entitled, The Heart of God. In preparation for our
study, you may wish to consider the following:
1. Why would
R.C. Sproul call this the greatest chapter of Scripture?
2. What do the
first three words of chapter 15 signal?
3. What would
Abram be fearful of in verse 2?
4. Who is
Eliezar of Damascus?
5. Why are
descendants so important to Abram?
6. What’s the
first proof that Abram will have descendants?
7. What’s the
second proof?
8. What is the
significance of verse 6?
9. How does the
promise of verse 4 square with the promise of verse 7?
10. How does
God’s answer to Abram’s question in verse 8 prove that His heart is the same as
Jesus’ heart?
See you
Sunday!
