The Eyes of the Heart

Recently, my two-year-old granddaughter, Lynnie, was sitting on my lap at church when she reached out for my necklace and began examining it carefully. Without ever taking her eyes off it, she said in the sweetest and most earnest tone, “Cross. That’s for Jesus.”

Childlike acceptance is distinguished in Scripture as essential for salvation. It is being certain of what is true, not because of indoctrination, but because it is authentic and steadfast. This is what a child experiences in their pure acceptance because Truth isn’t just a concept presented with words. It is an experience that cannot be challenged. It is the essence of why martyrs die for the Truth, missionaries give up everything on earth for the Truth, evangelizers cannot be silent about the Truth, and expositors cannot put down the Truth.

Paul to the believers in Ephesus: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know Him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in His holy people, and His incomparably great power for us who believe” (Ephesians 1:17-19, NIV).

Seeing with the eyes of the heart is where we experience the glory of God, and it is through this glory the Truth is revealed to us.

We are surrounded by those who do not see with the eyes of their hearts. That’s why the idea of what is true becomes constructed of variables instead of joy-filled resolve.

Frequently, when contemplating how we make the case for “what is the truth and how do we know it to be true,” we go to intellectual proofs like Christian evidences. In today’s world, we are dealing with highly educated objectors to our convictions. When they encounter someone who is sold out on the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they see someone who, in their judgement, lacks understanding of the validity (and authority, even) of scientific knowledge. They do not see someone with a heart that sees. We are in an age where our children are taught in public school uniformly through all their subjects upon a foundation of a godless evolution. We are considered fools if we reject what the advancement of secular science has concluded even though highly relevant pieces to their theories remain missing.

It serves as a great encouragement to us as believers to contemplate the manner in which the truth of the Word of God has been proven time and again. That’s appropriate. That’s worship, even. We can’t help but well up with humble adoration of God’s blatant proof of existence while scratching our heads at how cynics or outright deniers of God’s existence aren’t impressed with such facts.

I, personally, am captivated by biblical evidences because they cause amazement even though we know the Divine Creator will always exceed our expectations. Let’s consider a few.

Job 26:7 — “He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; Hhe suspends the earth over nothing” (NIV). Galileo started making claims in the early 1600s that the earth was suspended on nothing but was, in fact, forced by his contemporary community of philosophers in 1633 to recant these claims. If you look this up today, you will find Galileo’s claims were formally considered verified in 1968 during the first space voyage around the moon.

Isaiah 40:22 — “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth” (NIV). The earth is ROUND. This concept wasn’t accepted widely until the fifteenth century. Of course, I was taught in school in the 1970s that Christopher Columbus proved it was round in 1492 when he sailed the ocean blue.

Genesis 2:1 — “Thus the heavens and earth were completed in all their vast array” (NIV). The original language in Hebrew is using a verb that means “finished,” so that is to say the energy and mass used to create all things had been exacted and concluded. Yet, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that physicist Julius Robert Van Mayer authored the first law of thermodynamics stating that neither matter nor energy can be either created or destroyed, which is exactly the same thing as what was expressed in Genesis 2:1.

Psalm 102:25, 26 explains that the earth is wearing out yet, once again, in the nineteenth century we have authored the second law of thermodynamics which states that the earth is wearing out. Relevantly, these laws of thermodynamics are fundamentally key to the science community persisting in a course to make sense of it all absent a Divine Creator.

Amos 9:6 explains in essence how all the rivers run into the sea but the sea is not full; Ecclesiastes 1:7 says, “to the place from which the rivers come they return again” (NIV).

Psalm 135:7 declares that God causes the vapors from the ends of the earth to rise into the clouds, then brings rain causing it to return to the earth. We get the entire hydrologic cycle in these Old Testament passages, yet the hydrologic cycle was “discovered” by Bernard Palissy in 1580.

Now, to be clear, science is not an enemy of Truth. It is the mindset of man that is a

denouncer of Truth. Science, as we can see, continues to prove God.

Amid such examples is one that is especially meaningful. Naval oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury was a seafarer whose ambitions at sea were cut short by an injury that left him reassigned to shore duty at the Naval Conservatory. He had been a Christian since his youth and was well-acquainted with the Holy Word, including the Psalm 8:8 passage that refers to the paths of the sea. He believed in the paths of the sea on the merit of the Scripture’s claim of their existence, but he’d lost his opportunity to bring weight to this Truth by way of ongoing sea voyages. Then he found trunks of old captains’ logs at the Conservatory stowed away with no examination. He studied them and harmonized them and through these forgotten records, brought forth the emerging dynamics of paths of the sea. While he’s credited for “discovering” paths of the sea for all ocean voyagers, he knew from the beginning it wasn’t a discovery but a verification of the Word of God.

These are the kinds of things we can contemplate that elate us as believers. We delight in them because we see the glory of God in them! We have consumed these things with the eyes of our hearts. Conversely, these very same details are unpersuasive to those who reject the Truth of the gospel. In fact, they are flatly ignored as if we use them to defend our belief system while they are the actual keepers of truth. They do not see with the eyes of the heart and therefore simply cannot see the glory of God. In fact, though they see themselves as the keepers of all things evidentiary, they do not argue with evidence to disprove our beliefs in a Divine Creator who is the essence of Truth. They instead argue against the existence of God using negatives, such as “We don’t have enough evidence to determine there is a God” or “If God is all-powerful and benevolent, then why does evil exist?” or “We as a human race have no purpose because the universe is indifferent to our existence.”

Our passions exhaust them because of what is stated outrightly in John 1:5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it” (NIV). The world of atheism that rejects biblical evidences is captivated by their own theories because they do not see the glory of God in the written Word that serves as affirming proof in these examples we’ve just reviewed. They only see words, and they then judge those words to be invalid because they do not have hearts with eyes. They are instead more confident in the words of man, and if you do not accept the Word of God to be absolute Truth, you are only hitching your wagon to whoever’s opinions impress you most. Livescience.com, an award-winning resource for the secular science community, openly acknowledges that the original hypothesis Darwin used to construct the theory of evolution doesn’t math out with the Big Bang theory. That’s right. The combination of general relativity and the idea of singularity of energy and mass hits a snag in its mathematical equation in relation to the Big Bang. Yet the response of this community is not to abandon a failed theory but to work hard at developing a second theory using quantum physics to marry Darwin’s original theory to make it all work. (https://www.livescience.com/what-is-singularity) This amply demonstrates the hopelessness of a heart without eyes.

On the other hand, God, and therefore Truth, is established in us, not because we see words on pages that we dull-mindedly accept as Truth, but because the glory of God is radiating in and through them, and our heart sees and experiences that. In fact, as we consume the written Word and find it perplexing or are in search of how it agrees with other text or are simply in pursuit of learning, relating it back to the sweeping and omnipresent glory of God that abounds from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 becomes immediate context. Every word is penned within a persistent Truth that has revealed itself throughout time, eras, geographies, and circumstances from whence the writers hailed.

The eyes of the heart see the glory of God, and it is through this glory the Truth is revealed to us. It is essential that we recognize that which segregates us from those who persist in a place ungrounded in the Truth because God loves them and longs for them. We are the light of the world and meant to penetrate the darkness of untruth as He would have it done. How He uses us to enable a lost world to find the eyes of their hearts is His purpose. For us, our certainty of what is True is radiating in His glory and is steadfastly resolved. My, but doesn’t the world need that! C.S. Lewis said it well when he pronounced, “There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.”