An Autopsy of Spiritual Blindness (Rom. 11:7-10)

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The Bible doesn’t put every unbeliever in the same category.  Though all unbelief in the gospel is sin, some species of unbelief are worse than others.  However, what makes it worse is not so much the kinds of flagrant sins that we often associate with “being bad,” but the attitude a person takes towards the gospel.  There is a kind of unbeliever who has resisted the gospel for so long that they have put themselves in a place where God has given them over to a state judicial hardening and blindness. And there is nothing left for them “but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries” (Heb. 10:27).

The Bible warns us of this type of person because it is meant to stir up the elect to a godly fear and repentance and faith.  When this warning is taken to heart, it is a means under God’s grace of preserving a soul from utter and eternal ruin.  But for it to be a means, we have to understand the warning concerning those who have hardened themselves against the truth, and to understand the warning, we need to examine this person and the stages through which they descend into spiritual blindness and irreversible hostility to Christ and his gospel.

That is what the apostle Paul does here in these verses.  Here we have a sort of spiritual autopsy of a person and a people who have resisted the gospel to the point of coming under God’s judgment, even this side of death, a judgment that leaves them spiraling toward eternal destruction.  This is not a pleasant thing to talk about, but it is necessary.  It is necessary because God’s word sets this before us and it therefore demands our serious and sober attention.

Remember that the apostle is asking and answering three questions in the first fifteen verses about Israel’s present and future (1, 7, 10).  He has argued that despite persistent Jewish unbelief God was not done with the Jewish people.  This then leads to the question, okay, if God is not done with Israel, then what is going on right now?   What is God doing?  And that leads to the question that Paul asks and answers now.

The question is, “What then?” (7a).  That is to say, “What is going on then?”  What is God doing now?  And Paul answers: “Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded” (7b).  The thing that Israel was seeking was righteousness before God (see 9:31; 10:3).  But they did not attain it; they did not find it.  We know why; it was because the only way a person can be right with God is through faith in Jesus Christ and they had rejected Jesus as the Messiah.  There is no other way.  There is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved (Acts 4:12).  We must remember that seeking salvation is not the same thing as being saved.  Just because a person wants to go to heaven doesn’t mean that they will.  The desire to escape hell is no sign of an authentic work of the Holy Spirit in the heart.  Nor is being religious.  It is religious people who are being spoken of here.  Israel was not pagan Rome.  They had God’s word.  They had the true religion.  And yet they were lost!

Thank God, it was not the case with the whole nation.  “But the election hath obtained it,” Paul reminds us.  The “remnant according to the election of grace” obtained it.  They were righteous before God through faith in Christ.  “As many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48), whether Jew or Gentile.  Thank God, not one of those whom the Father gave to the Son in the covenant of redemption will be lost.  All will be saved.  

What about “the rest”?  They “were blinded.”  The Greek word there literally means to be hardened, although this hardness was characterized by blindness to the truth of God, an inability to appreciate it, to find the relevance of it to one’s life or to see the reality of it.  This was the state, by and large, of the Jewish nation in Paul’s day.

In verses 8-10, Paul goes on to quote OT passages that illustrate this condition of blindness and hardness, quoting from Deut. 29:4, Isa. 29:10, and Ps. 69:22-23.  But you will notice that the pervasive metaphor here is the inability to see or hear God speaking in any meaningful way.  It is this thing that we want to examine together. There are four questions we need to ask of this text.  The first is, what is this condition exactly?  Second, how does God factor into this?  Third, how does a person get here?  Finally, what lessons do we need to take to heart from it?

What is this condition exactly?

The apostle tells us that God has taken away the ability of these people to see and hear the gospel.  But, you may ask, isn’t that the case with all who are not born again, and isn’t Paul speaking here about the lost – so how can people who already can’t see or understand the kingdom of God (cf. Jn. 3:3,5) be deprived of something they don’t even have?  How can you take away the sight of the blind?

The fact of the matter is that not all spiritual blindness is the same.  Some is worse than others.  There are levels of depravity.  When we talk about “total depravity,” we are not saying that humanity is as bad as it can possibly get, we are saying that every part of the human person is depraved.  We are depraved in the totality of our being.  But we are not as bad as we could possibly be. And we are thankful for that.  This is what theologians call common grace – the kindness of God to a sinful and fallen world that even though it is fallen yet is able to cobble together things like art and politics and law and stable societies and science and so on.  It’s not just regenerate people who can do these things.  Lost people, unsaved people, do these things too.

However, what this means is that sometimes God judges wicked societies by taking away his common grace, his restraining hand, and letting the society fall deeper into spiritual darkness and depravity.  That is what Paul is talking about here.  

It is in fact what our Lord is talking about when he explains why he spoke in parables.  Sometimes people think that our Lord spoke in parables to make things clearer.  That’s exactly backwards.  He spoke in parables to make things less clear to his audience, and he did so in response to their unbelief.  It was our Lord increasing the level of darkness, so to speak.  Here is what he said in response to the disciples’ question, “Why speakest thou unto them in parables?” (Mt. 13:10):

“He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them” (Mt. 13:11-15).

So this is not just darkness.  It is being given over to greater spiritual darkness in response to persistent unbelief despite being given every reason to believe the word of God.  It is at the other end of God stretching out his hands all day long before a disobedient and gainsaying people (Rom. 10:21).  I think perhaps one of the reasons why our translators used the word “hardened” in verse 7 was because Paul is very definitely still thinking in terms of Romans 9.  There we read of Pharaoh being hardened by God.  We also remember that Pharaoh also hardened his own heart, as the text in Exodus reminds us.  Pharoah was told to let the children of Israel go because the God of Israel told him to.  The king of Egypt’s response was that he did not know this God, and he would not let Israel go.  But he could not have said that after even one plague, let alone ten plagues.  But he did, over and over again, refuse to let Israel go, refuse to obey God’s word, despite being given every reason to do so.  That is what Paul is referring to here.  Jesus came to his own, with power and great glory.  He healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, enabled the lame to walk again, delivered people from the power of demons, and raised the dead.  And yet they destroyed him!  They killed him!  This is not just sinning; it is sinning with your eyes wide open.

The Bible says that it is still possible to get into this condition.  It is the condition that the author of Hebrews refers to in chapter 6 when he speaks of those “who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come” (Heb. 6:5-6).  This is not a description of a regenerate person, but it is a description of a person who has on some level been intellectually convinced of the merits of the gospel.  They would have described themselves as a believer.  They would have been a part of the church.  And yet, despite it all, despite all these privileges, “they shall fall away,” and fall away so hard that “it is impossible . . . to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame” (4, 6).  They sin against light.  They reject Christ despite having every reason to embrace him and trust in him.  They will not repent of their sins though they know that they should. It is this person that the author of Hebrews comes back to in chapter 10 when he speaks of those who have “trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace” (10:29).  What does he say about them?  He says, “if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries” (26-27).

It is the condition that the apostle Peter speaks about his in second epistle.  He writes, of people who had been in the church, “For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (2 Pet. 3:20-22).  Again, it is sin against light.  It is persistent, incorrigible unbelief, in the face of good evidence and reasons to believe.  It is knowing the truth and turning from it.

“But,” you may say to me, “How can a person know the truth and not be saved?”  My friend, there is knowing the truth and then there is knowing the truth.  To know God savingly is not just to have an intellectual conviction that the Bible is true.  You can have that and go to hell.  Being a convinced theist is not a ticket to heaven.  You know how I know that?  Because every demon in hell knows that God is real and that the Bible is true.  Satan knows that the Bible is true.  But he does not love the God of the Bible.  To know God savingly is not only to believe that God is real, and that the Bible is the word of God, it is to love and trust in and obey the God of the Bible and his Son Jesus Christ.

This is the point that James makes, isn’t it?  “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?” (Jam. 2:19-20).

This is what Paul says is the condition of Israel in his day.  They had the Bible.  Through them the Messiah came.  They saw the newborn church filled with the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.  And yet they rejected it again and again and again.  They became hardened to the point of utter blindness.  They got to the point where they were unable even to interact with God’s word on any level.  God’s word, which should have been like medicine to heal their blindness, only created harder callouses over their eyes.  Their consciences became utterly hardened.

What role does God play in all this?

God does play a role.  Notice the language here: the “rest were hardened” is what you might call a divine passive, for God is the one who is doing the hardening here (7).  This is confirmed in the words of the very next verse: “God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear” (8).  Then the quote from Ps. 69 is David praying to God: “Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back always” (10) – in other words, David sees God as the one who is doing this.  God gives them a spirit of stupor, blind eyes, and deaf ears.

In other words, this is judicial blindness.  This is God responding to unbelief by giving a person over to unreasonableness.  This is God responding to darkness by giving them to greater darkness.  It is not God causing a person to sin.  It is not God directly creating a hard heart.  The holy God is not the author of sin and cannot be: “God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man” (Jam. 1:13).  Rather, this is God giving someone up to their sin.  This is not just a person deciding that they will have nothing more to do with the gospel: this is God punishing the unbeliever by giving them over to an incorrigible and unreasonable opposition to the gospel.  It is God withdrawing his common grace from those who persistently resist the gospel.

Now, going back to verse 7, we remember that “the election hath obtained it;” they were saved.  And the fact of the matter is that unless God had chosen them, they would have deserved this as well.  God did not give them over to the sin of unbelief and to this judicial hardness but in sovereign love and grace delivered them from themselves.

The thing to realize here is that those who fall into the category of people who have eyes to see but do not see, who have ears to hear but do not hear, often think that they are exercising their self-sovereignty over against God’s claims upon them.  They think they’re the ones calling all the shots.  They think they are the masters of their fate and the captains of their soul.  But it is not so.  They are being given up by God in a sovereign act of judicial hardness to a reprobate mind.  They are not the ones in control; God is.

How does a person get to this condition?

Here I think we need to reflect upon the path that individuals and even people groups follow to descend here.  The first thing we need to recognize is that Paul is not necessarily describing something that happens to a pagan people.  He is describing something that happens to people who have been persistently exposed to the true word of God.  “All day long have I stretched out my hands to a disobedient and gainsaying people” (Rom. 10:21).  These are people who are seeking righteousness (11:7)!  This is the terrifying aspect of all this.  Having the truth doesn’t mean that you will believe it.  Having the truth doesn’t mean you will apply it to your life.  You can search the Scriptures and miss what the Scriptures are saying to you.  That is what happened in this case.  Here were people who had the word of God, the Scriptures. They heard them read every Sabbath in the temple and in the synagogues.  And yet these very people rejected the Messiah and even had him crucified.

This is not just something that happened to the Jews in Paul’s day.  Notice what Paul will say in just a few verses to Gentiles: “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” (22).  There will be people in the Day of Judgment who will appear before Christ and have this horrible exchange with him: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Mt. 7:21-23).  My friend, do not think that just because you have come to church that that means you are okay.  The question is not if you have heard God’s word.  The question is what you have done with it.  If you ignore it and dismiss it, I’m telling you it is the first step along a path that could very well mean being given up by God to this judicial hardness and blindness.

The next step is not just ignoring the word of God, but doing so to the point that you ignore the testimony of your conscience to it.  You see, the conscience is God’s built-in witness to the truth of his word.  The word of God reveals some sin in your life.  It tells you to repent, and your conscience agrees: “Repent!”  But what a person may do is to ignore the conscience.  When you do this again and again, it becomes increasingly easy to ignore the protestations of this inner witness.  Spiritual callouses develop over your heart and you become immune to the Divine summons to repent and believe.  Paul speaks about people like this to Timothy:

“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:1-2).

It is also this that the author of Hebrews is warning us when he writes,

“Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:12-13).

The next step is outright rebellion.  This person started out so well, under the word and discipline of the word of God.  But they have thrown off the perceived shackles of God’s word and gone on to do their own thing.  They no longer feel the pangs of conscience, and it all feels a bit freeing.  But they do not realize that they are really putting a real set of shackles on.  As our Lord put it, whoever commits sin is the slave of sin.  The devil becomes their master.  Like Young Goodman Brown in Hawthorn’s short story, they go down the dark path with the devil, passing by opportunity after opportunity to go back until it is too late.  They are now under his control.  They are now his servants.  

Then this is often followed by not only rebellion against God’s word, but outright and open hostility and unreasonable hatred for the Bible, God’s people, the church, and above all, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Paul describes what happened to many of his fellow countrymen as a result of going down this very dark path:

For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost” (1 Thess. 2:14-16).

In this state, it’s not only that such a person becomes hostile to the gospel; even the good gifts of God’s physical creation become a snare and a trap and a stumbling block and a recompense unto them (Rom. 11:9-10).  Instead of pointing us to God and his goodness, finite things become so many drugs that dull us to the infinite and the eternal.  Instead of the goodness of God leading us to repentance, we harden our hearts in impenitence and treasure up for ourselves wrath for the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God who will render to every man according to his deeds (cf. Rom. 2:4-6).  The gold and silver that we love instead of God will eat our flesh and be a witness against us in the day of judgment (Jam. 5:1-4).  And so the gospel bounces off this person because though their soul is destitute and utterly starved, they are perfectly satiated with their dinners and football games and vacations.

But again, let’s remember that Paul explicitly says that what happened to the Jews can happen to Gentiles.  There is a lesson here for Gentiles who have heard the gospel and reject it.  This is a sobering warning to all who turn away from Christ, suppress their conscience, and harden their hearts.  It could be that God gives you over to increasing spiritual blindness and darkness. What a terrifying and grievous condition!  Oh, may the Holy Spirit so strive with us that we none of us end up this way!

My friends, this path can be taken by individuals.  But here’s the thing: it is also a path that can be taken by nations and peoples and societies.  It happened to Paul’s people in his day.  I cannot help but think that it has happened to the church in the West in our day.  There is a darkness around us that is as bad or worse than what happened to the Jews in Paul’s day.  We too have been blessed to have the word of God for generations.  Our Baptist and Protestant forefathers were faithful to the point of death.  They at great sacrifice gave us the word of God in our own language and gave us a rich theological and ecclesiastical heritage.  What have we done with it?  We have squandered it.  Behold the goodness and the severity of God!  We have seen the goodness, but now we are seeing the severity.  It doesn’t mean God is not in control.  What it means is that we are a culture under the judgment of God.  We are not waiting to come under God’s judgment, we are already there, although it certainly can get worse, and will, unless there is widespread repentance in our land.  We should therefore be praying, with the prophet Habakkuk, who lived in a day when God’s temple was destroyed and his people banished from the land for their sin against him – “O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy” (Hab. 3:2).

So what should be our response to this?  Well, these warnings are not in the Bible just for our curiosity.  As I said at the beginning, they are there to act as warnings are meant to function: to get our attention and to turn us from this path and to turn us rather to the light of God’s truth.  And if you found yourself this morning along the path that I have described, you need to repent: “Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Eph. 5:14).  May your eyes be opened, may you be turned from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God, that you may receive the forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in Christ (Acts 26:18).  

And there is only one who can give you this light.  It is the Lord Jesus Christ.  May you receive him in true faith and with heart and life-changing repentance, the Jesus that John the apostle speaks of in the opening lines of his gospel.  May we be drawn to him and find in him the light and life that we need.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John. 1:1-18).