Eye on the Sky

Then Nahash the Ammonite went up and besieged Jabesh-gilead, and all the men of Jabesh said to Nahash, “Make a treaty with us, and we will serve you.”  But Nahash the Ammonite said to them, “On this condition I will make a treaty with you, that I gouge out all your right eyes, and thus bring disgrace on all Israel.” – 1 Samuel 11:1-2

The right eye represents wisdom whereas the left eye speaks of knowledge.  Jesus talks about having an eye that is “single”, clear in its vision and balanced.  Spiritually speaking, a lot of us have a much better left eye than right eye.  We acquire a lot of knowledge.  People think we are smart.  We even think we are smart.  Yet our eye for wisdom is short-sighted.

The world and the devil are not enemies of knowledge.  The natural order is not threatened by information or even by cunning and cleverness.  We are told, though, that the fear of (i.e., respect for) the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  Godly wisdom will mess up our relationship with the world system.  We may end up seeming foolish, since the wisdom of God is foolishness to man.  Our thinking and behavior will not always line up with the logic of the Flatlanders because we are operating in additional dimensions. 

Nahash typifies the devil in desiring to blind us to those divine, vertical realities.  He states his case plainly and reveals the enemy’s plot throughout the ages:  to enslave humanity to the material and deny us access to divine revelation, wisdom and understanding. 

All the “Left Behind” scenarios and typical evangelical thinking and descriptions of the beast and the mark of the beast and the antichrist always rang a little hollow to me.  If you want to see the beast at work, turn on your television.  The news is mostly partisan propaganda.  Commercials play with our lusts, our fears, and our appetites to control our habits.  Some of the programs numb our minds and anesthetize our thinking allowing still others to perform the surgery necessary to render us blind to truth.  

The beast is not in retirement.  The antichrist is not in hiding, waiting for some snatching away of the righteous that he might be revealed.  The enemy adapts new methods but never a new end.  The history of the one-eyed is a bloody history.  Those who could see only with the eye of knowledge have dug mass graves and slaughtered their fellow men by the millions in the last century alone.  We do not need to fear them, but we cannot trust them or submit to them.  We need both eyes.  Open.