Are People Born Deaf and Blind to The Truth?

Are People Born Deaf and Blind to The Truth?

Contra Total Depravity, part 6

The Calvinists find themselves in a very difficult situation. They maintain that a sinner separated from God is spiritually deaf and blind, incapable of receiving or understanding the truth about God, and incapable of exercising saving faith. Their hearts must be regenerated first before they can come to the understanding that they were once deaf and blind to the truth.

But if this is true, at what point was the Ethiopian Eunuch regenerated? Were his ears deaf during the time in which Philip was explaining to him Isaiah 53? If so, how did he come to understand these things to lead him to faith if he was at that time deaf? Or did God regenerate his heart first before he understood Isaiah 53 so that he could rightly understand what Philip communicated to him? But if one maintains that regeneration is necessary to happen first in order to understand the gospel, then why preach the gospel at that point if they are already saved? They’ll figure it out, right? So what is the Calvinistic understanding here? Does the natural mind receive the spiritual truths of the gospel? Or is regeneration required to first understand? Or were his deaf ears opened before being regenerated? Or was he even deaf in the first place?

Do you see the problem? If the Ethiopian Eunuch was regenerated prior to understanding Isaiah 53 in order that he might understand Isaiah 53, then it becomes quite pointless to share the gospel with him if he is at that point already saved. But the Calvinist would probably say that the preaching of the gospel is the ordained means by which God saves someone. However, if they maintain this, and also maintain spiritual and moral incapacity to understand spiritual truth, then that means the preaching of the gospel would have to have no effect upon the heart or mind and is independent from God saving them (unless they believe in partial regeneration). The only reason the gospel is used then for saving people is God’s choice to zap someone’s heart to be saved while the gospel message is being preached but such a zapping is independent of that person’s understanding or feelings since the regeneration must take place first in order for them to understand anything spiritual. At this point, the “ordained means” simply becomes a charade, having the appearance of affecting the heart and mind but really having no actual effect upon it since an incapable person is incapable of being affected.

But if that is all true, how is the gospel truly the power of God unto salvation? (Ro 1:16). It would not be, since the true power is not in the gospel but rather, in God’s deterministic choice to regenerate someone’s heart regardless of what a person’s mind, heart, or will may be. In Calvinism, the gospel message is just a charade and a charade has no power. All the power truly goes back to God’s sovereign determination.

For what reason also did the Apostle Paul rationalize with people if they are totally and spiritually dead? Would dead people listen? Acts 17:2 and 18:19 says that Paul reasoned with them, the Jews, from the Scriptures. And he also reasoned with the Greeks (Acts 17:22-33). But if the gospel message is that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead, would not that simple phrase be sufficient as God’s ordained means to save someone? If so, why did Paul use lengthy discussions? Why was he trying to convince people of who the true God was first before presenting the truth about Jesus? Perhaps their understanding is not as incapable or independent from their understanding as the Calvinists maintain…

Why even use the gospel message at all if the necessary precondition is actually God zapping them alive? Why would anyone reason with spiritually dead and deaf people? Also, in Paul’s conversion, why didn’t God zap Paul to be regenerated on the spot? Why did someone have to come to lay hands on him for him to receive the Holy Spirit? Paul heard the message of the truth about the resurrected Christ and so he believed at that point. But he was not regenerated until later.

Jesus spoke to His disciples, saying, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand” (Lk 8:10). But if people are blind, deaf, and incapable from birth, there would be no reason to speak in parables, would there? Jesus could have spoken plainly, with the utmost clarity, and these people would still not understand if Calvinism were true. Why also did Jesus warn people not to tell others who He was? (Mt 8:4; 16:20; 17:9; Mk 8:30, etc.). After all, if it is all based upon God’s determination in who believes and who does not believe, then God could have just sovereignly determined that anyone who was told about Jesus would simply not believe because God had not determined it. But since that is not the reality here, it was necessary not to spread the message of Jesus since people were truly capable of responding and believing in Him, which could have subverted the plan of crucifixion to save the world.

Then in 2 Corinthians 4:4 it says that the god of this world, the devil, “has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” But why would the devil need to do this kind of blinding if they were born that way and sovereignly determined to be reprobates from the very beginning by God? The devil would not need to do any work in convincing people to go to hell or to ignore God if that were simply their natural and inevitable condition apart from God choosing to regenerate their hearts. The devil might as well sit back and relax because under Calvinism, there is nothing he can do to bring more people down to hell with him. Only the predetermined number of people that God has ordained to go to hell will go to hell. But if Calvinism is not true, then there are real consequences and the devil is really doing everything he can to bring the whole world down with him. Therefore, he can truly blind people from the truth through his cunning methods and there is a true spiritual war going on. It would make no sense to blame the devil for anything like blinding people if God is the one who created people spiritually blind and incapable of ever spiritually understanding the truth. If that were true, then God would be the one to blame, not the devil.

If people are born incapable of believing in Jesus, then why did Jesus allow Lazarus to die first and wait four days in order to raise him from the dead as a convincing proof of Jesus’ power and authority? Jesus said to His disciples, “Lazarus is dead, and I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, so that you may believe; but let us go to him” (Jn 11:14-15). If everyone’s belief and salvation are all rooted in God’s sovereign deterministic choices, then why all the theatrics? Why did Jesus do what He could in this scenario to be all the more convincing to people if in fact, the ability was not in them to be convinced? Instead of saying, “Lazarus, come forth!” He should have snapped His fingers and said, “Everyone at the sound of My voice, I command you to believe in Me at this very instant and be made alive” or “I command your faith to increase at this moment” and then everyone in the crowd would be convinced that He was the Messiah and the Son of God and would have the faith to move mountains. But did Jesus do that? No. Why? Because that is not how it works. People truly need to be convinced in their own hearts and minds. And that is exactly what happened and what Jesus intended to happen as it says, “Therefore many of the Jews who came to Mary, and saw what He had done, believed in Him” (v. 45).

In Romans 8:7-8 it says, “the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” Some may see this and interpret it as mankind’s natural inability to have faith in God but it is not talking about that. It’s talking about man’s incapability of obeying God’s law apart from the Spirit of God dwelling within them and if we branch out to Hebrews 11:6 we see that faith is needed as well to please God. But these passages do not say that having faith in God is impossible for the natural man to do. It is only indicating that in order to please God, our hearts need to be right before God. And as long as we are living according to the flesh rather than according to the Spirit and according to faith, then we cannot be pleasing to God. Therefore, what is needed for those people is for them to have faith in God and repent so that they can receive the Spirit and be pleasing to God.

In that old hymn, Amazing Grace, there are those words, “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” No doubt, it comes from the story of the blind man in John chapter nine. But we must be careful here to properly distinguish between a physical miracle and the miracle of salvation. It would only be proper to understand blindness before our conversion in a more idiomatic sense and to not take that idiom too far as I have warned against previously in the article Does Dead Mean Dead? In the same way as we do not make the idiomatic word “dead” to mean more than it means in the biblical context, so also we should not make the word “blind” mean more than it truly means. Spiritual blindness would simply be the inhibitions or blockages that prevent us from seeing the truth. These inhibitions would include things like our sin, the distractions of the world, lies we believe in, and our ignorance of God. Those things are in the way and prevent people from seeing the truth but as those things diminish, God’s light shines through and we have enough light to see and believe. Therefore, it is not an ontological spiritually incapable kind of blindness but rather, a blindness due to the darkness that is around us and obscures the light from reaching our spiritual eyes.

The Pharisees witnessed with their own eyes what Jesus did in giving sight to the man who was born blind but despite this, they refused to believe. The evidence was right in front of them. The blind man testified that Jesus gave him sight and his parents testified that he was indeed born blind. The man who had received his sight told the Pharisees that if Jesus were a sinner, then God would not listen to Him or give Him the ability to open the eyes of blind people and that this miracle had never been done before. All he knew was that he was once blind but now he could see. That was enough evidence for him to believe but the Pharisees continued refusing to believe Jesus, insisting that Jesus was a sinner and they could not figure out where Jesus had come from or why He could perform these miracles. The man who had received his sight said, “If this man were not from God, He could do nothing” (Jn 9:33). Then John 9:39-41 says:

And Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.” Those of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these things and said to Him, “We are not blind too, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

Here Jesus begins to speak of blindness and sight in a spiritual way. Those who did not know Jesus, who were not religious, and did not know the Law of Moses, would see and believe Jesus unto eternal life. But those who claimed they could see because they had and believed the Scriptures, would be the very ones who would become blind, since they rejected Jesus despite all the clear evidence right in front of them.

But here this is very interesting because the Pharisees asked if Jesus thought they were blind. Jesus responds, “If you were blind…” meaning, they were not actually blind. They could see clearly. They had functioning minds. The problem is that they refused to see and so in that sense they were blind. But Jesus points out to them that in their condition of claiming to see the truth, they were culpable for their sin. This means that if they were truly incapable of seeing and believing, then they would have no sin at all and would not be guilty. But since they can truly see and truly respond, for this, they are guilty for refusing to accept the truth. Their sin remains. But contrary to Jesus’ words, the Calvinist position wants us to believe that we are guilty for sin even though we cannot truly spiritually see anything or are ever able to respond in faith. This doctrine is the opposite of what Jesus is teaching here. Jesus says that because you can see, you are guilty while the Calvinist says that even though you can’t see, you are guilty. So which one is true?

Tell me, when the blind man received spiritual sight so as to believe in Jesus, was that before or after the physical miracle of him receiving sight? If the Calvinist maintains that the blind man received spiritual sight at the same time that he received physical sight, then how on earth was he capable of submitting to the command of Jesus to wash his eyes at the pool of Siloam? How could he have the faith to believe the words of Jesus before the miracle? According to the doctrine of Total Inability, he could not have. Therefore, the Calvinist must maintain that this man supernaturally received spiritual sight prior to him receiving physical sight to be consistent with Calvinistic doctrine. However, the context implies that there was a progression of this man believing more and more about who Jesus was. First, he acknowledged that Jesus was from God and was a prophet (v. 17, 31-33), then he acknowledges and believes that He is the Son of Man (v. 35-38). This was the title for the Messiah (Dan 7:13-14).