Spiritual Blindness

The movie, Barbie (2023), is a fantasy/comedy about a group of dolls who live in the perfect world of "Barbieland." One night, the dolls are having a dance party when Barbie starts thinking about the uncomfortable reality of death.

All the barbies are dancing to pop music in the barbie dream house saying, “Oh, isn’t this the most beautiful day! Aren’t we the most beautiful people? Doesn’t it feel like this is just going to go on like this forever?” And then the main Barbie, Margot Robbie’s character says, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” and the record scratches and the music stops. The other Barbies stare at her aghast and angry, as if to say, that topic doesn’t belong in Barbieland. And Barbie kind of covers it up and says, “I’m just dying... to keep dancing!” and the music plays and the Barbies go back to their fantasy world.

The next morning, Barbie wakes up with bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet. The rest of the movie is about her quest to discover what it means to be alive outside of perfect Barbieland.

Preaching Angle: Just like in Barbieland, it can be uncomfortable to bring up the topic of death. But we need to face the reality of death to grow spiritually and emotionally.

Clip available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImFQpKImJqQ

In his book, A Million Little Miracles, Mark Batterson believes we’re walking through a world brimming with the miraculous—we just don’t have the eyes to see it.

“There are miracles happening all around us all the time, hidden in plain sight,” Batterson says. “If you miss them, life can become a little bit of a chore and a bore. But if you rediscover the miracle that is life, it takes on a different dimension.”

It’s not just the big, cinematic miracles—the Red Sea parting or a blind man seeing. It’s the fact that we’re currently spinning at 1,000 miles per hour on a planet hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour, all while our bodies conduct trillions of biochemical reactions every second.

What if the real problem isn’t that miracles are rare—it’s that we’ve trained ourselves not to notice them? Psychologists call it “inattentional blindness.” If something is constant—like the sun rising, our hearts beating, or our lungs breathing—we stop paying attention to it. Batterson explains, “We should be startled by the sun, not the eclipse.”

The same is true of our own bodies. Batterson says:

Right now, you have 37 sextillion biochemical reactions happening inside of you. Your heart will beat 100,000 times today, pumping six quarts of blood through 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries—that’s twice the circumference of the Earth. And yet, we go about our day saying, ‘Well, I’ve never seen a miracle.’ With all due respect, you’ve never not seen one. In fact, you are one.”

So how do we start seeing the miracles around us? Learn to take nothing for granted. To wake up each day and marvel at the ordinary. To stop waiting for the grand, spectacular moment and realize that the spectacular is happening all around us, all the time. And maybe, just maybe, if we start paying attention, we’ll realize that life itself is the miracle we’ve been waiting for.

Humans have color vision because our eyes contain three types of cone cells. One cone helps us see blue, another to see green, and the third to see red. This is called trichromatic vision. The brain combines signals from these three types of cones to perceive a wide range of colors, allowing humans to distinguish millions of different colors from periwinkle to chartreuse.

There is, however, a rare breed living among us called tetrachro¬mats. They possess a fourth cone, allowing them to see a hundred mil¬lion colors that are invisible to the rest of us. For every color a trichromat sees, a tetrachromat perceives a hundred hues!

I can't help but wonder if we'll get a fifth cone in heaven, enabling us to perceive a billion colors. Or perhaps a sixth, seventh, or hun¬dredth cone! By earthly standards, we'll have extrasensory perception. Everything will smell better, taste better, sound better, feel better, and look better. With our newly glorified senses, we'll hear angel octaves.

Remember when Elisha was surrounded by the Aramean army? He said to his very confused assistant, "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." Elisha prayed that the Lord would open his servant's eyes, and it's almost like God created an extra cone. "He looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha."

Possible Preaching Angle: If our spiritual eyes were opened, what would we see? We'd see what's really happening! We'd see guardian angels, as the scriptures describe them ministering to those who will inherit salvation (Heb. 1:14). We'd discern the manifest presence of God, perhaps like Moses who encountered God's glory on the mountain or Isaiah in God’s throne room (Exod. 33:18-23; Isa. 6:1-7). We'd perceive powers and principalities, those unseen forces at work in the world, as Paul warns us about (Eph. 6:12).

When Galileo introduced the telescope as a tool to peer into the galaxies, his contemporaries did not believe him. Scoffing, they refused to even look through the device. Galileo sat alone with his telescope. He was the sole observer of the vastness of the cosmos. A single witness of galaxies beyond anything anyone had seen or imagined. Galileo had the stars to himself.

Undermining Aristotle’s previous explanations of the universe, Galileo published his own findings based on what he’d seen through the telescope. He painted a picture for the entire world through words, a display of the heavens scratched across bound pages. He wrote about mountains and craters on the moon, spots upon the sun, satellites orbiting Jupiter, and multitudes of stars never known to exist.

These were monumental discoveries that would shape future space explorations, but they fell on ears refusing to hear and eyes refusing to see. Galileo’s peers mocked him and his toy. Strictly adhering to Aristotle’s descriptions of the universe, they refused to believe anything contrary to what they had held to for so long.

Diamonds are the hardest substance on Earth, they rate a perfect 10 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. But on other carbon-rich planets, the jury is still out. That’s because for some 40 years, scientists have theorized that diamond can squeeze into an even harder mineral known as an eight-atom body-centered cubic, or BC8. If true, this ultra-dense form of carbon would likely be found on carbon-rich exoplanets and would have both a higher compressive strength and thermal conductivity than diamond.

As a result of their exceptional toughness and resistance to wear, diamonds have found a wide range of services in various fields and daily life. Saw blades and drill bits with diamond tips may easily slice through stone, concrete, and metal. Diamonds are also essential in the electrical industry because of their resilience and resistance to heat and chemicals. Another use for diamonds is their high electrical insulation which makes it a promising material for improving the reliability of semiconductors. And let’s not forget the romantic side of diamonds. Because of their extreme hardness and brilliance diamonds are prized as jewelry which can last forever.

Simply put, the discovery of a way to make this “super-hard diamond” could be a game changer for a variety of industries. And scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of South Florida using the Frontier supercomputer are researching just such a possible pathway toward creating BC8.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While a diamond is remarkable for its incredible hardness, there is something on earth that is even harder – the human heart. The Bible warns that a hardened heart is a serious spiritual condition that can develop through unrepentant sin, pride, ingratitude, or disappointment. Only God can truly soften a hardened heart, which requires recognizing the problem, repenting of sin, and submitting to God's work in one's life.

Have you ever heard about "The Ant Death Spiral"? A fascinating NPR article describes this phenomenon. A particular species of army ant is utterly blind, so they get about by sniffing trails left by the ants in front of them. They, in turn, leave chemical trails of their own.

But, as the article notes, "the system works smoothly when everybody's going in a straight line in one direction. But when the lead ants start to loop, bad things can happen …. If the ant-in-front loops and intersects with its old trail, the whole crowd then turns in on itself and everybody gets caught in the endless circle." Another researcher wrote, “this circle is commonly known as a ‘death spiral’ because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. It has been reproduced in laboratories and in ant colony simulations.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Theodore C. Schneirla, the scientist who first observed this behavior, was quick to point out "that ants get stuck in ways that we humans never do." I'm not so sure Schneirla is right about that.

When Desirae Kelly woke at 5am, she knew something was off. Kelly felt an unsettling fluttering sensation in her right ear, but initially dismissed it, thinking it was the comforter on her bed. She only sought medical attention after being persuaded by her fiancé.

Sitting in the clinic's waiting room, Kelly felt the mysterious movement again, this time accompanied by pain near her eardrum. By this point Kelly thought it was earwax. The nurse, however, made a startling revelation. There was something in her ear, and it was moving.

The nurse treated Kelly's ear by irrigating it with water, which prompted a black object to fall onto her sweater. To her horror, it was a live spider, about the size of a nickel. Fortunately, there was no damage to her eardrum, and no medication was required to prevent infection.

Despite the reassurance that her ear was free of spider remnants or eggs, the incident left a lasting impact on Kelly. Every night since the traumatic event, she has worn earplugs, unable to shake the uneasy and violating feeling of a spider crawling out of her ear.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We need God's help to be truly aware of what's going on inside. If we're not careful about how we live, and if we're not faithful to practice a rhythm of self-examination, we might be surprised by the ugliness we find in our own selves.

Researchers reported recently that it is striking that water is the “least understood material on Earth.” In an article, researchers ask, “What could we not know about water? It’s wet! It’s clear. It comes from rain. It boils. It makes snow and it makes ice! Does our government actually spend taxpayer money to study water? Yes, water is common—in fact, it is the third most common molecule in the universe. But it is also deceptively complex.” From steam to ice, water continues to mystify. Here are several of the weird facts about water:

Why Does Ice Float?

Researchers tried to tease apart what makes water unique among liquids. It’s got anomalous properties, like expanding when cooled below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. (This) explains why lakes freeze downward, from top to bottom, rather than up. Normally frozen solids are denser than their liquid equivalents, which would mean that frozen chunks would fall to the bottom of a lake instead of staying on top. But when water freezes, it creates an open structure, mostly empty space and less dense than … liquid water, which is why water props ice up.

Why Can Insects Walk On It?

Water has an uncanny level of surface tension, allowing beings light enough, like insects, to walk or stand atop it. Since it’s these distinctive features among others that power our climate and ecosystems, water can appear to be “fine-tuned” for life according to the researchers.

How Does Water Evaporate?

The rate of evaporation of liquid water is one of the principal uncertainties in modern climate modeling. ... The addition of salts to water raises the surface tension … and so should reduce the evaporation rate. But experimental studies show little or no effect when salts are added. The exact mechanism for how water evaporates isn’t completely understood.

Possible Preaching Angle:

These researchers point out some of the weird anomalies of water, which covers 71% of the surface of our world. Although they do not acknowledge God in their research, they do admit that “water can appear to be ‘fine-tuned’ for life.” Christians would respond that without its God-given properties, lakes would freeze from the bottom up, killing all fish in them. And, although the salt in oceans should inhibit evaporation, the water in the oceans evaporates, producing rain over the land. These are some examples of “Intelligent Design” in which our wise creator fine-tuned the earth to sustain life and provide for our needs and enjoyment of life.

There’s a well-known story about a famous violinist who took his $3.5 million Stradivarius onto a platform of a Washington DC subway and started playing music. He was dressed in a T-shirt and a ball cap. Joshua Bell was accustomed to playing for packed concert halls and getting paid $1,000 a minute. During his 43-minute solo concert in the subway a total of 1097 people passed by. But only seven people stopped to listen. He earned $32 in change.

J.T. Tillman, a computer specialist, was one of the people who walked by. He said, “I didn’t think nothing of it, just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks.” Tillman would’ve given him some cash, but he spent all his money on the lotto. When he was told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he asked, “Is he ever going to play around here again?” The reporter said, “Yeah, but you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him.”

Exactly one person recognized Joshua Bell. Her name was Stacy. She positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. She said, “It was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in Washington. Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush-hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some more flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?’”

On December 11, 1998, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. It was a highly advanced piece of technology that cost $327 million. The data it gathered would open new doors for planetary science. But instead, the orbiter exploded. It launched successfully, but as soon as it arrived in Martian orbit, radio contact was lost—permanently

NASA scientists eventually realized what had gone wrong. The Orbiter had been a sophisticated piece of technology, programmed with software in triplicate to avoid any chances of miscalculation or error. All of its components coordinated perfectly, except one. NASA had purchased a certain piece of software from a US aerospace company. This would not have been a problem except that NASA used the metric system for all its instruments and software, but this firm’s technology did not.

Measures of acceleration that NASA’s instruments were reading as newtons (metric) had been provided instead as pound force-seconds. The ensuing miscalculation forced the Orbiter to fly much closer to Mars than it should have. This miracle of space engineering ended up meeting its untimely demise in the planet’s upper atmosphere. The great loss was caused by a very human error: a wrong assumption. The scientists at NASA designed the Orbiter to be based on the metric system and they assumed that all subcomponents would be as well.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Attributes of God; False beliefs; God, nature of; Human Nature – Spiritually speaking, we can also get drastically off course and even self-destruct when we believe false assumptions about the character of God or the abilities of our own human nature.

In May 2022 astronomers announced an extraordinary discovery. They claimed they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there. It is a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.

The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing empty space. Oohs and aahs broke out at a meeting with the press when Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona displayed what she called “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” She added, “I met this black hole 20 years ago and have loved it and tried to understand it since. But until now, we didn’t have the direct picture.”

In 2019, the same team captured an image of the black hole in a different galaxy. One astronomer described the discovery this way: “We have seen what we thought was ‘unseeable.’”

Possible Preaching Angles:

One day, the Bible promises that we will see the “unseeable” when we meet God face-to-face and Jesus wipes every tear from our eyes.

No one wants to be seen as a liar. Liars are considered untrustworthy. And yet, we are perfectly content to lie to ourselves all the time. “I’ll enjoy this sleeve of Oreos today because my diet starts tomorrow,” I might tell myself. Or, “I love my job; who cares that I complain about it constantly?” Or even—ironically— “I am always honest with myself.”

Deceiving yourself doesn’t make logical sense. After all, lying involves telling someone something you know to be untrue. When you are both the liar and one lied to, this means you have to both know the truth and not know the truth. To be really happy, we must learn to be completely honest with ourselves.

Relatively few people are completely honest with others. In one study, researchers found that 60 percent of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation, and many lied multiple times. Distorting reality inside your own head might be even more common. No one is completely honest with themselves, because the truth hurts. Life is simply full of harsh realities.

All that self-deception takes a lot of work to maintain. Consider procrastination, a form of self-deception that can be trivial (“I’ll unload the dishwasher later”) or catastrophic (“I’ll call the doctor next week about that chest pain”). This form of self-deception is costly not only because avoiding problems can make them worse but also because the procrastinator must do the mental work of a task over and over, without reaping the rewards of actually getting it done.

If you are willfully oblivious to your flaws, you can’t correct them. In the end, each of us has to decide: Do I want the full truth, no matter where it leads? The honest path isn’t easy, but you can be sure that day by day, you will be proud to say that the person in the mirror is not a liar. And that will be the truth.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Real happiness starts with telling yourself the truth, even when it hurts. Real healing begins when we stop making excuses for our sins, telling God the truth in confession, and receiving his forgiveness.

Beginning in 2019, the entire globe became immersed in the COVID-19 pandemic that has so massively disrupted our daily routines. And there is an understandable obsession with physical cleanliness, which is keeping pace with the spread of the virus itself. Everywhere we look are signs demanding that we regularly wash our hands and refrain from touching our faces. Personal hygiene has become paramount.

In the early stages of the pandemic, we heard of certain individuals who were hoarding a wide variety of hand cleansers and then selling them at exorbitant prices. At offices, stores, and public places are numerous containers of disinfectant wipes that we are expected to apply generously to all surfaces and objects. The disinfectant claims to kill cold and flu viruses and virtually all bacteria within fifteen seconds.

Needless to say, the concern in the wake of COVID-19 is physi­cal health. External cleanliness to guard us against infection is the goal. It is common sense to take steps to protect ourselves from such outbreaks of disease. But to put this crisis in an eternal perspective, the worst that COVID-19 can do is take your physical life. Any form of physical infection from a lethal virus can do only so much.

But there is a worse virus circulating in our world which is 100 percent fatal. It is the virus of sin, contracted from spiritual rebellion and its eternal consequences for people is far more severe. It is staggering to think that so many people obsess over their physical welfare but give little or no thought to the health of their soul.

“O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Selah” (Ps. 39:4-5).

An inmate caused a mild drama in the Nigerian High Court after a judge acquitted him of all charges against him, but he refused and demanded to go back to prison. Instead of the usual jubilation that follows any ruling of "discharged and acquitted," the inmate in question headed straight back to the prison. He was intercepted by a prison guard who reminded him he was free to go home. To the chagrin of eyewitnesses, he said he was going nowhere, demanding to be allowed re-entry into the prison.

The calm of the court premises was shattered by the freed prisoner's shouts and pleas to be allowed to go back to prison, as he thrashed about and struggled with several prison officials. According to eyewitnesses, it took the effort of over six prison officials, court workers, and policemen to get the freed inmate out of the court premises.

Possible Preaching Angle:

That's a picture of us all. We have been set free in Christ, but we often find ourselves returning to the prison of our old way of life and behavior. Healthy Christians remind themselves of their settled status in God’s courtroom. We have been "approved by God" (1 Thess. 2:4) and “set free” (Rom. 6:18-22).

Americans are worse at The Price Is Right than they used to be. On the game show, which has been running since 1972, four contestants are asked to guess the price of consumer products, like washing machines, microwaves, or jumbo packs of paper towels. The person who gets closest to the actual price, without going over, gets to keep playing and the chance to win prizes like a new car. In the 1970s, the typical guess was about 8% below the actual price. These days, people underestimate the price by more than 20%.

This finding comes from research released in 2019 by Jonathan Hartley, at Harvard University. A longtime fan of the show, Hartley was inspired to conduct his research after reading a paper that reveals contestants don’t use optimal bidding strategies. Hartley wondered what else the data might show. He found that the accuracy of people’s guesses sharply decreased from the 1970s to the 2000s, and then stabilized in the 2010s.

So, what accounts for guesses getting so much worse? Hartley thinks there are three economic factors that are the most likely culprits:

First, inflation in the US was much higher in the 1970s and 80s. When inflation is high and variable, people become more attentive to prices, noticing they are paying more for goods than before.

Second, the rise of e-commerce may have made people less sensitive to price. As a result, people may feel less of a need to do price comparisons.

Third, there are more products than ever. There are 50 times as many products at a grocery store than 80 years ago. This also might make it harder for The Price Is Right contestants, along with the rest of us, to know how much stuff costs.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Are believers getting worse at recognizing sound doctrine and genuine Bible teachers and churches? If so, it is because they are paying less attention to the study of biblical doctrine, are less aware of doctrinal issues, and are confused by the hundreds of varieties of churches, denominations, and even cults.

Mistakes are easily made and it’s often too late to rectify the situation by the time someone notices. That was the case with Spain’s supposedly state-of-the-art submarine the S-81 Isaac Peral. The submarine was commissioned in 2013 as one of four new submarines for the Spanish Navy, but there’s just one problem with its modern design. Once it’s submerged the S-81 Isaac Peral may never be able to resurface again.

This is because a miraculously unnoticed flaw in its design means that the ship is around 75 to 100 tons overweight. Which means Spain essentially invested in a submarine which can only move in one direction--down. The mistake is said to be the result of a pesky decimal point placed in the wrong place during calculations. And it’s a single dot which can cost an extra $9.7 million per meter of the hull, which has to be extended to regain its balance.

Considering $680 million has already been invested in this single ship as part of a total $3 billion for all four subs, this is hardly a (mistake) which can be brushed under the rug. It took an additional seven years to repair and the submarine finally joined the Spanish fleet in May 2021.

You can view the clip here (8 min 52 sec – 10 min 03 sec).

Researchers calculate that about 530,000 fewer public school students are learning about intelligent design in 9th or 10th grade biology classes today, compared to 2007. The amount of class time science teachers spend on human evolution has also doubled in those 12 years, according to scholars at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education. The changes come from a new generation of teachers, new textbooks, and updated education standards.

Science teachers who teach intelligent design is a valid alternative:

2007 – 8%

2019 – 5%

Science teachers who discuss intelligent design:

2007 – 23%

2019 – 14%

Science teachers who teach evolution is established science:

2007 – 51%

2019 – 67%

In his book, The Sentient Machine, Amir Husain writes:

Today I find myself drawn to the important observation that the universe around us is clearly a consequence of computation. A seed, for example, encodes the information necessary to produce a tree. With DNA as the software and cells and proteins as the hardware, the biological process is a computational one. We find these types of algorithmic outcomes everywhere we look in the universe.

Patterns like the Fibonacci sequence, for example, unlock designs across our cosmos. Everything from flower petals to the curving shells of a mollusk, to spiral galaxies, to hurricanes, adheres to this mathematical formula. Is this by chance?

There seems to be a mathematical seed at the heart of the cosmos that through the power of computation, has been magnified into the universe as we know it, just as a tree is a magnified seed.

At some point in my early adolescence, I tried to imagine a future where all of science fused together. All the deductions completed and all the building blocks of science synthesized into a great pyramid of knowledge. At the very top of this pyramid however, I realized that I was still missing a block that tied it all together. That block is the ultimate question, “What is this all for?’”

He then concludes with a chilling realization, that even with all of our advancements, “we still don’t know the purpose for our existence."

Possible Preaching Angle:

As a Christian, we would argue, that just as a computer program begins in the mind of a computer scientist, the mathematical patterns that govern our universe are testimony to a Programmer. And just as a computer program must run on hardware, that is itself manufactured by an intelligent being, the universe itself bears witness to a supernatural Creator.

A recent survey polled people with an average age of 38. Eighty percent had college degrees. The results revealed a lot of ignorance about origin of life research and the success of life creating life from nonliving matter (also called abiogenesis).

More than 41 percent thought that researchers had created “complex life forms from scratch,” such as frogs, using simple chemicals and conditions that “approximate Earth’s early atmosphere.” Remarkably, more than 72 percent of respondents thought origin of life researchers had created “simple life forms from scratch,” such as bacteria.

To put it kindly, the respondents’ great expectations about the accomplishments of origin of life researchers are wrong. Wildly so.

Researchers have not created a frog or a bacterium from simple chemicals in the lab under early Earth conditions. They haven’t created a functional membrane, or flagella or cilia, or any of dozens of molecular machines, or the DNA required for even the simplest living bacterium.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The mystery of life is explained in the profound phrase “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (Ps. 139:14). We can only understand the origin of life when we turn our minds to our Creator God who is the Source of life.

Jeanne Pouchain knows she’s not dead. But she has to prove it in court. The 58-year-old French woman was declared dead by a court in 2017 during a decade long legal case. An employee Pouchain had fired years ago sued her for lost wages and told a court that Pouchain was dead after she stopped responding to the employee’s letters.

Without evidence, the French court accepted the allegation and levied a judgment against Pouchain’s estate. The court’s decision set off a chain reaction in France’s bureaucracy, which scrubbed her from official records and invalidated her identity cards and licenses.

Pouchain recently told The Guardian, “I have no identity papers, no health insurance, I cannot prove to the banks that I am alive … I’m nothing.” Pouchain’s attorney then presented an affidavit to the court from her doctor attesting to her continued existence. Her former employee says Pouchain had been pretending to be dead in order to avoid paying the court-mandated damages.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Christians can also appear to be dead if they let their spiritual life lapse. This is true in church membership (Rev. 3:1) and also in the lifestyle they choose if they fall into worldliness (Eph. 5:14-15; Rom. 13:11).