Interpretation

I hate getting things wrong. The sun certainly APPEARS to move from East to West and the earth APPEARS to be flat , so I do understand why the early people interpreted the facts the way they did and got it wrong.

Sometimes, not everything seems as it really is . . .

As a child I was fascinated by a pair of prism glasses my father had, used for reading books when lying down. You’d lie down and look up at the ceiling but see 90 degrees out horizontally to the book. It took a while to interpret what you were seeing but as you got used to them you could interpret things properly. There was a guy George Stratton years back that tested up-side-down glasses. Apparently wearing them on both eyes was too stressful but when he wore them on one eye the brain adjusted over a few days and he started to see normally. It’s amazing how the brain can learn to interpret reality like that.

In the last decade or so people who have been blind from birth have been getting their sight back after eye operations. I think it is some type of laser surgery that corrects birth defects and surgeons can enable their sight. When they wake up from the surgery they have to wear eye covers for a while until they are allowed to see for the first time. I understand that upon opening their eyes they are always over-awed with the colours and shapes that they’ve never been seen before.

But when people who have been blind from birth get their vision back it’s not as simple as we’d first think. The eye may be working perfectly but they can’t see the detail and their brain can’t interpret what they see as anything meaningful. They may have sight but there’s a learning process that has to occur (it takes a few days) where the brain has to be conditioned to interpret the electrical signals into something meaningful. That’s when they have vision.

There was a particular guy a while ago who got his sight back in a different way. He was blind from birth and got his eyes fixed - healed pretty much instantly, actually by the ultimate of Healers, the good Lord.

When the Healer asked him how things were going, his feedback was along the lines that he could finally see but all the people looked like trees. He could see all right, but he couldn’t interpret things properly at that stage, because his brain hadn’t had the time needed to learn to read the electrical signals from the millions of photoreceptors in the retina.

The story doesn’t end there however because not only did the Lord pause halfway through the healing process and draw our attention to this point, He carried on with the second stage and trained the guy’s brain in an instant how to interpret things and go from getting his full sight (just seeing things) to getting his full vision (interpreting the things he was seeing) - Totally healed in a flash, well actually two “flashes”.

The really interesting thing is that 2,000 years ago nobody would have known the science behind this amazing event. You could approach this story from the angle that Jesus didn’t get things right the first time and had to have a second go at it, but equally, you could view it from the prespective that Jesus knew and understood the science of sight and vision, and deliberately did the healing in two parts to prove a subtle point to any skeptics coming later. It’s a pretty strong example to me of how the scriptures contain countless nuggets of detailed fact, and wisdom that strongly indicates divine involvement.

Here’s how Mark reports it all:

He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.
Mark 8:23

I know people who have experienced this exact same sort of healing, so even though it is still totally amazing, I believe this one absolutely 100%!

It’s the VICTUS IN AMBITUS way to go further than just seeing things, but to interpret them correctly  - to interpret the sight and gain vision.