HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 13, 2025 – We’ve all been blinded by God on occasion. He blinded me for the first 36 years of my life, when I suffered the same deserved blindness that Isaiah describes and Jesus quotes:

“By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and 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.” (Matthew 13:14-15)

If you’re genuinely born-again, you were also once blind. If you’re not genuinely born-again, you’re still blind.

God famously blinded Pharoah just before the exodus from Egypt. Scripture calls it a hardening of the heart, but it’s the same as spiritual blindness. The result is the same.

Sometimes God physically blinds people, like he blinded Paul on the road to Damascus or he blinded the men who were trying to sexually assault the angels at Lot’s house. And sometimes he unblinds people, like the ones Jesus healed.

So, God can make you spiritually or physically blind, and he can make you spiritually or physically see. Nothing is impossible for God.

Sometimes God will blind you spiritually as a form of protection, following the adage “what you don’t know, can’t hurt you”. Sometimes he’ll blind you as a form of punishment, and sometimes he’ll blind you because he needs you blind for his plans to proceed. This is the form of blindness that affected the disciples just before Jesus’ crucifixion, so they wouldn’t stop Judas Iscariot from betraying Jesus.

Even Jesus was blind to a certain measure and for a certain time. For instance, he knew what his mission was and he knew the intended outcome, but he didn’t know when it would start or end until God let him know. Jesus also said that no-one but God knows the timing of his second coming and of the end of the world. These things are hidden from us to thwart our spiritual enemies and to test us. If we knew the end was a long way off, we might slack off doing God’s will. Conversely, if we knew the end was coming soon, we might focus solely on that event and ignore everything else that God’s asking us to do.

I see this in the “Jesus is coming back soon!” cult that currently infests the worldly church. Nothing matters to these people except the presumption that they’ll soon escape all their troubles by being raptured to Heaven. Their whole witness is based on Jesus whisking them away to safety, but Jesus himself told us that he’ll come when he’s least expected. In other words, we’ll be spiritually blinded just before his second coming so that we won’t be expecting it. Because Jesus told us point-blank that he’ll come when no-one expects him to come, the “Jesus is coming back soon!” cult is clearly false.

God allows us to be blind if our life choices lead us to that state, and he also purposely blinds us whether as a form of punishment or protection or so that we won’t disrupt his plans. But he never maliciously blinds us. If he, for a time, physically or spiritually blinds us to further his agenda (like he did to the man who’d been blind from birth and who Jesus later healed in the temple to show God’s glory), he repays us multiple times over whatever we “lost” in being blinded.  

Although we can see, we born-again believers still don’t have perfect spiritual vision. We have the measure of vision that God permits us, according to the measure of God’s Spirit that’s in us, which means that a certain measure of spiritual myopia is our unavoidable lot here on Earth. Paul likens it to seeing through a glass darkly, but he promises that we’ll all see clearly if and when we get to Heaven.

This is what I’m holding out for – perfection in Heaven. In the meantime, I don’t fight the blindness or curse the blindness or try to see more than God allows me to see, because I know that whatever God wills or permits, it ultimately works in my favor as long as I remain his child.