There’s a well known joke about a man whose wife catches him in bed with another woman, which ends with the punchline, “so who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
We laugh at the guilty husband’s desperate attempt to deny what is obvious true, but it occurred to me lately that sometimes God asks us the same question, only with the opposite intent. Sometimes our eyes do lie to us.
In 2 Kings there’s an account of the prophet Elisha facing an entire army of hostile Arameans. When his servant saw the forces arrayed against them he was dismayed, but Elisha was calm.
“Don’t be afraid,” the prophet answered. “Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”
And Elisha prayed, “Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.” Then the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha (2 Kings 6:16-17).
The servant believed his eyes. And what his eyes told him wasn’t wrong, but it was incomplete. The reality was bigger than he could see.
Similarly, when Israel sent men to spy out the land of Canaan, as described in Numbers 13-14, ten of the twelve spies believed what their eyes told them; that the land was occupied by enemies far too powerful for the Israelites to defeat. Only two men, Joshua and Caleb, trusted that God would do what he had told them he would, and give them victory. The people listened to the ten instead of the two, and as a result, they spent an entire generation wandering in the desert before their children inherited the promise that the parents had rejected.
We all have lying eyes sometimes, and the lies are usually lies of omission. We only see in part. And it’s really not our eyes that are at fault. Human eyes only see this world; that’s all they were designed to see. But we know that there is another reality, a heavenly reality, and if we only pay attention to what our eyes can see, we will miss it every time. That’s why Paul could write:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18).
Fixing my eyes on what is unseen means trusting that what God has said is the truth, even if I don’t yet see it. And the first step to trusting what God has said is to know what God has said. It’s incredibly basic, and incredibly obvious, that we have to know God’s word before we can trust it, but incredibly often, we don’t make time to actually do that. Yet what we see depends almost entirely on what we choose to look at.
I want to throw out a challenge to everyone reading this: over the course of the next week, record how much time you spend reading, studying and meditating on the Scriptures. And also record how much time you spend reading or watching the news and commentary on the news. Just those two things. At the end of the week compare the two, and decide if you should make changes in the way you spend your time.
At the end of the day, of course, it’s not the amount of time I spend in the Scriptures that matters; that’s only the means to an end. What matters is whether I trust what I see, or what God tells me is true. As the Scripture says, we “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Not denying what our eyes tell us, but recognizing that it is not the whole truth.
Which will you choose to believe?