Jeremiah 5:25 Your iniquities have turned away these things, and your sins have withholden good things from you.
I once took an airplane for a small jump from Greenville, South Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia. It was an early flight and I was tired, so by the time we took off, I was literally asleep. I don’t know if this has ever happened before or since, but we actually landed and were taxiing on the ground in Atlanta before I woke up. I totally missed the sights and sounds of what was happening over South Carolina and Georgia. My eyes were closed.
You don’t know what you are missing when your eyes are closed. Sometimes you want to miss out. I remember driving once from Angels Camp in California to Yosemite. There was a really scary road between the two. It was a narrow road over a mountain where there were a number of switchbacks with no guard rail, trees, or anything. I was a little nervous to say the least. I wanted to close my eyes the entire drive, but the problem was that I was the guy driving.
Again, you don’t know what you are missing when your eyes are closed. God’s people had their eyes closed. Now, they had senses. They could see, hear, smell etc., but they were totally without understanding when it came to God. In Jeremiah 5:21 God says through the prophet, “Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding.” What is to follow is not what they could not see, but what they would not see. It says, “Which have eyes, and see not: which hath ears, and hear not.” It was a choice. Jesus often said, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” There is a difference between hearing something and actually listening and taking heed to it.
The question for you is, “Are your eyes closed?” You have physical senses, and with those you navigate your world. You hear, see, and so on. You respond to those senses to make your way through the world. But how do you make your way through the universe or into the future? Some people have no spiritual sense. God tries to guide and guard and they disregard it. Foolish people without understanding have eyes but they do not see.
Don’t remove God from the world and the life that He has made. In verse 24 He says, “Neither say they [this rebellious people] in their heart, Let us now fear the LORD our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season: he reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest.” God is the One Who gave rain. Today, we don’t regard rain much except as a nuisance, but when everyone is a farmer or at least knows that their food comes from the ground which needs the rain, weather is very important. So, they could see those physical things, but they had disassociated those physical things with a living God.
Now, Israel was in a covenant with God and that covenant is perhaps different from the one you have with God today. In their case, God was literally withholding rain and they did not have the sense to realize that God is the One Who can give rain and He was not. There was a reason for that. They had removed God from the world that He had made. There is more to life than what you can see and what you can hear. Jesus told the religious leaders that they were foolish because they could discern the signs in the sky about the weather, but they could not discern other things that were more important because their eyes were closed.
The point is to open your eyes. Open your eyes to God’s nature. God’s nature is good. He is the Creator, the One Who loved His people. He made you and loved you. Open your eyes to God’s nature.
Open your eyes to God’s power. The prophet says, “God is the One Who literally holds the sea in its place. No matter how much this mighty sea roars it can’t prevail against the God Who bounds it in with sand.” The people could see the physical sea, but didn’t realize that same God had power to intervene in their life.
Open your eyes to God’s guidance. Why did God send the prophets to His people? He sent them to give His people guidance and show them the way they should go.
You don’t know what you are missing when your eyes are closed. So many times we miss out on so much, but we don’t even realize it because our eyes are closed.