I had a helper at work some years ago who was color blind. He couldn’t tell the difference between red and green; the only way he knew whether to stop or go at a traffic light was by whether the top or bottom light was lit. If you put a red something alongside a green something, he could usually puzzle out which was which, but if he saw one, by itself, he didn’t know what color it was. The phrase, “color blind” is typically a misnomer, because in the vast majority of cases, it really means color deficiency: that is, a person has trouble seeing a particular color or distinguishing it from other colors. The most common type is the inability to tell red from green, like my helper, and 7-10% of the men in the world have this trouble … but those who can see no colors at all are in the 0.00001% range. 1
But let’s consider what it would be like if those numbers were flipped. What if most of us only saw our world in glorious black-and-white, and the number of people who could see in color were vanishingly small? How could those few people describe to the rest of us what they were seeing? How do you describe colors without knowing what the words represent? If one of the rare color-seeing people pointed a few things out and said, “the trunk of that tree is brown, and its leaves are green, but the sky is blue,” we would nod sagely, maybe take some notes, and every time we saw something of those particular shades of gray, we would assume they were brown and green and blue. But we wouldn’t quite be sure. And in the Autumn, if our color-sighted person wasn’t still around, we might look at those leaves and and still think they were green, but maybe the lighting was playing tricks on us to make them look a different shade of gray. Or maybe we could read in a book that leaves change colors in the fall, and we’d have to guess what colors they were … but if we didn’t know what set of colors the leaves used, we might guess wildly, and think, “well, those leaves are a shade of blue, because they look a lot like the sky,” when in fact the sky was gray that day with clouds, and the leaves were actually yellow. Unless we were scientists running around with spectroscopes, that would be the best we could do, guess at colors by reference and comparison. Some might get it right more than others, but no one who didn’t actually see them would really know. And even knowing the right words, we still wouldn’t know what those colors really were, not the way a color-sighted person would.
And this is very much like the way the natural human perceives eternal things. In our present state, we are eternal souls in a temporal body, earthen vessels (2 Corinthians 4:6-7), in which the knowledge of Christ has been poured. But the vessel itself is still just clay, and will be until the day we are raised up in Christ. If we didn’t have the Word of God to point out to us the truths of God, we wouldn’t recognize them when we saw them. Think of what the average unbeliever believes love to be: they think strong physical attraction and lust are love; they think infatuation is love; they think obsession with another person is love; they think giving someone everything they desire is love. Someone may have pointed out real, true love, and they picked up on some of the characteristics of it, but they don’t truly understand the real thing. But how does the Bible describe love? “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins,” (1 John 4:10); and, “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves Him who begot also loves him who is begotten of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome,”(1 John 5:1-3); and, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love,”(1 John 4:7-8). Those verses describe love in a way that someone who has never seen the Bible will ever fully grasp; it’s not simple sentiment, it’s a self-sacrificial care and devotion, it’s obedience, and it’s something only the godly can truly know.
And this is because people are color blind. Spiritual things are hidden from them, and in many cases, so obscured they cannot perceive them at all. In even the best of cases, they only have a glimpse, a description from someone else’s lips that they must interpret for themselves and compare to what they do know … and they often get it wrong. Some things God has pointed out in His creation of the world (Rom. 1:20), and sometimes people deliberately ignore this so they can have their own way (Rom. 1:21). But the Bible teaches us that when we are in Christ, these hidden things are revealed (Eph. 2:3-5, and Eph. 2:8-9), and that it is the work of the Holy Spirit to open our eyes (John 16:7-8). God has provided a way that we can see Him, and we can know Him. It starts with creation, and finishes in revelation, which is to say, the Bible. But it also requires us, who have seen the work of God, to point things out:
“For ‘WHOEVER CALLS ON THE NAME OF THE LORD SHALL BE SAVED.’How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘HOW BEAUTIFUL ARE THE FEET OF THOSE WHO PREACH THE GOSPEL OF PEACE, WHO BRING GLAD TIDINGS OF GOOD THINGS!'” (Romans 10:13-15)
God has given us life in Christ, and in doing so, He has opened our eyes to the things of the spirit. Our vision is not perfect, not yet (1 Cor. 13:12), but we do see spiritual things. And like my hypothetical color-seeing person in a color blind world, it’s up to us to love and obey God in the sight of the world, point at it, and say, “this is what the things of God look like.”