Healthy eyes

Two days ago I had an eye test and a prescription for new spectacles. Then I read some words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Matthew 6.22-23). 

For a long time I didn’t really understand those rather enigmatic words. But then I saw that the eye is how you see the world. Do you see it correctly? If you do, your whole life will be well led; if you don’t, you will stay in the dark about important things.

Another way of saying this is: what is your worldview? How do you understand the big picture? Do you see meaning in our human existence? Can you put it all together? If you’re confused about the big issues of life, your personal experience will be dark, rather than light. You will experience dark emotions like meaninglessness, hopelessness, anxiety and despair, and emotional or psychological problems will not be far away.

So it’s important that your eye be healthy – that you see the world and your place in it with good sense and a true perspective. Then you will have a meaningful life and be able to conduct yourself in a worthy and fulfilling manner.

So how should we see the world? There are basically two major options: either we are here by pure chance, with no design, no wisdom, no overarching intelligence to guide us, but merely our fate to fulfil; or there is a Greater, wiser Mind behind the universe and more specifically able to lead us into a fulfilling life according to his intelligent design as our divine Creator. 

After generations of scientific experts have contributed to the first of those options, using the theory of evolution to support their philosophy of naturalism and materialism, we are able to come to a serious conclusion. This worldview must be categorised under the rubric, “the eye is not healthy”: it not only fails to offer a positive vision of human fulfilment, it actually destroys various elements that we require in order to live a psychologically healthy and fulfilling life. There can be no purpose if all came about by chance; there is no reason even to believe that our brain and its rationality is valid if we are but the result of an impersonal movement of atoms; there is no serious basis either for any wise guidance in moral questions nor for the wondrous value of love which would be merely the emotions of our physical system. It is for following this worldview in the West over these last decades that society suffers from its various ills. This is not the best explanation. As Jesus also said, “if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”

A healthy eye, however, allows you to see how “the heavens declare the glory of God” and when the universe began, there must have been an almighty Creator. As you open your eyes to the amazing fine-tuning of the constants of physics, so indispensable for the universe and life to exist, you can conclude that there was a Divine Mathematician who calculated all those precise numbers. And as powerful magnification has brought to light the “language” of DNA, which language requires personality, we see that the Creator must be personal in whose image our personalities are a reflection.

Is your eye healthy? Do you see there is necessarily a Creator? 

He reveals himself in the Bible.

Clive Every-Clayton