Blindness (Punishment of Disobedience)

Forgetting Where we Came From

Isaiah 49:21 Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, and removing to and fro? and who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been?

This describes the blindness of Israel – we know not where we came from! The day we discover it, our people will ask: How did that happen? This blindness was one of the punishments of our disobedience.

Matthew 8:10 And hearing Yahshua marveled and said to those following: “Truly I say to you, from no one in Israel have I found such faith!

While many Greeks, Romans, Kelts, etc. were indeed descended from Israelites dispersed long beforetime, who had for the most part already forgotten their identity in their blindness, as Paul said in his epistle to the Ephesians, they were alienated from the civic life of Israel, and therefore being divorced from Yahweh they truly were not counted as Israel. As Hosea says, they were His people, but they were called “Not His people” until the time when they would accept Christ and be reconciled to God.

Matthew 9:28 And upon having come into the house the blind men approached Him, and Yahshua says to them: “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They say to Him: “Yes, Prince!” 29 Then He touched their eyes, saying “It must be for you according to your faith.”

Recognizing our God and His sovereignty is one of the first steps to curing our blindness!

Ministry of Christ

The purpose of Christ's ministry is recorded in Luke chapter 4, where He Himself quotes from the later chapters of Isaiah:

Luke 4: “16 And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. 17 And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, 18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives [the Israelites, who were described as prisoners and captives by Isaiah], and recovering of sight to the blind [we should know that we are Israel!], to set at liberty them that are bruised, 19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. 20 And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”

Note that He stopped before proclaiming the Day of Vengeance, which has to do only with His second advent, and not His first.

There are clear connections between Christ's word in the New Testament, and the promises to Israel recorded by Isaiah in the Old Testament. Christ had come for those who sit in darkness, for the prisoners, for the captives, for those very people of the children of Israel divorced from their God centuries beforehand, in the very days of Isaiah! So it is evident that an honest study of scripture reveals precisely what Jeremiah prophesied to be: that the New Covenant was made by God with those very same people with whom He made the Old Covenant: the literal, physical, children of Israel.