You must be in fellowship prior to your Bible study, so that the spiritual information you receive can become a source, of blessing to your soul and produce spiritual growth.
18 Having
the understanding[dianoia] darkened,[skotizo] being[on] alienated[apallotrioo]
from the life[zoe] of God[theos] through[dia] the ignorance
[agnoia] that is[on] in[en] them,[autos] because[dia] of the
blindness[porosis] of their[autos] heart:[kardia] KJV-Interlinear
18 being
darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the
ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; NASB
People who do not have any truth within their souls, people who lack correct information within their minds, have no means of understanding anything in life.
Truth comes in many forms. It is not just scriptural content. Truth can come from ones daily experiences, from ones five senses, from common sense, from the knowledge of right and wrong, from the sciences, and so forth.
What Bible doctrine does for you, is to help make all of that information understandable, discernible, clear, comprehensible, interpretable and so forth.
The spiritual life, helps keep everything in perspective and oriented properly to life.
Without a functional spiritual life, you have no measurable direction finder, no map to properly orient with your life.
Since truth, used in its broadest sense, is light, then light is the key for being able to see clearly. Lack of light means that you cannot see.
In life, Bible doctrine is the light that the soul uses to help you see, to understand, to comprehend, to make the right decisions in life for yourself.
Without Bible doctrine, and more specifically, without an ongoing and functional spiritual life, then your sight becomes darkened. You lose more and more of the clarity about life. You drift off into oblivion, as it were.
No doctrine, means no knowledge, no correct orientation to life.
And what remains, is ignorance.
It makes no difference if you are a PhD., or some learned scholar, or celebrity, or some sort of royalty or achieved person from whatever means, whether by birth or by effort. If you lack doctrine, then all of your intellect or position is useless, because it lacks a proper connection to reality.
And so, when society functions like this, then all the elite can mislead, and all of the classes can easily be misled.
And that is the great danger for humanity. When the leaders lack truth, and the followers lack truth, then all are easily led and misled, and the result will be disaster.
We can see this concept unfolding right in front of us in society today, with the latest supreme court decision which effectively gives the government total control over all citizens.
Throughout history, when people were misled or brutalized, they could move to new territories, or to new countries, or to new continents. But now that there are no new frontiers to which the vast majorities can run to, in order to escape, the only defense that people can have, is the same defense that they have had throughout history, which is Bible doctrine.
But we see all of the learned or learned want-to-be's, pursuing a liberal agenda, that progressives began over a century ago, and that is to dilute our constitution to such a weak document, that it will eventually become pointless, as government goes its own way, with virtually no controls on its conduct or power.
Today, the government can mandate what insurance you can or cannot have. Soon, in the Tribulation, when it arrives, these powers, will give the anti-christ the authority to decide who can trade and who cannot, who can eat and who cannot.
So whether you are a student of history or not, you need to understand that the pattern and direction of the world, is heading directly toward the prophecies that have been long written in the Bible.
And they will come about, not because God makes them so, but because God foretold what man himself will do, of his own volition.
By rejecting truth, by rejecting the use of a functional spiritual life, then man places himself in a darkened void, which is in fact void or empty of understanding.
Blindness of the heart, is the lack of functional knowledge in the soul resulting in a callousness wrapping over the soul.
The heart represents the functioning pump or thinking process that circulates thoughts throughout the soul or mind. If you have no substance, then you have nothing to pump through your brain. In a spiritual sense, it would be like all of those blonde jokes, only on the spiritual level. And it applies to everyone who lacks doctrine, regardless of their hair color.
And in one more verse, we will see just how the lack of doctrine in the soul, and especially the lack of doctrine flowing through the soul, will lead to a callousness or hardening of the soul, that eventually locks out all light, all truth.
But here we have the blindness or callousness or hardening of the heart, which in turn means the shutdown of practical thought and the separation of ones life from God and truth. In short, all that society will think will be one of deception through false ideas, through false ideals, through false principles, and promoted not by sincerity, but by evil.
There was a study done once that looked at the affect that the elites have on the minorities of the world. And it is clear that there are those who want to create a society of people who give up, who believe that they do not have a chance, and therefore become subordinate to and under the control of those in power.
What started as progressivism a century ago, and has turned to liberalism, the minorities being the first target, have been expanded to include all peoples in the lower economic classes. The philosophy is to make society believe that is cannot get by without government, that they have no chance, and therefore will give up and become dependent on government.
Wilson promoted prohibitions on inter-racial activities, FDR promoted the social society, Johnson promoted his great society, and now we have the Obama'ites promoting government control over all personal aspects of society, in the name of social reform.
And people have no more frontiers to which they can run and escape from the oppressions that are coming. That can lead people to God, or it can lead people to the government programs that are being promised. And unfortunately the latter will get more and more followers as the great apostasy, also foretold, begins taking hold of the world, paving the way for the next great change in the history of humanity, namely the Rapture and the Tribulation. All still future of course.
