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Matthew 13:16-17, 58  But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.  For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it. … … And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.

The great Bible chapter on faith (Hebrews 11) begins by defining ‘faith’ as having “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”  In other words, lookng with the ‘eye of faith’ is what gives us access to, and confident trust in, the revealed truths of God in Scripture, and supremely in the Lord Jesus Christ, his Son and our Saviour.
The Evangelist John tells us why he wrote his Gospel: “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.  But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30-31).  Our culture today, after many years of systematic brainwashing in humanism, adopts the view that ‘seeing is believing’, and tests everything on this principle.
God’s revealed truth, on the other hand, declares the opposite reality: ‘Believing is Seeing’.  This makes all the difference, as Jesus himself continually pointed out.  In John 9 we read of how Jesus condemned the Jewish leaders for being blind because they defiantly refused to ‘see’ the clear evidence before them of his proven Messiahship in his healing of a man born blind.
In today’s verses, Matthew  tells us that there was no point in Jesus’ doing miracles in his hometown, because the people there had already shut their eyes to any clear evidence before them.  May we all read Gd’s Word with childlike faith, so that we might not miss the truth of who God is and what he has done.  May we have, and pray for others to have, ‘blessed eyes and ears’, that believe first, and therefore take hold of Salvation with saving faith.  It would be so sad, on the Day of Judgement, to see it all laid out before us so clearly, and have to wonder why we had been so proud, so arrogant, so self-satisfied and so self-sufficient, to have rejected the evidence when we had had the opportunity, in faith, to believe and therefore see.
– Bruce Christian