Luke 18:31-34 “Then He took the twelve aside and said to them, "Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished. (32) For He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. (33) They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again." (34) But they understood none of these things; this saying was hidden from them, and they did not know the things which were spoken.”
We have seen in the previous section that the method God uses to predestine unbelievers for destruction, is that He blinds their understanding to the gospel message so that they cannot believe it and thus be saved. The question is then asked, how does God blind the minds of the unbelievers? The answer is that He does so by allowing them to believe a lie, and because they believe the lie, they cannot believe the truth when it is presented to them, because the truth is completely opposite to the lie that they have always believed. And so, it is only God Who can grant them repentance from believing the lie, and give them understanding of the truth so that they can change their thinking and thus believe the truth. In order to illustrate this principle, I have quoted the above passage of scripture as an example. In the example, we see our Lord Jesus taking His twelve apostles aside and explaining very clearly to them, what would happen to Him during the Passover feast that they were about to celebrate in Jerusalem. For Jesus told them plainly, that the Jews would deliver Him to the Gentiles to be mocked, insulted, spit upon, scourged and eventually killed, but that on the third day after He was killed, He would rise again from the dead. Nevertheless, the same passage also clearly tells us that his disciples understood none of what He was saying, because it was hidden from them.
Michael E.B. Maher
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