Photo courtesy of Jess & Colin
This passage has perplexed me for a couple of days:
It just doesn't seem to make plain English sense to me, so I checked all the translations and they said roughly the same thing. Vincent's Word Studies has the following commentary, which certainly makes sense..."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. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:22-23)
...but it's still a stretch for me to see how Vincent's got that out of this scripture.“Seeing falsely is worse than blindness. A man who is too dim-sighted to discern the road from the ditch, may feel which is which; but if the ditch appears manifestly to him to be the road, and the road to be the ditch, what shall become of him? False seeing is unseeing, on the negative side of blindness”
2 comments:
I can only speak from my own doctrinal background, but for me (a KJV and JBS reader mostly), verses 22 & 23 lead right into verse 24.
You simply can't turn to evil things and expect to stay good inside. In other words, once your eye is turned toward darkness, the rest of the light that's in you *will* be contaminated.
And then verse 24 develops the idea with different terms.
The application is more simple than the interpretation. You must train your eyes to not lead you into darkness. It is easy to fixate ourselves on the things which our eyes want to see, but we must use our eyes instead as tools to recognize the darkness from the light, and to always follow the right path. Don't forget that it is you who controls your eyes, not the other way around.
As for the language, I'm sure the passage makes more sense in its original tongue. It is possible for the light to be overcome by darkness, but we must always seek to overcome the darkness (within ourselves, and within the world) with light (Rom. 12:21).
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