Before we are converted to God we are spiritually blind. We are not in touch with God; we don't understand spiritual things; we have no communication, no vision, no awareness; we are cut off in every sense. Before we are converted to God, like a blind person, we are dependent upon the world around us. If I am not a child of God, if I have never found the Lord, if I am not converted, where am I going to get my happiness from? Where am I going to get my satisfaction? I depend upon the circumstances around me; I depend upon what's going on with the people around me, and what they can do for me. I have no internal spring of strength and joy and happiness. If I have never found the Lord and I don't know him, I am like a blind person, dependent on being led here and there. I am dependent upon my circumstances for everything: for how I feel, for how I get I am getting on, so blindness is a very good picture of the plight of somebody who is unconverted, who has no connection with the Lord, who has never found him. Blindness – the organ of visual perception, in the old-fashioned words. If you're blind, you can understand a great deal, but you can't see the colours. You can't see the depth. I read about an academic many years ago a professor who was blind, and apparently when anyone came into the room as soon as they spoke he could tell how tall that person was. So yes, blind people may develop extraordinary perception and capacities, but nevertheless there's so much a blind person cannot see and cannot know. It is the same with us before we are converted. We may imagine things about God, but we can't really tell. We can't understand, because we have never experienced him and his goodness and his power. We don't belong to him. These things are just so vague and shadowy to us, at best. Here is the Lord and he is coming past this man as he sits by the wayside begging near Jericho.
There is a supposed problem here in the Bible, because in Matthew 20 it tells us about two blind men who were healed, rather than one, and that the healing took place as the Lord Jesus Christ was leaving Jericho, not as he was entering Jericho, and it is quite plain that it is the same event. It happened at the same time in this last journey of the Lord to Jerusalem. In Matthew's Gospel it is as he is leaving Jericho that there are two men who say exactly the same as this man in Luke, and the Lord Jesus Christ says and does pretty well exactly the same as is recorded here in Luke's Gospel. And so of course people who are cynical about the Bible say: ‘There you are, a contradiction. The Bible contradicts itself – two men in one Gospel, one blind man in the other. And then to add to the complication just a tiny bit in Mark 10 it is one blind man – that agrees with the Gospel of Luke – but Mark agrees with Matthew in the other respect, that the Lord Jesus Christ is leaving Jericho when this happens, whereas in Luke's Gospel he is approaching Jericho. The know-alls – who seem to know so much about the Bible – say, ‘Here is another contradiction. How can we trust this? So what is the explanation? Matthew's Gospel says there were two men and that means there were two men. Mark's Gospel and Luke's Gospel happen to look at only one of the two men. Why is that? Because one of them obviously was much more prominent in this than the other, and indeed Mark's Gospel names him: he is called blind Bartimaeus. He was quite well known in that area of Jericho. Probably he is the man who is the most forward, the most outspoken.
But what about the other problem: that two Gospels have Christ leaving Jericho and the other gospel has him approaching Jericho? That seems a bit harder to explain. It is actually quite simple. Jericho was just about one of the only places in the world where in those days you could be leaving it and approaching it at the same time. There was old Jericho and there was new Jericho, and there was about a mile and a quarter between them. Today they are all the one great municipality, but in those days there was Old Testament Jericho, famous for its balsam, and for its palms – they were spoken of everywhere. But that had been all run down and the city had become quite derelict and hopeless, but it was still occupied. Then along came Herod the great just before the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and he picked Jericho as the site where he would build a palatial place full of splendid buildings that would be to his everlasting glory and honour. So Herod built a new Jericho about a mile and a quarter's distance from the old one, and his son took over and actually some experts say it was still in the process of building at this stage. It is thought that the old Jerichoites regarded their place as Jericho and the new Jerichoites did so also, but it was about the only place on earth where you could be both leaving and approaching Jericho at the same time. That may very well explain the apparent discrepancy.