When Hearing is not Really Hearing

There is a remarkable feature of the human brain that, depending on the circumstances, can be either a gift or a danger. When exposed to a repeated sound long enough, whether it is the hum of traffic, the distant wail of a siren, or the rumble of passing trains, the brain learns to filter it out. The sound does not disappear. It simply stops registering as significant. It becomes background noise, indistinguishable from the environment itself.

Imagine a man who walks a set of train tracks every single day as the most direct route to and from work. Over years of doing this, he learns to identify every train by its sound. But that very familiarity eventually works against him. The trains become routine. He stops noticing them. And one day, after a long and exhausting shift, he does not hear the one coming.

That image is more than a cautionary tale about railway safety. It is a portrait of something that can happen to us spiritually, and it sits at the very heart of one of the most challenging passages in the Gospel of Matthew.

In Matthew 13, the disciples ask Jesus a direct and honest question: why do you speak to the crowds in parables? It seems like a reasonable method of communication, using stories and images to illustrate deeper truths. Most of us were probably taught at some point that parables exist to make things easier to understand.

But that is not what Jesus says.

His answer is striking, even uncomfortable. He tells his disciples that it has been given to them to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to others it has not been given. He goes on to say that he speaks in parables precisely because the crowds, seeing, do not see, and hearing, do not hear, nor do they understand. He then reaches back into the prophecy of Isaiah to describe a people whose hearts have grown dull, whose ears can barely hear, and whose eyes they themselves have closed.

That last phrase deserves to sit with us for a moment. Their eyes they have closed. Not eyes that were forcibly shut from the outside. Eyes that were deliberately closed from within.

The passage forces a confrontation with an uncomfortable biblical truth: spiritual blindness is not primarily something that happens to us. It is something we participate in creating. Romans 1 describes human beings who suppress the truth. Psalm 115 warns that those who worship idols become like them, seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing. The natural condition of the human heart, apart from the grace of God, is one of hostility toward the things of the Spirit. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2, the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

This is not a comfortable diagnosis. Culture insists on the basic goodness of human beings. But Scripture tells a different story. Jeremiah 17:9 describes the heart as deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Genesis 6:5 records God observing that every intention of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually. The blindness that Jesus describes in Matthew 13 is not an anomaly. It is the default setting of every human heart that has not been made new.

And here is the sobering detail that makes this passage so urgent: Jesus was not speaking to strangers. He was speaking to people who had been in the synagogue their entire lives. People who knew the scrolls, who observed the feasts, who could recite the prayers. Familiarity with religious practice had not opened their eyes. In some cases, it had simply made the blindness harder to detect.

So what does Jesus offer in response to all of this?

The answer is not despair. It is a promise embedded in the very passage that describes the blindness. In verse 15, after painting the full picture of a people who have closed their eyes and stopped their ears, Jesus says that if they would turn, He would heal them. That door is open. It has always been open. The tragedy of Isaiah's generation, and the warning for every generation since, is not that God slammed it shut. It is that people refused to walk through it.

And then in verse 16, Jesus turns to his disciples and says something remarkable: blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Understanding the things of God is described here not as an intellectual achievement but as a gift. A supernatural gift. Something given, not earned.

This raises four responses worth sitting with.

First, stop assuming that you hear. Proximity to the Word of God is not the same as receiving it. Owning a Bible is not the same as knowing God. The crowd that day was physically closer to Jesus than any of us will ever be, and many of them heard nothing that truly landed.

Second, respond to the light you already have. Jesus says in verse 12 that to the one who has, more will be given. The way to receive more understanding is to obey what has already been revealed. Hebrews 3 puts it plainly: today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.

Third, pray for open eyes. Psalm 119:18 is a model for this. Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. The one who wrote those words already had the Scriptures. He studied them. And still he prayed for eyes to see. That posture of dependence is not weakness. It is wisdom.

Fourth, turn. Repentance is not a feeling to be manufactured. It is a direction to be chosen. It is the act of turning away from whatever has been keeping your eyes closed and turning toward the One who promises to heal.

The train is still coming. The voice is still speaking. The question is whether we have grown so accustomed to the sound that we no longer hear it for what it is.
Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your heart.