BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

“Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” Prov. 29:18

The Revisers have helped us by changing the word "perish" to "cast off restraint." Quite literally the Hebrew word means to "break loose." The central word, quite simply and literally, sight, and refers both to the thing seen and to the power to see it. "Where there is no vision," the thing seen; "Where there is no vision," the power to see, "the people cast off restraint." The condition is that of anarchy. Anarchy is lawlessness, not being without law, but refusing to be bound by law. That is the one fundamental trouble with man. John declared that, when he wrote: "Sin is lawlessness." (1 John 3:4). We have been living in the days when lawlessness has been rampant. Men have been breaking through covenants, regulations, agreements; refusing to abide by any decisions, even those of their appointed leaders, and even our leaders are casting off the restraints of our constitution forged at the start of our countries outset and to which they swore to abide. In this word of wisdom the reason for this casting off of restraint is given. It is that of lack of vision. That is true on lowest levels of consideration. Men who so act have no true vision of what they are actually doing, no true vision of the consequences of their action. They have no true vision of society as a whole, and of the necessary obligations of all those individuals who constitute society. They do not see that lawlessness in personal life destroys the possibility of true social conditions, and that false social conditions in turn destroy the individual. But the deeper note is that the lack of the vision of God issues in lack of vision in all these regards. To see God, is, as in tbe case of Jacob to bring healing to the individual; and that is to create a healthy community. To lose that vision, is to have no vision which is adequate to meet the needs of man; to have no authority to which man can be submitted. The vision of God is given to man in the law of God and today in that law as it has been interpreted in Christ and made possible of realization through Him. "He that keepeth that law, happy is he." America will surely perish with blind leadership according to the writer.