The Moral Blindness of Sin: Walking in Darkness

The way of the wicked is as darkness; they know not at what they stumble. The blindness of sinners constitutes their destruction. All men walk in paths as different as the characters they sustain—saints or sinners—yet sinners remain insensible to the objects leading them toward ruin.

The darkness in which sinners are involved is not deficiency in natural powers or intellectual information. It is moral darkness, residing not in understanding but in the heart. Moral depravity always produces moral blindness. While sinners remain under the dominion of a wicked heart, they are blind to the moral beauty of God's character, works, and providence.

Sinners are insensible of the specific objects over which they stumble and fall: they are blind to the great deceiver, blind to one another's suffering, blind to Divine providence working against their sin. Their common employments become dangerous snares; their religious performances mask inner corruption. The preaching they hear cannot penetrate their moral darkness. Most perilously, they remain blind to the blindness of their own hearts, insensibly descending toward eternal darkness.

This explains why sinners live so securely and joyfully amid danger. When confronted with their perilous condition, they resist—not from reason, but from blindness itself. As sinners grow progressively blinder, they sink deeper into the sovereign hand of God, increasingly in danger of final destruction. Their condition demands urgent illumination by Elohim's grace.