Luke 12:54-56 (NIV) He said to the crowd: “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘It’s going to rain,’ and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say, ‘It’s going to be hot,’ and it is. Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?”
Jesus was extremely troubled by the attitudes of the crowds that were listening to Him. This stems clear back to the beginning of this discourse, when the man in the crowd asked Jesus to arbitrate a conflict with his brother over an inheritance. Even while they were listening to Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom of heaven, many in the crowd were firmly focused on the things of the earth.
Jesus’ ministry was quickly nearing its close, and the people, even His own disciples, had no idea that not only the kingdom of God, but the Day of the Lord, was upon them. The time was quickly approaching when they would have to make decisions about allegiances that would affect their whole eternity.
Jesus’ point in this section is that the people were skilled at looking at what was happening with the weather right then, and being able to see what would happen based on what was happening now, to successfully extrapolate the current conditions into the future. But as far as spiritual things went, they were blind, unable both to see what was currently happening, and to extrapolate those events into the future.
This was made even more frustrating (and, on the part of the Jewish leadership, more tragic) because of the furious pace at which Jesus was fulfilling the Messianic prophecies. The people and the leaders had been waiting for the Messiah for centuries. But now that He was here, their viewpoint was so earthbound that they couldn’t even see what was actually happening.
Father, it is so easy for us to allow our perspective to become earthbound, and so miss what You are doing in the world around us. Lord, save us from this kind of spiritual blindness that leads to inactivity on our part, or, worse, resistance to what You are doing all around us. Amen.