I once heard a story about the first automobiles in the rural United States. An older gentleman and his grandsons sat on the porch enjoying a lazy summer afternoon. He was reading a newspaper, and they were watching the swallows dipping and swooping through the humid air.
Suddenly, a strange sound caught their attention. In the distance, the boys spied a cloud of dust. To their great delight, one of those new-fangled horseless carriages was coming down the road. They jumped up from their seats and began to exclaim, “Grandpa, Grandpa, look, look. Here comes a carriage with no horses pulling it!” Keeping his head buried behind his newspaper, the grandpa said gruffly, “I don’t believe it, I won’t believe it!”
The grandpa’s response reminds me of the line of a song from my youth: ” There is none so blind as he who will not see.” His refusal to believe wasn’t because of poor eyesight or hearing or a lack of evidence; it was an act of his will. We may smile at his foolishness and unwillingness to accept the truth, but he isn’t alone. Many today do the same thing.
In the 1990s, Paul Krugman wrote, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law” becomes apparent. By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines.” That hasn’t aged well!
However, there is something much more severe than this kind of blindness; it’s blindness to truth as it’s revealed to us in God’s Word and His world. Highly educated and intelligent people who design complex systems and procedures for many applications accept the theory of evolution as valid without question. The evidence for a Creator is right in front of their eyes and under their microscopes every day, but like the old grandpa and the automobile, they close their minds to the evidence and refuse to believe it.
This rejection of truth is almost as old as the human race. There are countless examples of unbelief in the Old Testament and plenty in the New Testament. One of those examples shows up in our text for today, Mark 6:1-6. Listen as I read that text, and then we’ll look at this example of “Amazing Unbelief.”
In this text, we see the EFFECTS of unbelief on the lives of those who reject Jesus as Messiah.
The First EFFECT of Unbelief is,
A Surprising Reaction
Immediately after the healing of Jairus’ daughter, Jesus leaves Capernaum and returns with His disciples to His hometown. This visit was not meant to be private. Bringing His disciples with Him demonstrated His position as a Rabbi; He had a following. Perhaps Jesus wanted to reassure His family that He valued them and hadn’t lost His rationality as they supposed. Remember, at the end of chapter three, they came to rescue Him from the rigors of His ministry.
Luke also records a visit by Jesus to His hometown. That visit took place very early in Jesus’ ministry and almost led to His premature death. We have no record of Jesus revisiting Nazareth until this incident in Mark’s Gospel. Despite the rejection He faced there, He most likely wanted the people of His hometown to have a second chance. It was natural for Him to care about them. The setting for both of these incidents was the local synagogue.
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