Here is a remarkable appeal by Moses to the people of his time about their souls being lifeless and non-operational. Are his famous signs of an inactive soul true of us? Here is how Moses unfolds the way to connect with God.
‘Yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear unto this day.’
And our subject is ‘How To Connect With Almighty God.’ Moses appeals to the people. They’re at the end of their period of some 40 years in the wilderness. These are people who have seen amazing things. They’ve seen great demonstrations of the power of God in their deliverance from Egypt, and subsequently they had been maintained and provided for in all these years. They were people who had benefited so much from things that could not be explained, except that they were done performed by the hand of God.
And yet Moses tells them this. This is one of the final messages to the children of Israel preached by Moses, and we’re going back some three and a half thousand years. And yet the words here stand today. They’re just as applicable to us today as they were to the children of Israel so very long ago. Here they are: ‘Yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear unto this day.’
What you’re looking at is a remarkably profound statement of the signs or the marks of a dead soul, of an inert dormant soul, dormant would probably be a better word than dead. The soul is never entirely dead. It can be aroused. It can be brought into activity by the blessing and power of God, but it is as though it is dead, asleep, non-operational, not functioning toward God. The soul, the spirit, that faculty in every man and woman which enables communion with God, which enables prayer, the faculty by which we have some sense and awareness of the being of God and can reach to him and can understand him. A mysterious faculty, if you were to be someone able to dissect the human brain, you wouldn’t be able to find it. The soul is a mysterious entity. It uses the brain. It uses our faculties and our minds, as yet it’s something undiscoverable and invisible to us. But the soul, is it active? It’s the highest part of you. It’s the most important part of you. It’s the eternal aspect of you. Is it not functioning?
Are we only, dare I put it this way, it’s very inadequate, are we only half people? Because what God intended us for and created us for, communion with himself, awareness of him, receiving guidance and help and power from him, that faculty is dormant and inactive. There’s so much missing from us. And it’s this which Moses describes, ‘Yet the Lord has not given you a heart to perceive, eyes to see and ears to hear unto this day.’