2 Samuel 4:10 “When one told me, ‘Behold, Saul is dead,’ and thought he was bringing good news, I seized him and killed him at Ziklag, which was the reward I gave him for his news.”
How’s your eyesight? Mine’s not very good. Thankfully there is the blessing of eyeglasses to correct things. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to see things as they really are. Without glasses I can’t read the road signs, recognize the people around me, or see where I’m going. Such distorted vision distorts everything in my world. Obviously, it’s not those things that are distorted. Rather, it’s my eyes that are the problem.
Jesus spoke about this in a spiritual sense with the following words that are recorded in Matthew 6:22-23: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” Interestingly, He said this in the context of man’s view of the value of things. Immediately before these words He said this: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” With these words Jesus warned us of our distorted view of the things around us. It’s called “the lust,” i.e., “the desire” of the eyes in 1 John 2:16. It’s a distorted view of what’s wonderful. It’s the condition of valuing eternally worthless things as the be all and end all, while, at the same, being blind to things that are eternally rich.
We get a shadow of this tragic malady in the passage above from 2 Samuel 4. It is taken from an account of the treachery of two men, Rechab and Baanah, who saw that their king, Ish-bosheth, the son of Saul, was doomed. They saw that his kingdom was slipping away from him and that David would very soon ascend to the throne. So they took matters into their own hands and murdered Ish-bosheth while he lay on his bed. They were so thrilled with themselves that the Bible tells us that they beheaded him and rode all night to get to David because, as the verse above put it, they “thought (they were) bringing good news.” The Hebrew from which this phrase is translated literally means “in their eyes” they were bringing good news. In other words, in the way that they viewed the world, what they had done was a wonderful thing. The problem was, their eyes were bad, and so their whole body was full of darkness. They didn’t see things like David did, and it led to their destruction. It could have been said of them, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Proverbs 14:12). They were like the apostle Paul who, before he was a Christian, thought he was glorifying God as he was persecuting believers to the death. But because his spiritual eyes were bad, so his body, likewise, was full of darkness.
And that’s the way it is with any other unbeliever. They have bad eyes, spiritually speaking, so they are unable to see things the way the Son of David does. Many things that they see as “good” are actually “evil” in God’s eyes, and vice versa. When they think of the Bible, it’s nothing more than a boring book of rules, or, at best, some interesting historical literature, but they have no great desire for it. Those who have had their spiritual eyes opened, on the other hand, see the Bible as the very wisdom of God. They come to realize that the very mind of Christ is revealed in its pages (1 Corinthians 2:16) and, as such, they see it as manna from heaven for which they suddenly have a great hunger. When an unbeliever looks at nature, they see just that, nature, while the one who loves the Creator sees His handiwork, His matchless glory, everywhere he or she looks. And in the end, the one who has never known Christ, like Rechab and Baanah who never really knew David, although they may be proud of what they’ve done in their life and think they are ready to meet God, will tragically find that they’ve never really done anything to the glory of the Son of David because they never really knew Him nor loved Him. And while they might expect open arms when they meet God, they will find themselves outcasts from His mercy which could have been theirs all along by simply trusting in His only begotten Son.
So, is what you think about life the way life really is? Is your value system rooted in your own ideas, or is it the value system of the Son of God? Is your spiritual eyesight bad so your whole body is full of darkness, or have your eyes been opened by the one and only Light of the World, the One in Whom there is absolutely no darkness at all (1 John 1:5)?
To Encourage You 
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