Perceptual Vigilance and why it mattes

The astronomer Galileo once challenged a group of philosophers, who denied the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the Sun, to simply look through the telescope. They refused, and Galileo was labeled a heretic in 1632 and suffered humiliation and prison because the establishment refused to see the truth. I wonder how often we refuse to look and behold the truth of God’s Word because of how it challenges our belief systems.

For example, the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 2: 4-5, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ –by grace you have been saved.” This is the lens through which God sees our lives if we are in Christ. It is also the lens with which we should view our lives and what Christ is doing in and through us.

Worldviews can complicate how we see things. The cumulative effect of our experiences tend to color everything we observe, including God’s Word and working in our lives. In his book, Primal: A Quest for the lost soul of Christianity, Mark Batterson writes of a study involving a group of Americans who had never been to Mexico, and a group of Mexicans who had never been to America.

The researchers constructed a binocular viewer capable of showing one image to the right eye and another image to the left eye. One of the pictures was of a baseball game, a traditional American pastime, and the other was of a bullfight, a traditional Mexican pastime. According to Batterson, “During the test, the pictures appeared simultaneously, forcing subjects to focus on one or the other. When asked what they had seen, the American subjects reported seeing a baseball game, while their Mexican counterparts reported seeing a bullfight…. The psychological term is perceptual vigilance. What we see largely depends upon what we have experienced, or have not experienced, what we know or don’t know, what we expect or don’t expect. That is why Americans see a baseball game while Mexicans see a bullfight.”

Due to the perceptual vigilance of our own tainted experiences we can find it very difficult to believe that Christ saves us by the grace of God. We grow up in a culture that rewards hard work, so it is very easy for us to perceive God’s blessings of salvation on our lives as a natural consequence of our own moral diligence. Or if we haven’t lived a good life according to the current expectations of society, it is very easy to perceive ourselves as undeserving of God’s gift of salvation. But grace is not a result of our ability to behave according to the expectations of society or others. Because ultimately it is not those expectations that matter, when it comes to matters of salvation, the only expectations that matter our those of the only one who can grant salvation, the almighty God.

God outlines His expectations throughout the Scripture, one such place is Deuteronomy 28:1, “And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all His commandments that I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.” Of course the challenge in this verse is the word “all”. Even on our best days, none of us our capable of keeping all the commandments of God, so we end up living under the curse of God instead of His blessing.

But God in His grace did not leave us under the curse. As the Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:20-21 “…We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God.” Grace is not based upon our ability or the expectations of others; it is the free gift of God. And it is in this gift that we can rejoice, knowing that now a new life is ours in Christ Jesus.

Because of the gift of God’s grace our position has changed from one where we were under the curse of God, to be lifted to a place of blessing. As Ephesians 2:6 points out, “…and raised us up with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”

We can persist in our own perceptions of working to earn our salvation through moral diligence and behavior modification, only to be disappointed by continually falling short of God’s standards. Or we can dare to look through the lens of God’s grace and behold the beauty of a salvation and life transformation that only God can provide by grace through faith in Christ.