The Copyright on Reality Text: Proverbs 20:12
Introduction: The World in Your Head
We live in an age of profound confusion, and the confusion all starts with a rebellion against the obvious. Our modern world is like a man who insists on assembling a complicated piece of furniture without looking at the instructions, and then, when he ends up with a lopsided monstrosity, he blames the manufacturer for making the parts. We want to understand the world, we want to have knowledge, we want to make scientific discoveries, but we want to do it all while pretending we are cosmic orphans. We want to be the authors of our own dictionaries and the captains of our own souls.
The result of this is a kind of intellectual vertigo. We have men who use their minds to argue that their minds are nothing more than chemical reactions. We have people who use the laws of logic to argue that logic is a social construct. They look out at the world with eyes that see color, light, and shadow, and then declare that it is all a meaningless accident. They listen with ears that can distinguish a symphony from a siren, and then conclude that all of it is just random vibrations in the air, signifying nothing.
This is not just a philosophical blunder; it is a spiritual disease. It is the ancient sin of autonomy, the desire to be as God, knowing good and evil on our own terms. And like all sin, it is fundamentally irrational. It is an attempt to saw off the branch you are sitting on. You cannot use your eyes to deny the one who gave you sight. You cannot use your ears to deny the one who enables you to hear. To do so is to engage in a piece of cosmic plagiarism, stealing God's equipment in order to argue against His existence.
The book of Proverbs is intensely practical. It does not float in the clouds of abstract theory but walks on the ground of everyday reality. And in this small, dense verse, Solomon gives us a foundational piece of epistemology. He tells us where our basic tools for interacting with the world come from. And in doing so, he lays the axe to the root of all autonomous, secular thought. This verse is a statement of divine copyright. It tells us who owns the patents on perception.
The Text
The hearing ear and the seeing eye,
Yahweh has made both of them.
(Proverbs 20:12 LSB)
The Divine Manufacturing (v. 12a)
The first part of the verse presents us with two ordinary, unremarkable faculties.
"The hearing ear and the seeing eye..." (Proverbs 20:12a)
Stop there for a moment. We are talking about the basic gates through which reality enters our consciousness. Think of the sheer wonder of these things, a wonder that we have lost through familiarity. The eye is an instrument of staggering complexity, able to process trillions of bits of information, detecting light, color, and depth with a precision that makes our most advanced cameras look like children's toys. The ear is a marvel of biological engineering, converting air pressure waves into the rich tapestry of sound, music, and language.
The materialist looks at these things and sees only the product of blind chance and eons of evolutionary trial and error. He must believe that the purposeless produced purpose, that the non-rational produced rationality, that the meaningless produced the very tools by which we search for meaning. But this is a blind faith, a leap into the dark. It is the assertion that a grand library, with all its books and coherent sentences, assembled itself from a print shop explosion.
The proverb simply states the obvious. These are not accidents. They are instruments. They are tools. And tools imply a toolmaker. An ear is for hearing. An eye is for seeing. They have a telos, a purpose. And purpose is the calling card of a mind. The secularist has to borrow the language of purpose to even describe what these organs do, all while denying the existence of the one who gave them that purpose.
The Divine Manufacturer (v. 12b)
The second half of the verse tells us who this manufacturer is. It resolves the issue with blunt, sovereign simplicity.
"...Yahweh has made both of them." (Proverbs 20:12b)
This is the great Creator/creature distinction in miniature. There are two kinds of reality in the universe: Yahweh, the self-existent, uncreated God, and everything else, which He made. This includes not just the stars and the mountains, but the very faculties by which you perceive the stars and the mountains. God did not just make the world "out there"; He made the world "in here." He fashioned the equipment that resides in your head.
This has massive implications. First, it establishes God's ownership. If He made them, they belong to Him. Your eyes are not your own. Your ears are not your own. They are on loan from the manufacturer. This means we are stewards, not owners. We will give an account for what we have looked at and what we have listened to. This is why the psalmist prays, "Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things" (Psalm 119:37). It is why Paul commands us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, which are fed by what we see and hear (Romans 12:2). What you allow through the gates of your eyes and ears is a moral and spiritual issue, because those gates are God's property.
Second, it is the foundation of all true knowledge. How can you trust that your senses are giving you a reliable picture of the world? The atheist has no ultimate answer. He has to just assume that the random chemical fizz in his skull somehow corresponds to the random arrangement of atoms outside his skull. He has to take it on blind faith. But the Christian has the only solid ground for epistemology. We can trust our senses, not because they are infallible, but because a faithful God made them and made the world they interact with. God made the eye, and He made the light. He made the ear, and He made the sound waves. He is the one who correlates the two. Without this divine bridge, all knowledge is impossible. You cannot know anything for certain unless you presuppose the God who makes knowing possible.
This is a direct assault on all idolatry. Pagans make idols with eyes that cannot see and ears that cannot hear (Psalm 115:5-6). Our God is the one who makes eyes that can see and ears that can hear. He is the living God, the source of all perception and life. To worship the creature rather than the Creator is to trade the source of sight for a blind stone.
Seeing and Hearing God
This proverb operates on two levels. It is about our physical senses, but it points to a deeper, spiritual reality. The Bible is filled with the language of spiritual sight and spiritual hearing. Jesus repeatedly says, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (Matthew 11:15). He was not questioning the physical auditory capabilities of the crowd. He was speaking of a spiritual deafness.
The natural man, because of sin, is spiritually blind and deaf. Paul says the god of this world has "blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:4). Isaiah describes a people who are "ever hearing, but never understanding; ever seeing, but never perceiving" (Isaiah 6:9).
This is the state of every person apart from grace. God, in His common grace, has given all men physical eyes and ears. The sun shines and the birds sing for the just and the unjust alike. This is a mercy that holds the world together and makes life possible. But it is not a saving mercy.
For salvation, a second creative act is necessary. The same God who said, "Let there be light" in Genesis 1 must perform that same miracle in the human heart. Paul says it this way: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). Regeneration is God making a seeing eye in a blind soul. It is God making a hearing ear in a deaf spirit.
Conclusion: The Steward of Perception
So what do we do with this? First, we must repent of our intellectual autonomy. We must confess that every thought we have, every sight we see, every sound we hear, is a gift from God. We must renounce the foolish pride that thinks we can understand the world on our own terms. We must begin our thinking with God, not with ourselves.
Second, we must cultivate gratitude. Do not take your senses for granted. Every sunrise, every child's laugh, every song is a mercy from the hand of God, transmitted through equipment He designed and maintains. Thank Him for the simple, profound gift of being able to perceive His beautiful and broken world.
Third, we must be careful stewards. Since our eyes and ears belong to God, we must dedicate them to Him. We must guard what we watch and what we listen to. We must actively use them for His glory, looking at His Word, seeing His glory in creation, hearing the preaching of the gospel, and listening to the needs of our brothers and sisters. We are to present our bodies, including our eyes and ears, as living sacrifices (Romans 12:1).
And finally, if you are here and you are spiritually blind and deaf, you must cry out to the one who alone can make you see and hear. Your condition is not a result of a lack of evidence. The evidence is shouting at you from every corner of creation. Your condition is a matter of a rebellious heart that loves the darkness. You cannot fix yourself. You need a creative miracle. You need the Lord, who made the first eye and the first ear, to make yours new. He is the great physician. Jesus came and opened the eyes of the blind and unstopped the ears of the deaf, and He did this to show us what He does in the new birth. He gives sight to the blind. He gives hearing to the deaf. He does it all by His sovereign grace, so that we might see the glory of God in the face of Christ, and hear His voice calling us His own.