A story is told about four men who are blindfolded and (for some reason) placed with an elephant. They are trying to figure out what this thing is, so each one touches it and takes a guess as to what it is. The first man touches the elephant’s leg and says, “This is a tree.” The second man feels the elephant’s trunk and says, “No, I think it is a large snake.” The third man touches the tail and says, “You are both wrong it is a vine.” And the fourth man feels the side of the elephant and says, “You are all wrong, I am certain it is a boulder.”
The point of the story is this. The blindfolded men represent the incredibly limited perspective of humans. As they try to describe God, each one can sense only a portion of the whole. Therefore each person (representing a world religion) sees part of the larger truth about God. The four blindfolded men are all partially right in their understanding of God.
This story accurately captures something fundamentally true about humans and their pursuit of God. Humans have limited capacity to understand and finite perspective. Therefore we are like blinded men trying to understand God, but what the story leaves out is the possibility that someone could remove the blindfold!
The good news of Jesus birth, is that God sent his son into the world to remove your blindfold. The Son of God came so that though we were feeling our way through the darkness, now we can see God clearly. When your spiritual eyes are opened by Jesus, it is as though you can step back and say, “Oh, I see now that we were all wrong, it is an elephant!”
