Isaiah was sent to preach to people who would hear and never understand, see and never perceive. Built on Isaiah 6, Psalm 115, and the man born blind in John 9, this is a warning from a singer who was born in the same dark, until the God who said "Let there be light" shined in his heart.
Lyrics
Et audientes non audiunt
You count the stars, you weigh the sun
You name the laws by which they run
You hold the light up to your eye
And never ask the reason why
You heard God's Word a hundred times
And filed it with the nursery rhymes
You think you know, you think you see
And call your darkness liberty
Your idols have eyes, and they see not
Your idols have ears, and they hear not
And all who make them, all who bow
Become like them, you're like them now
You hear, and hear, and understand not
You see, and see, and perceive not
You think you know, you walk in night
You put the darkness for the light
He that hath ears, let him hear
(Qui habet aures, audiat)
(Qui habet aures, audiat)
I had the coal still on my tongue
When I was told what must be sung
Go tell them, Hear, and know it not
Go tell them, See, and see it not
I asked Him, Lord, how long? He said
Until the cities lie as dead
You hear, and hear, and understand not
You see, and see, and perceive not
You think you know, you walk in night
You put the darkness for the light
He that hath ears, let him hear
(Qui habet aures, audiat)
I know this dark, I was born there
The same blind eyes, the same blind stare
No argument could make me see
The god of this world (Satan) blinded me
Let there be light
He shined His light into my heart
The face of Christ, I had no part
I heard, and heard, and understood not
I saw, and saw, and perceived not
Whereas I was blind, now I see
He that hath ears, let him hear
I heard, and heard, and understood not
I saw, and saw, and perceived not
Whereas I was blind, now I see
He that hath ears, let him hear
He that hath ears
Let him hear
Song Meaning
Seeing, They See Not
On Videntes Non Vident — Isaiah 6:9–13, Psalm 115, Matthew 13:13–16, John 9, 2 Corinthians 4:3–6
The strangest commission ever given
Most callings in the Bible come with a promise of success. Moses will bring the people out. Jeremiah's words will build and plant. The apostles will be witnesses to the ends of the earth.
Isaiah's calling comes with a promise of failure.
He has just seen the Lord on a throne, high and lifted up. He has cried "Woe is me! for I am undone." A seraph has touched his lips with a live coal from the altar, his iniquity has been taken away, and he has said the famous words, "Here am I; send me." Then God tells him what to preach:
"Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed." (Isaiah 6:9–10)
Isaiah is being sent to preach to people who will not listen, and his preaching will make them less able to listen. It is a sentence of judgment, delivered by the man who has just received mercy.
This song is built on that commission. Its title is the Latin of Matthew 13:13, where Jesus quotes Isaiah: videntes non vident, "seeing, they see not." The song opens on the second half of that verse, the only Latin it sings at the start: et audientes non audiunt, "and hearing, they hear not."
One sentence, two testaments
Isaiah 6:9–10 is not an obscure verse. It may be the Old Testament text the New Testament reaches for most often when it needs to explain unbelief.
Jesus quotes it to explain why He teaches in parables (Matthew 13:13–15; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10). John quotes it to explain how the crowds could watch His miracles and still not believe, and then adds a remarkable sentence: "These things said Esaias, when he saw his glory, and spake of him" (John 12:39–41). In John's reading, the Lord Isaiah saw on the throne in chapter 6 was the Son. Paul quotes the passage near the very end of Acts, to the Jewish leaders in Rome who will not receive his message (Acts 28:25–27). And Paul draws on the same idea in Romans 11:8: "God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see."
So the song is not taking one strange verse out of context. It is tracing one of the main threads that runs from the prophets through the Gospels to the apostles: the mystery of people who are shown the light and do not see it.
Verse 1: Counting what God already counted
You count the stars, you weigh the sun,
You name the laws by which they run.
The first "you" in the song is the modern, educated unbeliever, and the song does not mock him. Counting stars, weighing the sun, and naming physical laws are real achievements. Scripture is not embarrassed by them. In fact, it got there first.
"He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names" (Psalm 147:4). "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span… and weighed the mountains in scales?" (Isaiah 40:12). Every act in Verse 1, counting, weighing, and naming, is something the Bible says God did before any astronomer. The scientist is retracing God's own work, a point often credited to Johannes Kepler, who described astronomy as thinking God's thoughts after Him. That is why the scientific revolution grew in soil prepared by people who believed the universe was orderly because its Maker was rational.
The song's charge is not that he studies. It is the last line:
You hold the light up to your eye
And never ask the reason why.
That is Romans 1:20–21 set to music. God's "invisible things… are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made… so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful." The problem is not a lack of data. The problem is a man who studies the light all day and never asks where it comes from, or to whom he owes thanks for it.
Naming a law is not the same as explaining why there are laws at all. A law of nature describes how things regularly behave. It doesn't account for why the universe is orderly, why it is intelligible, or why there is something rather than nothing. Verse 1 lets the unbeliever have every one of his discoveries and simply asks the question he has trained himself not to ask.
Verse 2: The words you've heard too many times
You heard God's Word a hundred times
And filed it with the nursery rhymes.
The second "you" may be in church. In Isaiah's day, the people who heard and did not hear were not pagans. They were the covenant nation, people with the temple, the sacrifices, and the Scriptures. In Matthew 13, Jesus speaks to Galilean crowds raised on the Law and the Prophets. Familiarity is its own kind of blindness: the stories of Noah's ark and Daniel in the lions' den become things we learned as children, kept on the same shelf as nursery rhymes, and quietly outgrown.
You think you know, you think you see,
And call your darkness liberty.
This is the bitterest irony in the song, and it is biblical to the letter. "While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption" (2 Peter 2:19). Jesus said the same: "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin… If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed" (John 8:34, 36). The man in Verse 2 feels freest exactly where he is most bound. Notice the verb call. Isaiah's woe, one chapter earlier, is on those who "call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light" (Isaiah 5:20). Calling darkness liberty is the same act.
Pre-chorus: You become what you worship
Your idols have eyes, and they see not,
Your idols have ears, and they hear not,
And all who make them, all who bow
Become like them, you're like them now.
This is the theological hinge of the whole song. It comes from Psalm 115:4–8, mirrored almost word for word in Psalm 135:15–18:
"Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands… eyes have they, but they see not: They have ears, but they hear not… They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them."
Put that psalm next to Isaiah 6 and the connection is hard to miss. Isaiah is told that his hearers will have eyes that don't see and ears that don't hear. That is the exact description of an idol. Old Testament scholar G.K. Beale built a whole book on this observation, We Become What We Worship. His argument is that Isaiah's judgment is the curse Psalm 115 describes. People who worship blind, deaf idols become spiritually blind and deaf themselves. God gives them over to the likeness of what they chose.
For a new listener, "idol" may sound like a carved statue on an ancient altar, but the Bible does not limit the word that way. Ezekiel speaks of men who "set up their idols in their heart" (Ezekiel 14:3). Paul calls covetousness "idolatry" (Colossians 3:5). John ends his first letter with "Little children, keep yourselves from idols" (1 John 5:21), addressing Christians, not temple-builders. Martin Luther defined it plainly in his Large Catechism: whatever your heart clings to and relies on is, in reality, your god. John Calvin added that the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols (Institutes 1.11.8).
So the man in Verse 1 does not need a statue. When the created universe or his own mind becomes the final authority, the thing he serves instead of thanking its Maker, he has made an idol out of it. Romans 1 says this directly: they "changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image" and "worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator" (1:23, 25). Psalm 115 then tells us what happens to people who do that: they become like what they worship. A universe that cannot see makes a worshipper who cannot see.
Chorus: Hearing, hear
You hear, and hear, and understand not,
You see, and see, and perceive not.
The doubled "hear, and hear" is not filler. It reproduces the grammar of the Hebrew. Isaiah 6:9 uses a construction that repeats the verb for intensity, literally "hear, hearing" and "see, seeing." The KJV renders it "hear ye indeed… see ye indeed." The song keeps the repetition because the repetition is the point. These people hear over and over, again and again, and the hearing never reaches understanding.
You think you know, you walk in night,
You put the darkness for the light.
That last line returns to Isaiah 5:20. Then the chorus ends with Jesus' own words after the parable of the sower: "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Matthew 13:9, 43). In Latin, Qui habet aures, audiat.
It is a call that works two ways. To the hardened, it is a sentence: you have ears, and you will not use them. To anyone whose ears God is opening, it is an invitation: you have ears, so hear. The same words do both. Paul describes the gospel the same way: "to the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life" (2 Corinthians 2:16).
Verse 3: The prophet's sentence
I had the coal still on my tongue
When I was told what must be sung.
Now the singer changes. In Verse 3 we hear from Isaiah himself, just after the coal has touched him. This song is a companion to I Am Undone, which tells the story of Isaiah 6:1–8. This is what happened next.
Go tell them, Hear, and know it not,
Go tell them, See, and see it not.
I asked Him, Lord, how long? He said
Until the cities lie as dead.
Isaiah's question is Isaiah 6:11, and the answer is devastating: "Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate." Isaiah doesn't argue. He asks how long, which assumes it will not last forever. And the chapter's last verse holds a seed of hope. Even after the land is cut down like a tree, "the holy seed shall be the substance thereof" (6:13). A remnant will remain, a stump with life in it. The song keeps that hope for its bridge.
The hard question: Does God blind people?
Any honest reader eventually reaches this question, and it deserves a direct answer. Isaiah is told to make the heart fat and shut their eyes. Mark 4:12 even uses a purpose clause: Jesus speaks in parables "that seeing they may see, and not perceive." Is God the cause of their unbelief?
Scripture's answer has three parts, and all three have to be held together.
First, the hardening is judicial. It is a judge's sentence, not a first cause. By Isaiah 6, the people have already spent five chapters rebelling. Isaiah 1 calls them "a sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity" who "have forsaken the LORD." The hardening confirms a direction they had already chosen. Romans 1 uses the same pattern three times: "God also gave them up… God gave them up… God gave them over" (1:24, 26, 28). The Westminster Confession states it with precision:
"As for those wicked and ungodly men whom God, as a righteous Judge, for former sins, doth blind and harden… He not only withholdeth His grace… but… gives them over to their own lusts, the temptations of the world, and the power of Satan: whereby it comes to pass that they harden themselves, even under those means which God useth for the softening of others." (WCF 5.6)
Notice "as a righteous Judge," "for former sins," and above all, "they harden themselves." Pharaoh's story shows both sides. Exodus says Pharaoh "hardened his heart" (8:15) and that "the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh" (9:12). Both are true. God does not put evil into a willing heart. He stops holding back the evil that is already there.
Second, the blindness is moral, not mechanical. Jonathan Edwards distinguished "natural inability" from "moral inability." A man with no legs cannot walk, and no one blames him. A man who hates his neighbor so much that he "cannot" forgive him is unable in a completely different sense. His inability is just his unwillingness at full strength. Spiritual blindness is the second kind. "Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light" (John 3:19). Romans 1:18 says people "hold the truth in unrighteousness," which means they suppress it. No one in Scripture is blinded who was straining to see. The blind are people who closed their eyes, and God gave them what they chose.
Third, God is not the author of sin. The Westminster Confession's chapter on God's decree says that He ordains whatsoever comes to pass, "yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures" (WCF 3.1). Reformed theology has never said that God hardens innocent people, or that the hardened act against their own will. They do exactly what they want, and that is the tragedy.
So when the chorus accuses its listener, it does not accuse him of being a victim. It accuses him of being a worshipper.
The bridge: The singer was born there
I know this dark, I was born there,
The same blind eyes, the same blind stare.
This is the turn that keeps the song from becoming a sneer. Up to this point, the singer has said "you." Here, he confesses that the "you" was him.
"I was born there" is not exaggeration. Paul says that all of us were "dead in trespasses and sins… and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others" (Ephesians 2:1–3). The man in John 9, whose testimony closes the song, was "blind from his birth" (9:1). Spiritual blindness isn't something the singer fell into one day. It was his native condition.
No argument could make me see,
The god of this world blinded me.
That is 2 Corinthians 4:3–4: "If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ… should shine unto them." The god of this world is Satan, and his work is the third power named in WCF 5.6.
"No argument could make me see" is not an attack on arguments. Paul spent his ministry reasoning with people in synagogues and marketplaces (Acts 17:2, 17). Arguments are real tools, and God uses them. But the line diagnoses where the problem really lies. If blindness were a lack of information, more information would cure it. It isn't, so it doesn't. "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14). The problem is in the eye, not in the light.
Bridge 2: Let there be light
Let there be light.
He shined His light into my heart,
The face of Christ, I had no part.
The answer comes in four words, the first words God speaks in the Bible: "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3).
Paul reaches for that same verse when he describes conversion: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined 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). In other words, becoming a Christian is not a man deciding to open his eyes. It is creation. On the first day, the darkness contributed nothing to the light. It did not invite the light, cooperate with it, or meet it halfway. God spoke, and there was light.
That is why the line is "I had no part." It is the Reformed doctrine of regeneration in six words. God gives the new heart before the heart can respond: "A new heart also will I give you… I will take away the stony heart" (Ezekiel 36:26). The Westminster Confession describes effectual calling as God "enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God, taking away their heart of stone" (WCF 10.1). When Lydia believed Paul's preaching, Luke records it this way: "whose heart the Lord opened" (Acts 16:14).
The faith is real, and the believing is truly the believer's own. But the sight that makes believing possible is given, not achieved.
Final chorus: Now I see
I heard, and heard, and understood not,
I saw, and saw, and perceived not,
Whereas I was blind, now I see.
The chorus comes back in the past tense, sung twice, and its third line is the testimony of the man born blind in John 9:25: "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see."
That chapter is the whole song in miniature. Jesus heals a man blind from birth with clay and spit, and the man contributes nothing except washing where he is told. The religious authorities interrogate him, and he can't explain the theology. He only knows he was blind and now he sees. Then Jesus says the sentence that unlocks the song: "For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind" (John 9:39). The Pharisees ask, "Are we blind also?" Jesus answers: "If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth" (9:40–41).
Notice the difference between the two claims. "We see" is the confident boast of religious insiders, and it leaves them in their sin. "Now I see" is one beggar's testimony about something done to him. The song ends with the beggar's words, not the Pharisees'.
Why Latin?
A careful listener may wonder why a song about understanding is full of a language most people don't understand. That is the point.
The Latin lines come from the Vulgate, the Latin Bible the Western church used for a thousand years. The same Latin was chanted in churches across Europe by people who heard it every week and could not understand it. Medieval worshippers, in a very literal sense, heard and did not understand. When the listener hears the chant in this song and doesn't know what it means, he experiences the song's theme instead of just being told about it.
This gives the song a Reformation echo. The Reformers insisted that Scripture be put into the "vulgar language of every nation" (WCF 1.8), the ordinary speech of ordinary people, because "faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Romans 10:17). William Tyndale gave his life to that work, vowing that a plowboy would know the Scriptures better than the clergy who opposed him. In the song, the Latin is the sound of hearing without understanding. The English is the Word that can be understood. But even the English, as the song insists, is understood only when God opens the ear.
Answering the skeptic
A song this direct will draw objections. Here are the strongest ones, taken seriously.
"This is circular. If I disagree, you just say I'm blind. That can't be falsified." The Christian claim is not "disagreement proves blindness." It is a diagnosis offered alongside public evidence that anyone can examine: the order of the universe, the moral law every person knows (Romans 2:14–15), and above all a historical claim, the resurrection of Jesus. Paul offers that claim to be tested, and he names the result if it fails: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Christianity bets everything on an event in history. As for the claim that humans resist conclusions they don't want, that is not a special Christian dogma. It is one of the best-documented findings in modern psychology, usually called motivated reasoning. The Bible simply names the deepest motive.
"Religious people are the ones who don't look at the evidence." The song agrees that religious people can be blind, and it says so first. Isaiah's hearers were the temple-goers. Jesus' sharpest words in John 9 are for the Pharisees, the most devout men in Israel. Verse 2 is aimed at people who have heard God's Word a hundred times. The song doesn't claim that Christians see and everyone else is blind. It claims that everyone is born blind, and no one sees unless God gives sight.
"A God who blinds people and then judges them is a monster." That would be true if God blinded the innocent or the seeking. Scripture describes the opposite: people who love darkness (John 3:19), suppress the truth (Romans 1:18), and are given over to what they chose. The sentence fits the crime because it is the crime, completed. It is also worth asking where the objection gets its moral force. If the universe has no Judge, "monstrous" is only a strong feeling. The objection assumes an objective moral standard high enough to judge God, and that standard needs a source. The skeptic who calls God unjust has already, without noticing, used the light he says isn't there.
"Why would a loving God speak in riddles?" Parables do two things at once. To people who are hostile, they are closed doors: a story about seeds and soil, nothing more. To people who want to know, they are open doors, and Jesus explains them privately to anyone who asks (Mark 4:10, 34). "Whosoever hath, to him shall be given" (Matthew 13:12). The riddle is a mercy to the seeker and a judgment on the scoffer. The song's own refrain is an open invitation: he that hath ears, let him hear.
"If God has to open eyes, why preach at all?" Because God opens eyes through preaching. "How shall they hear without a preacher?" (Romans 10:14). Isaiah was sent knowing most would refuse, and he went anyway, because the holy seed was real (6:13). This song exists for the same reason.
"Science has explained the universe. There's no room left for God." Science explains how nature behaves. It cannot, by its method, explain why nature behaves lawfully at all, why the human mind can grasp those laws, or why anything exists. Discovering how an engine works does not disprove the engineer; it shows how good he is. Verse 1 grants every discovery and asks the one question science cannot answer on its own: why?
Answering the theologians
Seasoned readers may raise a few internal questions.
Does the song make God the author of sin? No. The song places hardening after idolatry (pre-chorus, then chorus) and calls the hardened people worshippers, not victims. That follows the order of WCF 5.6: a righteous Judge, for former sins, giving people over to themselves.
Does accusing the listener assume he is reprobate? No. Isaiah didn't know which hearers belonged to the holy seed, and neither does any preacher. The song issues the warning and the invitation together to everyone, as the gospel does. The Confession says God "freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ" (WCF 7.3). The refrain he that hath ears, let him hear is that free offer.
Mark 4:12 says "that" (purpose). Isn't the song softening it? No. The song keeps God's purpose fully in view. Verse 3 is Isaiah receiving a commission whose stated goal is hardening. Reformed exegesis doesn't need to soften the purpose clause, because it doesn't require God's purposes to be morally neutral. The purpose is judgment, and judgment is just.
Is "I had no part" too strong? It refers to the giving of sight, not to the act of believing that follows. Regeneration is monergistic: God alone works. Faith, which follows, is truly the believer's own act, but it rests on sight that was given. The parallel with Genesis 1:3 is exact: darkness contributes nothing to the light's arrival.
What is invented, and what is Scripture
Following this project's standard, here is what the song adds:
"The coal still on my tongue" — Isaiah 6:7 says the coal touched his lips or mouth. "Tongue" is poetic license.
"Filed it with the nursery rhymes" — invented imagery for familiarity with the Bible.
"Until the cities lie as dead" — compresses Isaiah 6:11 ("wasted without inhabitant… utterly desolate").
Counting stars and weighing the sun — modern imagery, built on Psalm 147:4 and Isaiah 40:12.
Shifts in who is speaking — the song moves from an accusing voice, to Isaiah in Verse 3, to the confessing believer in the bridges and final chorus. Those transitions are the song's structure, not the text's.
Everything else is drawn directly from Scripture: the commission, "how long," the idols that become their makers' likeness, putting darkness for light, the god of this world, "Let there be light," the face of Christ, "whereas I was blind, now I see," and the Latin of Matthew 13.
He that hath ears
The song ends where Jesus ended the parable of the sower, with an invitation that is also a warning: He that hath ears, let him hear.
Right after quoting Isaiah's sentence in Matthew 13, Jesus turns to His disciples and says something the song leaves for the listener to discover:
"But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear." (Matthew 13:16)
Every person who hears this song has ears. The question it leaves is the one Isaiah left, Jesus left, and Paul left: will you hear? And if you do — if the words land, if the light breaks in — know that you didn't switch it on. The same voice that said let there be light on the first day has spoken again.