To become a Christian, one simply needs to believe the Gospel, but that is much harder than it seems.
In effect, behind the scenes, all Christians have the same exact steps they must take:
- Accept they are insufficient to the moral tasks they understand they must do.
- Give God the problem.
- Walk faithfully where God directs them, without knowing many times what will happen.
This is utterly simple, and seems easy, right?
Why It’s Hard
The reality about ourselves is that we are so very certain about so much that isn’t:
- We plan the day and week out as if it will happen the way we planned it.
- Our stockpiles of resources are indicators to us that we are doing well, and we even distinguish social status based on the size of that stockpile.
- Death can happen to us at any time, but we treat it as if it’s an indefinite thing until we’re just about to face it.
Of course, it’s a hedge against The Unknown. We learn from early childhood onward that bad things exist there, and that what we don’t know will hurt us worse than what we do know.
And yet, God exists in the unknown as well as the devil. He is ever-present, ever-powerful, but intentionally not visible.
God is basically asking us to go against our common-sense, intuitive, rationally-established approach to things and trust Him.
It’s actually not “hard”, except that we need the correct atttitude for it to not be hard. But we’ll get to that.
Rebalanced Trust
If postmodern philosophy teaches us anything, we’re stuck having to trust something in this life.
And, when we don’t trust God, we must trust something else. To that end, the terms “idolatry” and “addiction” are interchangeable:
- They are both our devotion to something that we believe can fix a problem we have.
- They both group The Unknown into a completely certain domain.
- They’re both truly insufficient at their roles.
It’s only a natural thing for us to trust something if we’ve had a known-reliable success rate with it in the past. Thus, every single thing can (and often does) become an addictive substance.
Re-Rebalanced Trust
These substances, though, are not equal:
- Crack cocaine, for example, is more expensive than alcohol.
- Work creates longer-lasting results than video game sessions.
- Being a car enthusiast is a far more acceptable thing than being a marijuana enthusiast.
There’s an illusion to this: everyone is still escaping and drawing themselves away from devotion to God, but they’re creating varying results in the process that may be more justifiable.
Over time, we face adverse consequences for our idols. We lose jobs, marriages go wrong, the substances give us health issues, and we’re left at a fork in our path with a decision:
- Accept we have a problem, and start down the path of recovery.
- Find another substance.
If we’ve found ourselves another substance, we have started a meta-habit across long spans of time, and we run a major risk of doing it again later.
The Final Substance
In proportion to both our perceptiveness and intelligence, we will find all exterior substances untrustworthy.
- Every collection is reclaimed by the elements.
- All highs come back down again, and all numbing agents eventually fade.
- Every friend will eventually die or drift away.
- The work will eventually be done, or will become meaningless.
The only place to turn to will be within our minds.
At first, we may only visit the “mind substance” for a time, such as while incarcerated or hospitalized. But, as we age and experience the eventual futility of all things represented in Ecclesiastes, we will visit that domain more often.
And, this is the beginning of a developed cycle that signals a true risk to our souls.
God’s Perspective
Let’s shift the perspective now to God’s view.
He, the God of love, designed you for the purpose of having a loving relationship with you. Everything created is meant to point back to Him, for the enhanced relationship He wants with you.
Even in this fallen, broken world, that still holds true. Every created thing was originally designed, in its place, for us to discover another aspect of God.
By shoving God out and consuming any substance, we do Him a disservice, but we also bring a consequence.
Beyond God’s love, He is also powerful, and will not be mocked or marginalized. His jealousy is strong (James 4:4-5), and every substance is both an impediment to our well-being, but also an impediment to what He wants.
And, therefore, for every eternal reason, He will systematically destroy all idols we have.
Mind Games
By the time we’ve given up our exterior substances, we’ve already started to reject God’s chastisement, and the realm moves almost exclusively to our mind.
Now, the way our minds represent this substance abuse can come in many forms:
- Daydreaming and fantasizing (i.e., living in an imagined world)
- Mentally disconnecting from the world around us (i.e., Stoicism)
- Focusing intently on the pleasures in our scope of experience (i.e., philosophical Hedonism)
- Building structured thoughts and analyzing (i.e., math and logic)
In all of this, we steadily continue to flee God and refuse to accept that we are sinners in desperate need of His exclusive healing.
And, this is the life most people lead, the undercurrent of the “quiet lives of desperation” that eventually dominates their essence.
But, this is not the end of it, and the tragedy grows worse.
Finding Closure
In our passive defiance against God, He works from every possible angle to break us.
In response, we frequently fight desperately to cling to the shreds of conceit and self-glory we have. We call it “honor”, or “dignity”, or “appropriate behavior”, but it really is an unwilingness to accept that we’re sinning against the One True God.
In our modern secularized society, we have assigned clinical definitions to many things, and we do have a term for someone unwilling to admit their sin. It goes by the term “narcissism”.
This state is farther-reaching than most people realize: narcissistic behavior starts as a lie with the public-facing image of certainty, and the personality disorder is developed by a crushing sense of worthlessness that mandates glory in oneself to prevent a complete existential breakdown.
If we live long enough on this earth, this is the eventual mental state of all people who do not submit to His will.
In other words, there is a predictable cycle present throughout this world, which will persist until Jesus comes back:
- Everyone will be coaxed by God toward having an implicit trust that He loves them, knows what He’s doing, and that He’s trustworthy (Matthew 18:3).
- A huge chunk of them will reject that, and will instead pursue a variety of substances to deaden the pain of rejecting God.
- Eventually, if they continue to not pay attention to the consequences He’s placed in their lives, they’ll only have mental substances left.
- If they persist, even against all sanity, they will eventually have to explicitly lie to themselves about the full effect of their sin.
- Assuming they don’t commit suicide or repent, they will eventually harden their heart from every possible angle.
- At that point, all God can do is to send them on to the next life and their pending Judgment.
In light of all this, it is a tremendous moral duty for us to love our enemies.