Becoming a Christian starts with simply the Gospel. The information is simple: accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
This, however, is much harder than it sounds. The information itself isn’t difficult to understand, but our response to it requires a few steps:
- Accept the specific factual information that you’re a lost sinner that needs saving.
- Accept you’re unable to fix your moral tasks whatsoever.
- Give ourselves to God to fix us.
- Trust God to direct you, then walk faithfully without knowing many times what will happen.
This seems easy, right?
Why it’s hard
One reality about ourselves is that we are very certain about many things we shouldn’t be:
- We plan the days, weeks, and sometimes months out as if we know what will happen.
- We self-identify our prosperity and distinguish social status based on the size of what we stockpile. We also typically assume our things won’t go obsolete, break, decay, depreciate, or that anyone will steal them.
- At any time, we’ll experience death, usually without warning. We treat it as if it’s indefinite and not worth thinking about until we’re just about to face it.
All of these are mentally coping with The unknown. We learn from early childhood onward that bad things exist there. We also learn that the “evil you know” is better than the unknown one.
While the devil exists in the unknown, God does as well. He is ever-present, ever-powerful, but He is also intentionally not visible.
God is basically asking us to go against our common-sense, intuitive, rational approach to things and trust Him.
It’s actually not “hard”, except that we must have the correct attitude for it to not be hard. But we’ll get to that.
Rebalanced trust
If postmodern philosophy teaches us anything, we must trust something in this life.
- If we start by trusting ourselves, we are trusting the structure of language, experience, and information we possess.
- When you really think about it, you inherited your language and experience. The only information you have starts with what your environment gave you.
- The Bible’s command on trust is straightforward: trust God and not yourself (Proverbs 3:5).
In short, we either trust God, or we must trust something else.
In this view, the terms “idolatry” and “addiction” are basically the same thing:
- Our idols and addictive substances both focus our devotion on something we believe can fix things.
- The “unknown”, in both cases, is a fully certain enemy to our peace.
- Both addictions and idolatry are insufficient at fixing what we’re expecting them to.
Naturally, we trust things when they’ve had a proven record in the past. Without clear guidance, every single thing can (and often does) become an idol/addictive substance.
Re-rebalanced trust
When we put our substances side-by-side, though, they don’t create equal results:
- Work creates longer-lasting results than video game sessions.
- Collecting cars are far more acceptable than collecting angry internet comments.
- Crack cocaine is more expensive and destructive to our health than alcohol.
These competing addictions create a powerful illusion. We’re still escaping and drawing ourselves away from God, but the varying results give us room to justify our actions.
Over time, our idols create unpleasant consequences for us. We lose jobs, marriages go wrong, collections have maintenance costs, and substances give health issues.
Eventually, at some point, we will realize the substance has created more trouble than solutions for ourselves. Once that happens, we must make a clear, diverging decision:
- Accept we have a problem, and start down the path to recovery.
- Find another substance and start the cycle again.
If we’ve found another substance (and we often do), we will start a meta-habit across long spans of time. After a few substance/abuse/change cycles, we will typically have a rhythm of continuous abuse.
The final substance
At some point, we will grow to distrust all exterior substances.
- The elements will eventually reclaim every collection.
- All highs come back down again.
- All numbing agents eventually fade.
- Every friend will eventually die or drift away.
- All projects will eventually finish or become meaningless.
Eventually, the only reliable escape will be within our minds. Our experiences, perceptiveness, and intelligence will all show the exterior world’s fruitlessness.
At first, we may only visit the “mind substance” for a time. Even if we’re “doers”, life and age will eventually force us to sit and think (e.g., hospitalization, incarceration). As we age and experience the eventual futility of everything (Ecclesiastes), we will visit that domain more often.
This mental shift begins a new cycle that more intimately risks harming our souls.
God’s perspective
Hold that in your mind for a minute, and let’s shift perspective to God’s view.
The God of love designed every human being for a clear reason (1 John 4:16).
- He created everything to point back to Him (Psalm 19:1).
- But, beyond simply existing, God’s purpose for us was to have a loving relationship with Him (Genesis 1:26-31).
- God planned our existence to have a relationship so advanced that even the angels don’t understand it (1 Peter 1:12).
This is still true, irrespective of this fallen, broken world. Everything is still in its place for us to experience a relationship with God.
Our breach of contract
In light of God’s design for us, shoving God out of our minds and consuming any substance creates several consequences:
- Rejecting God is performing a disservice to ourselves. God designed us for a relationship with Him, so we’re operating beyond our design.
- From God’s point of view, our severed relationship also obstructs what He wants, and He is very jealous (James 4:4-5).
- While God is love, He is also so powerful that mocking Him comes with consequences (Galatians 6:7).
And, therefore, for every eternal reason, He will systematically destroy all our idols. This includes the consequence of death (Romans 6:23a).
Mind games
To add God’s view to our addictions, He created everything in its place, including how addictions work (Colossians 1:16).
- God designed every substance to only have a lasting pleasure. This works fine when the substance is not the center of our lives.
- In any domain whatsoever except God Himself, we will get less reward for one additional unit of something (“diminishing return“).
- If we keep pursuing what God doesn’t want, we require more and more of it to stay equally satisfied.
Further, we directly reject God’s correction when we give up our exterior substances and move to our mind.
Now, the way our minds represent this substance abuse can come in many various forms:
- Daydreaming and fantasizing (i.e., living in an imagined world), which often includes performing all sorts of otherwise unattainable sins.
- Mentally disconnecting from the world around us (e.g., asceticism, Stoicism).
- Focusing deeply on pleasures within our direct experience (i.e., philosophical hedonism).
- Building structured thoughts and analyzing them (e.g., math, logic, philosophy).
To maintain all this, we must keep fleeing God. It is nothing more than refusing to accept we are hopeless sinners who desperately need His exclusive healing.
This is the life most people lead. Their “lives of quiet desperation” will eventually dominate their essence.
Sadly, this isn’t the end of it, and the tragedy gets worse from here.
Finding closure
When we passively defy God, He works from every possible angle to break us.
In response, we often cling desperately to any shreds of conceit and self-glory. We mask it by labeling it “honor”, or “dignity”, or “appropriate behavior”. Behind it, we simply refuse to admit we’re sinning against the One True God. Our story has us as the hero or victim, but never the enemy.
Narcissism by another name
In our modern secularized society, we have assigned clinical definitions to many things. The clinical term for someone who can’t confess their sin is “narcissism“.
This state is farther-reaching than most people realize.
- Narcissistic behavior starts as a lie with a public-facing image of certainty.
- That person’s personality becomes a disorder through a crushing sense of worthlessness.
- They aren’t willing to accept that worthlessness, so they will idolize themselves to prevent a complete existential breakdown.
With enough time, every person on this earth who doesn’t submit to God will eventually develop this mental state. When we have resisted repentance to God from every possible angle, we have blasphemed the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31-32).
A continuous cycle
In other words, this world maintains a predictable cycle, which will persist until Jesus comes back:
- God will coax everyone to understand the following like children (Matthew 18:3):
- He loves them
- He knows what He’s doing
- He’s trustworthy
- He will take care of us.
- A huge chunk of people will reject that. They’ll pursue a variety of substances to deaden the pain of rejecting God instead.
- Eventually, they’ll only have mental substances left if they ignore consequences He places in their lives.
- If they persist against all sanity, they eventually must lie to themselves about the full effect of their chosen sins.
- Assuming they don’t commit suicide or repent, they will eventually harden their heart from every possible angle.
- At that point, God can only send them to the next life and their pending Judgment.
God is a faithful Shepherd, so believers have nothing to directly fear about this. However, believers should stay mindful for when these types of people infiltrate the Church.