Sin or Sickness

Biblical Counsel for a Change — Steve Gregg

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Sin or Sickness

Biblical Counsel for a ChangeSteve Gregg

Steve Gregg explores the concept of change and counseling from a biblical perspective, emphasizing that transformation is possible through God's guidance. He highlights the distinction between sinful behavior and sickness, asserting that those engaged in self-destructive behaviors can find themselves unable to change despite their desire to do so. Gregg argues that personal responsibility and the freedom to make choices are integral to the Christian faith. He challenges the notion that mental illness is solely a physical ailment, suggesting that psychological and spiritual aspects should also be considered when addressing mental health issues.

Transcript

Today I'm beginning a series with you which is called Biblical Counsel for a Change, or the Counsel of God for a Change. The title of the series is Flexible Enough. Of course, for a change is intended as a double entendre.

It is intended to suggest that when change is necessary, there is counsel from the Word of God to help affect and direct us in the change that needs to be made in our lives. And on the other hand, the expression for a change suggests that that's not what we would normally, or not frequently enough hear when we're looking for change in our lives, both from secular and sadly even from religious Christian persons. We often have recommendations of methods of change that are not really biblical, that are not really what the scripture has advocated for the past 2,000 years and even longer because the Old Testament contains a great deal of the same counsel, nor what Christians have believed or followed until recent decades.

And so we're going to spend some time looking at this because change is one of the most important things for us to get a grip on. Change, for one thing, is inevitable, but not all change is improvement. We will change, but we won't necessarily improve.

It's not a given that people improve just because time passes. It is a given that people change with the passage of time. Your looks will change as you grow older.

Your moods change from time to time. Your feelings change. Your viewpoint changes.

Your theology changes. And perhaps as important as any of the above, more important than most, your character changes. Your character is who you are.

It is the spiritual state of your heart from which issue forth all the issues of life, according to Proverbs. Therefore, we need to be aware that change happens and change is inevitable, but not all of that is automatically change in the direction of improvement. In fact, someone has said that change is more inevitable than any other thing.

Many people have thought that the two things that are absolutely inevitable are death and taxes. And I don't know about taxes, but I will say that death is not inevitable. Change is more inevitable than death, because according to 1 Corinthians 15 and verse 51, it says, I show you a mystery.

We shall not all sleep. He means die, but we shall all be changed. So not all will die, but all will undergo change so that change is even more inevitable than death.

It's more absolute. It's more certain to happen. And that's because human nature is not static.

Of course, in that particular point, that scripture in 1 Corinthians, Paul is not talking about change in our character necessarily. He's talking principally about the resurrection and the glorification of our bodies, although that will change some things about our inward life as well, I'm sure. But what we want to concentrate on is the change that is inevitable in our human nature and our character.

According to 1 Corinthians 6, verses 9 through 11, Paul said, Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you are washed, but you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.

Now, what I'd point out to you is that many of the habits of life that Paul says will disqualify someone from inheriting the kingdom of God are habits of life that are extremely common in our society. And even Christians often complain of them. They give them different names, for example, instead of calling them idolaters, we call them addicts, people who are addicted to certain things, which is really simply putting something ahead of God.

If the things they're addicted to are forbidden by God, things like drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, there's all kinds of things people nowadays claim to be addicted to or are told they're addicted to. But if the things that they are said to be addicted to are forbidden from Scripture, but they do them anyway, then we'd have to just describe those problems as a problem with idolatry, that they are obsessed with certain things and honor certain things and pursue certain things more than they pursue God and his will for their lives. When it refers to people as effeminate, we would probably call those people homosexuals or abusers of themselves of mankind.

We'd maybe call those theomasticus. Thieves, we might in some cases call a thief a kleptomaniac. Nice therapeutic name.

Covetous, drunkards, we call people like that alcoholics today. Revilers, these are people who have anger problems and there are ways that the world tries to deal with them. Anger management classes and so forth that people go to if they, especially if they commit crimes while they're angry, they're often told that they have to go through some kind of an anger management class and learn all kinds of ways to change that behavior and so forth.

There's a lot of variety here of what Paul says will disqualify a person from the kingdom of God. It is quite clear that if it disqualifies a person from the kingdom of God, that the persons who do these things are not merely victims of their behavior. They are perpetrators of sinful behavior that God would not punish a person if he was simply the victim of something he couldn't help.

It is assumed that these people were guilty of sin and these are some of the sins they were guilty of and these were lifestyles of theirs, but notice they have changed. Now, there are many people who have these very lifestyles today who are interested in change. There are two motivations that might cause somebody to want to change their behavior.

One, and probably the most common, unfortunately, among men, is that they simply find their behavior undesirable, unprofitable. Perhaps their behavior is costing them too much money. Maybe it has cost them some valued relationships.

Maybe it is destroying their health. Maybe it is simply making them miserable day by day, emotionally, and they want to get over that. They don't like damaging things.

These are self-destructive behaviors and yet many people find themselves incapable of changing, but they in many cases very much want to because of the great sorrow and problems that this is bringing into their lives. This is what we would, I think rightly call the selfish motivation for change. Now, I'm not saying that such selfish motivation isn't okay.

I mean, if what you're doing is destroying your family life and destroying your finances and destroying your health and so forth and likely to bring you to an early grave, then I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being at least self-interested enough to change from those behaviors. Although there's certainly a different motivation that belongs to the Christian in wanting to change such behaviors and that is the motivation of wanting to please God. And if a Christian desires to please God, they will want to change because there are many things in our lives that don't please God.

I remember hearing a preacher named Bob, I won't tell his last name, but he was saying that God spoke to him once when he was in his devotional time and he said, Bob, you and I are incompatible and I don't change. And the implication obviously was, the way things stand, Bob, you and I don't get along. We don't see things eye to eye.

We can't walk together because we're not agreed. And I, God, do not change. So guess who's going to have to change? You're going to have to change.

And knowing that so many of our natural behaviors in the flesh are contrary to God and inhibit not only our going into the kingdom of God, but also our relationship with God and bring God great displeasure, should motivate us to want to change. And the person who wants to change behaviors because they are displeasing to God is motivated quite differently than the person who wants to change behaviors simply because they're displeasing to self. And this is really a dividing point between the way two camps view the subject of personal change.

There are those who make self the God. Self-esteem, self-gratification, self-acceptance, self-confidence, self-actualization. These are the things that are considered to be the ultimate values and that the kind of sinful behavior that was just described in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 that we just read, that obviously works against personal fulfillment and self-actualization in the minds of such people.

And therefore, we need to change anything that makes me unhappy, anything that makes my life more complex, more problematic than it would ordinarily be. We've got to change that so my life will be more fulfilled. My life will have fewer problems, that I'll find it easier to cope with circumstances.

That is the motivation behind one school of thought about personal change. Biblically, however, the motivation behind the desire to change must be not that my behavior has been unpleasant for me. It may have been, and I may be very pleased when it stops happening because I have much less of the kind of displeasure that behavior brings once I stop doing that behavior.

But I want to stop because it's not pleasing to God. Now, sometimes doing what is pleasing to God is not going to be a hundred percent pleasing to me. There may be strong urges which I would feel pleased to succumb to, but would not please God.

There may be certain sacrifices I have to make. There may be certain states of unhappiness that I'm called upon to accept as the will of God because they please God for me to endure them. They may be a test.

Suffering can be embraced by a Christian whose concern is to please God. However, suffering is not highly valued in the other camp on this subject. If you are suffering, you've got to do something to change that.

And the Christian is motivated by, well, if God is pleased with what I'm doing, whether or not I'm suffering, I am to be content. If God is not pleased, then even if my behavior makes me happy, I cannot be content in that behavior. I must seek to change.

Now, human nature is not generally inclined toward positive change. I said that change is inevitable, but not necessarily positive change. Paul said in 2 Timothy 3 13, but evil men and seducers shall wax or become worse and worse deceiving and being deceived.

And in Romans 1 26, it speaks of certain persons who have made initial choices to suppress the truth and unrighteousness. And after a certain point, it says for this cause, God gave them up to vile affections. If you choose wrong behavior and you do not repent of wrong behavior, the likelihood is great that you will become more established in that wrong behavior.

Part of that might simply be the natural snowballing effect that occurs when you make habits and habits become very difficult to break. Part of that may even be God turning you over because of his judgment upon you for earlier choices. He may well, as his judgment, turn you over to those things and give you no power to overcome them.

Now, this is not the case with Christians. That is to say, it is not supposed to be the case with Christians. And the Christians direction of change is supposed to be continually upward.

As the apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3 18. In 2 Corinthians 3 18, Paul said, but we all with unveiled faces beholding as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord are changed from glory to glory into that same image. So that the change in the Christian as he beholds the glory of the Lord day by day is from glory to glory into that image of Christ.

There is change taking place in the believer who is looking unto Jesus in that manner. In Jeremiah, we read that human nature does not necessarily encourage or does not necessarily submit to positive change on its own. It's going to require something supernatural.

In Jeremiah 48 11, it's talking about Moab. It's personifying Moab. Actually, it's doing something different.

It's taking Moab the nation and treating Moab as if it were wine. And it makes allusions to the ancient winemaking procedures. It says Moab has been at ease from his youth and he has settled on his leaves and has not been emptied from vessel to vessel.

Neither has he gone into captivity. Therefore, his taste remained in him and his scent is not changed. He is not improved.

There's been no change for the better in Moab. Why? Because he's been too much at peace. He's been settled on his leaves.

He hasn't been poured from vessel to vessel. Now this imagery refers to the fact that in making wine, they would strain out as much as possible the leaves or the dregs, the grape skins and pits and so forth when they were making wine. After they'd trampled the grapes, you have these other things besides the juice.

In the juice, they'd strain out what they could, but then they'd let it sit in bottles for a period of time to let whatever remaining dregs there are settled to the bottom of the jar. Then they would pour carefully that jar off into another jar, taking care not to let too many of the leaves at the bottom to go into the new jar. Then they let that sit and whatever leaves had gotten in there would settle to the bottom.

And they'd do the same thing, pour it off again, trying to keep the dregs at the bottom and not let them enter the new jar. And by pouring from vessel to vessel, they improved the wine's purity. They got rid of the dregs to a certain extent by a process of pouring.

Now he's saying that Moab has never improved, has never sweetened. He's got a dregs sort of taste. His scent has not changed because he's never been poured from vessel to vessel.

This is an image for never having been taken into captivity. And he's basically saying Moab has remained fat and sassy, contented in its sinful state because it's never really suffered any. It's never been poured out of its comfortable vessel.

It's never had to go into captivity. But you see, unless God intervenes, it is human nature to not get better. It says in Psalm 55, 19, because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God.

Now the first part of that verse says, God shall hear and afflict them, even he that abideth of old, because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God. They have not changed in the area of godliness. They've not improved toward the fear of God.

Therefore, God will afflict them. That'll help. Bible says foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, and the rod will drive it from him.

God uses his rod to drive foolishness out of people or out of nations in some cases. But because they have no changes, they don't fear God. God obviously intends for people to change in the direction of fearing God, but it's not natural for that to happen.

That's because it requires a new nature and a new spirit to change into the image of Christ. In Jeremiah 13, 23, God said, Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Then may you also do good who are accustomed to do evil. Jeremiah 13, 23.

Just as a leopard could never change the arrangement of its spots, and the Ethiopian could never change the color of his skin, which happens to be very dark. So also you who have customarily done evil cannot turn around and stop doing that. It's in your nature, just like it's the nature of a leopard to have the spots it has, and it's the leopard of an Ethiopian to have the color of skin he has.

It's in the nature of a sinner to do the sinful things he does. He's accustomed himself. He's ingrained himself in certain ruts.

He cannot change on his own. That is what is suggested. The only way an Ethiopian could change his skin is to be born again of another nationality, another race.

He would have to have a change of nature starting all over again. And Ezekiel 36 promises such a thing. It's a promise in the Old Testament associated with the new covenant, which is realized, of course, in what Jesus has done for us.

In Ezekiel 36, verses 25 through 27, God said, Then I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will cleanse you. A new heart also I will give you.

A new spirit will I put within you, and take away the stony heart out of your flesh. And I will give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you shall keep my judgments and do them. Ezekiel 36, verses 25 through 27.

God said that the only way he's going to get people to walk in his statutes and do what's right and overcome their evil behavior is for him to remove the heart that's in them and put a new heart in them of another sort. A soft heart. Remove that hard-heartedness.

Put his spirit in there. And this, of course, is what happens when what we call regeneration occurs in the person. It's a supernatural event because by nature the sinner cannot change.

By sinner, one is a slave of sin by nature. And therefore, one needs a new nature, a new heart, and a new spirit. And this is what the New Testament promises us.

And the Old Testament even promised it by way of anticipation. Having a new nature, being regenerated, does not guarantee that all of your behavior will instantly change. And that is because behavior comes from beliefs and values and perceptions and, in other words, mental considerations call forth behavior.

If your mental attitude is that pleasure is the most important thing and that everybody ought to cater to you so that you would have pleasure, then, of course, your behavior will be very different than if your attitude is that your pleasure is inconsequential. God being pleased is what is all important. Obviously, that will dictate different kinds of behavior.

Behavior is dictated by thought and by attitude and by other mental considerations. And therefore, there's this link between the mind and the actions, of course. That is what is meant when it says in Proverbs 4.23, keep your heart with all diligence, meaning your mental faculties.

Because the heart, we in America, in our culture, make a distinction between the heart and the mind sometimes. That isn't the case in the Bible. The Bible says, as man thinks in his heart, the heart is the thinking part of him.

From the heart, it says, issue forth the issues of life. Jesus said something very, very close to that himself in Matthew chapter 15 and in the parallel in Mark 7, when Jesus was talking about what comes out of a man's mouth is what defiles him, not what goes into it. And he said in Matthew 15, verse 18 and 19, but those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart and they defile a man.

For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man. Now, those behaviors he just listed come from the heart.

Until the heart is changed, there will not be a change of any permanent or consequence in behavior. So Paul argues that we, even though we are Christians, now must engage in a process, be engaged in the enterprise of renewing our thought processes. And this is done in ways that the Bible describes.

Paul says in Romans 12, verses 1 and 2, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service, and be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. By your life you can prove what is perfect and acceptable to God, but only as you present your actions to God as a living sacrifice, and you be renewed in your mind, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The mind is not the brain, and we need to make that very clear early on.

We'll see in a few moments very important reasons to make that distinction. The brain is an organ of the body, like the heart or the lung or the stomach. There is some way unknown to us that the brain seems to interact with what we call the mind.

The mind is the processes of thought and feeling and opinion and values and personality and will. You see, the natural man who does not believe in God or in spiritual things has got to believe that all the things I just mentioned, your opinions, for example, the things you love, the things you find attractive, your personality, none of that is immaterial, none of that is spiritual. That is all just the result of certain chemical reactions between various cells in your body, your brain cells.

That you've got all these neurons flashing electrical sparks at each other, interacting with one another. These synapses of the brain function in some highly complex way, and it causes you to feel and think and decide and prefer and love and hate and all those things. It's all just material.

It's just all physical. It's all biological. Of course, if that is true, then change in behavior becomes, first of all, a non-moral issue.

If I were a serial killer, and I was a cannibal as well, and I killed people and ate them, this would be a behavior that most people would find unacceptable, and I would probably find it a bit desirable to quit, too, if I was going to get in trouble with the law for it. But really, no one could say there's anything morally wrong with it, because that's just the way the neurons are firing in my brain. It's a biological reaction, just like when my skin itches or something.

It's not really anything moral at all. There's nothing more than physiological going on there. The person who does these things isn't to be blamed for it.

He doesn't choose how his brain will, the neurons will fire. That just happens. He may be the victim of a genetic mental disorder, some suggest, or all of his problems may be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

This is often said, too. The Bible doesn't accept this view of things. The Bible indicates that behavior is free and chosen, and therefore responsible.

Moral behaviors are commendable or condemnable, because we have a choice, because there's something besides the physiology of the brain that determines whether we will do good or evil, whether we will love or hate, whether we will like a certain kind of music or another kind of music. These are choices and things that we do. There's something called the mind, and the mind is not the same thing as the brain.

It is clearly related, because of course you disable the brain with drugs and it affects your moods and your mind. No one will deny that God made us complex beings where the physical and the soul and the spirit all have some kind of interaction with each other. And also I think it'd be crazy for us to suggest for a moment that the mind does not interact very closely with the brain's activity.

Brain damage, for example, or brain chemistry can affect moods, perception, all kinds of things that are part of the mind. We can be made more irritable or have some other mental response because of some conditions in the brain, chemical or some other. But that's not the same thing as saying that all of our choices and our personality and our values and all the things that make us persons can be explained in terms of brain activity.

If it is, then there's absolutely nothing commendable about anything anyone ever did. For me to say to my wife, I love you, is to communicate nothing more than saying, I've got a headache. You know, really, I mean, because my headache has a physiological cause and my love for my wife, as opposed to my love for any other woman, is also caused exactly by the same physiological considerations.

Now, if my wife was the only attractive woman around, we might say that was almost entirely a physiological thing, but it's not the case. The choice to love her and not to love others in the same way is a choice of a moral sort, of a personal sort. It's not biological, merely.

There is this non-physical, this other aspect of personality. Now, of course, not everyone agrees with that, but that is certainly taught in the scripture. And therefore, our behaviors and our thoughts are part of who we are as non-physical persons.

And we are, of course, all wrapped up together with the physical and physiological functions of our bodies. And they do interface and interact, but we have personal responsibility about choices and behaviors because we are persons with some degree of freedom to be what we choose to be, to follow what we choose to follow, to believe what we choose to believe, and to love what we choose to love. These things are not all called forth by merely biological processes in the brain.

Now, I've suggested that change is essential. Change is very important. The Bible says a great deal about change, and even people who don't read the Bible and don't believe the Bible realize in many cases that a lot of changes need to be made in certain people's behaviors.

And if you don't have the Bible, or if you don't believe the Bible, or you're not a Christian, and you're seeking change in some kinds of problematic behaviors, then, of course, you need to seek some other kinds of help. And therefore, we have the mental health professions. And the two branches, these principally, would be those that fall under the category of psychology and those that fall under the category of psychiatry.

Psychology is really basically theoretical discussion and speculation about why people do the things they do and what things they might do to help them change. Psychotherapy of a psychological sort has nothing to do with treating medical problems whatsoever. It just has to do with a counselor, a psychotherapist, suggesting certain ways of looking at things, suggesting certain changes in various aspects of attitude and so forth.

But the psychology, strictly speaking, is talk therapy. It doesn't deal with chemicals, for example. It deals with addressing the way people are thinking about things and hoping to help them think differently, which is done through the medium of talk.

Now, psychiatry differs from psychology in this respect. The psychiatrist is a man who he may have some psychological training. In most cases, of course, they do.

Although, as time goes by, from what I understand, those who are going out for careers in psychiatry are getting less and less psychological training and more and more pharmaceutical training. Because the principal difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist is that the psychologist can go no further than to employ talk therapies, whereas the psychiatrist is a medical doctor. The man who is a psychiatrist has gone on to medical school, gotten a legitimate medical doctor's degree, and he is therefore qualified or permitted, at least legally, to prescribe medications, pharmaceutical medications.

Therefore, whereas the psychologist generally resorts and must almost entirely resort to talk to try to help a patient, as they call them, the psychiatrist may, of course, employ talk, depending on the degree to which he credits psychology as having any value. But more and more psychiatrists simply resort to the prescription of medications. The pharmaceutical world is making a lot of money on medications that are mood-altering drugs and, in some other ways, help people feel better who have problems in their living.

Now, many Christians feel that there's the possibility of using psychology and psychiatry to some good effect. If you are a Christian with Christian worldview and bringing Christian perspective into it, others feel, and I would have to be one of them, that Christianity by itself is more than adequate to address all the problems of living that people usually go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist for. Now, in saying that, I realize that some are going to say that it sounds as if I'm rejecting all of modern science and technology.

And those who want to mix together Christianity with, say, psychology or psychiatry or both, they usually have as a mantra that they repeat all the time, all truth is God's truth. And they would say, whatever truth Freud or Jung or Maslow or Ellis or Skinner came up with, well, that's just part of God's truth. And we don't reject God's truth when it comes from other sources in other fields, even if it's from a non-Christian.

We use electric light bulbs, even though Thomas Edison was in no way a Christian, probably an occultist. We use the Xerox machine, even though the man who invented the Xerox machine was not a Christian, far from it. He actually got his technology from a spirit guide, he said.

When he died, he left his fortune to the study of parapsychology because he believed he owed it to the spirit world because he, in a vision, saw the plans for the Xerox machine. But we still use the technology. So why wouldn't we use the discoveries made by people like Freud and Jung and Skinner and Ellis and Maslow and some of these others, Carl Rogers? Now, the reason I would suggest is because those so-called discoveries made in the field of psychology actually are seeking to address the same issues that Christianity addresses, but give different answers than Christianity does.

You see, Christianity does not have a distinctive set of biological or chemical or physical laws, separate from those discovered in secular biology or chemistry or physics. And there is not an alternative Christian answer to making rapid photocopies to that which is found in the secular world. To use a Xerox machine does not put us in competition with Christianity, necessarily.

But to use psychology, in many cases, does run competition to Christianity because both are discussing the same issues, but they're giving different answers. Now, psychology, or for that matter, any kind of behavioral studies and mental studies and so forth, concerns itself with two principal issues. These are not in your notes, so you might want to write them down.

At least, they're not in the notes I gave you. The ways that different so-called therapies and behavioral practices and theories differ from one another is in two realms, in answering two questions. The first is, what is the model of man? And the second question is, what is the method of change? Now, when we talk about the model of man, what we mean is, what is man? Is man essentially good? Is man essentially evil? Is man essentially neutral and self-interested? Is man a complex being with a good side and a bad side? Is there like a black dog and a white dog fighting it out in there? What is the nature of man or woman? The reason this question is so essential is because it will go a long way toward describing why it is that the behaviors we're struggling with are being generated from us.

What is it in my nature that generates bad behavior? Is it essentially part of what I am as a human being to be bad? Or am I basically as a human being born good, but society and my parents and my training and so forth have made me bad? How do we answer these questions? Well, they are answered differently by different persons. The Bible certainly gives an answer. Generally speaking, psychology gives a very different answer.

And now when I say psychology, I want to make something clear. I want to limit the range of what I'm talking about. There are some forms of what could be called psychology that I don't really care to have a beef with necessarily.

I assume, for example, I assume there are researchers in learning problems, why people have trouble learning math or whatever, and the people who are doing research in that area, what they're working on technically falls within the pale of the general rubric of psychology. Working on those kinds of problems is not really what I'm concerned about here. I'm concerned about psychology that seeks to help people overcome bad behaviors, behaviors that the Bible would call sinful behaviors, but which are just considered to be self-destructive or otherwise undesirable behaviors by the therapist.

Now, you're going to get different answers from people who have one model of man from those answers that you'll get from people with a different model of man. And the Bible gives an answer, but mostly in psychology, you'll get different answers from the biblical answer, which means that psychology isn't complementing Christianity by finding God's truth, which we can complement what we know from the Bible with. It is contradicting Christianity.

It is competing with Christianity. It has a worldview, a certain anthropology of the nature of man that is different than that in Christianity. And the second question, I mentioned the model of man, the second question is what is the method of change? And this, of course, the answers to that question must grow out of what we answered in the first question.

Well, what is the problem with man? What is man essentially that his behavior is so bad at times, so unpleasant, so hurtful? Well, once we answer what it is that makes a person that way, that's the model of man, then we decide, well, what can you do about it? How can he change this behavior? I don't know if you're aware, but there are over 250 competing psychotherapies. That is to say, when people say, well, you know, psychology is just science. Why do you Christians don't rebel against telephones? That's science too.

Why would you rebel against psychology? Well, one of the reasons is because A, psychology isn't science. And B, what it is, is more or less overlapping the realm of religion. And we already have our religious and theological views laid out for us in the scripture.

We don't need pagans supplying us with a whole new set to replace with the biblical ones. But when I say that psychology is not science, I mean, one of the easiest ways to see that immediately is that there are in fact over 250 competing psychotherapies. Each one has its own model of man and its own method of change that it recommends.

Each one started by some different leader, some of them very well known, some not quite so well known, but all of them claiming to get about the same results, all claiming to be part of behavioral science or part of mental science, the study of man. But these do not agree with each other. In many cases, they're mutually exclusive.

They're directly contradicting each other. Which of these are we going to call God's truth? Well, the only way we could possibly know as Christians would be to compare it with scripture. And once we've done so, we could say, well, I guess this one over here compares the scripture better than this one over does, at least on these few points.

But if we're going to go to scripture anyway, why not just go directly to scripture and get it from there in the first place? Why go to psychology to some discipline that's developed by an unbeliever? And every major psychological camp has as its founder an unbeliever, not a Christian. There is no field of psychology that's out there called Christian psychology that started by a Christian. Every Christian psychologist simply practices secular psychology and baptizes it with some Christian ideas and sometimes very, very unnaturally bringing verses of scripture into what is alleged to be support to these notions.

We'll see that more in a later lecture. But suffice it to say, we need to know what the problem is. We need to know what the model of man is before we can change.

We need to know why it is we do what we do to a certain extent. Now, there are a certain variety of problems that people go frequently to psychologists and psychiatrists to remedy and other kinds of therapy. People who seek counseling, they are often suffering from things that would be described as anxiety disorders or panic attacks or clinical depression.

Sometimes they've got problems with anger or guilt. Sometimes they'd be diagnosed as schizophrenia because they're hearing voices. Maybe it's paranoid schizophrenia if it's very severe.

There's people who are said to have obsessive compulsive disorders. People who pluck their eyelashes and can't stop or things like that. Addictions to alcohol or drugs or gambling or pornography or chocolate or whatever.

There's people who are said to be addicts to these behaviors. And of course, a great number of the things people go to counselors about is relational problems. You'll find that some of the most popular radio programs on talk radio are hosted by psychologists.

I was surprised to learn just the other day that Dr. Laura Schlesinger's program apparently is now more popular than Rush Limbaugh's program, which is, I'm no great fan of either of those. I certainly don't like Dr. Laura. I agree more often with Rush than with Dr. Laura, I suppose.

But what I just thought was very telltale, because for the longest time Rush Limbaugh was able to boast that his is the most widely listened to talk show in history. And I just heard that Laura Schlesinger surpassed him. And what does she do? She's a psychologist.

She gives people counsel. She's not a Christian and she doesn't know morality from third base. But she offers her services to help people with their moral dilemmas and ethical dilemmas and their relational problems.

And I try to avoid listening to her as much as possible. Occasionally in channel surfing, I get to hear a few minutes of what she has to say. And I think what's amazing is how many Christians call her.

I've listened to her very, very little. And yet on many occasions when passing by someone who's called is very clearly a Christian asking her counsel and she gives ungodly counsel. But most of what people call that are relational problems and ethical dilemmas.

These are the things people go to counselors for. And yet these are the very things that the Bible itself addresses. It's by itself.

It doesn't need the learned pagan to answer these questions for the believer. And frankly, even when they're telling the unbelievers what is really needed for that person to change in a way that will help them to fulfill what God created them to be and do what God created them to do. Now, there are two essential models of man and his and his behavior from these models.

We have basically the various explanations of why people have some of these behaviors that are so troubling. The first model I'd like for us to consider is called the medical model of behavior. The second is called the moral model.

And what that means is that if your behavior is troublesome and out of control behavior or moods, either one, if you're having trouble with moods, if you're having trouble with relationships, if you're having trouble with your behaviors, if you're, you know, I don't know what else. I mean, just if your life is a problem, the problem may well be explained in medical terms. Therapy, for example, is a medical term.

When you talk about psychotherapy, you're mixing two things. It's really psychotherapy as a strange joining of terms because psycho comes from the Greek psuche or psyche, which is the soul. And therapy is a term that has to do with, you know, affecting medical cures.

And yet there is not a medicine of the soul in a literal sense. Yet that is what many people think there is. This is called the medical model of men's behavior.

If you're really, you know, misbehaving and can't stop, many people say you're mentally ill. J. Adams, in his book, Competent to Counsel, wrote, quote, Freud, taking his cue from Charceau, under whom he studied in France, adopted and popularized views of human difficulties under a medical model. Prior to this time, mentally ill persons were viewed as malingerers rather than as patients.

A malingerer is a criminal. This medical model has been widely spread in recent times by propaganda using the mirror words mental illness and mental health. This model has been disseminated so successfully that most people in our society naively believe that the root causes of the difficulties to which psychiatrists address themselves are diseases and sicknesses, unquote.

That certainly is widely believed today, but it was introduced by Freud. You see, Freud, before Freud's time, there were people who still address these kinds of problems of human behavior. But psychology was considered to be part of the realm of philosophy before the time of Freud.

But Freud was a medical doctor, and as a man of science, he was able to elevate psychological theories to the status of science because he was a scientific man. Before his time, there was psychology, but it was always considered in the realm of philosophy. People, you know, philosophizing, guessing, really, is what it was, speculating about why people do what they do and what might work best to get them to stop doing it.

It is in the realm of philosophy. It still belongs there. But with Freud, the whole field was elevated in the popular mind to that of a science and that of a health issue.

This kind of thinking, however, raises some significant hindrances to helping people. If you have the medical model of human behavior, there's two problems that it raises. One is it reduces personal responsibility for behavior and promotes a victim mentality.

One of the chief shifts in the way people view themselves today, because of the fact that psychology and psychological ideas have shot through our culture and our language is just completely permeated with psychological jargon and so forth, is that people have the impression that when they're suffering or doing something wrong, they're a victim. They're not the ones at fault. They're a victim.

They're doing something wrong because they've got a chemical deficiency or they've got a genetic problem or they were just badly raised. My father beat my mother and I grew up to beat my wife too. Statistically, they say that happens.

Well, I'm just a victim of bad parenting. It's a bad environment I was raised in. And so that behaviors that would ordinarily be regarded as matters for a person to take personal responsibility for and overcome are viewed more as something they're victimized by.

And there's many who believe, and by the way, even some psychologists have come to believe that people cannot be helped until they take responsibility for their behavior. I mentioned Dr. Laura a moment ago as the most popular talk show hostess in America. I think one reason that people find her refreshing, I do not because I find her obnoxious and certainly saying things contrary to the word of God, but one reason people do like her is that she's one of the first psychologists to come along publicly and start making people take responsibility for their behaviors.

And yet she does not totally abandon the medical model of behavior, which it's hard to have a medical model and still make people responsibility for their behavior. If they're behaving badly because they're mentally ill, well, we don't hold people responsible for catching the flu or the chickenpox or the measles. How can we hold them responsible for being a deranged psychopath? I mean, that's a mental illness.

And that's one of the problems with the medical model. Another, of course, with a medical model, another problem is that it places treatment into the hands of a professional elite like doctors and makes self-help or help from non-professionals seem impossible. There is and has been for several decades now in the evangelical church is a trend where pastors are taught not to try to counsel hard cases of mental illness.

If someone comes in and they're hearing voices that they're telling to kill themselves or to kill their mother or their child, or they've got deep depression and suicidal tendencies or whatever, pastors are informed, you're not really trained for this kind of thing. This requires a mental health professional, someone who's trained to deal with these problems. And some pastors are actually forbidden by their denominations from giving counsel to such people.

They are supposed to refer them to a professional. There are many churches these days, the larger churches in the country, who keep a psychologist on staff full time so that if someone with a really hard case comes to the pastor, he can refer directly to a staff psychologist. But one way or another, pastors are not permitted to counsel these situations so much anymore because they are not medical professionals.

These are considered to be medical problems because behavior has now been medicalized and the model of man that is most popular is the medical model. Now, of course, that's just part of the whole professionalization of our culture in general. Many things that used to be done at home or by parents or by ordinary people, now the mentality of our society is you need a professional for that.

You can't have a baby at home. You need the hospital. You need the medical doctor.

People have babies at home for centuries and centuries. And it's true, there was probably a higher infant mortality rate in some countries and some places than that, although the infant mortality rate is not as low in America as it is in some other countries. And America has a great deal of medical intervention in this matter.

But things that used to happen naturally or that ordinary people could handle are now delegated to the professionals, so much so that in some cases, if you try to go without a professional and something goes wrong, you can be sued or thrown to jail or whatever because you didn't turn it over to the professional. Same thing with education. For centuries, people educated their own children, but nowadays it's assumed that the trained professional teachers are the only ones who can do that.

Recently in Ann Landers, there was a public school teacher who wrote in and she said, I've never met a parent who could give their child the kind of education I'm capable of giving them. Makes me wish I'd written a response saying, and there's a good reason for that. Most parents don't want to give their children the kind of education the public schools give them.

Most parents would like to have literate children, children who know the difference between right and wrong and children who know how to relate with people without being weird. I mean, yeah, that's true. It's probably true.

Most parents are not capable of giving that kind of education that the public schools give to their children. But the assumption is that only the trained professionals in the educational field really know what your child needs and how he should be trained and socialized. And therefore, there is a bit of persecution of those who say, well, we don't care to surrender these professionals.

And the same thing is very much true in the area of so-called mental health. As soon as you call it mental health or mental illness, you need a doctor. You need a professional.

It's not just that you're having struggles with sin in your life. It's not just that you need some encouragement or you need some rebuke or you need some spiritual help, but you need a professional. And one thing I've noticed, because I've heard many psychologists on the radio, not just Dr. Laura, who I've made reference to, but over the years, I've heard many, many psychologists.

Most of them are women, interestingly enough. There's quite a few women psychologists who have radio programs. One thing that is repeated again and again, almost with every caller in some cases I've listened to, the caller says, I've got a problem with XYZ.

And the person gives some kind of sage advice about it and then says, are you in therapy yet? No. Well, get yourself right into therapy. Next call.

Okay. I got this problem. Okay.

Here's some advice for me. Be sure you get into therapy as quickly as possible. I mean, it's like a given.

Everyone needs to be in therapy. If they got any kind of problem, it doesn't matter what it is. Therapy will help.

And what is therapy? But therapy is the care of a professional, a caring, trained professional. And as soon as you adopt the medical model that came in with Freud, basically, of human behavior, then you, first of all, turn misbehavior into sickness, making the perpetrator, the counselee, becomes the victim rather than somebody responsible for his actions. And secondly, you, of course, relegate the care of such people and their help to a professional elite.

And it's assumed no one else can help them. Mary Stuart Van Leeuwen, who is a psychologist, also a, I'll say a professing Christian. I don't really want to cast any aspersions on whether she is a Christian.

She may be. I don't know. All I know is she's a feminist also.

But she is a psychologist. And in the Journal of American Scientific Affiliation, September 1979, she said, quote, once we concede that people passively catch bad behavior from their environment in the same way in which they catch measles or bubonic plague, then it is up to the specialist to diagnose the disease and to prescribe the cure, unquote. And that's a very good observation.

Martin and Dieter Bobgan, who have written several books from a Christian perspective against psychology, in their book Psychoheresy, wrote this, quote, as soon as a person's behavior is labeled illness, treatment and therapy become the solutions. If, on the other hand, we consider a person to be responsible for his behavior, we should deal with him in the areas of education, faith, and choice. If we label him mentally ill, we rob him of the human dignity of personal responsibility and the divine relationship by which problems may be met.

Calling a person a pedophiliac, an egomaniac, an infomaniac, an alcoholic or a drug addict with the added label mentally ill denies willful choice. It removes moral responsibility and thus reduces the possibility for improvement, unquote. Now, the inappropriateness of speaking of somebody as mentally ill is something that not only Christians are protesting against.

Actually, not enough Christians are. Most Christians are just going right along. I was listening to a tape by A. W. Tozer yesterday, and he was saying that Christians often want to ride on the coattails of some thinker or some movement.

He says they always, it seems like whenever the Christian wants to jump onto somebody's coattails, he jumps on the coattails of someone who's on his way down. And it's really true. Christians fall behind the world by several years, generally speaking.

And many of the greater thinkers in the area of secular mental health are abandoning some of the traditional notions and terminology of mental health, whereas Christians, who shouldn't be dealing with it at all, are jumping right on the bandwagon of the older way of medicalizing behavior. There is a non-Christian psychiatrist, very well known, writer of many books, named Thomas Sazh. And he wrote in 1974 a book called The Myth of Mental Illness.

In that book, among other things, he wrote this, quote, mental illness is a myth. The notion of a person having a mental illness is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization, namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases, unquote.

So Thomas Sazh has this idea that behaviors are in essence comparable to bodily diseases. He said that's a myth. It's the myth of mental illness.

Another psychiatrist, E. Fuller Torrey, in his book The Death of Psychiatry, said, quote, the term mental illness is nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together. You can no more have a mental disease than you can have a purple idea or a wise space.

The mind cannot really be diseased any more than the intellect can become obsessed. It is necessary to return to first principles. A disease is something you have.

Behavior is something you do, unquote. It's a shame that it takes non-Christians to point this out to us. This is something Christians ought to have been saying more loudly, but very few Christians are.

Most Christians are just running like the rats following the pied piper after the psychological respectability of the medical model. Another psychologist who I know very little about, but I don't believe was a Christian, named Stephen Morris, was writing in the Southern California Law Review in May of 1978. He said, a diagnosis or label of mental disorder means primarily that a person behaves abnormally.

Mental disorder does not imply any necessary scientifically proven findings. No test will demonstrate the presence or absence of a mental disorder other than behavior, unquote. See, that is so important to note.

If you go to a regular doctor and you've got diabetes, he can tell you so by taking a blood test. He can tell you whether you've got high blood pressure, low blood sugar, those kinds of things. There are medical tests for physical conditions that you can get a CAT scan to see if you have a tumor.

There are ways in medical science to prove and to test what the problem is with a person and to a large extent to suggest reliable remedies. But you cannot see the mind. You can see the brain, but you can't see the mind because the mind is non-physical.

And the only way you can test, as it were, for a so-called mental disease is by looking at the behavior of a person. Now, if a person behaves a certain way, it becomes then the theory of the therapist as to what is making him behave that way. But it's never occurred to many therapists, apparently, that the patient can fool the therapist.

The patient can pretend. Jay Adams, who wrote the book, Confidence Counsel, opens the book, as I recall, with an example that when he was doing his graduate training for the ministry, but he was required to take some units in psychology, he teamed up with a psychiatrist who was not a Christian, but was sort of a guru of a certain branch in the field. And he would go regularly into this mental hospital and deal with a particular group of patients there.

And one of them was, as I recall, he named him Stephen. I don't know if that was his real name or if that was a pseudonym for the sake of telling the story. But this man was in sort of like a, apparently a catatonic state.

He was non-responsive entirely to all conversation. He was just gazed off with a glassy stare week by week, month by month. And the guy that Jay Adams was training under didn't buy this medical model business.

Even though he was not a Christian, he believed that people were responsible for their behavior. He didn't believe there was such a thing as mental illness. And they began to talk to this Stephen and say, you know, we know you're in there.

We know you can hear us. We know that for some reason you're acting like you can't hear us and you're trying to make us think you can't respond. But we, you know, tests have been done.

You don't have brain damage. You're alive and you can hear us and you are responsible. You're hiding something.

There's something in there that you're not telling us. And those kinds of things. And after a while, in time, this guy began to talk to them.

And after a very long while, I guess, after, before they were finished with him, they found out that he had been a college student who had gotten deeply involved in drama, as I recall, and his parents didn't fully approve of that. And his grades had suffered one semester and he got really bad grades and he was terrified of his parents' reaction. So instead of fessing up to his, you know, bad decision-making and to his responsibility for his bad grades, he faked mental illness.

And he preferred to have people pity him because he was ill rather than take responsibility for his bad choices and bad behavior. And he eventually came out and talked about this. And he said, one of the things that made it even harder for him that increased his problem was he felt so guilty when his parents' notice would come and just feel sorry for him and say, oh, our poor son, when in fact he knew he was deceiving them.

Now, I don't want to say that this happens a great deal in mental hospitals. I don't know. I've never been a mental patient and I don't ever intend to be one.

But I will say this, that if that is the case of one person, we don't know that it couldn't be the case with many others besides. All we know is that the therapist can only guess why the person is behaving this way. He can give it a guess, but he can't make a test.

All he sees is behavior. And Lee Coleman, Dr. Lee Coleman, a psychiatrist who's been called in to give expert testimony in hundreds of court cases where the defendant was using a mental illness or, you know, not guilty by reason of insanity kind of plea. This man wrote a book called The Reign of Error.

And he's a he's a secular. He's not a Christian. He's a secular psychiatrist.

Well, I say he's not a Christian. I don't know if he's a Christian, but he doesn't identify himself as one. It's a secular book.

In his book, The Reign of Error, Dr. Lee Coleman says, quote, While medicine measures the body and therefore can collect scientific data, psychiatry's data collection inevitably relies on one person's opinion about another person's behavior, unquote. How scientific is that? This is supposed to be science. Psychiatry makes its diagnosis because the psychiatrist has an opinion about the patient's behavior.

That's not science. That's philosophy. That's opinion.

Martin and Deidre Bobgan again in their book, Psychoheresies wrote, and I quote, Psychological counseling does not even deal with the brain itself. Instead, it deals with aspects of thinking, feeling and behaving. Therefore, the psychotherapist is not in the business of healing diseases, but rather of teaching new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.

He is actually a teacher, not a doctor. So when you think about that, if you are misbehaving and you're going to a psychotherapist, he's not a healer of diseases. You don't have a disease.

He's there to talk to you about your problems and teach you new ways of coping with your problems or whatever. Now, why is it that he would be trusted to give better teaching and better counsel about human behavior than is found in the Bible? Why would a person who has the Bible and access to biblical persons who know the Bible and can give them biblical counsel, why would they want to go to a secular psychologist? Because they assume wrongly that their problem is somehow medical in nature, requiring a specialist. Now, part of this whole medical model finds expression in that field of psychiatry, which finds or thinks they find chemical or genetic biological factors in certain kinds of mental problems.

If a person is diagnosed as having a bipolar affective disorder, which we also know as, I'm actually more familiar with the technical term than with the popular term. Yeah, the popular term is manic depressive. That person has a chemical imbalance, we're told.

He has manic episodes because of a lithium deficiency in the brain. And so they almost inevitably give him lithium, which is supposed to correct that. He's got a chemical problem.

If a person is diagnosed as schizophrenic, that is usually argued by psychiatrists to be a chemical problem in the brain, perhaps genetically passed down. Now, frankly, I mean, what many people are diagnosed as having schizophrenia, when you look at the behaviors that the psychiatrist is interpreting as schizophrenia, I dare say if that same person was behaving that way in New Testament times, there'd be a very different interpretation of the cause of that behavior, because persons that Jesus dealt with as demon possessed and cast demons out of, were certainly behaving in ways that a psychiatrist would call schizophrenic. And while I would not be prepared to say that every person who's got a diagnosis of schizophrenia is demon possessed, that'd be an impossible thing for me to say, yet I dare say that people who are demon possessed are probably often diagnosed as schizophrenic, which means that a certain percentage out there, maybe a very large percentage of people with that diagnosis, may have a spiritual problem, not an illness at all.

Of course, the psychiatric community has a vested interest in saying that this is a medical chemical problem. And that vested interest is simply this, of all mental health professionals, only psychiatrists have the right to prescribe medications. If the general public can become convinced that mood and mental and behavioral disorders are caused by chemical physiological conditions in the human body and brain, then they have cornered the market on the mental health dollars.

You see, because if you've got misbehavior that's caused by a chemical problem, then of course you need a chemical solution. If you've got diabetes, that is a chemical problem. And therefore, you take a chemical solution, because it is a chemical problem.

Now, if you're, now diabetes certainly is a chemical problem. It is a biological problem. If schizophrenia and depression and anxiety and panic attacks and ADD and a lot of these other behavioral problems, if they are indeed chemical in nature, then obviously the only solutions that's going to help people is going to be chemical.

And the only people in the mental health field who can prescribe chemicals are psychiatrists. So they have a very strong vested interest in passing off the propaganda that tells you there's a chemical cause for these behaviors. There are some psychiatrists, however, who will deny that this is the case.

Interestingly enough, since in a sense they're cutting their own throats financially by saying that, one of those is a man named Dr. Peter Bregan, who wrote the book Toxic Psychiatry. In that book, he said, among other things, quote, people suffering from what used to be thought of as neuroses and personal problems are being treated with drugs and electroshock. Children with problems that once were handled by remedial education or improved parenting are instead being subjected to medical diagnoses, drugs, and hospitals.

Old people who used to be cared for by their families are being drugged in nursing homes that find it more cost effective to provide a pill than a caring, stimulating environment. Increasing numbers of elderly women are being given electroshock. Dozens of mass market books misinform the public that a broken brain or biochemical imbalance is responsible for personal unhappiness.

Yet the only biochemical imbalances that we can identify with certainty in the brains of psychiatric patients are the ones produced by psychiatric treatment itself, unquote. So Dr. Peter Bregan, who is not a Christian, by the way, he's a humanist, but he's a leading psychiatrist, he says that there has been no proof of chemical causes of these things. But he says sometimes you do find when you take a psychiatric patient and take some fluids from his body to test for chemical imbalance, they do sometimes find a chemical imbalance.

It's the chemical imbalance caused by the medication he's on. But they have never yet proven that they have these chemical imbalances as the cause of their illness in the first place. I mentioned Dr. Lee Coleman, who wrote The Reign of Error.

In his book, he said this, quote, Similar distortions are being foisted on patients taking anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs. First, the patient is led to believe that research has shown that major mental disorders are biological in origin. Next, the patient is given equally misleading information that studies show that the drug corrects the abnormality.

While many psychiatrists believe these claims will eventually be validated, as of now they remain wishful thinking, unquote. I'll give you one other quote from the same man, Dr. Lee Coleman. He said, More and more people have accepted psychiatry's claim that major mental disorder is a sign of a disordered brain and is thus a medical problem.

Although some psychiatrists still see mental disorder as a sign of a troubled life rather than a troubled brain, psychiatrists are being trained to prescribe medications for an ostensibly physical problem as other medical doctors do. This position is justified only in a few selected situations where behavioral or mental symptoms might indeed be the result of medical conditions. These would include some chemical or hormonal imbalances, infections, and brain tumors, unquote.

Now, by the way, you might say, Well, he just admitted there are chemical imbalances that cause these problems. Well, yes, but that's not psychiatric problems. You see, if you have an overactive thyroid and it is causing you mood problems, let's say, and you go to a doctor and he discovers, Oh, you've got an overactive thyroid, there's your problem.

He will give you thyroid medication. He will not give you a psychiatric medication. He will give you thyroid medication.

It is not psychiatric at all. It's not a mental disorder. It is true that certain kinds of malfunctioning glands and hormone imbalances, things like that, do affect moods and perceptions and things like that.

That's not unheard of. We don't want to deny that there are sometimes biological factors that affect people's moods and minds. But these are not psychiatric conditions.

When we talk about a psychiatric diagnosis, we're talking about someone claiming that somebody's got some kind of a genetic brain defect that causes him to hear voices and so forth, rather than saying that there's some discernible other kind of imbalance in the body that a medical man could find and diagnose a problem, solution for it. Anyway, such is the problem with the medical model. The psychologist does not deal with theories about chemical imbalances.

The psychologist believes there's something non physical called a mental sickness, a mental illness. But the psychiatrist says, well, it's quite physical. It's caused by chemical imbalances, things like that.

And so we'll give them drugs for it. Neither of these, it is my opinion, neither of these are really biblical solutions to behavioral problems, or they are certainly not biblical descriptions of how to change. Dr. Peter Bregan, who wrote Toxic Psychiatry, also mentioned that some problems in behavior arise not because of original chemical imbalances, but because the medications that are given by psychiatrists cause new problems.

Such illness is called iatrogenic illness. When iatrogenic means treatment induced, it means it is caused by the medical treatment that the person is getting actually causes side effects or some other serious problems. I'd just like to quote a little bit from Peter Bregan on this.

He says, quote, as with most psychiatric drugs, the use of medication eventually causes an increase of the very symptoms that the drug is supposed to ameliorate. The minor tranquilizers can produce paradoxical reactions, acute agitation, confusion, disorientation, anxiety, and aggression. The Xanax report in the 1991 PDR, that's the physician's desk reference, states, quote, as with all benzodiazepines, paradoxical reactions such as stimulation, agitation, rage, increased muscle spasticity, sleep disturbances, hallucinations, and other adverse behavioral effects may occur in rare instances and in a random fashion.

As in response to alcohol, some people more readily lose their self-control and become violent when taking minor tranquilizers. There are frequent references to this in the literature, including cases of murder under the influence of minor tranquilizers. Minor tranquilizers, like any sedative, can be harmful in the long run, not only because they are habit-forming and addictive, but because they cover up anxiety by suppressing the capacity of the brain to generate feelings.

The brain, as usual, tries to overcome the suppression and reacts in ways we cannot begin to predict or fully comprehend. As we have seen, drug-induced rebound anxiety is one common effect, unquote. That's just one short quote out of his lengthy book on that same subject.

But basically, there are people who can have chemical problems caused by the chemicals the doctors are giving them, the psychiatrists are giving them, that cause anxiety and agitation and rage and so forth. Now, in contrast to the medical model, we have what the Bible says on the subject. This is what we call the moral model.

That behavior is moral in nature, not medical in nature. And that when people have problems with depression, anxiety, anger, and relational problems, things like that, this is not caused by a medically described thing needing therapy. This is a moral problem requiring a moral or spiritual solution.

The biblical teaching is that man has wrong behavior because he is a slave to sin, which dooms him to make sinful choices until he obtains supernatural deliverance from Jesus through the Spirit of God. This teaching is found in many places in Scripture. In John chapter 8, for example, Jesus said, John 8, beginning at verse 31, that if you continue in my words, you are my disciples indeed, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.

And they said, well, we're Abraham's seed. We've never been bondage to anyone. Why do you say we're going to be made free? He said, well, anyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.

A slave of sin cannot stop sinning. It says in 2 Peter chapter 2 and verse 19. 2 Peter chapter 2 and verse 19.

Peter said, while they promised them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption. For by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. People are often overcome by temptation and sin that is within them makes them slaves to behaviors that are sinful.

And this is generally true of all people. All people who sin become slaves of sin. But as far as special problems that people go to see counselors about, um, there are specific things that may in fact cause different kinds of behavioral problems of a moral sort.

Springing from the basic problem of human nature, specific emotional or behavioral problems result from maybe three different factors. Biblically one is failure to cope biblically with responsibilities and pressures of life. The example of Stephen in the mental hospital that J Adams gives is a good example that he's, he's not responding biblically to the challenges and responsibilities and pressures of life.

He succumbed to temptation to waste his time and not do his studies. He got bad grades. He was under pressure to face his parents and he couldn't, instead of being honest and admitting his fault, uh, he, you know, he, he went berserk.

He went weird. And, um, and I dare say that in many cases, maybe all cases, I don't know if the truth were known, people who are said to have mental disorders, those who are hospitalized have at some earlier point, not responded biblically to some challenge that they faced in life. Peter Bregan, who I mentioned earlier, uh, who wrote toxic psychiatry and who is not a Christian when he describes these conditions that people have, he doesn't, he doesn't refer to it as mental illness because he doesn't accept the medical model.

He believes that we should call these things psycho-spiritual overwhelm. Now he says that as a, not as a Christian person, he believes that everyone has a spiritual side. He's probably closer to new age than Christianity, but, but he recognizes that it's a psycho-spiritual situation.

It's not a physical, it's not a medical situation. It's a moral issue. And he believes that many people go bad because they're overwhelmed.

Life is full of challenges. Life is full of stresses and responsibilities. Some people get overwhelmed.

They shouldn't because if a person's walking in grace, walking in the spirit, following Jesus Christ, there's always the ability to overcome this stress, these challenges. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10, 13, there is no temptation taking you, but such as is common to man. And God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you're able to endure, but will with the temptation provide a way of escape that you may be able to endure it.

Now, when you are tempted, when you are pressured, the Bible indicates that your, the temptation you have is not more than you can endure. Now you might say, well, I've, I've certainly not been able to endure the degree of some of these temptations, but the promise of God is that he provides a way of escape from it. No one can really argue that you faced a trial that was too big for you, a temptation that was too strong for you.

And there was no way of escape from it. There's always a way of escape provided. If people don't take that way of escape, of course, they find themselves overwhelmed and they fall.

And the failure to cope biblically with responsibilities and pressures of life often, I believe results in spiritual bondage and depression and guilt and, and other kinds of things that, that are unnecessary for somebody who is actually living according to the way the Bible tells us how to do. Another factor in the moral model is that these problems, these specific emotional behavioral problems might result from refusal to admit responsibility for this failure, blaming others and playing the victim. In other words, once this problem has arisen from misbehavior, it is aggravated by the refusal to take responsibility, instead trying to find someone else to blame for it, which is a very common psychological thing to do.

And, and, and define oneself as a victim rather than someone who's a sinner needing repentance. If you have failed to cope biblically, you have sinned. You've fallen short of the glory of God.

Now, some people might think, well, that's a very unkind thing to say to somebody who's suffering. We hear this from time to time, you know, well, at least psychologists are compassionate. They don't blame the sufferer.

Well, is that compassionate? If the person is suffering because of his own decisions and his own actions, and the solution is for him to own up to it and to repent and get right with God, is that not the compassionate thing to tell them? Is it more compassionate to mask the problem, to pretend like it lies elsewhere, to not deal with the core issue of alienation from God that has taken place in their life through sin, and to tell them that it's a medical problem that can be solved by this or that psychotherapy or this or that medication? Like all forms of liberalism, of course, psychiatry and psychology sound more compassionate than Christianity, because they pamper the conscience. Christianity confronts the conscience and says, you have problems in your life because things are not all as they should be between you and God. But the difference is psychology cannot offer a remedy.

People who are put on psychiatric drugs are often told they've got to use them until the day they die. There's no cure. This drug is not a cure.

It's a management tool. It'll just help you cope. Of course, it may have terrible side effects.

You may have motion disorders, tardive dyskinesia for the rest of your life and have, you know, nervous jerks and tics that you'll never overcome, but at least you're managing your problem. Well, Christianity says you don't have to manage the problem. You can overcome it.

You can be cured. You can get right with God. The thing that is keeping you from overcoming it now is the alienation.

But alienation with God is not something that you have to just live with. You can change it. You can repent.

You can be right. And you can have his power to overcome sinful behaviors in your life. That is what the Christian message has always been.

That is exactly contrary to the counsel of psychology and psychiatry. You know, there is a third thing many people may not consider that emotional behavior problems or what might even be called insanity can even be caused as a judgment from God. We see that in Daniel chapter four, the pride of Nebuchadnezzar's heart caused God to strike him with what we'd call insanity for seven years.

Then he recovered when the judgment of God had run its course. In Deuteronomy, chapter 28, God told the Jews that if they violated his laws and broke his covenant, that a great number of curses would come upon them, among other things that would come upon them in Deuteronomy, chapter 28. And in verse 20, it says, the Lord will strike you with madness.

And blindness and confusion of heart, then that's not like a mental disorder, madness and confusion of heart says God will strike you with that. That can be a judgment of God. That's a very unpopular thing to say.

But Saul's madness where he hurled spears at his friends and things like that in the book of first Samuel is certainly attributed to God sending an evil spirit against him. In first Samuel, chapter 16 and verse 14, it says an evil spirit from God came against Saul. Why? He was under God's judgment.

There's many ways God can judge a person. He can harden a heart as he did with Pharaoh, or he can send an evil spirit against a person, or he can give somebody confusion of heart, or he can send madness or as he did with Nebuchadnezzar. These things are all biblical.

Now, I'm not saying that having made that observation, we can now identify in each case what's wrong with the person instantly and immediately. But I do believe that when we're addressing people who have the very problems for which people go to counselors, we will not do them any good if we do not recognize the moral nature of the problem. If we fall into the trap of adopting a medical model of human behavior, it will prevent us from seeing what the solution is.

It is a spiritual and moral issue what you do. If you do things that are contrary to scripture, that's sin. That's not sickness.

In later lectures, we will continue and examine what the solution is. We've talked a little bit about the model of man. We need to also look at the method of change, the difference between psychological, psychiatric, and Christian methods of change will be the subject of our next lecture.