Paul, Augustine, and Addiction
So letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace. For the sinful nature is always hostile to God. It never did obey God’s laws, and it never will. That’s why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God. Romans 8:6-8 NLT
We do not say that God is the author of evil, and yet we can correctly say that human beings are born evil as a result of the bond of original sin with God alone as their creator. —St Augustine
What does the current research on addiction have to do with Paul and Augustine? To answer that question we must first have a clear idea of what the Church taught about “sinful nature” and “original sin.” A simple clarification can be found on this web site:
It states:
Original sin is an Augustine Christian doctrine that says that everyone is born sinful. This means that they are born with a built-in urge to do bad things and to disobey God. It is an important doctrine within the Roman Catholic Church. The concept of Original Sin was explained in depth by St Augustine and formalized as part of Roman Catholic doctrine by the Councils of Trent in the 16th Century.
Original sin is not just this inherited spiritual disease or defect in human nature; it’s also the ‘condemnation’ that goes with that fault.
Original sin is a condition, not something that people do: It’s the normal spiritual and psychological condition of human beings, not their bad thoughts and actions. Even a newborn baby who hasn’t done anything at all is damaged by original sin.
In traditional Christian teaching, original sin is the result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God when they ate a forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
Some Christians believe that human beings can’t cure themselves of original sin. The only way they can be saved from its consequences is by the grace of God.[1]
It’s fairly easy to see that if original sin has generational consequences and affects the essential nature of the human being, then the existence of a “sinful nature” in each subsequent human being follows. Since sinful nature is an inherited spiritual condition that opposes God, this means that every human being is “born” a sinner. It is not a matter of choice or of intentional acts. It is a matter of spiritual DNA. Had Augustine lived in the modern world, he might have been in search of the “sin” gene.
One of the reasons that the Church proposed and adopted the idea of purgatory and infant baptism was the implication of this doctrine. Born sinful might explain the human penchant for typical opposition to God’s instruction, but it is hardly comforting to parents of infants who die at birth. These children are condemned to hell simply because they are born with Adam’s guilt. Such justice seems a far cry from the forgiving and loving God. Infant baptism is the ecclesiastical attempt to insure the youngest human beings actually get to heaven despite their inability to make individual choices.
One further complication of the idea of original sin and sinful nature is that, in their “normal” state, human beings act sinfully because they are compelled to do so by their fallen nature. In other words, since their DNA actually contains predetermined opposition to God, subsequent disobedience is nothing more than the manifestation of an inherited condition, much like a child with sickle-cell anemia cannot help but exhibit the characteristics of the disease. This entails that my culpability for the sins I actually choose to do (“choice” might not be the appropriate verb here since I am predetermined to act this way) are really not my fault, if we understand “fault” in its usual sense. Fault/blame requires responsibility, i.e., the state of being accountable because of the ability to act independently and make decisions without coercion. For example, we do not attach blame to someone who is forced to perform an action under the threat of bodily harm, and we do not attach guilt to someone who acts without full mental capacity. Apparently God’s version of justice does not include these human caveats.
Original sin and its transmission as sinful nature leave us in the difficult position of holding Adam ultimately responsible for all subsequent human sin (and, in fact, this is precisely what theological Federal Headship suggests). On a personal level, it means that I am ultimately merely the victim of being born and inheriting an opposition to God in thought and deed. As Pedro Calderon de la Barca suggests, “Pues el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido.”[2]
For these reasons and others, there has been a great on-going debate over the translation of the Greek word sarx as “sinful nature.” As I have written in other places, “sinful nature” is a theological concept, not a linguistic one. Sarx is simply the Greek word for “flesh.” How it is interpreted is a matter of theological paradigm, not a matter of linguistic transmission. There is a world of difference between sarx as “flesh” and sarx as “sinful nature.” Only one of these options entails a lengthy ecclesiastical history of pre-existent blame and guilt.
We should note that the idea of individual person, necessary for the development of sinful nature, could only arise after the development of Greek philosophy.
Greeks were independent and engaged in verbal contention and debate in an effort to discover what people took to be the truth. They thought of themselves as individuals with distinctive properties, as units separate from others within the society, and in control of their own destinies. Similarly, Greek philosophy started from the individual object—the person, the atom, the house—as the unit of analysis and it dealt with properties of the object. The world is in principle simple and knowable: All one had to do was to understand what an object’s distinctive attributes were so as to identify its relevant categories and then apply the pertinent rule to the categories.
Chinese social life was interdependent and it was not liberty but harmony that was the watchword—the harmony of humans and nature for the Taoists and the harmony of humans with other humans for the Confucians. Similarly, the Way, and not the discovery of truth, was the goal of philosophy. Thought that gave no guidance to action was fruitless. The world was complicated, events were interrelated, and objects (and people) were connected “not as pieces of pie, but as ropes in a net.”[3]
But I want to focus on the relationship between modern research in addictions and the cultural religious idea of “sinful nature.” There is no doubt whatsoever that the Western ideas of person, responsibility and guilt have been significantly influenced by the teachings of the Church (both the Roman Church and the subsequent church groups of the Reformation). Ideas like “sinful nature” have more than theological influence. For centuries the culture was taught that human beings are essentially depraved and require the gracious intervention of God for any of their actions to have positive moral value. This led to generations of people who believed that no good thing resided in them, that at their very core they were evil, a disappointment to God and deserving of eternal punishment, no matter how they tried to redeem themselves. This sense of unworthiness is an inherited Western paradigmatic assumption. Notice the connection between the pervasive belief in personal and corporate unworthiness and drug addiction.
A sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture. The drug addict is more painfully conscious of this void than most people and has limited means to escaping it. The rest of us find other ways of suppressing our fear of emptiness or of distracting ourselves from it. When we have nothing to occupy our minds, bad memories, troubling anxieties, unease or the nagging mental stupor we call boredom can arise. At all costs, drug addicts want to escape spending ‘alone time’ with their minds. To a lesser degree, behavioral addictions are also responses to this terror of the void.[4]
[Addicts] don’t know that the hole, the sense of deficiency, is a symptom of a loss of something deeper, the loss of essence, which can be regained. They think the hole, the deficiency, is how they really are at the deepest level and that there is nothing beyond it. They think something is wrong with them, something is basically wrong.[5]
Incompleteness is the baseline state of the addict. The addict believes–either with full awareness or unconsciously—that he is “not enough.” As he is, he is inadequate to face life’s demands or to present an acceptable face to the world.[6]
The idea that there is something basically wrong with me is a direct implication of the doctrine of original sin, including the idea that there is nothing I can do to fix this. Only God, in His inscrutable justice, can repair this mortal damage, and only if He chooses to do so (which, according to some branches of theology, isn’t always the case). From the perspective of an addict, this is a terminal life sentence to worthlessness. Imagine a culture that has been taught the essential worthlessness of humanity for a millennium. It’s not hard. Just look around you.
One consequence of spiritual deprivation is addiction, and not only to drugs. At conferences devoted to science-based addiction medicine, it is more and more common to hear presentations on the spiritual aspect of addictions and treatment. The object, form, and severity of addictions are shaped by many influences—social, political, and economic status; personal and family history; physiological and genetic predispositions—but at the core of all addictions there lies a spiritual void.[7]
There is a void in our cultural psyche that should have been filled by the Church, but was instead exacerbated by its teachings. When spiritual solutions only increase the trauma of living, other “fixes” must be found.
To see addiction as the only problem is to leave intact the context that triggered the addiction in the first place. For human beings most stressors are emotional ones. Anyone wanting to gain mastery over their addiction process must be ready, through counseling or some other means, to look honestly and clearly at the emotional stressors that trigger addictive behaviors, whether these stressors arise at work, in their marriage, or in some other aspect of their lives. In our culture, the suppression of emotion is a major source of stress and therefore a major source of addictions.[8]
Maté offer some example of the impact of society’s headlong rush to emotional anesthesia. The list might be modern but the idea is ancient. The Greeks feared emotion, all emotion, because it upset the rational balance they craved. It still does. What the Greeks failed to recognize is that emotion is life; rationality is life in abstraction. “Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.”[9]
It’s safe to say that any pursuit, natural or artificial, that induces a feeling of increased motivation and reward—shopping, driving, sex, eating, TV watching, extreme sports, and so on—will activate the same brain systems as drug addictions.[10]
No human being is empty or deficient at the core, but many live as if they were and experience themselves primarily that way. Attempting to obliterate the sense of deficiency and emptiness that is a core state of any addict is like laboring to fill a canyon with shovelfuls of dust. Energy devoted to such an endless and futile task is robbed from one’s psychological and spiritual growth, from genuinely soul-satisfying pursuits, and from the ones we love.[11]
The reshaping of society as a result of the industrial and technological revolutions has exponentially magnified the original lesson in unworthiness. This is not a new phenomenon. Camille Paglia notes, “Christianity’s failure to protect the good [from the devastation of the Black Plague] damaged Church authority and opened the way for the Reformation.”[12] When the Bubonic plague exterminated nearly 40 percent of Europe’s population, the social mores that held the society together were burned up along with the piles of bodies. Law and government, at that time extensions of the Church, collapsed in the face of an unexplainable and unstoppable evil. Human worthlessness was confirmed in God’s “punishment” for collective sin. Paglia notes that after the Plague, cultural recovery shifted the idea of personality “into a purely physical or secular dimension.”[13] The Church died in the bone-fires. Paganism reasserted itself as the triumph of chaos and uncertainty. Gabor Maté recognizes the same destructive forces at work in the industrial revolution.
With the rise of industrial societies came dislocation: the destruction of traditional relationships, extended family, clan, tribe, and village. Vast economic and social changes tore asunder the ties that formerly connected people to those closest to them and to their communities. They displaced people from their homes and shredded the value systems that secured people’s sense of belonging in the moral and spiritual universe. The same process is happening around the world as a result of globalization.[14]
Dislocation continues to be an ever-accelerating feature of modern living. The disruption of family life and the erosion of stable communities afflict many segments of society. Even the nuclear family is under severe pressure with a high divorce rate and single-parent households or, in many cases, two parents having to work outside the home. For these endemic cultural and economic reasons many children today who are not abused and who come from loving homes have lost their primary emotional attachment with the nurturing adults in their lives, with results disastrous for their development.[15]
In a state of spiritual poverty, we will be seduced by whatever it is that can make us insensate to our dread. That, ultimately, is the origin of the addiction process, since the very essence of that process is the drive to take in from the outside that which properly arises from within. . . . The sparser the innate joy that springs from being alive, the more fervently we seek joy’s pale substitute, pleasure; the less our inner strength, the greater our craving for power; the feebler our awareness of truth, the more desperate our search for certainty outside of ourselves. The greater the dread, the more vigorous the gravitational pull of the addiction process.[16]
It is no coincidence that addictions arise mostly in cultures that subjugate communal goals, time-honored tradition, and individual creativity to mass production and the accumulation of wealth. Addiction is one of the outcomes of the “existential vacuum,’’ the feeling of emptiness engendered when we place a supreme value on selfish attainments.[17]
The biblical ideas of corporate identity, cultural connection and intrapersonal responsibility are the antidote to the decay of traditional mores and the epidemic of addictive anesthetics in modern life. But, “ . . when we think about recovery from addiction, we see it through only one lens—the individual. We believe the problem is in the addict and she has to sort it out for herself, or in a circle of her fellow addicts . . . [but] the problem isn’t in them, it’s in the culture. Stop thinking only about individual recovery, and start thinking about ‘social recovery.’”[18]
As long as the Church teaches a theology of native worthlessness, corrected only by divine intervention, the existential hole in the middle of our collective hearts will not be repaired. The solution to the thousand-year decline into addiction is not “personal” grace, because men are not islands of individual guilt. Christianity deliberately adopted the Greek idea of person in its attempt to rid itself of its Near Eastern Semitic collective consciousness. In the process, it set the stage for a massive psychological blow to human valuation. The rise of paganism in pop culture is humanity’s rejection of the Church’s condemnation. As Hari notes:
“We have been taught by our culture what you are supposed to do in situations like this [confronting a loved one who is an addict]. I had learned from endless films, and from TV shows like Intervention. You confront the addict, shame him into seeing how he has gone wrong, and threaten to cut him out of your life if he won’t get help and stop using. It is the logic of the drug war, applied to your private life. I had tried that way before. It always fails. Now I could see why. . . when I threatened to cut him off—when I threatened to end one of the few connections that worked, for him and me—I was threatening to deepen his addiction. [Now] I didn’t threaten to sever the connection: I promised to deepen it.”[19]
We are all sarx, but sarx is a corporate, communal idea. It is not me and you. It is us. If one of us falls, we all fall. If one of us believes himself unworthy, we are all unworthy. And if one of us recovers, so then do we all.
[1]http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/beliefs/originalsin_1.shtml
[2]“For Man’s greatest crime is to have been born.”
[3]Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought, p. 19.
[4]Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, p. 39.
[5]A. H. Almaas, cited in Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, p. 418.
[6]Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, p. 355.
[12]Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, p. 141.
[14]Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, p. 275.
[18]Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, p. 181.
Wow great, back to some real substance rather than proding contentions. Thanks Skip! So it seems it is not so much about the excessive drink or the insatiable thirst implied by the excess. Rather the proximity to real water that satisfies, and those willing to share that spring not stop it up?I know personally someone who can provide that living water!
Mark, You said: “Wow great, back to some real substance rather than proding contentions”. Given Today’s Word topic it appears that contention can be just another form of “substance abuse”.
Skip if sin is not part of our earthly creation, why would Davūid make the claim that he was born through sin not into sin…
Wow as Mark said substance…
Sarx -flesh as in adam earth. Or sarx as in desires of flesh. Which Paul explains as the inclination towards sex… Born from earth versus born from spirit.
May need more discussion to understand that a sexual relationship is not sin but living a relationship on lust is what is sin… Addiction too the fleshly things…
Little lost with relationship with the man rather than relationship with Adam the person. Could you please explain in relation to adam the red earth or male the image of God. What relationship was pursued. And why is the distinction necessary to understand what relationship occured…
And the relevance to glorifying God as blessed is the male child that opens the womb of the mother…..
Please read the Today’s Word on Psalm 51, the verse that you cite. You’ll find that the usual interpretation might not be correct.
Skip yes and no. Depending on how we read into the text. David was confessing his sin unto God not pleading for the just impregnated egg.
I cannot agree with the interpretation of the verse in the TW.
All four translations I read relate verse 5 to the rest of Davids comfession and plea for purificatoon.
But none of the translations account for the method of divine drama in the ancient world. I really don’t care what the TRANSLATIONS say. Let’s get back to David’s time and style, in Hebrew. And then explain to me why David would claim that HE was the product of sinful conception? Is there any Scriptural basis for that claim other than Augustine’s imported doctrine of sinful nature?
You are right translations cannot explain the divine drama in the ancient world… Neither can we deduce them from a written account of anything.
I know of no scriptures justifying Davids claim, nor do I know of any that support the divine nature of living most people assume existed during any era in the scriptures.
As Laurita explains David could well be blaming his parents for his sexual appetite as every guilty person seems to justify their failure to make right choices for their actions based on their circumstances and family lifestyle. Here I would rather refer to Davids inability to showing remorse rather than introduce an alternative view also not supported by scriptures.
But isn’t your interpretation just as unsupported (as is Laurita’s)? You have to make all kinds of assumptions about David’s parents in order to explain his statement, assumptions unsupported by any text in Scripture. Furthermore, if you make these unsupported assumptions, you open yourself to the idea of sinful nature which I have demonstrated, along with many others, leads to a very dysfunctional notion of Man and a disturbing idea about God. In addition, divine theater as a part of the ancient world is NOT unsupported and was present in other ancient cultures (see Lambert). Does your interpretation rely more on Augustine than it does on cultural patterns of the ancient Middle East? Are you content with that?
I will grant you your superior understanding of “divine theater” if you will grant our contemporary understanding of addictions as part of the package of imperfections our ancestors handed us. I don’t think divine theater explains all of David’s confession, even if it was the vehicle he had to express it in. Personal suspicion, anyway (as a fellow human). I think David wrote this Psalm from a parent’s perspective more than from a son’s because I don’t think he could even see his sin clearly until it started showing up in his own kids. I write the following as a fellow parent.
I know it does no good to blame my forbears for my disfunction (indeed, I need to find a way to forgive them to get it back off my plate), but I think it is essential to understand that the problems they failed to see or solve tended to end up on my plate. If David saw that or not, we can’t know, but I feel I can speak from my experience, and this is how my personal experience resonates with me when I read David because I don’t think his sex issues ORIGINATED with him: I don’t think he just invented them. He did not have to act on them, of course (which he would have if they were ‘original sin’), but neither, I think, did the inclination to sexual addiction just come out of nowhere, either, because it never does. Gone are the years we blamed the victims (please God). Children do as they are done by, after all.
Divine theater or not, I think it is clear that disfunction is generational in general, even though it takes a choice to act on those inclinations before sin gets accounted (“imputed”) to us. David was not held accountable for the sins of his forbears, but neither did they not have any influence on the particular ones he ended up choosing to commit. Stuff really does run in families, after all. I think he composed that Psalm after he saw his children acting out what he had failed to cure. As a parent, I know I feel guilty when I see my kids repeating my mistakes!
You are correct with making assumptions. Lambert’s assertions I cannot comment on.
If this divine theatre was part of the cultural reality of those years it was not God given.
David was adultorous and Gods laws of that time said kill… why was he not stoned? Period, that would be God given and a true divine theatre.. .
Or were only the ladies stoned. Not the same divine truth you hint towards here and nicely explain in Guardian Angel.
The divine culture was then just as corrupt as we find in society norms today.
But lets learn something here. We cannot plea for the unborn or dead God has nothing to do with them as He is explained to be the God of the living not the dead. Many scriptures hint towards God preparing in the womb. This new impregnated egg is not in the womb and there was no indication that impregnation occurred at that stage. A guilty feeling is the most likely deduction I can make.
I may be influenced on similar ways as Augustine but I am no church scholar either. A sinner by nature and seeker by choice…
I am just trying to read the bible without a paradigm. My research into biblical truths reveals as you rightly caution against dysfunctional teachers or human relationship with or understanding of God is a reality in all religious sects.
Another fact no one knows Gods view or purpose we all dysfunctionally assume we may be right.
Maybe my knowledge base is puffing me up. Sorry about that nothing personal I admire your work and knowledge but do not always agree with your views. I also appreciate your frank honesty it helps clear the air more than you realise.
I appreciate your reply. Just remember this please. It is NOT possible to read the Bible without a paradigm, since a paradigm is the way we see the world. It is possible to be AWARE that we are reading with paradigm glasses, and consciously try to catch our a prioi assumptions before they do a lot of damage.
Thank you for the reminder. I will really need to place a guard before my mouth…
Just a thought about David. His Grand Mother was a Moabitess. Wasn’t there a Statue that forbid such a union, between a Hebrew and a Moabite?
Ruth, yes. But there are lots of other issues in Ruth’s story. You can look at some of the Ruth verses I have written about. I doubt David was referring to Ruth in his exclamation. Ruth is s powerful story of the role of hesed, not a condemnation of Lot and his two daughters.
When David said “in sin did my mother conceive me” he was not confessing HIS OWN sin; he is acknowledging the sinful state of his mother (or the sin of his father TOWARDS his mother?) and the circumstances surrounding his conception/birth. There is a very high probability that his sexual proclivities came from the sins of his parents. He was acting out the unexamined propensities that they did not recognize and deal with. To the extent that he came late to his own understanding, his own children continued to suffer the family dynamic/curse.
I think the curses associated with unrepented and unforsaken sin reverberate down the family line, so that the children will be motivated to turn, but that does not mean that the sin ITSELF got transferred. The children, through the motivation of those curses, have a new chance to choose differently. If they do not, their children, cursed even more, will be even more motivated to choose differently, but each generation’s sin will be their own.
“Sarx as a communal idea”. I am becoming more and more convinced that disconnection from the Body (community) – which is the very essence of the individual – IS death itself. When ‘I’ get down to the singular, I cease to exist at all. The individual is a myth – a dangerous myth. Even when we attribute the singular to God Himself, I think we deny the Echad – the communal idea of what heaven is – which is the very substrate of love.
Love (connection) in the singular? Um, wouldn’t that be the epitome of an oxymoron? There is no such thing in reality. The essence of evil is divide and conquer. The very design of modern society cuts us off from ourselves, others and from God, too by isolating us on every level, from the cradle to the grave, and we have swallowed the bait on that hook because we wanted to believe humanism when it told us we could put self first. But when we fall for the seductive idea of the singular individual, haven’t we already bitten the fruit that effectively cancels out the ability to understand anything about the Kingdom at all? I think humanism has been the master stroke of hell itself and everything on the planet is now thoroughly infected with it.
Thank you, Skip, for being willing to start over, and bring the entire nephesh along this time. Even our own ‘selves’ are collective!
Excellent writing Skip. Very insightful, educational and thought-provoking. I appreciate all the resources that you have provided in writing.
Although, I will have to read and reread what you wrote, because there is so much of value in it, here’s a paragraph or part of one out of what you wrote. “ there is a void in our cultural psyche that should have been filled by the Church, but, was, instead exacerbated by its teachings. When spiritual solutions only INCREASE the trauma of living, other ‘ fixes ‘ must be found “. Becoming a Christian as a teenager but still living in an extremely dysfunctional and abusive home, looking back now, although the church meant well and my pastor at that time was a very loving, engaging man, still, the teaching, sometimes spoken but mostly implied, caused me great distress and guilt and shame and condemnation without any seeming avenue for escape from it all !
I was usually the last one at the altar after pleading with God for mercy and help for my ‘great and continued sinfulness’. Now remember, I was only 15, having recently entering puberty . Coming home from church and being screamed at and told I was a worthless piece of crap didn’t help either. So I was shamed, not only at home, but inadvertently at the place where I should’ve found comfort. The sense that if you could just be good you would be approved! If it wasn’t for the incredible love of God and his meeting me in my emotions at the altar, I wouldn’t be here. Now, many years later I am choosing to follow after God, but there are places within me that are requiring significant attention and intention in order to be transformed. To be set free from years of behavioral addictions that I have counted on…. it’s easy to be fixated on specific behaviors…. that can be a slippery slope, because instead of majoring on relationship with God, I’m fixated on change and improvement. Who shall deliver me from the body of this death ?
Shalom!
Thank you for this. It means a lot to me too.
Can’t resist. ” I means a lot to me too”. Freudian slip, slip of the finger or an honest opinion of self?
Oh Michael…the humor you bring to this site is an oasis in the dessert…I mean desert. ?
Your quick wit doesn’t take away from the meaningful, thought provoking and appreciated comments from all the bloggers. It just adds a little comic relief. Thank you.
Thank you Judi, IT means a lot to me. I am still working on the “I mean a lot to me” version. Thus far it is ” i am mean, a lot, to me.”
Good one Michael. You seem to have an endless supply when it comes to associating words with humor and creating double entendres. Most likely a sign of a high IQ.
Re: being mean and beating yourself up…identifying the problem and being open to talking about it is 90% of the battle. From past posts, it sounds like you have a pretty good understanding of yourself and your past pain. Many others (including myself) on this site have read some of your story and are praying for resolution, as well as God’s perfect peace to irresistibly wash over you.
Michael,
Do you mean it? Or is IT a means not to be mean to yourself or others? I get it . . . or IT!
I am full of IT! It is not a Freudian slip.
Hardly Freudian. Just a typo, now corrected.
Agree, I had seen many “preachers’ kids” turning into addictions due to the void and isolation they suffer in their own homes. At the other side are the centuries of abuse and scandals in the Catholic Church. I’d love to find a congregation where the teacher is as transparent as the author of this blog; bringing people to a deeper understanding of the Word. Thank you Skip for your work and this space to learn from each and other. ?
It was good to come back and read all your thoughtful considerations. Agin thanks Skip for your profound abilities, carefull consideration of the words of Yahh and willingness delve into the depths of the soul and nature of mankind. It can expose us all to be so honest and confront and explor such profound things. In the exposing our hearts are clarified, we are made better and hopfully more whole. Rendering and clarifying of the heart is a work of the spirit yet most frequently acomplished in oposition and often conflicts. Hold on to grace and the unity of the spirit by which we are one. Shalom. …
I’ve been reading ecclesiastes for the holy days and one of the things that hit me in regards to this whole issue is the statement, “what profit has a man from all his labor which he toils at under the sun”….I’m certainly not against gain or advancement, and obviously niether is God by His own declaration, but I wonder, according to the context of this man and the history behind him if, that isn’t exactly the whole problem. A society or people who consider the world as individualistic, would naturally seek individual gain rather than mutual blessing. (which IS gain, but in a communal sense) Some interesting considerations, The teacher recognizes that with the “gain” of wisdom (individually speaking) comes a gain in grief and with an increase in knowledge, an increase in sorrow. Then comes this most interesting of statements, (if you go to read this, note the frequency of “I” “mine” “my” etc.) “also my wisdom remained with me, (how is that so?) and whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them”. In lieu of the fact that with wisdom and knowledge comes an equal measure of sorrow and grief for balance, one would suppose that with the measure of assured wisdom comes assured folly. It would seem that the, me mine and I of Solomon resulted in the division of the people and eventual destruction of the people for, “as the king goes, so go the people”….Well, the new world order proves out to be not so new after all, as the only other option to true freedom is coerced obedience. (disobedience) But maybe, the wisdom of Solomon is a matter of wisdom in what not to do rather than how to operate effectively in the Kingdom of God. Note that the kingdoms of the world were seeking Solomon out but when it came to Moses and Joshua, they were fighting them tooth and nail. What changed?
That it is not so with us, to lay at the end of our lifes and realise that the seeds of our labors are now beyond our control and remember the cry of Solomon towards the end, ” remember your Creator in the days of your youth”…while we still have strength, to influence and to encourage. Fear God and keep His commandments, (simple stuff) not for my own gain, but for the blessings of us all, as the Messiah said, “overcome evil with GOOD” (God’s Good) How “gainful” is that!
I do not have a drug or alcohol addiction, though it was in my family (from Catholic abuse?), however since we are all raised by other very imperfect humans with their acquired imperfections, it seems we “all” rely on some form of addiction to pacify ourselves. Inner joy, what is that? I don’t remember being raised with this theological teaching, so not sure if the results are from that, or the lack of perfect teachings from an imperfect church, but in the end, the struggle is the same. I wonder if it is just the result of living in a world without the required relationship to our Creator. Is that our missing link? Oh, let His Kingdom Come!!
This is good to know and to understand it does mean digging and being aligned to the scriptures continually. Greek thinking is very abstract and is without the desire to stay in line with the Hebrew concrete thinking. The thought process is vast and aimless. Actually it boils down to what currently our fallen nature is following and that is our blindly believing in a heliocentric planetary thinking cosmology and it’s teaching of an ever advancing and growing universe. The concrete truthful evidence of a geocentric immovable enclosed cosmology with a firmament above us is no more considered as common sense anymore. What was concrete and common sense years ago too. Has now been forgotten and our Western/ Greek thinking way of our cosmology living today has made us to easily make the concrete way of thinking questionable and even laughable knowledge too.