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Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory (Part Four)
The War Waged Against the Soul
Storming the Gates or Something Clandestine
Fleshly lusts war against the soul of believers (1 Peter 2:11) by invading each soul as a conquering army would . The army storms the gates, enters in a more clandestine manner, or sieges its target of battle. It depends on whatever the most successful art of war.
As an example, consider the “evil communications” (homiloi krakai) of 1 Corinthians 15:33. These evil communications, Paul says, corrupt good manners. The corruption related to the doctrine of bodily resurrection, starting with the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The evil communications invaded the souls of professing Corinthian believers. Paul starts that sentence with the command, “be not deceived.”
The deceit that fooled on the truth about bodily resurrection seemed to enter in a clandestine manner through corrupting good manners. The purveyors of evil Egyptian culture tried to deceive Moses with enjoyment of the pleasures of sin for a season (Hebrews 11:25). Someone need not assert a statement of doctrine to corrupt someone’s doctrine. Instead, he allures someone through the pleasures of sin.
Favoring Lasciviousness
The false doctrine of Corinth influenced through lasciviousness. It could be humor, music, enthusiastic acceptance, entertainment, or drink. These accompanied a perverted view of the body. Libertines denied bodily resurrection, which favored their licentious manner of conduct.
Also, to retain employment in Greek society, employers required Christian employees to ally with their Greek philosophies. Rather than start with your doctrine, they start with acceptability of lifestyle and then the false doctrine follows by conforming to the behavior.
The accompanying false doctrine might sound like the following: “You don’t have to believe in bodily resurrection. You could just believe in a spiritual resurrection, couldn’t you? Isn’t that just a divisive and unnecessary scruple?” By hanging on to this exactness in doctrine, someone could lose his job or the pleasures of Greek society.
The War Against the Entrepreneur’s Soul
People want what they want. This lust wars against the soul, but it doesn’t seem like it wars against success in a business. Someone entrepreneurial sees through his eyegate the success of capitulating to lust. People line up for something that makes them feel good. Using the attraction or allure of the lust is just good business. It must destroy people, because it wars against their souls, as God says, but it helps in the bottom line for business. God wants us to succeed, doesn’t He?
Longstanding victory is not the short term victory of keeping a job in Corinth or succeeding in business. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 9:25:
And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.
Everyone must struggle against the corruptible. This is Solomon saying in Ecclesiastes in essence, “Ditch the temporal for the eternal, because the former is vanity and vexation of spirit.” Struggling against the lusts of the flesh is good. Any person’s struggle does not justify lust. It’s a struggle. It’s a fight not to acquiesce to the lust of the flesh.
The crown or success for the short term is what Paul calls, “a corruptible crown.” Someone can succeed and receive the corruptible crown, if that’s what he’s shooting for. He can use fleshly lust to obtain it, which still wars against his soul and that of his adherents or audience. It brings failure and destruction, posing as an award or reward. It looks motivated and ambitious, but it promotes the worst ultimate failure.
The War Against Incorruptible Gain
Someone might call the spoils of fleshly lust a market. Like James says in chapter four of his epistle, he goes, buys, sells, and gets gain. He doesn’t say, “If the Lord wills, I will do this or that.” Does how you get the gain matter? Yes. And it also considers, “Is this really gain?” Is it gain if it is short-term gain that receives the corruptible short term gain? In fact, it’s not gain at all, because, again, it wars against the soul. When the soul takes a hit, everything is taking a hit.
Perhaps you’ve heard the terminology, “Gainfully employed.” Is a casino operator, “gainfully employed”? He’s bringing money home from work, putting it in the bank, and taking care of his family. The United States Mail in part because of the “success” of Amazon, sends drivers delivering packages all day Sunday. That is also “gainful employment” for delivery drivers. What crown would you receive, the temporal one or the eternal one?
It’s easy to confuse the distinctions between liberty and lust. Someone does not have liberty to war against the soul just because a verse doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not own a casino.” I’m just using that as an illustration.
College students and their coaches and staff travel all over the country on Sundays for basketball and their future bright shining moment. The bright shining moment is when the confetti falls in a basketball arena, not at the Bema seat of Jesus Christ (this might represent one shining moment as good as anything). One should consider the incongruity of these two crowns, just like Paul did, and judge whether the lust for short term earthly gain wars against the eternal value to the soul.
More to Come
Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory
Supply Chains and Tripping Hazards
Something I never heard before 2020 were the two words, “supply chain.” I looked into those two words and didn’t find them used together before the last half of the twentieth century. Google books gives just one page of examples for the whole century and none in the nineteenth century. Examples explode in the last twenty years.
Now that people use “supply chain,” historians provide supply chain advantage as the primary reason for victory in World War Two. It was easier for the United States to get its supplies in Europe than for Germany to get theirs. The Americans, over two thousand miles from home, had more and better supplies than the Germans, only hundreds of miles away.
The success of the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War were short supply chains, essentially tunnels, jungle trails, and near limitless volunteers. Among an assortment of lesser causes, this led to their victory over a superior foe.
To achieve success in life requires eliminating as many possible factors that impede that success. Next week Monday, I’m supposed to have a hip replacement. The booklet to prepare for it explains certain fundamentals like removing threats of tripping from the walking surface of your floors. As you read that, it seems a bit of a “duh” moment. And yet, people leave tripping hazards all over their lives.
Supply Chain Dysfunction
Life became more difficult for many people beginning in 2020 because of “supply chain” dysfunction. The price of homes increased because it’s harder to get the supplies. It’s also more difficult to find the people to build the homes.
God in scripture points out factors comparable to a broken supply chain and a tripping hazard. Peter expresses one in 1 Peter 2:11:
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
Paul begs and commands those traversing their life’s path on earth, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.” He didn’t say, “Stop sinning.” Saying “stop sinning” is like saying, “Win the war.” You want to win the war, but more basic than that is “build and sustain a supply chain.” Remove tripping hazards.
Professing Christianity today acts like an industrial complex for fleshly lusts. It isn’t abstaining. It riddles the floor with tripping hazards. If the goal is winning the war, not abstaining is a losing strategy. It creates a disadvantage so large that it guarantees failure. Fleshly lusts destroy the supply chain.
Winning the War
People might say they want to win the war. They might publish multitudes of magnificent war victory posters. Until they want to abstain from fleshly lusts and then abstain, they won’t. In fact, professing Christianity today campaigns for feeding fleshly lusts. It thinks its worst enemy is the command. Professing Christianity reacts most harsh to the threat of abstaining from fleshly lusts than the fleshly lusts.
A popular phrase, reaching cliche status, I will still use because of its appropriateness. Professing Christians shoot themselves in the foot when they do not abstain from fleshly lusts. They might not like the idea, but they are in a war, a war they should desire to win. Instead, they provide the way for their own defeat. They have multiple bullet holes in both feet. I think we should say that they want to lose. Losing must in fact be their goal. They are going to get tired of losing, they’ll lose so much.
“Dearly beloved” or “strangers and pilgrims” in this world find their interests in the world to come, not this one. They instead plan their lives around a future kingdom and a heavenly city. They invest for eternity.
Still, 1 Peter 2:11 expresses a command to believers, an unpopular mode of communication. True Christians still participate in fleshly lusts, so Peter commands them to abstain from them. Commands are not options. He also provides the consequence of not abstaining. Psychological problems, soul problems, are the worst ones people have. They obliterate people and families like Sherman’s march tore through the South at the end of the Civil War.
Fleshly Lusts and True Christianity
Fleshly lusts cannot characterize true Christianity. If fleshly lusts do, it isn’t Christianity. It’s something else, not Christianity. Someone who laps up fleshly lusts is not a Christian.
Biblical Christianity, true Christianity, is more than just a series of things someone doesn’t get to do that he might want to do. It is wanting to do what Christ wants Him to do and liking it. Loving it.
The soul that will operate in a godly manner will unhitch itself from fleshly lusts. A soul that continues in its pursuit of worldly pleasure is not “converted” or “restored” (Psalms 19:7, 23:3). God does not possess that soul. It remains in the realm of the wicked one. This is not a person who has lost his life (psuche, his soul) for Christ’s sake. He still loves the world and the love of the Father is not in Him.
More to Come
Making Sin Justifiable and Permanent By Diagnosing It As A Psychological Disorder
“Mad” and “Madness”
As you read through the King James Version, you will read the related English words “mad” and “madness.” People in general don’t use these words any more or they use them in a completely different way than both the King James Version and historic Christianity. In 1863, William Smith in his Bible Dictionary writes:
[M]adness is recognised as a derangement proceeding either from weakness and misdirection of intellect or from ungovernable violence of passion; and in both cases it is spoken of, sometimes as arising from the will and action of man himself, some times as inflicted judicially by the hand of God. In one passage alone, John 10:20, is madness expressly connected with demoniacal possession by the Jews in their cavil against our Lord; in none is it referred to any physical causes.
It will easily be seen how entirely this usage of the word is accordant to the general spirit and object of Scripture, in passing by physical causes and dwelling on the moral and spiritual influences, by which men’s hearts may be affected, either from within or from without.
Smith’s assessment of madness, as you can read, sees it as a spiritual problem and not a physical one. In other words, that’s not “mental illness,” to which it would be referred today by Darwinistic or Freudian psychology.
From the Will and Action of Man Himself
When you delve further into Christian (and societal) thinking from an earlier era in the United States, as does Smith above, you see a distinction between “demoniacal possession” and “insanity,” “deprivation of reason,” and his “derangement proceeding . . . from weakness or from ungovernable violence of passion.” Furthermore, Smith says that it arises “from the will and action of man himself,” if not “inflicted judicially by the hand of God.” Calmut’s Dictionary of the Holy Bible by Augustin Calmut (1823), reads concerning “madness”:
The epithet mad is applied to several of persons in Scripture as 1. to one deprived of reason, Acts 26:24, 1 Cor 14:23.
2. one whose reason is depraved and over-ruled by the fury of his angry passions, Acts 26:11.
3. To one whose mind is perplexed and bewildered, so disturbed that he acts in an uncertain, extravagant, irregular manner, Deut 28:34, Eccl 7:7.
4. To one who is infatuated by the vehemence of his desires after idols, and vanities, Jer 1:38.– or
5. after deceit and falsehood. Hosea 9:7.
None of the Calmut’s definition includes mental illness or psychological disorders. Has society, science, and theology come upon something true and helpful that these previous generations did not? Or, are the modern and postmodern view apostate or heretical? I believe the latter. Premoderns told the truth about the troubles and the true conditions of men.
Four Occurrences
Christopher Rufo
Four occurrences intersected to direct my thoughts to write this essay. First, I recently watched the following youtube presentation by Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute on “The Cluster B Society.”
Sermon on the Mount
Second, I’ve started preaching the Sermon on the Mount and this came to my attention in this focus of Matthew 5:3-4:
3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Ultimate fulfillment comes from poverty of spirit and mourning. Society goes opposite of these and others following in Jesus’ sermon, that cause the insanity, derangement, and deprivation of reason. The absence of the comfort promised equates to madness and what our culture calls “mental illness” and psychological disorder.
Adams and the Bobgans
Third, I read many years ago the work of Jay Adams and then Martin and Deidre Bobgan. They unmask the depravity of modern psychiatry and psychology. This seems like a major tool of Satan that has infiltrated in a major way and taken over the thinking of churches.
Ryan Strouse
Fourth, in reading reports from Bible Baptist Theological Seminary it sends out through email, I read work from Dr. M. Ryan Strouse on this subject (here and here). Apparently, coming soon is a 350 page Primer on Biblical Madness. I think it will be good. His father, Thomas Strouse, the dean of the seminary and pastor of the church, was my main seminary professor. This got on my radar, because I hear more overuse of the psychological terms than ever.
The Sinfulness of Sin
Everyone sins. The psychological disorders eliminate the sinfulness of sin. Sin becomes no longer sinful. It becomes permanent, even an imbedded trait and elevating sin as a useful trait. This is what Paul calls in Philippians 3:19, those who “glory in their shame.” This also hardens and then destroys the conscience, making souls beyond salvation, speeding them to their eternal destruction.
David wrote (Psalm 51:4): “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.” Sin is against God. It falls short of His glory. Sin damns people to Hell.
Today churches cooperate with justification and making permanent sin by diagnosing it a psychological disorder. This undermines the sufficiency of scripture, which is far above an earthly so-called wisdom. May we return to a biblical understanding of these important doctrines.
For All Have Synd
Sin
“Sin” is a word most people rarely say or hear any more. If they admit they’ve done anything wrong, they’ve made mistakes and committed errors. Rightly so, because they’re not thinking so much about whether they offended God in what they’ve done.
A very biblical word, “sin” left common usage as people eliminated it from the general public. Sin describes a crime against God, breaking His law. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:28:
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge.
Even if people don’t deny the existence of God, they increasingly don’t consider Him related to their lives. It isn’t that they can’t retain Him in their knowledge. They don’t like to do it. People would rather not. They’ve got their reasons. Bad ones, but they’ve got them.
The truth of sin connects people to God. He is the Creator, Sustainer, Lawgiver, Judge, and Redeemer. All of these attributes of God relate to sin in some way.
Denying, Excusing, or Redefining Sin
Part of the rebellion against God means rebellion against the confession of sin. Rather than recognize who God is, acknowledge Him, and admit to the offenses against Him and His nature, people change the way they regard sin. Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Instead of conceding on sin, people deny it, excuse it, or redefine it in many various ways.
In the Garden of Eden, after he sinned, Adam said to God (Genesis 3:12), “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” He said, It wasn’t my fault. First, it was your fault, God. You gave her to me. And second, it was the woman’s fault.
Adam did not take responsibility for His sin. Unlike David in Psalm 51:4 after his sins, Adam blamed it on someone or something else. Instead of saying, “All have sinned,” it could be, “All have synd.” Adam had a group of features that existed together. All of those came from God. He had the woman, the garden, the serpent, and his own vulnerability.
Syndrome
A mixture of features coming together and effecting someone like they did Adam, instead of a sin, someone might call a syndrome. Syndrome comes from a Greek word (sundrome) that appears once in the New Testament in Acts 21:30. It is a verb translated there, “running together.” A mob formed and came all at once and together against the Apostle Paul.
Merriam Webster online defines syndrome:
1: a group of signs and symptoms that occur together and characterize a particular abnormality or condition
2: a set of concurrent things (such as emotions or actions) that usually form an identifiable pattern
Hundreds, if not thousands, of syndromes exist. I’m not saying that actual syndromes don’t exist. Surely they do. Of all those listed, I couldn’t say which were legitimate and which were not. However, many use a syndrome as a means of denying, excusing, or redefining sin. Instead of saying, “I sinned,” someone might say, “I synd.” It’s not the only way to deflect from sin or salve a conscience, but it is a very common one today.
Sin Is Sin
Someone named Matthew Stanford wrote the following:
One question I am commonly asked by people of faith is, “Can sin be considered a disorder?” Typically what the person who asks this question wants to know is, “Can behavior associated with psychiatric disorders (for which there may or may not be a treatment) be considered sinful or wrong?”
Many negative behaviors considered “sinful” (e.g., rage, lying/stealing, addiction) are associated with specific psychiatric disorders. But does calling a behavior the Bible considers sinful, a disorder, somehow make that behavior no longer sin? Absolutely not!
Something called the Kairos Journal recorded this:
When English Puritan Richard Baxter penned his magnum opus of pastoral counseling, A Christian Directory, he appended a noteworthy subtitle: A Sum of Practical Theology, and Cases of Conscience. Directing Christians How to … Overcome Temptations, and to Escape or Mortify Every Sin. Though lengthy by modern conventions, it reflected his opinion that deviations from God’s standards of behavior are moral transgressions meriting judgment and correction.
In contrast, today’s most popular reference work on behavioral deviance operates from a worldview that is decidedly less spiritual. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, text revision (DSM-IV-TR) never speaks of sin and hardly ever references moral categories of any sort. Instead, it often reclassifies as “disease” what humans have known simply as “immorality” for millennia, ignoring the moral aspect of human behavior.
Sin and the Gospel
I hear among many to whom I talk, much more than ever, a naturalness in psychology or psychiatry speak. This occurs very often now. I heard nothing like this from the average person thirty years ago. Much less today people mention sin and this parallels with greater ignorance of the gospel. Ninety-five percent or more to whom I speak call themselves “good people.” This starts with a misunderstanding or deceit about their own nature and the actuality of their sin.
Without someone understanding his own sinfulness, his propensity to sin, and sin’s ruination of him, he will not believe the gospel. For someone to receive the good news, first he must understand and comprehend the bad news. All have sinned, death because of sin, so that death passed upon all men (Romans 5:12). 1 Corinthians 15:3 says, “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.” “The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). “And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).
Not Knowing What You With Certainty Can Know Is True and Knowing What You Can’t Know Is True
What you can know with certainty is anything that God says. You know the Bible is true. God said it. It’s true and you can know it with certainty. More than ever, what God says, people don’t know. They treat what God said like they can’t know it.
Scripture talks about treating what you can know like you can’t know it. It’s not about knowing. It’s about wanting. Someone doesn’t want to do it, so he eliminates it by not knowing it. He can know it and he does know it. He says he doesn’t know it.
What I’m writing about is like a little child who “forgets.” A parent asks if the child knows. The child nods, “No,” shaking his head back and forth, when the child knows. Not knowing is an excuse for not doing. He does know. With a very large sample size, I can say that children know more than what they act like they do.
Very often, for what people can know, they stay ignorant. They could know, but they don’t want to know. They like what they’re doing. If they don’t try to find out, then they won’t know. If they don’t know, they won’t have to do.
Knowing what you can know with certainty very often isn’t popular. It’s easier just to say that you don’t know.
On the other hand, people treat the Bible like it can’t be known. It’s just opinion. It is a story book of preferences. If it makes you feel good, sure, go ahead with it, but don’t treat it like something you can know.
An example of not knowing what you can know occurred recently in the Senate hearings for confirming the Supreme Court justice, when a Senator asked her to define a woman. She said she didn’t know that. She could know, but wasn’t willing to know.
Very often what the world knows is that it can’t know. It knows with certainty that it can’t know. The unknowability provides freedom. You’re not to judge what you can’t know, so you must not know. That way no one can judge. Then you get to live like you want.
Unwillingness to know becomes a basis of toleration. You’re in trouble if you judge something wrong, because you’re saying you can know, when you can’t. You’re left with tolerating wrong things. It’s required. The judgment itself becomes what’s wrong. An irony is that you can know when someone else can’t know.
I’m not saying, however, that people don’t say they know things. They know what’s wrong with their meal at a restaurant. These people write a bad review with complete conviction of their own knowledge. They know if they got bad service from someone. They know when someone offends them because it’s what they feel.
People know evolution is true. Evolution is still a theory. That status hasn’t changed, but men now know men evolved. This theory promotes naturalism. Knowing it frees men from their accountability to God, when they don’t know it. It’s a theory. It’s a theory that we actually know is not true.
Critical theory poses as knowledge. People know your motives. They know you’re racist. Climate science says it knows the world will end by global warming. Man causes the end of the world through natural means. God tells man how the world will end. That we know.
Churches are more and more worldly because of more and more preference, a lack of knowledge about scriptural things that were once known. They are still known, but treated like they are not. What distinguishes the roles of men and women, what were once known, now not known. The psychology behind overturning scripture, creating victims, who are not victims, this is now known. People are sure of this.
What I’m describing is leaning on man’s understanding and not on God’s. God is always right. Man is rarely to never. Living by faith, which pleases God, is living by what man can and should know, not by what he knows, but that he really cannot.
How should someone treat willful not knowing or rebellious knowing? He should tell the truth. He should embrace knowing what he can and should know. As the psalmist wrote in Psalm 118:6, “The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?” He should also stand against what he knows men cannot know.
Eastern / Buddhist Meditation Harms You, Psychologists Agree
In our world today people often assume that meditation, as practiced by Buddhists or other advocates of Eastern religion, is healthy and beneficial. Areas of society where Christian religion are excluded are often open to Eastern meditation, although it is just as religious–albeit a different (and false) religion.
Eastern meditation is diametrically opposed to the godly and Biblical practice of meditation. Eastern meditation involves emptying the mind, while Biblical meditation, commanded in Joshua 1:8, Psalm 1, and many other texts, is a crucial part of the Christian life that involves carefully and actively employing the mind to carefully ponder God and His Word for the purpose of living for God’s glory. Eastern meditation, evaluated by Scripture, opens one up to the influence of demons.
Scripture is sufficient to teach that Eastern meditation is evil and harmful. However, even secular psychologists are now issuing many warnings, warnings that do not get sufficient public notice. Modern psychology itself is unbiblical, dangerous, and has way too much pseudoscience, but it is nevertheless interesting that, for example, Cheetah House, which is affiliated with organizations such as Harvard Medical School, Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, Tufts University, the UK’s National Health Service, has published a list of 59 health dangers from practicing Eastern meditation, as well as compiling an extensive bibliography of peer-reviewed studies discussing the dangers of Eastern meditative techniques. To quote from my pamphlet “The Buddha and the Christ: Their Teachings Compared:
[A] shockingly high percentage of “regular meditators experience negative effects,” and among people who meditated only one time nearly 10% “experienced impaired functioning,” while “nearly 60%” of those who “experienced negative effects … were meditation teachers. Some even required inpatient hospitalization. … People’s demons come out and play[.]” (Christ Lyford, “Is Meditation as Safe as We Think? The Risks We Don’t Talk About.” Psychotherapy Networker 46:1 [January/February 2022] 11-13.)
Many people become Buddhists because of the alleged benefits of Buddhist meditation, rather than because careful study indicates that what Buddha said is actually true. The reality is that what the Buddha taught is not true, and Eastern meditation is harmful, as proven by Scripture and validated by science.
–TDR
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