Does the Bible Support the Concept of Mental Illnesses and Conditions, or Is This a Secular Idea Originating With Psychiatry?

I know of a lot of Christians who have wondered: “Does mental illness even exist?” “Does the Bible support the concept, or does the concept of mental illness come from secular psychiatrists?”

So what does the Bible say about the nature of our humanity? Are we spirit, or are we flesh, or are we both? When we think and have consciousness, is it our brain doing this, or is it our spirit, or is it both? Are we purely composed of created matter, or do we have an immaterial spirit that can live on after we die, and override our mental handicaps that we may develop while living?

Just what are we at our core, and what is our brain?

What is the Bible truth on this important subject?

This is always the fundamental question to ask. The Bible is the source of truth, and science and nature are God’s secondary “book”; the Bible is our authority and if we displace the Word of God with human wisdom and ideas, we will find ourselves in a state of confusion without an accurate map or trustworthy guideposts, wandering in a never-ending maze. 

Christians generally reject the humanistic philosophies of secular psychology and psychiatry, and this is a good thing. We’re supposed to do that, and to take the Bible as our only authority, measuring the professionals with the Word of God, rather than the other way around. But while Christians should reject evolution and philosophies about psychiatry and psychology that stem from an evolutionary and atheistic worldview, should we reject the science of the psychiatric and medical communities too?

When neuroscientists and psychiatrists conduct studies that show brain-signaling abnormalities on brain scans (such as MRIs) in people with psychotic disorders, how should a Christian view the science, and their analysis that people with psychotic disorders have brain malfunction? Do we take that as truth? Or, is a person more than their brain, also consisting of a soul, and possessing mental processes that occur beyond the physical, and which can’t be measured or evaluated?

Can we measure mental processing, can we study it? Does the Bible recognize the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry? What does God’s Word say?

Also, can we treat the physical brain and reduce or recover from mental symptoms? Or is our brain part-spirit and medical treatments won’t fully help or are out of place or out of alignment with Christian doctrine?

What is the truth on this?

One of the most common questions after a loved one displays symptoms of a psychotic break and gets diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder is “Are the health professionals right that this is mental illness? It looks so much like demon oppression – or even demon possession. Could they be wrong in their diagnosis and I should take my kid to a pastor or a priest instead? Is the psychiatrist trying to medicate what is really a spiritual problem?”

People have a strong hunger to know how all the facets of a person – physical, mental, and spiritual – interact. Christian people know that there is a spiritual realm and demons are very real. We trust God when he tells us this. We know the whole picture can’t be mental illness every time someone shows these symptoms because we’ve read the accounts of demon possession in the Bible, and some of the demoniacs had clear mental issues caused directly by demons. And so any doctor (a high percentage of psychiatrists are atheist and don’t believe in God or demons which compounds the confusion) who seems to indicate that mental illness is the whole picture we feel is missing an important part of the puzzle. We want to understand how it all intersects and fits together. This is a good and a right desire – the desire to study God’s creative works, especially our design as beings made in the image of God.  In order to keep ourselves in a state of health it’s important we pay attention to all aspects of our health. Keeping our bodies in a state of health and studying how to do so is an act of worship to God. (Romans 12:1)

I believe God has much to reveal to us in His Word about this subject and that a correct understanding can be found. This doesn’t mean we’ll always be able to tell in every case whether a person is demon oppressed or mentally ill – we’re not Omniscient and we can get things wrong – but I believe the general guidelines of how the physical, mental, and spiritual intersect and react upon a person are given in the Word of God and they can be understood by all.

I’ve spent the last few years having many conversations with Christians of various denominations and backgrounds. The truth is that most Christians today believe we have a spirit and we aren’t just created matter – a physical brain and body systems – come to life by the power of God. From this belief stems the almost unconscious belief that on some level when a person enters psychosis in their physical brain, that they can still connect with God, that their spirit can commune with Him, and that a person is never fully mentally disconnected from the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and from understanding right and wrong. There are varying degrees to how much each Christian believes this, but few Christians actually believe that when our physical brain malfunctions severely that we can completely lose the ability to commune with God and understand right and wrong completely. Some do not believe the concept of psychosis exists at all, some believe it does and can compromise our brain, but that our spirit is never really unable to be convicted and that on some level they can still do so. The doctrine that we do not possess a spirit and are completely composed of created matter is rarely held in Christianity and it’s taken as a given that we have a spirit or soul by most. 

The two beliefs that lead to this conclusion that people can always be convicted by God’s Spirit about right and wrong are based on the nature of God, and the nature of man.

The rationale goes like this:

1. Nature of God – God is Omnipotent and thus can do anything. This would include even the ability to communicate effectively with a delusional person or someone with advanced brain injury from stroke or dementia. He can find or create a way, even if it doesn’t make logical sense.

2. Nature of Man – Man isn’t composed solely of created matter and has an indestructible, immaterial spirit. Man thus not being completely physical has another consciousness that communes with God in the spirit realm and is not completely limited by brain handicaps and mental illness – or even physical death itself.

It’s point 2 that I want to focus on mostly in this chapter, and I will leave point 1 for a future chapter.

What your beliefs are on this topic actually make a huge difference in the real world. If a person diagnosed with a mental illness like schizophrenia assaults and kills someone or commits a school shooting, if you believe that person always has a spirit that can understand right and wrong and commune with God, then that person must be somewhat responsible for their actions 100% of the time. It’s hard for people to imagine that that person’s brain could be so compromised that they lost the ability to have any moral agency over themselves – and the belief that we have a spirit separate from our physical brain contributes to this line of thinking in ways that are often very subtle and can go undetected.

This topic is particularly troubling to caretakers of family members with advanced dementia, particularly if their family member was a Christian and an upstanding father and citizen, when he starts sexually assaulting nurses in the nursing home and acts completely out of character. This reality can really try the faith of family members who knew him for who he was before the illness. If they believe his spirit is always able to be convicted by God’s Holy Spirit and understand right from wrong, then that means their elderly father is falling to temptation later in life, and sealing his legacy with a departure from everything he once stood for. Leaving the faith, disappointing everyone who respected him and whom he raised in godly fear and love. Abusing a woman selfishly for personal gratification. What a horrible picture for his family to take with them for the rest of their lives as he’s dying and leaving this world!

If however, their elderly father’s brain is deteriorating (with dementia the brain atrophies and dies and that’s how death occurs), and he has no spirit to override the mental deterioration, and he’s literally lost function and no longer possesses the ability to control his most basic impulses (which can become heightened to a high level when dopamine surges as a result of brain injury), and he’s in a state of confusion and/or psychosis, and doesn’t know what he’s doing is sexual assault or that it’s wrong, then it’s no moral failure on his part. It’s merely a horrific symptom of the dying process (nothing about death is really natural since God didn’t create us to die and it’s a result of sin) and he’s a victim of dementia and is himself suffering greatly, deserving of empathy and compassion and not a criminal. Protocols still need to be implemented to protect nurses, and mentally handicapped people can be as dangerous as mentally healthy criminals, but the difference is the mentally ill person is not a criminal and that makes all the difference in the world. What a different picture this is from the previous one!

Indeed, if we do have a spirit separate from our brain that can always commune with and understand God and right and wrong, then it is always the fault of men in advanced dementia who sexually assault nurses, it is always the fault of school shooters in physical brain psychosis when they kill innocent people, it is always the fault of mothers with post-partum psychosis who drown their babies in the bathtub. These people are the horrific criminals the news likes to paint them to be. Indeed, the idea of not guilty by reason of insanity isn’t actually real, if our spirit can override our physical brain when it malfunctions. This of course changes completely how we view crimes done among the criminally insane.

But, if we are our physical brain – if all of our parts are created matter (dust as it says in Genesis) – and we do not possess a spirit that can commune with God despite losing function in our physical brain, then not guilty by reason of insanity does exist in extreme cases of loss of brain functioning. And people can do horrific things and not know what they are doing. And they aren’t all monsters. Yet, their actions are destructive and cause great harm, and we need solutions that take into account the reality of the situation and address the problem from the actual cause.

Furthermore, how we go about addressing this problem in the church and in society will be completely different depending on which belief we hold. If we believe that no matter how compromised the physical brain can become, that all people can commune with God and understand right and wrong through their spirit on some level, then we’re going to see these school shootings and freak murders where mothers drown their kids in the bathtub and assaults of grown children on their parents when in a psychotic state, as chosen actions, and we’re going to address them with discipline, punishment and by preaching the gospel to them and showing them redemption through Christ. We aren’t going to be strong proponents of mental health education and resources; we’re always going to be holding back some and leaning towards disciplinary action as the real solution.

But, if these people are completely mad, they aren’t going to respond to punishment, discipline, or the gospel. It’s going to go over their heads and crime isn’t going to diminish, and those suffering from brain illnesses aren’t going to get the treatment they need; they will just be sent to prison in psychotic states where they will suffer terribly (full psychosis causes great mental distress), and may assault other prisoners and cause more harm. And whatever is causing cases of insanity to be on the rise is going to keep going strong, unless we find the underlying cause in the rise of insanity and diminish or remove it.

Whatever is true is what we want to embrace. It’s only in the truth that answers can be found, and that God and His will can be understood and followed. Untruths will not lead us to answers or to God. This is a subject many people know little about and it’s important we get educated on it. Knowledge rightly used is a force for good. God gave us the knowledge found in the Word of God for our good. He wants us to be informed and equipped to be lights in the world and to do actions of justice and mercy that glorify Him and draw others to Him.

Are these acts of extreme violence that we see in the news moral issues, or are they a health issue? The answer matters.

I believe that mental illness does exist. Let me tell you why. Let’s go all the way back to the creation of man. God in the beginning created man one being in three interconnected parts: physical, mental, and spiritual. He breathed into man and he became a living soul. 

“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7 . 

This shows that what makes up a soul – or a person – is our physical body (which includes the brain) plus God’s life-giving power. It’s common in many Christian circles to believe that man has a soul, rather than man is a soul, but the Bible tells us plainly that the latter is true. Man is indeed a soul. What this means is that our spirit, our self, is not disconnected from our physical brain. We don’t have a physical brain and a spirit brain; we have a physical brain that God’s spirit infuses with life (and of course God created the dust our body was formed from too). We our own brains.

When a kidney malfunctions, we need dialysis. We will experience pain from the toxins not being sifted out of our bodies like they should be. If our eyes malfunction we might experience double vision. But the brain is a much more complex organ, responsible for all of our thoughts and perceptions. For the brain to malfunction can result in many different kinds of symptoms – a wide, almost limitless range of symptomology can result. 

Every organ in our body can malfunction and the brain is no exception. If our brains do malfunction, we don’t have a spirit that is disconnected from our physical form and untouched by our physical malfunction; we are our brains. We will start to manifest the symptoms of brain dysfunction in our mannerisms, personality, behavior, sentence structure, logical reasoning and communication skills. 

We see the brain malfunction all the time when someone is drunk, or takes a drug such as LSD. Great personality changes can occur from drug use because they are substances that alter the chemicals in the physical brain, and chemicals in the brain and how they react on neurons and form neural circuitry is a big part of what gives us our personality. Not only this but the person can actively hallucinate due to changes in neurochemistry. The same can be said of mental illnesses; they involve altered brain biochemistry, and can cause personality changes, and even hallucinations at times. If you see someone drunk staggering to their car late at night, or a rich socialite high on cocaine and acting wired and bizarre, you don’t think ‘demon-possession’. It’s easy to understand that a brain on a substance is altered and recognize the symptoms. It makes sense then that a chemically imbalanced brain could show similar symptoms.



Let’s talk a little about God’s mind…

God possesses a mind that is uncreated, indestructible, not designed or limited to the confines of a specific created design; not existing within space and time, infinite. His mind has all information and all knowledge, and His judgment is perfect. Thus He can never err, His mind can never malfunction, or have any type of limitation.

When we hold people with mental malfunction to this standard – that no matter what state their physical brain is in they ought to always be able to tell right from wrong and do the right thing, even if there’s visible brain damage to the areas of the brain responsible for moral judgment – we may not realize this, but we’re holding them to something only a divine being can be and do.

In The Bible it of course says to take every thought captive. Sometimes people with involuntary intrusive thoughts or hallucinations that are immoral or dark in nature feel guilt because they try but they can’t take these things captive. When people with mental illness feel guilt for brain processes outside of their control, they may not realize this, but they are holding themselves up to a standard of being possible only for God.

We are finite beings called to resist temptation, walk in holiness, and live moral lives.
God is an infinite holy Being.

Thus we are held responsible for things within our control, not for things outside of our control such as damage to our physical brain that causes malfunction and takes away perceptions.

Jesus however became a man, one with a fallen nature born of Mary, a fallen women, and He was subject to mental fatigue, mental limitations, and malfunction in His humanity. Due to this He understands those of us with mental illnesses, and can care for us, sympathize with our mental handicaps and the fear and frustration they may bring, guide us to health treatments, and sustain us through every kind of mental illness and symptoms we may face, even ones the doctors don’t yet know about or know how to treat. As the Great Physician Jesus can give us wisdom and help in every health emergency.

The question of the nature of man boils down to this: Is being immortal a divine trait that is intrinsic within the divine nature, or is it something God can create within the nature of a person? Can and does man have an immortal soul, or is immortality only something God Himself can possess? If it’s a divine trait then being immortal would make someone a god, and no created being could possess immortality in themselves as we are not gods. However, if it’s not an intrinsically divine trait, then God could create it into our design and even non-gods could possess it. If you really think about it, it’s incredibly important what we believe about the nature of man, because if we get this wrong and we’re giving divine properties to human beings, we’re making them into demigods in our minds and Christianity does not support human beings as being any kind of God. Does the concept of an immortal indestructible soul gives human beings divine properties? Does it make us into demigods rather than people?

God alone is God, so any belief that would challenge God’s divinity and attribute it to humanity is harmful and could potentially deprive God of the honor and worship that is due Him. “Thou shalt have no others gods before me” is the staple belief of Christianity. In breaking this commandment Satan became his own god and sinned, and tempted Adam and Eve to desire to be gods and brought sin and woe into the human race as well. Being your own god is the antithesis of Christianity and as Christians we want nothing to do with any doctrines that either outright or subtly support this false philosophy. We are to demolish all such arguments that set themselves up against the knowledge of God, by the truth found in the Word of God. (1 Corinthians 10:5)

Follow Bible Logic

a. All of God’s traits have to do with God being the source of all things and of all truth. The only One that has always existed. The standard of all truth. The Creator of all life. The only immortal, self-sustaining, self-existing One, who creates all things and brings all things into being. This is what “I Am” means – He self-sustains and looks to no other person or power to hold Him up and keep Him alive, and He has always been. Everything else then stems from Him – all truth finds its source in Him. Jesus is indeed “the truth” and there is no truth apart from Him.(John 14:6) He is also the “Life”. If a person can self-sustain, and self-exist, this makes them the “I Am”, this makes them “the Life”, this makes them divine. If God can create a soul or spirit that is immortal by its very nature and can self-sustain, this would mean He could create another god, and if you believe this, it’s not a Christian belief as Christianity supports only one God in three distinct Persons (the doctrine of the Trinity).

Therefore man cannot possess an immortal soul as man is not divine.

b. Man must also consist of completely created material – there can be nothing in man that is not created – or man would also be divine. Not only can man not be immortal, but no part of man can be immaterial, or anything other than finite, existing outside of space and time. All parts of man must be created parts – finite, physical, existing within space and time, or if there is another dimension or kind of created reality they must exist within that. To be immortal, infinite, or immaterial is to be above the laws of physics, and only a divine Being can be above and outside the laws of created reality. God is the only One who has not been created – the only Creator – and any other life form is 100% created and consists of material God brought into existence. Otherwise we’re gods.

The most well-known verse in the Bible, John 3:16, tells us the lost will perish. If there is any part of man that doesn’t perish – an immortal, immaterial soul incapable of destruction and death (invincible) – that would go against this text, and since Jesus never lies, if He says unrepentant human beings must perish, and uses that word specifically, then man perishes. If He meant man burns forever in hell, then it would be a lie to say man perishes. He would have had to select a word like “suffers” instead, rather than “perish”. (More on this in a later chapter.) 

c. If people are 100% created matter, and completely finite, not possessing infinite attributes that our outside of our physicality, that are outside of created reality, this means our deep brain processes, our ability to commune with God and understand right from wrong, is an ability of our physical brain. But, not of our physical brain alone. Man’s consciousness comes about by a great mystery. God’s Holy Spirit infuses us with life. This is more than science – at least the definition atheist’s use and that has become so popular – the mystery of life and of consciousness is too deep for any human being to fully understand. How God’s Spirit gives consciousness to a group of atoms is known to God alone and no one will ever be able to do it or replicate it.

Since we have physical brains and processes, all of these processes has the potential to malfunction. Even the deepest desires of our heart and what it means to be a person can malfunction – and this is why dementia and psychosis are so painful. Having experienced severe psychosis I can tell you that it feels like the self is being split up into parts – like my very self is fragmented and I can’t get in touch with who I am or what I care about on the deepest levels, including how I feel about and perceive God. Instead of a bipolar 1 diagnosis, which is technically what I have been diagnosed with, (some of my psychiatrists say schizoaffective), I’ve often thought a better description would be Fragmented Mind Disorder or Fragmented Psyche Disorder. In Japan schizophrenia (which is an illness very similar to bipolar 1 and both involve psychotic symptoms) has been renamed Integration Disorder, and I think this name accurately fits the illness. The parts of the brain that make up the perception of the self and of the world and reality, feels dis-integrated and you feel like your self needs to be pieced back together with the pieces put in all the right places because they have become completely re-arranged and some of them feel like they are missing.. When I went through it I believe I got a taste of what Jesus may have felt like when He was on the cross and separated from God, and God used the experience (after I came out of psychosis with lithium) to give me a deep appreciation of what Christ endured for me, and to enter into his sufferings, also to appreciate in a much deeper way rationality and the ability to be a moral agent and choose benevolence and submission to God. I could not find meaning when I was in deep psychosis, and I learned how superior meaning is to comfort and feelings.

d. Being 100% created matter does not mean that we are not spiritual beings. Indeed the purpose and function of our brain is to commune with God and understand the deep truths found in His Word – salvation, forgiveness, righteousness, freedom, justice, mercy, and truth. Our physical brain is capable of understanding all of this when healthy and was created for this purpose. We are spiritual beings by nature, unlike animals. What makes us different from the animals is not that we possess a soul or spirit, but rather that God’s Holy Spirit can dwell in us and fill us because we are made in His image and capable of understanding right from wrong, and repenting and having faith in Christ. 

Notice that the Bible says “Let us make man in our image”. We aren’t in God’s image from having an immaterial eternal spirit, but our physical bodies which are made by God are made in His image. Everything about us is made, the very image of God that we’re made in, is made (sorry for the redundancy but this is an important point I don’t want you to miss).

In the Bible again and again our sinful nature apart from God is described as our flesh. Why is this? Because greed, malice, selfish ambition, jealousy, hatred, etc. are how a person acts when they are not filled with God’s spirit, when we are just our flesh without the Spirit. We were not created to exist alone independent of God and outside of his perfect will, abiding by His commandments. All of that happened as a result of the fall and is out of order for human beings. Our physical bodies were created to be temples of God’s Holy Spirit – not of our own souls or spirits. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20) This is the purpose of being a physical being. It’s why we have physicality in the first place. The fact that we are physical and limited to space and time – which are created things – the fact that we need space and time in order to exist, and that our very attributes and essence comes about due to space and time – speaks to the fact that we’re created beings. God, being outside of space and time and creating both, is not a created being. If we possess a spirit that can exist outside of matter, and space, and time, again this would make us divine.

What does it mean to be in the image of God? It means we can’t possibly have his divine attributes. We can’t be immortal, all-knowing, Creator of life, Omnipotent, invincible, the Standard of Truth, anymore than a picture or image of the Grand Canyon can be the Grand Canyon and possess its grand dimensions. We are like God, but without being divine. We have His attributes of free will, moral agency, the ability to be good and righteous and benevolent by choice (through the atonement of Christ after sin entered to picture) and to love. We are free agents as God is Himself a free agent, but without divine attributes. We therefore cannot be immortal as it is a divine attribute. The Bible says to “be holy because I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:16), and to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). We were created to be morally perfect as God is morally perfect – to have His same character of love. And through Christ we can regain this character. The Bible doesn’t say “be omnipotent as your heavenly Father is omnipotent”, or “be immortal as your heavenly Father is immortal.” We are to be like Him in character, but we are not like Him in his divinity.

It’s interesting, but the commonly held belief that we almost don’t even think to question, that animals and people give life to their offspring, is actually not true. Jesus being “the Life” doesn’t just mean that He brought Adam and Eve into existence with His life-giving power, it also means that anything that is alive is that way because God is breathing into those animals and people the breath of life, minute-by-minute, second-by-second:

“For in him we live and move and have our being.”

Acts 17:28

“In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”

Job 12:10

“This is what God the LORD says–He who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and its offspring, who gives breath to the people on it and life to those who walk in it”

Isaiah 42:5

“The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. “

Acts 17: 24-25

Everything living is held up second-by-second by the life-giving breath of God. He is indeed, the only way that any of us possess life. He is “The Life” at all times and apart from Him there is no life. We cannot self-generate it and we do not possess it apart from Him.

It’s the Holy Spirit, infusing our brain with life, that gives us consciousness. We don’t have life in and of ourselves.

God Can Do Anything

I want to take the time now to revisit argument 1:

1. Nature of God – God is Omnipotent and thus can do anything. This would include even the ability to communicate effectively with a delusional person or someone with advanced brain injury from stroke or dementia. He can find or create a way, even if it doesn’t make logical sense.

Let’s look at what omnipotent and almighty mean. They mean possessing limitless power, and being able to do anything. God can do anything. But He can’t create nonsensical, psychotic, things or do psychotic actions.

“Anything” excludes psychotic, self-contradictory ideas and concepts. For instance, God can’t be God and cease to be God. As someone who has been in psychosis, I can tell you that God didn’t do the psychotic things I asked Him to do when in psychosis for many years. What He did do and which I could finally appreciate when I came out of psychosis, is He did real things, the things that matter and are important.

I once prayed to Him to make me into a snow leopard when I was a kid, because they were my favorite animal, and held deep significance to me. He obviously didn’t do that for me. I didn’t understand at the time that the greatest thing to be is a person in His image, there’s nothing greater He could have designed me to be!

While God can break the laws of science, move outside of them and beyond them, because these are created things, and turning water into wine and breaking scientific law is a sign of His divinity, laws of logic work differently. They aren’t created things. They come from the nature of God Himself, and thus, like the moral law, they are eternal.

Before anyone or anything else was created, God existed eternally. He was good, and thus goodness and the moral law existed, and He had in His Person divine properties and attributes, thus beauty and logic, and symmetry existed eternally because they exist in God’s Person.

This is where the laws of logic come from, and they are eternal.

This is the reason why it’s not possible for something to both exist and not exist. It can either exist or not exist, but it can’t do both at the same time. It’s the reason our world is congruent.

These are concepts we take for granted, and don’t usually think about. If we see our sister is alive and well, we don’t even consider the possibility that maybe she’s also dead. We don’t need to go check the graveyard to make sure she didn’t die and was buried. We see her alive in one place, and we conclude she is alive, without having to check the world over to see if she’s dead somewhere else.

A person in psychosis can believe they are dead when their heart is beating. They can believe they are both dead and alive at the same time. Their brain breaks the laws of logic. But the world never will break the laws of logic. The world is always congruent even when our brain perception has malfunctioned. It’s a relief to know this!

And God does not change. He is always logical, and consistent, even when we’re suffering from a psychotic illness. God is outside of us, truth is a transcendent eternal reality. God will always be good and just and consistent and congruent, even if we’re suffering from a mental illness and can’t perceive Him to be those things. He will always do the right thing and operate in a benevolent way towards us, using His omniscient Fatherly wisdom to guide our lives in the perfect way. Knowing all things, and being able to chart the best possible course for us.

The statement that God can convict someone of right and wrong who’s brain has malfunctioned and lost the ability to discern right and wrong, breaks the laws of logic. This is a nonsensical statement.

And it wouldn’t make God more powerful to be able to do nonsense. Almighty is the most powerful that it’s possible to be, and the definition of almighty is being able to do anything. So not being able to do nonsensical things isn’t the opposite of almighty. It doesn’t make God weak. Rather those things aren’t things.

Asking God to do nonsense is looking at a picture of reality where there are no definitions, no things, and everything is everything else, and nothing at all. The minute you add a definition into the picture, definitions are by their very nature exclusionary. The minute you say a circle is a round shape without sides, this excludes the properties required to make a square.

So this idea that God can do anything, just paints a garbled picture of reality where there are no definitions anywhere; an impossible picture of nothingness.

You can’t have anything if there are no definitions, because definitions are what make something something.

This is magical thinking. Instead of praying and asking God to convict someone who has lost their moral perception, instead ask God to lead and guide your loved one’s doctor so he chooses the right anti-psychotic to bring them out of psychosis, and to help them regain moral perception. Then God can convict them again through His Holy Spirit once their brain is up and running again.

God can also directly heal your loved one’s brain. While God can’t do a nonsensical thing like make moral perception make sense to someone who’s brain has lost moral perception – and this is magical thinking outside of the laws of logic – God can do miracles that are outside and beyond scientific law and choose to miraculously heal your loved one.

He can also choose to bless the treatment your doctor gives your loved one and make it effective, or lead your family to natural health treatments that can make the medication more effective, or work on their own sometimes too to bring a person out of psychosis.

Is Satan Directly Involved In All Cases of Brain and Body Illness? Do We Have Authority As Christians to Rebuke All Illnesses Away From Us?

Now that we know mental malfunction and illness exists because people are physical beings with a physical brain, let’s ask the next logical question in the progression of this conversation: “What causes mental illness? Just because it’s physical doesn’t mean Satan isn’t behind it. Are people who are experiencing mental illness actually demon-possessed or demon-oppressed?” What is causing their physical biochemistry to malfunction? I bring this up because many Christians do believe Satan is directly causing all physical and mental illnesses, and there are enough people who believe this that this question needs to be addressed.

It’s also important that as Christians we understand from the Bible how illness and death came into the world, and what God’s plan and process is for eradicating both of these things forever. Then we can do our part to cooperate with that plan, and we can spot false doctrine that is not in accordance with that plan and step away from it and guard ourselves against it.

It’s become increasingly common, especially in charismatic churches and circles, for everything to be seen as demons. It can get quite extreme. If you cough, you’re supposed to rebuke Satan away and your cold is supposed to leave you. I know people who actually believe this and I’ve spoken to many others who also do. There’s also a number of people who are extremely confused and don’t necessarily buy into the idea that everything is demons, but this-view point being so widespread and seeping into sermons everywhere in part or in full, has lead to huge amounts of confusion.

I know people with bipolar disorder who experience psychosis as a symptom, who have been told by their pastors to get off their medication because taking it is a lack of faith, and that they should be rebuking the illness directly or in some cases they say they should be rebuking the demons behind the illness and exerting their God-given authority over Satan or the illness. These people are in compromised mental states and it’s often hard for them to distinguish between Bible truth and error. Some of these people have listened to him and gone off their medication and had a complete psychotic break where they spent their whole savings, moved to another state and started a new life due to delusions that their husband wasn’t really their husband and was in fact a demon, wrecked their life, and almost lost their lives because they were a danger to themselves and others in that state. 

You can see how inaccurate information surrounding this topic can be dangerous.

It turns out this view-point and this situation where pastors rebuke church members for taking medication rather than claiming their God-given authority over sickness and Satan is not an uncommon occurrence. Yes, that’s really the truth. It happens often as it’s a commonly-held belief in Pentecostal circles and in circles where the prosperity gospel and Word of Faith movement is preached.

I believe it happens because of an inaccurate understanding of the timeline of how the gospel brings an end to all sickness, poverty, and death. This doctrine isn’t false because it claims God will heal all sickness. Again and again in the scriptures the gospel is linked with and always has these core components of forgiveness of sin, freedom from death, poverty eliminated and prosperity given, and sickness being healed. In the passages in the Old Testament, God promised all these things to Israel if they would be faithful to Him. Jesus began his ministry by healing the sick and calling people to repentance and faith in His atoning sacrifice that He would give to the world. These things were all linked and connected with the ministry of Christ. It’s about the timing. It is definitely true that the gospel ends all sickness forever. But does it do it now? Well, the gospel doesn’t accomplish everything it’s promised to in this life, otherwise no Christian would ever die. So it’s clear there are some things the gospel brings about that don’t happen in this world.

Is recovery from sickness one of those things that the gospel accomplishes for us in the next life, or in this life?

Let’s dig into the scriptures. What does the Bible really say about this subject? What is the correct relationship between Satan and sickness? Does he directly cause illness every time, or is he sometimes directly involved and other times indirectly involved? Or is no sickness caused by demons and all sickness occurs naturally on its own as a result of a fallen and broken world that now has dysfunction that results in dangerous pathogens and cells mutating giving conditions like cancer?

We know that at least in one sense every sickness or illness, anything destructive, and death itself was caused by Satan. When He rebelled against God and His law Satan brought all these things into existence. When man fell due to Satan’s temptation in the garden, all of these things became a part of the human experience and existence in this world.

But is Satan directly causing all sickness today? And do Christians have authority from God to rebuke Satan and all the sicknesses he causes?

Let’s start at the beginning to get our answers.

There was no death in all of God’s created universe before sin. Not only this, but there was also no malfunction or disease. There was no break-down at all in any way in the whole of creation. Adam, though he had a finite brain that had limitations and wasn’t all-knowing like God’s mind, had a brain that functioned perfectly for a human being. The scriptures tell us Jesus though His Word holds all things together. (Hebrews 1:3) All of creation cannot function or exist in its own power. The laws of physics themselves, along with everything else, is held together by Jesus’ almighty power.

So Adam’s brain and body were held together and kept in a perfect state of functioning by that almighty Word of Christ.

It was sin – moral evil – that brought death – natural evil – into the world. Just to be clear here I want to point out that natural evil isn’t actually evil. Only a being with moral agency can be and do evil. Tornados and cancer do not have a motive or intelligence. The word “evil” is sometimes used to describe natural disasters and natural dysfunction like illness, even these are an entirely different concept than moral evil. But the word “evil” when referring to natural evil, is fitting in a sort of way because these natural things kill human beings, and it’s a great loss and an evil thing when people die – the result is seen as evil or wrong. God never intended for people to die and it was never supposed to happen.

Before sin Adam was not under the power of death. We need Bible evidence for this, so let’s look at some verses. The Bible speaks of this fact in many places. Paul says in Galatians 3:12 that he who keeps the law shall live by keeping it. Perfect obedience to God’s law – what Adam had in Eden before sin – results in eternal life through the God whom you are obeying. The laws are life-producing by their very nature. However, in Romans 7:10 Paul tell us that the law that was intended to bring life now brings death. After sin a person incurs God’s wrath and falls under the penalty of death. The law then has no power to forgive or redeem the person or give them a new heart. They law which is good, has no power to redeem the sinner, and is powerless to do anything about our lost state, which is why Christ came and died. (Romans 8:3-4)

This is a very key point to the discussion and I don’t want you to miss this. The law itself is life-producing. Its principles if kept perfectly cause a person to through God live forever. It brings no sadness, sickness, destruction of any kind to keep the law; in fact it does the opposite.

My son, pay attention to what I say;
turn your ear to my words.
21 Do not let them out of your sight,
keep them within your heart;
22 for they are life to those who find them
and health to one’s whole body.
Proverbs 4:20-22

7 Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the Lord and shun evil.
8 This will bring health to your body
and nourishment to your bones.

Proverbs 3:7-8

It’s the keeping of the law, which keeps a perfect sinless being connected with God (who is the Source of life and health) in a covenant relationship with Him (what Adam would have had had he never sinned, and what the loyal angels have), that prosperity of each type – health, eternal life, wisdom, riches/zero poverty, abundant knowledge – is secured and flows as a natural result of that relationship with God.

These things have always resulted from a relationship with God. Solomon puts it this way speaking of wisdom which is a reference to Christ Himself in Proverbs 3:16 “Long life (he means eternal life here) is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor.”

These things do go together. Eternal life does go with riches and honor. This is what Adam had before sin when he was the king of this world, and under God, was very prosperous, and also possessed eternal life. This is what the loyal angels have too as royalty in heaven as sons of God.

The Bible says “love does no harm to its neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Romans 13:10

Thus it’s these very principles of right-doing that kept the creation in a state of harmlessness and health and prosperity before sin.

Imagine if no one ever told a lie. Imagine if no one ever verbally abused another person, never hit or killed another person. Imagine if there was only good-will one towards another through the whole earth, only actions of thoughtfulness and love. Imagine if there was no adultery or rape. Imagine if no one littered or polluted or misused the earth and its resources.

I think you can see clearly how there would not be psychological distress, STDs, and the like in such a world.

So you can get a glimpse of how the breaking of each of these laws brings in death and malfunction of the emotions, psyche, and physical body.

While it’s true that verbal abuse tears down a person’s psyche at the physical level, and murder outright destroys their body physically, it’s also true that breaking the commandments against God also brings in death and disease.

Let’s keep studying this out…

Adam was told that by God if he ate from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that he would “surely die.” Genesis 2:17. God was telling Adam the same thing Paul says in Romans, that the law produces life, and that the breaking of it produces death. As Romans 6:23 states “The wages of sin is death.” The snake’s lie was that he would not surely die after all, and that he would in fact live in a higher state of existence as a god if he ate the fruit.

This command from God centered around his right to be worshipped and obeyed as God. Would Adam accept God’s authority in his life? The serpent’s lie challenged that authority, insinuating that Adam should disobey God and break away from His rule, because God was a selfish tyrant who hoarded good things for Himself arbitrarily. The lie painted God as unloving, as less than 100% righteousness and benevolence, and was an accusation against His character.

Eve chose to eat the fruit, doubt God’s character and come out from under His loving rule. After being tempted by Eve, Adam chose to do the same.

There were a couple other themes besides God’s authority and character…the third theme and message was that it wasn’t sinful to disobey God. This follows naturally from the serpent’s insinuation that God was selfish and evil Himself. If God is a stingy monster, with arbitrary rules just to control you and takes good things for himself and deprive you of them, then the right thing to do is to disobey Him. It can’t be wrong to disobey an arbitrary ruler and the laws of such a ruler, who is not grounded in goodness and truth and is just oppressing his subjects. These themes were implied by the serpent’s claims. Reading between the lines you can see them clearly. They also come up again and again in the scriptures as God breaks down for us who Satan is and how he is an accuser of God and the brethren.

God’s claim of course was that He is a Ruler of perfect goodness who had a right to Adam’s love and allegiance, and His intent in asking Adam to not eat from the Tree was so that Adam would not sin. God with His authority, truthfully declared that disobedience to His Word was sin.

And the fourth theme in the “Tree Test” was that of death. God’s claim wasn’t that God would arbitrarily sentence Adam with death if he ate the fruit, but that “the wages of sin is death.” Thus in intending to keep Adam from sin, God’s objective was to keep Adam from the penalty of sin, which is death.

The devil well knew that those who sin incur the death penalty. It was the devil who didn’t love or care about Adam and was trying to bring him under the power of death and destroy him.

Sadly, we of course know that Adam ate from the fruit, fell under the power of death, and only Jesus’ pledge to die in his place brought a period of mercy to the human race, where we all have time to live in this world and decide whether to believe in Christ or not and be saved. If we choose to reject Christ, judgment will fall on us on Judgment Day. This judgment is delayed so all can choose salvation (2 Peter 3:9, 2 Peter 3:15). Adam and Eve would have been instantly judged with death, and in them the potential for other human beings to be created and exist would have died out with them, had Jesus not pledged to die for the human race, as the whole human race existed in Adam.

We know that the whole human race existed in Adam – meaning God couldn’t create another two humans and start up the human race again if Adam sinned – because the Bible tells us “In Adam all die” 1 Corinthians 15:22, and in Romans 5:12 it says “Therefore just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed to all men because all sinned.” Then Adam is described as a “pattern of the One to come” Romans 5:14.

What the Bible is saying here is that Adam had a special role and authority as the first man that affected the whole human race. His sin brought death to us all, and captivity to Satan for the whole human race. We were no longer under God’s banner. The human race belonged to Satan and was estranged from God, and had God judged Adam with death right after his sin, God would not have the rights to make new human beings. God no longer owned our species.

By saying that Adam was a pattern of the one to come, we see the parallels involved in the role of Adam as the first man, and the role of Christ as the “Second Adam.” In Adam all die, in Christ winning back the rights to the world, the human race, and each individual person, we are made alive if we choose Him. 1 Corinthians 15:21-22

Thus we see here that the pattern referred to is this fact that Adam brought death to all and the whole human race died in Adam, thus God could not have created new human beings had God destroyed Adam for his sin, and the race not been redeemed.

Adam was a physical being, under the laws of physics. Thus for Adam to be able to die, God had to change the laws of physics themselves. And when that happened, death and malfunction entered the whole world. Plant life, animal life, even single-celled organisms and bacteria and viruses could now mutate to cause disease.

In the Bible God as the Sovereign Lawgiver and Judge of the universe, pronounces a curse on Adam and on Eve, and He also pronounces a curse on the earth as punishment for Adam’s sin.

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

Something changed with the laws of physics and our bodies to cause work of all kinds – even mental labor – to tax us and wear us out and break down our bodies. There is fatigue and pain in labor of all kinds, and it is difficult hard work.

However, there is still the original blessing in labor, for work itself was given before the fall of man and is good for our health.

So here we see a mixed bag of joy and blessing resulting from hard work, and we also see fatigue and pain happening in this world due to the curse of sin.

It’s interesting that the curse for the serpent to slither on its belly, the curse on the woman to feel pain in childbirth, the curse on Adam to experience painful toil in labor, and the curse on the earth to produce thorns and thistles all involved changes to the laws of physics themselves.

The curse on the human race and on the earth encompassed the whole worldly creation, including the laws of physics that operate life and movement and scientific processes in this world, as they apply to this planet.

Not only was death now possible and a part of life in this world, but decay and malfunction were too. Decay and malfunction are part of the death process.

The Bible makes this very clear in Romans 8:21 that there is decay in our world caused by Adam’s sin.

“the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”
Romans 8:21

This decay and malfunction is part of the curse. This is how mental and physical illness became possible, and entered our experience.

Thus you can see that according to the Bible, it’s not possible that all illnesses are directly caused by demons. The curse rests on the whole earth and everything in it, and brings malfunction and decay to people and animals and plants and organisms. Thus mental illness from purely biological sources with no demons involved is possible and happens.

It’s not possible that every illness is caused by demons. This is an impossibility.

However, this doesn’t mean that no mental or physical illnesses are directly caused by demons. (More on how demons can cause illness coming up soon in this article.)

What Was and Is The Devil’s Role in All of This?

So, let’s think about this whole process of how this happened, with the devil’s role in mind. What was the devil’s role in all of this, and what is our role when it comes to the devil as children of God?

In studying out his role and our relation to him, we can then see whether rebuking demons in order to recover from illness is biblical.

We will also be able to see whether rebuking illness directly is biblical too.

We know from what we’ve studied so far that it was Adam’s sin that actually brought death, and illness into this world.

The breaking of God’s law is inherently life-destroying, and the keeping of His law is inherently life-producing.

This means that it is the breaking of God’s law that brought the curse of illnesses into this world, not the devil.

It’s sin that brought diseases and health conditions. This is key, and very important to understand.

The devil’s role was that of a tempter to Adam.

However, once Adam actually sinned, the whole human race came under the ownership of Satan. So he then had the role of slave master. So he’s not just a tempter now, he’s the slave master of everyone who has ever lived long enough to sin, and who hasn’t yet accepted Christ as their Savior.

Jesus came and died to buy us all back. He didn’t just buy each of us as individuals. He also died to redeem the world from its bondage to decay and death. And He died to win back the rulership of the world from Satan. The crown of thorns that Christ wore on the cross was a reference to how Jesus was defeating the curse that rested on the world due to Adam’s sin.

At the end of time, God will engulf the world in fire, to cleanse it, and he will destroy this heavens (meaning the atmosphere) and this Earth, and create brand new ones.

In this new world, the laws of physics will go back to how they were before Adam’s sin. There will be no death or malfunction or decay of any kind. No “natural evil.” No hurricanes, no psychosis, or depression, or symptoms of mental illnesses and conditions.

This same fire will also destroy the devil and the wicked.

‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’ and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”
Revelation 21:4

No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.
Revelation 22:3

The Bible says death will be destroyed. In fact, it was to destroy death, as well as sin and the devil, that Jesus came into this world.

“Now since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity, so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil…”
Hebrews 2:14

“Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.”
Revelation 20:14

“And now He has revealed this grace through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has abolished death and illuminated the way to life and immortality through the gospel…”
1 Timothy 1:10

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
1 Corinthians 15:26

Death will not be possible in heaven and in the new world, because no one will sin and bring upon themselves the penalty of sin which is death. The cross of Christ fully defeats Satan and death for all time. This is how powerful the cross is!

What They Got Right
Those who believe that physical healing is a core part of the gospel, are not wrong in connecting these two things.

They are understanding Jesus’ role correctly, that He came to abolish all illness, to forgive all sin (of those who repent), and to destroy the devil…also to buy back the world and abolish death itself.

This is a whole and complete picture of what Jesus’ work did and does.

They are right to see that the Bible verses about healing apply to the gospel, Jesus’ work.

They are only getting the timing wrong.

Notice how the Bible says “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” This is significant. The last piece of the puzzle is to destroy death, meaning the curse that rests upon this world, and bring in a new world in which there is no death.

We know this to be true as Christians. God is active in our lives. He helps us with each day with the difficulties of life, giving wisdom and aid. He forgives us of our daily sins, and gives us moral strength to resist temptation. He teaches us from His Word. He gives His church power to take His gospel to the world and we see new people baptized into the faith and start relationships with Him.

God answers many prayers and provides much help. But if we were to pray for our 100 year old grandmother that she would never die, that prayer would not be answered in the affirmative. Likewise if we were to pray for ourselves that we would never die, the answer would be no. We watch as everyone around us gets older, and the signs of age show. We see older folks passing away and the new generation taking their place.

None of this negates Jesus’ power or His promises. He has promised forgiveness for sin right here in this world, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It’s here that we are adopted into His family, rescued from our slave master Satan, and given a new heart that can love and know God.

But it’s not here in this world that we’re promised death will be destroyed. It’s in the next life. The curse still rests on the world right now.

And this means also that there is going to be sickness and disease in this world too, as long as the curse exists. Because the same curse that brings death also brings malfunction and dysfunction to the physical world. They are part of the same dynamic and root cause. This means that there will be harmful viruses and bacteria in our world that can cause physical and mental symptoms. There will be cells that morph and turn cancerous.

I don’t want you to misunderstand me here. I’m not saying God doesn’t ever answer prayers for healing, even sometimes giving a person complete health – at least as complete as health can look in this world. He does heal people. I’m very much involved in helping people heal and I have a health ministry. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe God’s Word tells us that it’s often the case that God wants to heal people. But to make the blanket conclusion that God will always heal every sick Christian, is to bypass and negate the effects of the curse itself.

We live in a world under the curse, and the curse universally will not be removed until the end of time, well it happens at the resurrection for the righteous. To say that God will grant every Christian healing is to say the curse has now been abolished for Christians by Christ’s death, and this just doesn’t fit the Bible’s timeline of when the curse will be removed.

Notice the language here in Paul’s writing:
So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable;
1 Corinthians 15:42

The body we have now can perish. But the body we will be given at the resurrection will not be under the curse and will not be perishable.

Some translations say corruptible and incorruptible. Our body will not be able to die.

But right now that is not the case. Right now we have perishable or corruptible bodies. These bodies that can perish, can also malfunction and decay.

Thus those of us with mental and physical health conditions, have a constant reminder in our flesh of our need for the next life and for glorification, which is when we are raised with that glorified body in perfect health.

We need that new body and that new world and to be in the Presence of God. This life is not enough, it is defective, it is painful, we aren’t what we need to be.

The Bible speaks of groaning for our new bodies and of groaning for the day when are characters are 100% in alignment with His will and there’s no more selfishness in us.

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.”
Romans 8:23

As someone who has come out of psychosis with treatment, and who has taken brain supplements to really enhance my cognition, I can tell you that we don’t realize how much our brain, cognition, and perception are affected by the fall. It would not be enough to have a healthy working brain and body in this world. We need a higher level of intelligence. If we were much smarter, with brains that worked perfectly, we would see rich truths in the scriptures about the character of God that we couldn’t see in the same way with the kind of cognition we have now.

This happened to me after treatment. I could see so many wonderful things in God’s Word that increased my quality of life and joy in ways I’d never before experienced. I didn’t know this level of happiness was possible in this world until I treated my brain. I didn’t know this level of Bible understanding was possible until I treated my brain.

My brain had so many glitches in its processing that took away my ability to see Bible truths in their beauty.

So many of us have these kinds of symptoms. Even those without mental illness have brains affected by the fall. We don’t have the mind Adam had in Eden.

Now imagine how much more happiness would be possible if we were many times more intelligent than we are now, and our brain worked in a way that it made zero errors and was perfect in functioning.

If we could see the level of understanding and cognition that it’s possible to have with such a brain, we would spend all our time focused on furthering God’s work in our hearts and in the world around us, so Jesus could come soon and we could go home to heaven.

We would not become so fixated on wanting this world’s version of perfect health, to the point of making health an idol, even if it’s not God’s will here for us to be in health.

Satan paints life in this world as capable of meeting our deep needs and desires if we just work hard at setting goals and achieving them, but this world does not have the happiness we crave. We need the next world and the next life.

Promises to Israel

We see in God’s promises to Israel, a direct parallel to the promises in Eden before sin. Just as obedience to God’s law before sin resulted in health, life, and happiness, so God told the Israelites that if they obeyed His laws, that He would not bring on them the diseases of the Egyptians.

“11 Therefore, take care to follow the commands, decrees and laws I give you today.

12 If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the Lord your God will keep his covenant of love with you, as he swore to your ancestors. 13 He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers…15 The Lord will keep you free from every disease. He will not inflict on you the horrible diseases you knew in Egypt, but he will inflict them on all who hate you.”
Deuteronomy 7
Here, as in Eden, it’s clear that breaking God’s laws produces illness, and keeping them produces health.

In the case of Israel God actually did promise them that there would not be a sick one among them if they lived in obedience to Him, and the promise was fulfilled. Among something like a million people there was not even one sick person among them.

He brought them forth also with silver and gold: and there was not one feeble person among their tribes.
Psalm 105:37

Importance of Teaching Obedience to God’s Law

It’s very important that God’s church teaches and promotes law-keeping through Christ, to our members, and that we preach these things to the world at large, as an important component of the gospel.

Due to Adam’s sin, we are now powerless to keep God’s law in our own strength, but the good news of the gospel is that Jesus both forgives us of our sins, and gives us a new heart that can walk in His ways. Through the righteousness of Christ, we can now begin to walk in obedience to God’s law, by the new way of faith.

This is the power of the gospel. When it’s lived out in the character and life of the forgiven one, to produce good works of love, we see the transformative power of what Christ’s death and life accomplishes in a wretch, a lost person, corrupted by sin. They are set free from the power of sin, and enabled to walk in the new law of the Spirit. The definition of love according to the Bible is law-keeping. Not keeping it outwardly in behavior only, but keeping it with the love and spirit of Christ. This is what fruit or good works are. They are works of keeping God’s law of love.

And law-keeping is not possible for someone who is unconverted. Thus when good acts that keep the law and are in accordance with its principles are done by us, we reveal the power of Christ, because such acts of love are not possible in the humanist, in the person who does not have Christ.

Thus it’s fitting and right that God’s church ought not to only point out sin and our need for a Savior, and teach that we can be forgiven by Christ, but also emphasize that we can now through Christ keep His law imperfectly, and that this is a solemn duty and great privilege.

And educate people on what that looks like. Including God’s health laws, and how the keeping of these laws produces better health and a more sound and strong mind, enabling us to see rich truths in God’s Word that we can’t see when our brain is fuzzy or our perception is distorted by mental symptoms.

Coming Under the Power of the Devil

Now we know that our bodies themselves after the Fall are corruptible, or perishable, capable of malfunction and dysfunction by their very nature, and thus physical and mental illness can result from purely natural causes like pathogens in our body, or by things like birth defects, or even just aging, let’s ask the question “Is it possible to come under the devil’s power and experience illness as a result of demon involvement?”

The answer here is “yes.” In fact we are all before conversion slaves of Satan. So people are naturally under his power to a degree, but God sets in motion forces to bring the gospel to that person and give them the option of salvation through Him.

Everyone is given this option of salvation. While unconverted people are under Satan’s power and owned by him, he can’t keep them from being convicted by God’s Holy Spirit each and every day to come to God. He can’t keep them from salvation if they reach out to God. His power has definite limits, and the sacrifice of Christ buys for each of us the opportunity and power to choose to be saved if we will.

The Bible doesn’t tell us how much power Satan has over unconverted people or the exact limitations of that power. We do know that he holds them in bondage and that Christ alone can set them free.

Can Satan give an unconverted person an illness such as cancer or schizophrenia? The Bible doesn’t explain all the details of this.

What it does explain and show though is that if one yields themselves to Satan through immorality, the more they yield to him, the more power he gains over them.

The Bible wants us to understand this principle that it is through sin that Satan gained ownership of the human race, and it is through choosing to sin to greater and greater degrees that we come more and more under his power.

It’s never safe to live a lifestyle of unrepentant sin, and to go deeper and deeper into sin.

While Jesus was careful to explain to the disciples that when someone was physically blind it wasn’t always due to sin, in all the accounts of Jesus driving out demons, there was always sin involved. To illustrate this concept Jesus made statements such as the following:

43 “When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. 44 Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. 45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”
Matthew 12:43-45

Notice how Jesus specifically says this generation is wicked, and this is the reason given for why this condition of possession by 7 times as many demons will happen to them. Even though Jesus was among them living and working to cast demons out of people and draw them to Himself, if they didn’t continue to walk in the light He’d given them, and they rejected Him and practiced wickedness, they would again become possessed by demons.

Paul speaks of this same concept, echoing Jesus:

“If indeed they have escaped the corruption of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, only to be entangled and overcome by it again, their final condition is worse than it was at first.”
2 Peter 2:20

Notice that again it is the corruption – or immorality – that causes a person to have a final condition that is worse than they used to be even before their conversion.

So the answer is yes, it is possible for Satan to gain power over a person, and that happens when a person rejects truth and lives a life of immorality.

We briefly talked about natural evil earlier in this chapter. Demon possession is not a natural evil that can come over someone without their involvement, like a sudden hurricane or a car accident. Demon possession can only occur due to moral evil – due to rejecting Christ and embracing a life of immorality. So someone who is stealing money, or sleeping around, harboring hate or jealousy in their heart until it builds and becomes great – things like this.

Many of these demons that Jesus cast out of people were afflicting them with physical illness, or muteness, or mental symptoms.

In the gospels we see Jesus rebuking sickness and physical infirmities that were caused by demons. When he cast the demon out of the mute man, the person was able to speak. Matthew 9:32-33

In Matthew 17:14-18 Jesus casts a demon out of an epileptic boy who had been falling into fire and water (probably the demon’s attempts to kill him) and the epilepsy leaves him when the demon does.

We also see Jesus rebuking illnesses directly, that were not caused by any demons that needed to be cast out, and the illness leaves them. Peter’s mother-in-law suffered from a high fever, until Jesus rebuked it and it left her and she began to wait on them. Luke 4:39 We see Jesus rebuke the storm at sea and even the wind and the waves obey Him. Matthew 8:27 It’s interesting to note that in none of these cases where demons were not directly involved in a person’s sickness or in the waves at sea, did Jesus rebuke demons. Even though Satan is the cause of all these evil things coming into the world, Jesus didn’t rebuke Satan every time someone became sick, rather he rebuked the illness itself, unless demons were directly involved as in cases of demon-possession.

Jesus gave His church the authority to heal the sick, and to cast out devils.

When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases,

Luke 9:1

And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease.

Matthew 10:1

“Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.”

Matthew 10:8

This shows us that it is the role of the church both to heal diseases and to cast out devils. Some diseases are caused directly by demons, others are not attached to demons, but in either case the disciples healed people. Regardless of the underlying cause, the church has been given a mission to help in both cases. 

However, there’s nothing in the scriptures that say in every case God will always heal us, and such a belief is dangerous on a number of fronts. We have examples where people prayed for healing and were denied by God the healing they sought. Elisha, a man of great faith, died of a prolonged illness. 

Paul shows us the right attitude to have in praying for healing.

“because of the extraordinary character of the revelations. Therefore,[g] so that I would not become arrogant, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to trouble[h] me—so that I would not become arrogant.[i] 8 I asked the Lord three times about this, that it would depart from me. 9 But[j] he said to me, “My grace is enough[k] for you, for my[l] power is made perfect[m] in weakness.” So then, I will boast most gladly[n] about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may reside in[o] me. 10 Therefore I am content with[p] weaknesses, with insults, with troubles, with persecutions and difficulties[q] for the sake of Christ, for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”

2 Corinthians 12: 7-10

A humble, submissive attitude that acknowledges God’s omniscience and His authority is the only truly Christian attitude. If we are trying to command God to always heal us –  rather than submitting to His will – we’re making self our god and we’ve left the Christian faith.

Paul explains that in our weaknesses God can often best be glorified and this would include things like mental and physical illness. Only God knows for sure which is best – to allow the person to remain ill or to heal them –  and he will bring a blessing out of even the worst situations if He allows them to happen. I can personally testify of having a renewed appreciation for Christ and his sufferings on the cross after going into complete psychosis and feeling shut off from God and his conviction and then coming back to sanity with the aid of lithium.

Indeed we need sufferings. (more on this later)

The same Bible that testifies of the power to drive out demons and heal sickness being given to God’s church also makes us aware of our responsibility in caring for our physical temple, calling the acts of doing so our “reasonable worship.”

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”

Romans 12:1

This means that if we’re not doing everything we can to be in the best health possible and we’re mistreating our bodies, eating junk food, or willfully engaging in other types of health-destroying practices, then we’re doing the opposite of worship. We have a Christian duty to study and implement health and make it a major part of our lifestyle for the rest of our lives. And the church should be teaching and instructing people in how to eat and live healthy lives. We can have cooking schools, and nutrition classes, and mental health lectures and fulfill our health mandate this way. Indeed in instructing people there are many blessings that happen that do not happen from miraculous healings, because the person learns to worship God through healthy living and leave behind sins of unhealthy living. In teaching and instructing in this area, we aid people in surrendering their character and will to God and come out of sinful practices, and this is the most important work of all: our sanctification. 1 Thessalonians 4:3-6

It is therefore not faith to mistreat our body and then ask God to heal us. It’s disobedience. Of course, as fallen human beings (even after conversion), we’re prone to disobedience and this is a constant struggle. It takes surrender to Christ and power from Him to do the right thing when it goes against our fleshly desires, and we must commit to this battle. God’s ultimate goal is reaching the heart. He wants to heal the body fully and will give us new glorified bodies at His coming, but the big work that we need to be engaging in in this world is the heart change. We need new characters and through the sanctification process God will change us. We need to have a character that isn’t ok with mistreating our body and delights in treating it as valuable since Christ died for us. 

If you’re thinking it’s not easy to deny the flesh and live as healthy as possible, to delight in the science of how our bodies work and commit to on-going learning and implementing what you learn as a way of life, when you may really want to pursue your own goals, and not take the time out to consistently study health, and especially if you’re bad at science, which I was when I first set out on this journey and it’s a real struggle for you to understand scientific concepts, you’re right. The truth is it’s not easy for anyone. But once we surrender to God’s molding we will develop a love for health and science that will add great joy and meaning to our lives. And the reason it’s not easy is because we are sinful and we need to change. We want health but we don’t want to have to put in the work and commitment it takes to be healthier. God will change you if you will let Him and submit to this process. The truth is most of us need to repent and change course in this area and we need to do so today and not wait. Counting the cost is important though. Definitely count the cost before you engage.

The Bible Supports Purely Psychological Causes of Mental Illness. 

There are laws of right-doing and right-thinking that react on our physical being. The knowledge of doing and even speaking right, truthful words, has a healing reaction on our physical body, including our mood and mind.

The Bible teaches this truth that how we use our physical brain – what might be called purely mental health, or the closest thing to it, the thoughts we think, and whether we choose to cherish faith and hope in Christ or doubt and rebellion in our heart – influences our body and our physical brain. Hope and faith and truthfulness build up the physical brain and the physical body and create a balanced state of health. Doubt and guilt and sin and hate break us down both mentally and physically. How we use our physical brain with our agency and free to think and to will, affects us physically. The truth that the mind reacts on the body is Biblical truth, not just one doctors are becoming aware of and it did not originate with  the scientific and medical professions, but with the law of cause and effect in our actual world. The scientific and medical worlds are merely discovering this same truth that God’s Word has taught His people for thousands of years.

A man hath joy by the answer of his mouth: and a word spoken in due season, how good is it!

Proverbs 15:23

A truthful and good answer actually produces joy in the heart of the person who gave it. I’ve experienced this writing this book, which has been a positive influence on my health. Conversely lying words or hateful words have a negative impact on a person’s health. Not just the one being verbally abused by the words, but also the one saying the words.

“From the fruit of their lips people are filled with good things, and the work of their hands brings them reward.”
Proverbs 12:14

“From the fruit of their mouth a person’s stomach is filled; with the harvest of their lips they are satisfied.”

Proverbs 18:20

Both the work of our hands and the fruit of our lips bring reward and health to the body.

We also see from the scriptures that refusing to repent and remain in poor standing with God results in misery.

10 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:

11 There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.

12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

13 Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips:

14 Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:

15 Their feet are swift to shed blood:

16 Destruction and misery are in their ways:

17 And the way of peace have they not known:

18 There is no fear of God before their eyes.

The immoral person who hasn’t repented and put their faith in Christ is not just immoral and selfish – this state of their heart and these choices they make result in misery and mental unhappiness. And then things often go even further and the state of their heart not only makes them feel mental depression but affects their physical body and their health often breaks down, or they develop fatigue issues, aches and pains and things like this. Sometimes even more severe symptoms like cancer or heart disease or autoimmune disease.

Recently I spent some time in a medical library and researched trauma, and it’s very well known in the medical community that not only does physical trauma bring on mental illness, but purely psychological trauma can bring on mental illness. I read about how men who had gone to war and experienced the trauma of war – it wasn’t necessary that they be physically injured for this to happen – would sometimes snap and start friendly firing at their fellow soldiers even when they’d gotten back from the battlefield and were safe. It reminded me of school shootings. Like the school shooters, this was a rare, but well-known phenomenon. It’s also known that grief can cause mental illness.

The Bible supports this concept as well.

So, while all mental illness has physical affects on the brain, this does not mean that the origin of the mental illness is physical. Purely psychological causes can be behind mental illness.

The good news is that we have some control over this. We can choose to repent and be saved and experience peace in Christ. We can choose to think hopeful thoughts that have their foundation in God’s goodness and his many promises to us. We can choose to be convicted and moved by His Holy Spirit to do justice and mercy in the world, to speak elevating truthful words, and the true and helpful words we speak will lift our mood and react on us in physically healthy ways.

There may be things outside of our control too. If we’re a child with an abusive parent, we may not be able to do anything about that. (Though society needs to crack down on abuse and develop better ways of determining that it is occurring – I think questionnaires at school and appointments with a school therapist would help abused kids open up about what is going on at home and then the school can get CPS involved). We can’t always control everything. The early church was persecuted and many of them were killed. In cases where we can’t control the situation and we’re suffering, we can know that God will bring good from bad. He will use the experience to grow our faith and help us understand more of His love and what he went through on Calvary for our salvation.

It is a sin to doubt God. Why is this? Because God is good. He is perfect goodness, and our lives in this world testify to that fact. He causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on both the just and the unjust, He has infinite and impartial love, dying for us while we were still enemies with God in order to forgive us and reconcile us to Himself. Hypothetically (because this scenario does not exist in real life) If God were not good, then it would not be a sin to doubt Him. It’s certainly not a sin to doubt people who have let us down such as abusers and selfish people in our lives. It’s not wrong to call people’s actions what they are, evil, if the person has done wrong and evil in their lives (but also to be aware of our own sins and not use their sin as a way to feel we are righteous on our own without Christ). So the reason these attitudes of doubt or hate or indifference towards God are wrong is because He is so just and merciful and good.

Our attitude towards God and our choices involving Him, such as not choosing to repent of sin and believe in Him and instead serving self, carrying the guilt of our past sins, can lead to mental depression, anxiety, mood swings, and even physical illnesses like cancer, heart disease, or autoimmune disorders and symptoms. How we use our mind, a concept known as mental stewardship, or management of our thought life, can bring on not only feelings of guilt and discontent and dissatisfaction, but even full mental illnesses like depression, or generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, etc. This is known in the medical world now. That the mind is very strong in its ability to affect the body. One condition that really highlights just how powerfully the mind can affect the body is something called placebo effect. Placebo affect is the reason scientific studies need to be double blind studies and have two groups of people – those who are given the medication and those who are given sugar pills- and no one is told which group they are in. The mind is so powerful that if someone thinks they have started a medication that is going to help them, their body can mimic the healing effects of the medication and make the symptoms of their illness or underlying condition lessen or disappear entirely, and this happens frequently enough that this effect has to be factored into all scientific studies or the data will be wrong and distorted if it isn’t taken into account. 

There’s even a condition, pseudocyesis, where a woman perceives herself to be pregnant, and develops many or all of the signs of pregnancy, short of having an actual baby in her, but she actually isn’t pregnant. Her belief that she is pregnant causes her body to go through real physical changes that closely mimic the actual bodily changes of pregnancy.

Mrs. White speaks of this concept and says the thoughts we think send electrical signals through the whole system, and if these thoughts are negative and imbalanced, it can bring on a state of inflammation and disease to the whole system. Sometimes it’s poor mental stewardship that brings on illness, but other times the damaging effects of lies that we don’t know are lies can bring on illness, in innocent people. Mrs. White speaks of people losing their sanity because they believed hell burned people forever. These were good Christian people, but lies are damaging, especially ones about God’s character, and have very real negative effects.

A very real challenge that mentally ill Christians who are following God run into is that they may get blamed by other Christians for giving themselves depression or anxiety disorders. One big reason for this is that it’s just not as widely known that poor thought stewardship – harboring doubt and other negative attitudes – cause things like heart disease, and cancer, and autoimmune illness, as it is known that poor thought stewardship causes mental symptoms like depression and anxiety and psychological unrest.

It’s far more common for a Christian to accuse another Christian of lack of faith who has depression or anxiety than it is for that same Christian to accuse someone with diabetes of harboring doubt and disbelief in God. The diabetic is generally thought to be innocent and there’s a higher percentage of Christians who may see the person with chronic depression as guilty. But in reality doubt or rebellion against God can cause both of these conditions. And both of these conditions can also be caused by purely physical causes also. And then some people have both things going on – harboring an attitude of doubt or rebellion, and also perhaps they have a poor diet that weakens immunity, or maybe they were abused growing up which weakened their immune system and brought on sickness, or perhaps they were bit by a tick and contracted Lyme disease which tanked their immune system and brought on depression or disease. There can be multiple factors that bring on a state of mental or physical illness, some may be in the person’s control and others may not be.

The Mind Can React on the Body and the Body Can React on the Mind

The mind can react on the body and the body can react on the mind. It goes both ways. And we should never accuse anyone – this is the work of Satan and people he tempts to engage in his work. As Christians it’s important we seek God for strength to not share in Satan’s work. However, not everyone who brings up this issue is accusatory. There are many concerned Christians who endeavor to encourage one another to harbor faith and trust in God, and their counsel comes from a good place. They can still sometimes be wrong about an individual and may need to get informed about the power of the body to affect the mind, which is not as well known as the power of the thoughts to affect the mental state. They may not realize depression isn’t always purely mental in nature. It’s common for those with Lyme disease – a purely physical infection brought on by a tick bite – to have mental depression. Mrs. White is very helpful in explaining that anything that makes the blood sluggish can bring on a state of mental depression, and that even over-eating for a meal or two can push the person into a temporary depression that is relieved once they learn and practice healthier eating habits. Even things like not going outside often enough to get fresh air, and not having ones limbs adequately clothed can bring on a state of sluggish movement in the blood and bring on a state of mental depression.

It’s important we don’t make the mistake the disciples made when they asked Jesus who had sinned, the blind man, or his parents, that resulted in his blindness, the same mistake Job’s friends made when they jumped to the conclusion that Job had sinned when they saw he fell on hard times in every way, including losing his physical health. In both these cases sin wasn’t the cause of the blindness or Job’s chronic illness.

So sin may not be behind it, and jumping to conclusions based on whether the person is mentally ill, without asking them about their physical and mental health history can lead to errors. However, since we’re all prone to sinning in lifestyle habits, it is actually far more often that we do have some sin behind why we’re sick and even if we haven’t lost our health there’s usually some health-destroying lifestyle errors we’re all making that are keeping us from better health. I don’t believe we’ll be perfect in our lifestyle practices until our character is perfect, and so learning to be healthier and healthier and overcome more and more sin in the area of lifestyle and diet is a part of the sanctification process. So it’s ok to talk to people about areas they may need to improve if you are a health coach or just encouraging someone from church. Remember to include yourself too. There’s things you’re doing wrong you can improve on. Don’t let the person get the idea that you think you’re perfect and perfectly sanctified and that you have an air of self-righteousness rather than humility. You both need Christ and for Him to sanctify both of you. 

What’s not ok though is to try to manage their health or their lives for them. We are to be encouragers and supporters, but not micromanagers. At the end of the day whether this person needs to make certain changes in their thought life or eating habits is between them and God, and not knowing their hearts we really can’t accurately diagnose their condition from a spiritual perspective and it’s not our place to do this. We may think we see sin in them and be wrong. God won’t tell us everything about them. He will however convict that person about their sin. So there’s huge gaps in our understanding about them, things that are known to them and God alone, and it’s important to respect those boundaries and that personal relationship they hold with God.

It’s not right for someone from church to repeatedly accuse someone of sin, and refuse to back off and let them be their own person and managers of their own lives. You can certainly share your concern with them if you think you see them doing something dangerous such as doubting God, or engaging in a health destroying lifestyle practice, but once you’ve expressed your concern and endeavored to give them support and help, it’s not your place to bring up this subject over and over again and lord things over them. After you have mentioned your concern several times, at that point it’s their choice what to do, and God respects their free will. Even God will not force them and so it’s important we don’t do it either. Force is a principle of Satan’s kingdom, not God’s. Back off at that point and witness by example. Endeavor to learn health practices yourself and abide by them and let the person see the benefits of health and getting right with God in your own life. Win them over without words by your godly witness as Paul says wives are to do with husbands who aren’t open to hearing about Christianity verbally.

What is the Difference Between Nature and Character and Why Does This Distinction Matter in Understanding Mental Conditions?

I can’t tell you how frequently it happens that I come in contact with Christians who conclude they’ve lost their relationship with God because they feel angry or jealous or depressed much or all of the time, or because they can’t feel His Presence or His peace. They may find it difficult to focus long enough to study their Bible, and may experience very low levels of motivation to engage in the spiritual activities they once loved.

Their conclusion is often that they really don’t love God after all, or that He has left them. Some even fear they have committed the unpardonable sin, and I’ve talked with people who were convinced of this.

And the opposite is also true. If they go through a period of time where they feel great joy and peace, and a feeling they determine to be the Presence of God when they are worshipping in church, they conclude God is with them, and that they have a good heart with right desires put there by God. Why did they jump from feeling a sense of holiness to the conclusion that their heart is in the right place?

Are feelings of holiness actual holiness?

Do feelings indicate our spiritual state? Similarly atheists and unbelievers will often conclude the same. When a woman has a baby, and feels no emotions of bonding and love for that baby, and instead she feels complete emotional numbness and zero feelings of attachment, it’s common that women in such a condition conclude they are a monster, and make a character judgment about themselves. Regardless of her religious beliefs or lack of them.

But, are feelings or the lack of them character?

As Christians we really do have answers to these important and pertinent questions in God’s Word! Answers that are satisfying and give real clarity. We don’t need to be living as the atheist or humanist lives, and coming to their same conclusions. But unfortunately one of the biggest temptations people face and one of our strongest fallen desires, is to live for feelings, and to place an inordinate focus on emotions. These things have crept into Christian churches – not just the world – and gained traction in a big way, and exerting an influence to embrace false doctrine and to measure our Christian experience by our feelings. The difference is that secular hedonists look to things like promiscuity and alcohol or drugs to feel good, and Christians often look to deeply spiritual feelings and experiences to feel happy, and as the indicators of our spiritual state. We may discard and stay away from feelings that we would consider to be more superficial and rudimentary, but we’re still measuring our spiritual state by feelings, and we’re still centering our faith around feelings.

Can someone be a hedonist if they pursue feelings of holiness?

I believe so. What many do not know is that hedonism simply means that feelings become the focus of your life. The idol of your life. Any kind of feelings or emotions, if they are the focus and aim of one’s life, makes someone a hedonist. It’s not wrong to feel good feelings or emotions. It is wrong to make those feelings an end in and of themselves. And this is what hedonism is.

Hedonism is basically synonymous by living without principle. If a person doesn’t value principles or make them their aim, they end up living an unprincipled life, and all that’s left is feelings and inclinations and passions and desires. What Paul describes in the Bible as being dead even while being alive.”

But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives.
1 Timothy 5:6

It is exactly this state, that Christ desires to free people of. Such a person is devoid of meaning, living nihilistically.

While it may feel wonderful to have feelings of strong holiness and love for God and others while worshipping at church, there is no actual relationship with God unless one is living by principle.

And really this is what separates Christianity from false religions. Christianity is the true religion, because it’s the one built around true principles of love, goodness, justice, mercy. The others are founded on false principles of selfishness, inclination, passion, possessing no real truth and no real virtue.

And the whole point to what our lives in this world are for, is for us to learn how to have a faith and walk with God that is based on principle. Because in heaven, while we will see our Father face-to-face, we will be living by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, in a state of perfect faith, obedience, and trust in God. Yes even with powerful holy emotions and feelings, we won’t be living by those feelings. We will have formed a relationship built on the principles and truths found in God’s Word.

Only such a relationship is a true relationship with God.

We ended the last chapter discussing the Fall of man, and how it was the fall that brought mental dysfunction into the world, illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.

Now let’s pick back up and look at the role of Christ in our redemption, and how the roles of the two Adams show us the difference between nature and character.

It’s interesting and important to understand, that there are distinct differences between Adam’s role and Jesus’ role. Adam is referred to in the scriptures as the first Adam, and Jesus is called the Second Adam. The first Adam and Second Adam share some similarities, but they are also diametrically different in major ways that are core to Jesus’ identity and role as divine Savior of the world.

Let’s read Romans 5:12…

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned
Romans 5:12

Notice how sin entered the world through Adam, but it wasn’t Adam’s sin that condemned each of us to the eternal death sentence. It was our own sin! The Bible is careful here to make the distinction that sin is not something someone can do to you. Just as Satan cannot force us to sin, he can only heavily tempt us, so even Adam could not directly force us to sin. Because we all sinned, we all individually came under the death penalty of the law. This happened when we committed our first sin.

Here we see what Adam’s sin did to mankind. What Adam did to us wasn’t direct; it was indirect. Adam did not enter into our minds and take hold of our agency and our will and force us to sin. Just as Adam’s sin changed the nature of the whole world so that disease and dysfunction and death were now a part of life in this world, just as Adam’s sin changed the nature of the animals so they fought with one another and ate one another, rather than existing peacefully together as they had done before the Fall, so Adam’s sin changed the nature of human beings.

Adam could not actually affect our character – no one has the power to do that – but he did change our nature. Since the seed of all mankind existed in Adam, when Adam sinned and his nature changed, the nature of his seed changed as well.

We read in chapter 1 that everything about us is physical and man does not possess an immaterial spirit. When Adam’s physicality changed in nature, his physical sperm and Eve’s physical eggs also changed in nature, and since people do not possess immaterial spirits and are 100% physical, this caused our nature to change along with Adam’s. Adam could only pass down a fallen nature now, not an unfallen one.

But nature is not exactly the same thing as character. Animals, like us, have a nature, but they do not form characters. Only human beings form characters.

Another way of saying this is that all of God’s creation is under natural law, such as the laws of physics, but only mankind is under moral law – right and wrong. The stars do not have agency and are inanimate. It is God who guides them on their courses. Animals have consciousness and personality, and a sort of agency, but they do not understand right and wrong. Everyone intuitively knows this. We don’t send a dog to court and prison if he bites someone. But we do hold people accountable for their actions.

Only man in all of God’s creation understands right and wrong and can choose through Christ living in the heart to do the right, and reject the wrong, and glorify God in so doing.

And only man can become a monster. But what makes someone a monster? Is it their nature, or is it their character?

Well let’s think about this. A dog which has a nature, cannot ever become a monster. No matter how angry or dysregulated a dog gets – no matter how violent – the dog will either be rehabilitated or in extreme situations the dog will be put down to protect people. But the dog will never get sent to prison with a life sentence, even if it were to kill someone.

So it doesn’t appear to be nature that makes someone a monster.

It has to be character doesn’t it?

If having a fallen nature were synonymous with sinning, then Christ would be a sinner for having Mary’s genetic material and possessing a fallen nature in His humanity. And we know that is not true.

The beauty of Christ is that He was a man just like us with a fallen body, and yet because He was divine He had not sinned and fallen under the power of death, and thus He could resist sin and be victorious so that He could transfer His perfect life to our account and serve as the unblemished sacrifice on the cross.

“For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.

Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”
Hebrews 2:17-18

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”
Hebrews 4:15

When we inherited a fallen nature, it meant that all people would inevitably sin. But nature is still not the same thing as sin. While nature can cause us to sin, sin is always active.

The Bible defines sin as the active transgression of His moral law, either through omission or commission. Omission is when we know the good and right things that we ought to do – our inherent responsibilities to God and our fellow man – and we actively choose to neglect them. Commission is when we know the wrong things we ought not to think or to do, and we actively do them anyway.

“Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.”
1 John 3:4 NIV

“Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.”
1 John 3:4 KJV

Notice the language here: “breaks”, “commits”, “transgresses”. These are all active verbs, showing agency.

Sin always happens with a moral agent conscious and present, and carrying out the sin either in thought, word, or deed. Sin is always active. You aren’t sinning simply by sitting there. Sin is not the same thing as your fallen state. People in comas who lack full consciousness aren’t sinning by merely existing. Sin is not synonymous with being a fallen person in a fallen world. Sin is when you’re sitting there, and you see a girl who has prettier hair than yours, and you start thinking jealous thoughts, covetous thoughts about wanting what she has. Or you know you should thank your mom for buying something for you at the store that you really needed, but you choose to harbor an attitude of indifference to her rather than love, because you’re busy engaged in activities you enjoy and your focus is on yourself, and you let these little acts of appreciation go undone.

Sin is always active.

At this point you might be asking, “But even if I’m just sitting there, aren’t I a sinful person, even without actions? It can’t only be when I’m actively sinning that I’m sinful.” Yes, and what you’re referring to here is character. Character is the state of your heart. Our characters before conversion are sinful – an adjective. Character is a state of being. It’s the moral value of your heart. A character can be very sinful, as we all are before repentance, or if can be a lot less sinful, with a lot of good in it, as we are after conversion and walking with God through the sanctification process over time.

Sin itself is an evil act, or thought, a transgression, something we commit and do.

But, It’s So Unfair What Adam Did!
This may seem unfair that Adam could bring about a condition of things where we would all inevitably sin. But it makes sense if you ask the question “What are people? What is a person?” The answer is a person is a physical being that has a mind that can understand morality and spirituality and make a choice of loyalty or disloyalty to God.

We are physical beings made in the image of God.

Put another way, we are physical beings who can choose to be children of God, or monsters.

Thus in man there is always a purely physical element, that can experience natural dysfunction, and corruption just as the world and the animals do, and there’s always the element of moral agency, through which a person makes the decision to form a holy character through Christ, or to form an unholy one and follow down the devil’s path.

Unlike animals, due to our moral agency, people are both physical and moral beings. All people are both physical and moral. Animals are only physical, and not in any way moral.

Every man, always has this choice. Thus you can see that being 100% physical and existing in Adam, the very nature of being human is what makes it possible for us to inherit a fallen nature.

God couldn’t make people who weren’t physical and thus weren’t under natural law…people who couldn’t have fallen natures as a result of sin.

When the rest of the natural law, including the laws of physics were changed and warped by sin, it wasn’t possible that man as a physical race, wouldn’t be physically changed the same way the rest of the world was.

Such an idea is an impossibility.

The truth is that what it means to be a human being is that we are under both natural and moral law.

So this is a deeper truth than it first appears on the surface. We’re talking about the very nature of what makes us human, and how due to the inherent properties of that nature, a fallen nature is inherent with how sin affects us.

In the Bible, this deep eternal truth about how people are first physical beings, and then only after they have lived for some time and made a choice to follow Christ are they spiritual, is central to Christ’s mission and in showing the difference between the two Adams. The unconverted person who uses their moral agency to reject Christ is referred to as being carnal. The carnal person is not filled by the Holy Spirit and is either an empty vessel, or if this person yields more and more to Satan they can even become possessed and filled with demons. Such a person uses their moral agency to grieve the Spirit and be controlled by the carnal nature and the temptations of demons. The Bible tells us a carnal person cannot even understand God’s Word and the deep spiritual subjects in it, for “spiritual things are spiritually discerned.”

The first Adam provided the genetic material for our bodies. He is our ancestor and the father of all humanity.

But he did not provide for us a record or a character. We each form our own character and it is formed when we make choices, and we each have our own record in heaven of wrongs done and right things done like when we respond to God’s Holy Spirit.

We did not inherit Adam’s record, nor his character. We inherited only his fallen nature.

“So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.”

The last Adam – Christ – became a life-giving spirit.

The first Adam was himself bound by and under natural law. The last Adam was divine., the author of natural law and in His divinity not bound by it in the slightest. Fully God, He took on human nature and flesh in order to free us from sin and the devil.

Speaking of our bodies Paul says:

“it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”

He then goes on to say:

“The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.”

“The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven.”

Adam was quite literally made of dust. Jesus as God is not a created being and is omnipresent, outside of space and time, and not composed of any created material.

The two Adams are not to same. One was able to bring sin into this world only. And once he brought int into our world he could do nothing to save or help us after we each sinned. Adam had zero power to help us with our sin problem. He couldn’t forgive us of sin or live a life of obedience in our stead. Only Someone who was God, the Law-Giver could die in our stead and free us from the penalty of the law. The “Second Adam” lived a perfect life in our stead, and died as our Substitute. He possesses the divine authority to forgive sins and give us daily victory over temptation. The Second Adam holds power to affect our character, not just our nature (the first Adam effects our nature only and not character). This Second Adam is more than human. Rather than depending on someone for life – as Adam did – He is the Source of all life, a life-giving spirit through being both Creator and Savior.

Here in these verses we see an eternal principle at work in the universe when it comes to beings with moral understanding. For all of us, the natural comes first. We are born, and then we must be born again in order to be spiritual.

We even see this play out with the angels in heaven. They were created physical beings with moral understanding. And then they had to choose whether they would worship God eternally or side with Satan.

You might be asking “How do you know angels are moral beings?” Well the Bible actually tells us directly that Satan and his evil angel followers sinned. It doesn’t leave this fact ambiguous or hazy.

“The one who practices sin is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the very start. This is why the Son of God was revealed, to destroy the works of the devil.”
1 John 3:8

While created perfect and without sin, they hadn’t yet formed characters. They had to decide whether to form holy and loving characters or unholy evil ones.

And here we see how Lucifer, a holy and good angel, became the monster Satan and the devil. He chose to sin in an unrepentant way. He grieved God’s Spirit away with his sin, until all that’s awaiting him now is judgment (Jude 1:6).

And this is also how people become monsters.

The Pharisees in Jesus’ day had become monsters. They were planning the murder of Christ, that is how evil they had become. Jesus told them the truth in an endeavor to cut through Satan’s lies and reach their hearts.

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
John 8:44

Unlike us, the angels have already fully formed their characters either for good or evil. The loyal angels will live forever and have been given immortality by God, and the evil angels have committed the unpardonable sin and are reserved for punishment and death.

But human beings have not committed the unpardonable sin (except for people who have already died in a state of rejecting God), and we can choose to be saved and recreated in heart.

So this is an eternal truth that beings with moral agency are first physical and then must decide what kind of character they will form.

It’s not possible for God to create a being with moral agency that is both physical and spiritual at its creation. What I mean by this is it’s not possible for God to create a being with moral agency and not give it choice. Giving it moral agency means giving it choice.

Everyone who is on God’s side is there due to their choice. God can’t create someone to be on His side from birth.

Through the cross, God won all hearts of every moral agent in the universe to His side. Other than the devil and his angels, and wicked men who reject God, every other being will choose Him, and any newly created beings will side with God, due to the love displayed on Calvary which revealed God to be perfect love and perfect holiness.

In this way, maintaining the free will of moral beings, God wins the universe to His side and ensures sin will never occur again after this war is over.

It is in this way that Christ destroyed he who has the power of death, the devil, and brought life and immortality to light, defeating death itself.

“This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
2 Timothy 1:9-10

After Adam’s sin the law was weakened by the flesh. The law was still holy and good, but people possessing fallen natures would now all inevitably sin, and so in the flesh we were too weak to keep that perfect and holy law.

But Jesus fixed the gulf that existed between God and man and between this problem of the natural and the spiritual, where beings who were natural and were physical were choosing not to become spiritual and instead were choosing to sin and become carnal (as seen first in heaven with Lucifer, and then on earth with Adam).

Jesus bridged this gap between the natural and the spiritual, by Himself becoming a man – a physical created moral being – and living a perfect life which He could then transfer to our account, and give us a nature that through Him could choose to live in obedience. As well as paying our death penalty so He could forgive us, He also creates His own righteous character in us as we are daily sanctified and renewed in holiness. He had to live that perfect life and form that perfect character in order to be able to do that.

And this is why He is called the Second Adam, because like Adam Christ had to form a character, yes He had to in His humanity form a character of love and obedience to His Father. So He did what Adam should have done and gave the obedience Adam should have given, which would have resulted in Adam’s case in Adam fathering children with unfallen natures. But in Christ’s case He didn’t only affect the nature, He affected the character, redeeming people, revealing the love of God, and solving this whole problem of nature and character for all moral beings for all time.

This is the power of Christ and this is the way in which He is nothing like the first Adam.

“For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man, as an offering for sin. He thus condemned sin in the flesh,”

in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
Romans 8:3-4

“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—”
Hebrews 2:14

He will swallow up death forever.
Isaiah 25:8

For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
1 Corinthians 15:21-22

The cross refuted Satan’s false charges about God’s character and revealed Him to be absolute perfect love and goodness.

Thus intelligent beings the universe over were won to God’s side and a rebellion will never rise up again. Since no sin will ever occur again, the penalty for sin – death – will never happen again. It will be defeated for ever.

Since there has always been two elements – the natural and the moral – with moral beings made in God’s image, Jesus defeated death and ensured all natural beings would now all become spiritual beings.

Jesus bridged the gap that was made when Satan brought sin into the universe, and ensured that every natural being would become a spiritual being.

Every natural, created being, would choose Him and be loyal to Him, and not sin and fall under the penalty of the law, which is death.

What a phenomenal thing Christ did! What amazing power and love!

But Aren’t Nature and Character the Same Thing?

Before I confuse someone I want to clarify something. I know I probably have some readers who are thinking “But the Bible speaks of being given a new nature at conversion, so aren’t nature and character the same thing?”

Actually to be honest, the Bible rarely mentions nature. Speaking of the conversion experience, the Bible mentions the heart, not the nature. ‘Heart’ is referring to the part of our mind that possesses moral agency, where we form character.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
Ezekiel 36:26

Notice that ‘nature’ is not mentioned here. There are two things that are mentioned, being given a new heart or character, and being filled with the Holy Spirit.

David during his repentance for the sin of adultery and murder asks for these same two things:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
Psalm 51:10

Jeremiah uses similar language, and adds another important element.

“But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people
Jeremiah 31:33

In Jeremiah God speaks of the importance of having God’s law stored in our minds through the reading of the Word, and how it’s through the Word that the Spirit works to change our hearts/character.

Jesus described His Word as spirit and life, because the Holy Spirit works through the Word to bring a change to our character and give us holy desires and motives that align with God’s law of love.

Paul speaks of us being a new creation at conversion.

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!”
2 Corinthians 5:19

But clearly we don’t have brand new natures at conversion. There’s a lot that goes into the nature of man. The fact we are physical is a part of our nature. The fact we are finite is a part of our nature. The fact we reproduce and are sexual by nature is a part of our nature, an aspect of nature that angels do not have. The fact we have hands and eyes and ears (senses) is an aspect of our nature. The inherent majesty in the human physical form, modeled after God and being in His ‘image’ – such as our shoulders and our head sitting on them, the noble, chiseled features of our face, and all that’s involved in the majestic bearing we possess the math and ratios and science and all of that – is a part of our nature.

The fact that our bodies decay and age and die, is an aspect of our nature after the Fall.

If it were true that our whole nature were changed at conversion, we’d be given new bodies that did not age, new brains that worked perfectly and without error, and that doesn’t happen until we are given our glorified bodies at the resurrection.

It’s at the resurrection that an entire change to our nature – from fallen to unfallen – occurs. We will not see that happen to ourselves or anyone else until Jesus comes in the clouds of heaven.

Jesus explains that being born again means being born of the spirit. Meaning your nature – your body and brain – are still the same fallen nature. You are born of the Spirit when the Spirit comes and lives inside your body and gives you a new heart.

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh is born of flesh, but spirit is born of the Spirit.
John 3:5-6

A beautiful and powerful verse in 2 Peter – one that is very essential to the faith of the Christian – is the only one I can think of that actually uses the word ‘nature’ to describe a person’s conversion and sanctification.

“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”
2 Peter 1:4

Notice here that ‘nature’ must mean character. There are many aspects of God’s divine nature which we do not participate in. We don’t become omnipotent at conversion. We don’t become all-knowing or omnipresent at conversion.

No, it’s clear that we don’t partake in God’s full nature through these promises, only His character at conversion/sanctification. We become like Him in heart.

And character isn’t something that can actually be given, it has to be formed. This is why the Bible verse says “through these precious promises” we partake of the divine nature. The promises referred to are not just the promises of conversion, and justification, but of sanctification. And sanctification is not instant, but is formed over time, because of this fact that character cannot be given, but must be formed by the choices we make over time.

Even Adam in perfect Eden, though sinless, had to form a character over time.

Now after the Fall, we must engage in the same process, although in our case we must not only form a character, but we must also perfect that character because there is sin in us. Our character must undergo a renovation, not just form solidly in place as Adam’s would have had he never chosen to sin.

Our choices will also form our character solidly into place too though. So we’re kind of having to do what Adam should have done for himself (our individual choices do not apply to others as his choice did), and the character renovation that becomes necessary now due to our sin.

While we can’t be given character as it must be formed, what can be given is the part of the brain involved in making character choices – this part of the nature – changed at conversion, due to our choice to repent of sin and follow Christ.

This part is referred to as the ‘heart’. Not all aspects of our nature change at conversion.

So while it’s not incorrect to say we are given a new nature at conversion – as the character is one part of our nature – I think it’s more accurate to say we are given a new heart at conversion.

You’ll see in a minute why I’m drawing this important distinction. This Bible doctrine has many practical implications with mental illnesses and conditions when it comes to things like determining whether we are sinning by feeling jealous, angry, or depressed.

Character a Part of Nature, but Not the Whole Part
A new heart is not exactly synonymous with a new nature, because our nature encompasses much more than just our heart – or character. But it’s not really incorrect to say that we are given a new nature at conversion, because our character is one part of our nature.

Similarly, it’s not really incorrect as your assembling a bicycle to ride, to call the handlebars “my bike” as technically they are your bike, but it’s more accurate to refer to them as “handlebars”, since they are only a part of the bicycle.

That is the difference, and that is also why some people get the two confused. Because our character is a part of one nature, but it’s only one component of our nature, and there are other components. So our character is one piece of our nature, but not the whole thing.

And it’s our character specifically that God recreates at conversion; He does not recreate any other part of our nature.

What this means is that at conversion we are given a new heart, but this new heart is in a fallen body. Paul puts it this way:

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”
2 Corinthians 4:7

“That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day.”
2 Corinthians 4:16 NLT

The word here translated “dying” is “decaying” in the Greek. Paul is saying here that while our physical bodies are decaying and aging, our character is being renewed and sanctified day-by-day.

Our nature is not changed at conversion. We still have decaying mortal bodies, but our character is changed at conversion and we become a “new man” in Christ, filled with His Spirit.

So this specific part of our nature is changed.

Character and Its Relationship to Sin

As mentioned earlier, a person is not sinning by simply sitting there, or existing. But are they sinful? If they are old enough to have sinned their first sin, then yes they are sinful. And if they sit there long enough they will eventually start thinking some sinful thoughts and they will be actively sinning. We all sin many times every single day.

While Adam did not come into our brain and force us to sin, our fallen nature meant we would all inevitably sin.

So as soon as our brain is developed enough to understand right and wrong, to be tempted by our fallen nature and its inclinations, and to sin, and we commit our first sin, it’s at that point that we become slaves of Satan, and fall under the penalty of the law, condemned to die. It’s also at that point that we then have a sinful character. Sin is now in us – we are sinful – and we are not just inclined to sin because of our fallen inclinations.

From then on we have not just a fallen nature but also a sinful character. We’ve become evil. And only Jesus’ blood can forgive us of our violation of His perfect law and give us a new character of love.

So our fallen nature means we will sin, then once we sin we now have a sinful character. We are now sinful as a person, when before we were just oriented towards sin.

The Bible is very clear that desire is not sin.

“Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed.
Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”
James 1:14-15

Notice when the sin occurs. Not at desire.

Desire can come from either the fallen nature, or a sinful character. I’m not exactly sure at what point a person’s brain is developed enough to think its first sinful thought, but John the Baptist rejoiced in the womb at 6 months old. If he could rejoice and delight in being in the presence of Christ and was cognizant at that age to respond to the Holy Spirit, it seems reasonable to think that a 6 month old in the womb would also be cognizant enough to commit their first sin.

I’m going to need you to follow me closely here. We’re going to cover some very closely-related but actually different concepts, and I need for you to grasp the difference between them, because this subtle difference has implications with conditions like same-sex attraction, addictive tendencies, depression, anxiety disorders, and many other mental health conditions.

Before we sin our first sin we are inclined towards sin because we have a fallen nature. We do not at this point have a sinful character though.

In the womb before even developing mental faculties and reason, a baby may have the generic make-up to be prone in their DNA to anger outbursts, to hate and selfishness, to disrespect parents, which once fully formed they will experience the temptation to do.

Due to having a fallen nature, we’re all inclined to sin. We’re oriented towards sin. It feels natural to us; it is in fact natural to us.

And we do not have the power or the authority to resist sinning. Adam before sin had the power to resist sin because He was filled with the Holy Spirit and lived in right relationship with God.

But after the human race fell into the hands of the devil – really we were sold to the devil by Adam – we no longer belong to God as a race, and we’re no longer filled with the Holy Spirit. Jesus had to buy us back by His death and life, in order to gain the right to give us the power to choose to live holy lives and to give us a new character.

After we sin our first sin we now have a corrupted character, not just fallen inclinations. This is different from the inclinations that tempt us and which we’re oriented towards doing. This is the result of that inclination, when in our powerlessness to resist sin apart from Christ we carry out the desires of that fallen nature. It results in us sinning and we then have a sinful character. It’s at this point that we have become evil. Evil is now not just an inclination, but a part of us. It’s at this point that we’ve incurred guilt, and we need forgiveness, and if we do not turn to Christ, there’s nothing else in all of creation that can wash away our guilt.

So our fallen nature before we sin our first sin has sinful inclinations, but once we sin we now have a corrupt character. Evil is not just outside of us, tempting us, but it’s now within us.

But while we are now fully fallen and our character is depraved, we haven’t formed a fully evil character. Put another way, fallen people after their first sin are not pure evil. If they were they couldn’t ever be converted. Someone in such a state never again responds to the Holy Spirit’s conviction.

A fully evil character happens when a person over time repeatedly rejects the Holy Spirit and sins willfully again and again and again, forming character for evil with each of these choices, until they solidify their character in evil. This is called the unpardonable sin.

There are whole people groups in the Old Testament who committed the unpardonable sin. The whole earth at the time of the flood did this. We see this fact in the verse “every intent and thought of their hearts was only evil continually”. This verse describes a state of character that was fully formed for evil, there was no goodness left in the character. They no longer thought even a single benevolent thought. They were evil through and through.

There’s also one other way to commit the unpardonable sin and that is to die while rebelling against God, but I won’t go into that here as it’s not applicable to the conversation.

Our corrupt character after we sin our first sin now has desires that are sinful. These desires aren’t coming merely from our fallen nature anymore, but from the character we’ve now formed for evil.

So desire for sin can happen due to either of these things.

In both cases, whether before one has committed their first sin, or afterwards, one has not sinned simply by having sinful desires.

Neither has a person sinned if Satan outwardly tempts them with something their sinful character desires.

Temptation is not sin.

Recently I watched Youtube video where a Christian blogger was making the argument that if a person has same-sex attraction that this attraction is due to a character that hasn’t been fully sanctified. What she was really saying here is that this desire was not an unfortunate element of a fallen nature, but it is an element of character.

She believed that if same-sex attracted people follow Christ and repent of their sins, that over time as God changes their character that their desires will change, and they will no longer desire the same sex in a sexual way.

Her argument at its heart – which she may not realize she’s making – is that all desires come from the character, and there is no such thing as desires that stem purely from our physicality, which can become warped and changed by simply living in a fallen world capable of decay.

Her argument is really that the decay caused by the fall doesn’t affect every aspect of our physical bodies, just things like aging, but not our brain and neurochemistry, which affect our perception, and feelings of desire.

I don’t believe that the Bible teaches that the fall only causes decay and malfunction to certain parts of our body, and not all parts. I believe the Bible teaches that all parts of our body can now malfunction.

Why would it be possible for our heart to break-down and we have a heart attack, but it wouldn’t be possible for our feelings to malfunction?

If malfunction is possible in this world, then it’s possible for our feelings to malfunction also.

It is true that there are desires that are purely character desires. For instance, an atheist or unbeliever has hate in their heart towards God and His truth. They do not want to come into the light, the Bible says. They have desires to run from God, and rage if they are too long in the presence of a preacher who has love for God and speaks of His love with adoration.

This is true. If this atheist becomes converted, God gives him a new character, and he now desires what he once hated. His desires do a 180 degree turn.

But does this mean that all our desires are based in the character, and are changed by the process of conversion and sanctification?

I don’t believe the Bible teaches this.

Who as a converted Christian hasn’t experienced weird or dysregulated feelings? Who hasn’t had nights where we had a strange sense come over us that maybe was warped or wrong in some way and we knew it wasn’t a healthy feeling or desire that God created within us, we knew there was something off about it?

The truth is, feelings come from nerves and neurochemicals and hormones. While they interact with the part of the brain that is involved in logic, understanding truth, and forming character, feelings are by nature very rudimentary things.

Look at animals for instance. Though they do not have a character, animals have sexual feelings. Studies are showing that mercury in the water is giving ibises gay desires and behavior. Males are mating and nesting with other males rather than females.

Don’t human beings also have a rudimentary part of our nature, basic-level drives and inclinations that are not part of the higher functioning of the mind? But let’s say a person is exposed to mercury and develops the same base-level desires as the ibises to have a sexual relationship with a person of the same sex. A person can choose not to follow these basic desires. A person can see that it would be sinful and wrong to do so, and they can choose to glorify God by abstaining from such a relationship, going against their biological urges.

This is the difference between people and animals. Like them we have basic drives and feelings and biochemistry; unlike them we have the higher parts of the brain that can understand, obey, and worship God.

Let’s look more into the difference between desire and sin.

It is only when desire has conceived that sin has occurred. The Bible is using the metaphor of pregnancy here. The sperm and the egg must meet for a conception to take place. The sperm alone doesn’t result in a pregnancy. An egg alone doesn’t cause a pregnancy. But when the two meet a pregnancy has occurred. You’ve probably heard the expression “I’m pregnant with an idea.” It’s the same concept here. That of something taking root in the heart of the person. The person agrees with and lets in this idea or this cherished thought of doubt or hate or selfishness. They let it take root in their heart. Instead of just having a desire for something, or an inclination towards something they actively lust after it and pine after it, allow their thoughts to dwell on it, let their minds become “pregnant” with it, and cherish an unholy attitude of rebellion or doubt against God or another person.

Desire gives birth to sin. This means that if you have a sinful character that character will inevitably cause you to keep sinning, because it has sinful desires, and it will act on those sinful desires because it is itself sinful and corrupt. The only way to stop sinning is to be converted and have your heart renewed and sanctified each and everyday. The selfish character must be changed or you will keep sinning.

And if you’ve been given a new ‘heart’ and have begun to form a new character, you will not continue to sin.

No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.
1 John 3:9

Here John uses the metaphor of a seed, taking root, and springing up first into a tender young plant, and then into a stronger one, until it finally grows into a strong and stately tree.

This is what God does in the heart when we have been set free from the laws that make in impossible for us to do righteousness – the law of sin and death – which requires us to perish and pay the penalty for our sins, and which can give no power to do righteous acts, and through Christ sin now no longer has dominion over us. His Spirit is implanted in us like a seed, a new heart is given, and we can do the righteous acts we could never generate on our own.

The new desires of the renewed heart produce new attitudes, new motives, and express themselves in righteous actions.

Desire is not sin or acts of righteousness, but the desires of a fallen heart will produce sin, and the desires of a renewed heart will produce righteous actions.

Thus the answer to our sins is a new heart. And if we have this part of our nature recreated, we can walk with the Spirit.

So as we are sanctified each day, by surrendering selfish desires and not letting them take root, not allowing yourself to become pregnant with them and entertain them, our character is changed. And we sin less and less because our character is becoming more and more holy.

So character is behind the whole process.

The book of James has some powerful key scriptures that illustrate this truth.

“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?

You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God.

When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
James 4:1-3

Once again, it’s the desires of the sinful character that produce active sins.

Jesus gives several key statements that really make this truth plain.

“No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.

Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers.

A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”
Luke 6:43-45

“There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”

And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable.

And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him,

since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery,

coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.”

Mark 7:15-23

Notice how Jesus specifies where “within” is. “Within” is the heart or character of the person. The immoral desires of the character produce active sins.

The character is formed when we, knowing right from wrong, use our will to choose to do right. To surrender immoral attitudes to Him rather than cherish them. To give them up.

If we do choose to cherish jealous or evil attitudes in our heart, that choice grieves God’s Spirit and hardens our hearts, making our characters more selfish and evil.

There are a lot of things that are not the ‘heart.’ If you sick with a strep infection that goes to your brain, and this causes you to have strong emotions of anger and rage, this is not your heart.

If you’re bitten by a tick and develop Lyme disease and it tanks your mood and you become severely depressed, this depression is not your heart.

If you have sexual urges that are biologically based this doesn’t make you a fornicator for having a sexual body. This also is not the heart.

There are many different feelings and experiences that are not the heart or the character.

The character is not the involuntary processes and unconscious processes of our brain and body. If your leg involuntarily twitches that wasn’t a conscious jerk you chose with your will.

If you have the urgency to go to the bathroom, this wasn’t a conscious choice of your will.

If you feel very angry all of a sudden from histamine dumping in your brain, this also wasn’t an act of the will.

If you feel depressed because you have histamine toxicity and it’s chronic, your will and character also aren’t involved in that.

Notice that it is only the desires of the heart that can corrupt a person, not the feelings of the person or their emotions.

And even desires are not sin unless the person “conceives” them, choosing to actively fantasize about immoral things, or to do behaviors that are immoral.

What Implications Do These Important Concepts Have With Mental Conditions?

What implications does this have with mental conditions? Well, it means we can have mental symptoms, mental malfunction and dysfunction, even while having new characters in Christ.

Mental symptoms can affect cognition as in the case of psychosis, where the person loses the ability to think logically and believes nonsensical things.

And they can affect emotions, as is seen in the case of emotional dysregulation which is often a very core component of mental illness.

Let’s go back to the original scenarios at the start of the chapter, and answer some of those questions.

Is a person a jealous person if they feel a feeling of jealousy? Is a mother a monster if she feels no feelings of love for her newborn baby, just numbness?

Are feelings of jealousy jealousy? Are feelings of hate hate?

The answer is no, a person is not a jealous person if they feel feelings of jealousy. They are a jealous person if they choose to think jealous thoughts and have a jealous attitude towards others. Usually feelings will accompany these chosen thoughts and attitudes, but the feelings are not what makes the person jealous.

Remember the definition of sin is an action, thought, or attitude, not a feeling.

Feelings will accompany chosen attitudes and thoughts in a healthy brain.

But in a mentally unwell brain or even for something as simple as insomnia or stress, feelings can be dysregulated and not match up with our chosen attitudes and thoughts. Or feelings can be entirely absent.

Someone has not sinned by having a feeling sweep over them, or even one that persistently stays with them. In major depressive disorder, a person may have a feeling of hate that accompanies them for years or months, caused by their inflammatory rate. They have sinned if they are harboring an attitude or thought of jealousy or hate, not if they have a feeling of hate.

When it comes to emotional dysregulation, I’ve personally experienced the whole spectrum. I was depressed pretty much from day one as a kid, then at age 12 I developed crushing unrelenting depression that felt as sad as if my whole family had died that persisted for 8 years, along with feelings of loneliness that weren’t attached to any real situation. After that at age 20 I developed total and complete emotional numbness where I couldn’t even cry when my father passed away. I felt nothing, no sadness, or joy. I could still feel anxiety and that was it.

I’ve also experienced feelings of guilt when I hadn’t done anything wrong, feelings of strong shame caused by my inflamed physical state when I hadn’t done anything shameful. These are feelings that do usually accompany shameful and wrong actions, and they felt exactly the same as the ones I’d felt when I did actual wrong, only they were much stronger.

Than interestingly, I had an experience a couple years ago when I took a collagen supplement where I felt profound righteous indignation for minor annoyances. My mom making what I perceived to be too much noise in the kitchen, evoked a emotional response from me that felt like Moses throwing down the Ten Commandments in deep, holy anger.

I hadn’t known that righteous indignation could come about from biochemical imbalances – in this case the histamine raise that occurred from the collagen. I’m already histamine dominant and it was too much histamine for my brain.

I was used to more superficial feelings of rage and frustration and agitation coming from histamine toxicity as I had experienced this before, but I didn’t know righteous indignation, which felt so holy and serious – just as it would feel if you found out a church elder had murdered someone or did something else profoundly wrong – could be evoked by biochemical imbalance. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

All of our feelings are at their root physical. And that means that anything that disrupts a person’s physicality and biochemistry could potentially stir up and dysregulate these feelings and emotions.

Don’t Reason Backwards

Rape victims sadly often reason backwards. They feel profound shame, and conclude that they must be shameful in their person. They must be guilty somehow of their rape, because they feel such strong feelings of shame and guilt.

But shame and guilt are common feelings that can be stirred up when a person has been assaulted and there’s lots of inflammation from the assault. The body goes into fight-or-flight and shoots out inflammation and this dysregulates the emotions and feelings.

What does God’s Word say? It says a rape victim is as innocent as a murder victim. Fully innocent. The rapist alone is guilty, the Bible tells us. So a rape victim who feels extreme guilt and shame can know she is actually pure and innocent. The rapist is the guilty one. He is the one who has real shame and real guilt according to God’s record book in heaven. and God has very real wrath for what he did to the victim.

I’ve often wondered if school shooters, slipping into strong feelings of anger due to inflammation from mental illness reasoned backwards and concluded that if they feel hate for everyone that they must be a hateful person and attributed it to their character and who they were as a person, and reasoning backwards that they were a hater, felt hopeless and destined to hate, and then began making plans to act out that hatred.

It can be very dangerous to reason backwards and to use feelings as one’s gauge for their character.

It’s important we reason forwards. I feel a feeling of hate, doesn’t mean I’m a hater. I can choose to love and even if feelings of hate persist, they are just biochemical things at that point. I know God will give me a character that can love so any feelings of hate left over after I’m actively choosing to love are just that, feelings, nothing more.

This is the right way to look at things.

Someone else in my family took collagen too and had the same experience. We have very similar genetics and it caused the same response in us.

A person can experience a symptom called anhedonia where they lose all feelings of love and attachment, all positive feelings and also all negative feelings and they are in a state of total numbness. I had this symptom and when my dad passed away I didn’t even cry. I had severe anhedonia.

Going back to the example in the beginning of this chapter about the woman who did not feel any love or attachment to her newborn baby. This can happen with post-partum depression. It’s also a common symptom of post-partum psychosis. It’s also a common symptom of trauma.

As explained earlier people are physical beings and can have malfunction the same way the animals do, and we are also moral beings. Dysregulated or absent emotions can occur purely as a result of physical problems, and altered physical biochemistry and can have nothing to do with character.

You’re probably asking at this point “But don’t character and emotions share a relationship?” For instance, it’s very common for someone who doesn’t want to repent to have lack of emotions towards God, or even hostile emotions towards him. The atheist may delight in sinful things like self-worship and mocking God, and aren’t emotions involved when we delight in something?

The answer I believe is that yes in a healthy brain emotions flow from and mirror chosen attitudes and the character of the person.

Let’s first look at how feelings and emotions work in a healthy body, according to the Bible, and then we will explore how they can become dysregulated as happens in mental illnesses and conditions.

How Our Emotions Were Created to Work

You will see many texts in the scriptures that say to worship God because He is good, because of his benevolent acts in history culminating on the cross. (1 Chronicles 16:34, Psalm 117:1-2). First the mind grasps the significance and love of the cross, then the emotions well up within the person, and then they give shouts of praise. This is the order God created our mind to work in. He didn’t create us to feel appreciation without understanding and blindly offer praise and then only later intellectually grasp the significance of God’s love. This would be out of order.

You will see this order in Jesus Himself and how His emotions work.

“Then God saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.”

Genesis 6:5-6

Notice how God grasps logically what is happening and then His emotions respond to the tragic truth He is seeing before Him. His emotions respond to truths and reality in the world around Him. His emotions are not something He seeks to stir up apart from the external world and the truth about the situations He is seeing there. He doesn’t lead with emotion and work Himself up into an emotional state, with logic and truth following second.

Responding to the rebellion of His people, and knowing if they do not repent that they will be lost forever, God responds with emotional language in the following verse. You can hear the pathos in the words.

“O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!”
Deuteronomy 32:29

In a similar verse addressing a similar situation God cries these words:

“How can I give thee up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboam (people groups God had to destroy due to their wickedness)? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.”
Hosea 11:8

Jesus is an emotional God, but not in a way that is arbitrary and disconnected from truth and reality. Indeed emotions get their value from truth. There is no value in feeling joy if no significant thing has occurred, but if say a friend of yours has accepted Christ as their Savior and turned from a life of sin the joy is significant and has meaning because of the event and truth that caused the joy.

Jesus tells us there is joy and rejoicing in heaven over a sinner who repents. (Luke 15:7, Luke 15:10)

Emotions do not have value apart from truth and the world around us. They weren’t created to be disconnected things that we work up in order to get an emotional high. In fact it’s Satan who stirs up emotions devoid of reason and works our emotions according to ungodly and evil principles.

“They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and lead astray by various passions”

2 Timothy 3:6

We are not to live for emotional pleasure (or any other kind of pleasure), or use emotions against their correct design.

“She who lives for pleasure is dead even while she is still alive.”
1 Timothy 5:6

There are many passages in the scriptures about pleasure being used for pleasure’s sake rather than being attached to truth that is meaningful and used in its proper sphere and its intended purpose

“For at one time we too were foolish, disobedient, mislead, and enslaved to all sorts of desires and pleasures, living in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.”

Titus 3:3.

You will notice in the scriptures that God describes sinful attitudes as having emotions connected with them.

This aligns with the way attitudes and emotions work according to the verses we read above. We first grasp what’s happening outwardly with the logical part of our mind, and then our emotions respond to that reality and we experience feelings that go with that knowledge.

If we choose to harbor attitudes of jealousy, hatred, and anger, there are emptions that go with those attitudes.

If we choose to harbor attitudes of profound appreciation and gratefulness to God for the gift of His Son and His daily companionship and love, there will be holy emotions that follow those right attitudes.

This is how something like “fits of rage” can be described as one of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5:20.

It’s not the emotion of rage that is the sin. It’s the chosen attitude of unforgiveness, jealousy, or hatred, which results in the fit of rage.

I repeat, it is not the emotion that is the sin, but the chosen attitude.

So if one feels a holy emotion, does this mean the person is holy?

No. Emotions cannot be used to gauge the state of one’s heart. That is not their purpose. While in a healthy person feelings of holiness will often accompany holy choices and actions, it’s those choices and actions that make you holy, not the feelings.

If you’re worshipping in church and all of a sudden emotions of love for others sweep over you, this is not indication you have actually become more loving.

What is it that makes a person more loving? It’s when we surrender jealousy and selfish ambition to God. It’s when we stop fighting His conviction to stop being selfish and we agree to live for the good of others and not just ourselves. Such a surrender will not just manifest as a feeling in church. It will manifest in the life of the person. You will see the person join a Christian ministry and give of their time, energy, and resources to others. You will see them abandon selfish projects and dreams to spread the gospel instead.

There will be a complete change in the life from a heart that is truly surrendered to Christ. There will not be just feelings of holiness and only tiny changes or no changes in the life; there will be a transformation and a daily process of sanctification.

The longer you know the person, the more like Jesus they will be. Or if this person is you, the longer you walk with God the more like Him you will be and there will be obvious, measurable growth from year to year.

If you are having feelings of holiness but no actual change in heart and in life, then you aren’t holy no matter how holy you feel while worshipping.

Facial Expressions
What about our facial reactions, our expressions? Don’t these reveal the chosen attitude of the heart? If someone laughs when they hear someone they know has died, doesn’t this indicate they are harboring hatred in their heart?

The Bible does say the expressions of the face can reflect the character and the chosen attitudes. The Bible tells us the wicked have proud looks on their faces.

“The look on their faces testifies against them;
they parade their sin like Sodom;
they do not hide it.
Woe to them!
They have brought disaster upon themselves.”
Isaiah 3:9

The Bible also tells us the righteous have holy looks of confidence and faith in God on their faces, knowing they are forgiven of their sins. The fact their shame and guilt has been washed away is reflected in their faces.

“Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.”
Psalm 34:5

The Bible speaks of haughty looks in those who are proud.

‘You save the humble but bring low those whose eyes are haughty.”
Psalm 18:27

Indeed the Bible even says God hates haughty, proud eyes, grouping this expression of the face in with sinful things like a lying tongue and hands that shed innocent blood.

“There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.”
Proverbs 6:16-19

But while the face does to an extent reflect the character and responds to the evil in the heart, the Bible is also clear that outward expressions are not a way to gauge character. Only God who reads the heart can distinguish truly proud eyes, from someone who may appear proud due to say high dopamine in the brain or some other condition or situation, but not have pride in the heart. So while our character does influence our facial expression, it does so imperfectly and there are many other things that influence our expression also. Someone can’t look at you and know your character – the face is not a measuring tool of the soul.

Also, it’s not righteous judgment to judge someone as proud who is psychotic and doesn’t understand the difference between pride and humility. Pride is a choice to harbor an attitude of self-righteousness and violence against God or others. It’s not pride if it’s not chosen. A facial expression that comes over someone due to dopamine surging too high in their brain – even if it looks exactly like a proud sneer – is not actually a proud sneer unless they know the difference between pride and humility and make the conscious choice to be proud. It’s not sin for them unless they can tell the difference, and it’s wrong to charge a psychotic person with the sin of pride when they are out of their mind. Perhaps if you know them better and have evaluated them, or they have had a thorough evaluation with a psychiatrist, one could narrow down whether that individual is capable of understanding the difference between pride and humility, and that if it’s determined they are, then a sneer is likely to be chosen pride in their case. But it’s wrong to jump to that conclusion with a psychotic person, based on outward facial expressions and demeanor alone.

In court rooms it is unfortunately all too common for the jury to give the guilty sentence to people based on superficial things like the way the person acted in the court room, whether they showed the appropriate facial expressions, etc. Jesus says to judge with righteous judgment. While the Bible is clear that our feelings and our facial expressions do reflect the state of our heart to an extent, it also tells us these things are not fool-proof and they are incomplete. The Bible is clear that the thoughts of the heart don’t show up perfectly on the expression and that only God can know the thoughts of the heart. God did create our expression and our demeanor and mannerisms to convey the Godly love that exists in our heart, but He made sure that they do this incompletely and imperfectly, so that the thoughts of the mind cannot be fully discerned on the face. This is an issue of individuality and privacy. Only God is allowed to know the inner thoughts and read them with perfect accuracy.

And the Bible says fruit is the way we are to measure and judge others, but that even this is imperfect so we shouldn’t claim to know the heart. When it comes to measuring and judging ourselves, once again facial expression and reactions, do respond to character but not in a perfect way and thus we can’t use them to fully know our heart.

But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.
1 Samuel 16:7

Only God can see what’s in our hearts. To claim that we can gauge what is in someone’s heart by looking at them, or even speaking with them, is to commit 2 big sins:

1. It means we’re giving ourselves divine traits. We think we have perfect judgment like God does. We aren’t leaving room for God to be the Judge of the heart, acknowledging even with our best judgment we will miss things that only God knows and sees. We’re usurping His position.

“I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.”
Jeremiah 17:10

When it comes to evaluating others, if we think we can know the state of their heart by looking at their face or reactions

2. It means we don’t respect or believe in right to personal privacy. We are actually charging God with being a God who doesn’t give people personal privacy in their thoughts and airs out all their inner thoughts via their face. This would be a horrible dystopia if it were true. Privacy is a fundamental right. The privacy of our own thoughts is the most important privacy of all. The reason we can’t see inside someone’s mind or judge their thoughts and character with perfect accuracy is because everyone has a right to privacy in God’s government. They have a right to answer to God alone for their secret thoughts and secret sins, and if they are thinking good things and holding good desires, it is God in the secret part of their mind that inspires them and communes with them. No other person can be involved in this communion. Just God and the individual.

How does the Bible say to gauge whether a person is a believer and walking with Christ?
“Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
Matthew 7:16

“Even a young man is known by his actions–whether his conduct is pure and upright.”
Proverbs 20:11

Only God can see into the heart. The rest of us can see only your actions. Actions aren’t a perfect gauge of character, but they are the best we have access to, until the judgment when all the secret things of the heart will be revealed. The things only God knows will be revealed on that day and this is why we are to judge nothing before the time, until those things are revealed.

“Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.”

1 Corinthians 4:5

It is possible for someone to seem to have fruit, to seem to be walking with God, and to be harboring a spirit of rejecting Him in their heart, a spirit of doubt and accusation against God. So even actions aren’t a perfect way to gauge character or the status of whether someone is walking with God or rejecting Him.

There is no way for a person to know for sure who is walking with God and who isn’t. Only God knows with absolute certainty. At the same time, we can know in a general sense how to live a Christian life and be right with God. We know what kinds of fruit (actions) come from being a converted believer.

Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.
1 John 3:7-8

When people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning.

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions
and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.
Galatians 5:19-21

What Do We Use Then?

So what are we to use to gauge character then, when it comes to ourselves?

The answer according to the Bible is our motives and attitudes and desires gauge character. As explained above, emotions naturally follow motives and desires, and our character has desires which we then act out in the form of thoughts and actions. The answer to an imperfect character that desires wrong things, is to develop a new character through Christ. A converted person rejoices in the truth. An unconverted person rejoices and delights in wickedness. Their fallen character results in them having evil desires and motives, and their emotions respond to and flow out of these evil desires, reflecting them.

But while this is true, this doesn’t mean we can use emotions as a way to gauge what kind of character we possess and our standing with God. Rather it’s the motives and desires that the emotions are flowing from that reveal our character and that we are to use to gauge the state of our heart.

What makes something right is when the motive is giving, self-sacrificial love, this is the desire, and when the actions or thoughts focus on or carry out the good desire. Not stealing and respecting other people’s property is love, for instance. Being faithful to one’s spouse is love. Desiring to cheat on one’s spouse would be an unloving or an evil desire. Coveting someone’s things is an unloving or evil desire.

As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects the man.
Proverbs 27:19

As always what defines right is the 10 commandments. Taking a deeper look at the 10 Commandments reveals they aren’t just actions, but principles. In other words there is a motive actuating each of them. If your dog grabs a stranger’s bag and runs off with it, we don’t say the dog is stealing. Because we know the dog does not possess moral agency and therefore there is no immoral motive involved when a dog takes something that belongs to someone. But if a person does the same thing it’s stealing. Motive is present in all 10. Lying isn’t lying without a motive to deceive. Simply being incorrect about a fact and unknowingly giving someone false information isn’t lying. Lying is when the intent to deceive for personal gain at the expense of others is present in one’s actions and will. Same thing with all the other 10. If a person learning a new language intends to use a swear word to curse at their parents, but uses the wrong word and ends up saying something loving instead, this is still a violation of the 5th commandment. They intended to curse at their parents so they are disrespecting their parents. Likewise if someone intends to say something kind to their parent as they are learning a new language and they say a swear word by accident, this isn’t a violation of the 5th Commandment as the swearing was an accident. One could go on for some time with such examples about how motive is inherent within the concept of sin and of righteousness.

When we desire to fullfill these commandments and the inherent principles within them actuate us, then the desires and thoughts and motives that go in the direction or way of the commandments are holy and right desires and reveal a good character. If our thoughts and desires and motives (and actions) go in the way of breaking the commandments, then we are having sinful desires and motives and if fostered and not surrendered to God, these will make for a fallen, unconverted character.

It is possible to do the right thing with the wrong motives or to do the wrong thing innocently because of lack of knowledge. It isn’t just the thing done, but the motive behind it that makes an action sin for a person. In earlier chapters of this book we learned how someone in complete psychosis who cannot tell right from wrong is not guilty if they commit crimes while in psychosis, and how if someone has good motives but lacks Bible knowledge about a subject – say they live in a polygamous society that has had polygamy for hundreds of years, and is isolated from the rest of the world and has never had access to the Bible – then they may be innocent of breaking the 7th Commandment due to lack of knowledge.

To him who knows to do right and does it not to him it is sin.
James 4:17

Inclinations and Tendencies
Just to reiterate and make this very clear, when I say ‘desires’ I do not mean physical inclinations, like having a physical inclination to cheat on one’s spouse, or a physical desire to engage in a homosexual encounter or a physical desire to eat unhealthy food, or a physical desire to be famous and worship self and feel a thrill from it. Our bodies can have all kinds of faulty physical desires that can be related to things like neurotoxins and histamine and other biochemical imbalances.

Rather I’m speaking of the kinds of desires which comes from the character and are either immoral or moral. Not the basic, rudimentary drives we all have within us and which have nothing to do with the character, and which are subject to dysfunction, such as someone having same-sex attraction from mercury toxicity disrupting their hormones and their mental perception.

Do not envy the wicked, do not desire their company; for their hearts devise violence, and their lips declare trouble.
Proverbs 24:2

This text above shows motive. The wicked devise violence. They plan out how to harm others. Their goal is destruction and violence of that person, often due to envy or hatred.

Read the following text and note how motive is written into this entire text, in fact it’s spelled out clearly. You can see how what makes something an evil act and what makes someone a wicked, unrepentant person is when the intent and the motive is to harm another person or God in order to selfishly promote oneself above others and at their expense.

Of course even converted people will have some immoral and selfish motives. They will sometimes sin also. But the whole of their motives will be more like Christ than like Satan, and if unconverted it’s actually the other way around. If the Christian has selfish motives, they will surrender them to God, not foster and encourage or cherish them. They will hate the selfishness that still exists in their character and desire strongly for God to remove it from their character and mold them into His humble and pure character. They will make effort on their knees in prayer to gain the victory over self. They won’t celebrate the sin that still exists in their character or encourage it. The unconverted do the opposite.

If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause:
Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit:
We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil:
cast lots with us; we will all share the loot”—
my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths;
Proverbs 1:11-15

In the above verse the wicked covet the material possessions of others and so they kill them and take their goods.

Notice in this verse how the wicked kill and steal from innocent people “without cause”. This doesn’t mean they don’t have a reason or a motive. Their motive is selfishness, and they may have a number of reasons and past history factoring into why they gave into the temptation to do this. But what they are doing is still without cause, because by this the Bible means it’s without just cause. There is no just reason for them to be killing and stealing. A just reason would be something like a group of men capturing Lot and Abraham going and fighting and killing some of those men in order to rescue Lot. Or stealing back from someone something they stole from you (which really isn’t stealing at all; it’s just protecting your property). But when someone does something for an unjust reason such as stealing in order to get that person’s goods, the Bible calls this stealing without cause, meaning without just cause.

For among My people are wicked men; they watch like fowlers lying in wait; they set a trap to catch men.
Jeremiah 5:26

Jeremiah 5:26 is another verse depicting that to be evil one must have evil motives and showing clear evil intent.

Notice also the clear motive shown by the sacrifice of Christ.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Philippians 2:1-8

The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
John 10:17-18

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.
John 10:11

The person who biochemically desires a homosexual encounter hasn’t sinned. It only becomes sin if that person allows themselves to pine after and engage in fantasy over that desire, or if they actually go out and have a gay encounter with someone. A physical desire can be just a physical desire; it’s not sin. But if we let that physical desire become a cherished desire of the mind and heart and not just a feeling, then it’s a sin.

So when judging our heart to see if we’re right with God we’re not going to search our emotions or biochemistry to see if our body is oriented toward fornication or anger or any other sin. What we’re searching for is whether we are harboring a desire for fornication or sin that makes it an idol in the heart. Our body may desire wrong things. But our mind may be surrendered to God at the same time. But if our mind is angry at God for not letting us engage in fornication, if our mind is looking for a way to break this commandment and get away with it, if we are pining after it, then we’ve made it an idol, even if we aren’t actually engaging in it.

“For the word of God is alive and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
Hebrews 4:12

“Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”
v. 13

How do we determine whether our heart is right with God? By the Word, not by human reasoning. By searching our motives and intents of the hearts through lining our motives up with God’s Word and measuring them.

However, we cannot do this in our own power. Notice how the verse says the Word is alive and active. What it means by this is that the Spirit works through the Word both to teach us from God’s Word and to reveal the state of our hearts. Only the Spirit can open our understanding and make the Word clear to us. Only God truly knows our hearts. We don’t even know ourselves with 100% accuracy even when lining ourselves up with His Word, but He knows us with perfect knowledge.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
Jeremiah 17:9

Here we see a perplexing problem. Since the heart is deceptive, how can we search our own heart to accurately assess the state of our heart and our motives, if we’re so deceitful that we won’t be completely honest, even when we’re trying to be?

The answer is given in the text that follows:

“I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.”
verse 10

Praise the Lord, God knows our heart through and through; He can both assess and cure our sinful condition.

If we seek to engage in the process of searching our heart and measuring our motives and intents of the heart in our own mental power, we won’t be successful. We need God to try the heart, and to reveal the state of our heart to us through His Spirit working together with the Word (The Bible). This is the only way we can come to an accurate knowledge of the state of our heart. We can’t combine humanism with the Bible and seek to identify and cure our condition without Christ, using our own mental prowess and our will power. We must realize our dependency on God and ask Him to send His Spirit to teach us and reveal the true state of our heart. To see the true state of our heart will require humility. Those who are too proud will miss defects in their characters and evil desires in their hearts because they are too proud to be open to seeing the truth.

It’s necessary to magnify Christ and look to Him as the solution. It won’t be any benefit to us to get weighed down by the sins we see and there’s no reason for this because Jesus is the remedy. The purpose of revealing the evil in our hearts is for a redemptive purpose, to bring us to conversion, and also God periodically does this process with us through life as part of the sanctification process. He shows us our sins and our defects of character for the purpose of us working with Him on these specific weak points to overcome them. The goal is always redemptive, the end result is always victory. Through Christ we can overcome every one of our weak points and character defects.

“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
John 8:44

“For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.”
Matthew 15:19

For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
Mark 7:21-23

“Their feet run to evil; they are swift to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are sinful thoughts; ruin and destruction lie in their wake.”
Isaiah 59:7

“And you have done more evil than your fathers. See how each of you follows the stubbornness of his evil heart instead of obeying Me.”
Jeremiah 16:12

“All a person’s ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the LORD.”
Proverbs 16:2

What Are Emotions Good for Then?
Now that we’ve established that emotions are not a safe way to gauge character, I think it’s important that we ask the question “Well what are emotions good for then? What is their purpose?.” And also the accompanying question “What are emotions exactly?” If living by principle is what ultimately matters – living with the right motives of love and goodwill for God and man – and this choice is made by the will and the intellect, then why have emotions at all? Why would God create them?

Let’s look at what emotions are. As explained in the verses above where we looked at God’s mind and attitude and how He first intellectually grasps a subject or chain of events, and then responds emotionally, we can see the purpose of emotions.

Emotions allow us to feel in our humanity the deeply significant moral truths in the world around us.

Emotions aren’t valuable in and of themselves. It is truth that is valuable.

To illustrate this point you can ask any parent which scenario they would rather have:

In the first scenario they develop crushing depression and feel terribly sad every day of their life, but their kids are alive and well.

In the second scenario they are somehow given a substance that makes them feel deeply significant peace and joy all of the time and life feels like a profoundly wonderful and significant experience, but their child dies in a tragic car accident and they never see them again.

Parents will always choose the scenario where they feel crushing sadness but their kid is alive and well. They won’t choose the scenario where their emotions feel happy and healthy but their kid is dead and they never see them again.

Why? I think the answer is obvious. Because they want life for their kid. They want good things for the child they love so much. And they value the relationship they have with their kid. The value of the relationship and the well-being of the child is what matters.

This is true of all valuable things. It’s the thing itself that matters. People are made in the image of God, thus what happens to them and how we treat them matters because they are profoundly valuable. If we happen to have anhedonia and feel nothing for the people closest to us, this lack of feelings hasn’t negated their value, neither has it negated our responsibility to love them with actions of kindness.

But people aren’t robots or computers. A computer will just generate information and come to accurate conclusions. A computer will give us the facts. A computer can just as easily tell you it’s 70 degrees outside as it can tally up that 11 million victims died in the Holocaust. Not only does a computer not really grasp the weight of that tragic reality mentally, but it also doesn’t emotionally respond.

It makes sense for people to emotionally respond to great good or to great evil and tragedy. And that’s what emotions are – they are these weighty and important truths reacting upon a human being, a person with heart and soul.

When people do not react with emotion to important things, it definitely feels off both to them and to the people around them. Not only does it feel off, but it creates very real problems. When I had severe anhedonia and could feel no emotion except anxiety, when people I knew experienced a personal tragedy, I still cared and knew how significant it was for them, I just didn’t have an emotional reaction. And I found it much harder to act in a human way with them. I had to put expressions of concern on my face, because they didn’t just naturally form. My arm movements were kind of mechanical. I had to do a lot of acting and even then it was difficult to conjure the human response they needed. Even though I cared deeply, I hadn’t realized how much of our human reactions to console and comfort happen spontaneously as a result of neurohormones and biochemistry in reaction to sad events, and how it’s very difficult to manually create this same outward expression when your biochemistry isn’t cooperating.

When mental illness causes people to lose their emotions, you’ll see them act in a stoic way that makes it hard for them to communicate with one another and do the natural human behaviors that God programmed into our design. And if they are without emotions for too long and the people around them are without emotions also, they may even start to forget how to do these behaviors. This happen in the psychiatric hospital when people are there long-term and only interact with other mentally ill patients and do not interact with healthy individuals.

Of course many people in the psych hospital also have problems with cognition and mental perception, and their social cognition is impaired, so many of their odd behaviors and ways of interacting are stemming from cognitive issues and not from lack of emotion so that needs to be kept in mind, but definitely some of the patients have anhedonia as their only or prominent symptom and are in the hospital for that reason.

Another Reason Emotions Matter

A key reason emotions matter is because people matter. And if a person who matters is sad or troubled, both the situation that caused them to be troubled matters, and their own mental health matters.

The health of a person made in God’s image is significant and important. So the intense feelings of sadness, which cause a form of suffering, matter for that reason.

We should seek to alleviate suffering whenever we can. We shouldn’t try to do this in a vacuum, focusing only on the emotions. It’s unfortunately all too common for psychiatrists to prescribe medication to people who have had years of abuse, and then never offer any other form of help for them. There’s a psychological component when abuse has occurred, that needs to be addressed. The person also needs to be removed from the abusive home, not simply prescribed medication.

Even in cases of abuse, when the psychological element has been addressed, and the person has been removed from the abuse – even though the cause is physical or verbal abuse – supplements and health protocols can help and can be used alongside psychological interventions with great results. Abuse not only disturbs a person mentally, it actually breaks down the brain at a physical level. It causes inflammation, cell damage, dysregulated neurotransmitters, and a dysregulated immune response. Supplement protocols can rebalance these systems that have been thrown off by the abuse, and repair damaged cells. This will build the person back up at the physical level and make them feel stronger mentally and physically.

There are people who get depression and other troubling emotions from purely biochemical sources, such as Lyme disease, or mercury toxicity. Not everyone who experiences sadness is experiencing it from a psychological or situational source. It can be from pathogens in the environment or in the body. I had crushing depression starting at age 12 that felt like my whole family had died and was unrelenting for 8 years. This depression was actually greater than what people describe feeling from events, unless those events were especially tragic and severe.

I heard a testimony of a woman who had a hysterectomy at a young age, and when this surgery is done a woman goes very quickly from having normal hormone levels to having almost no estrogen or progesterone. Estrogen is involved in a happy mood, and if it plummets some women can become extremely depressed. The woman described a depression that was so severe she struggled not to commit suicide and battled constantly at an emotional level to stay alive.

Several years later she was finally put on estrogen hormones and her depression lifted and she was no longer depressed. Tragically her husband a child were killed in a car accident. She explained that the depression she feels now from the death of her husband and child, while obviously terribly painful, is not as severe as the depression she experienced from low estrogen.

That’s how much our biochemistry is involved in our feelings and emotions. And some people experiencing biochemical depression definitely do suffer terribly, and as Christians we ought to care about their mental health and inform them about treatments that can reduce or alleviate their suffering.

What is Schizophrenia?

I offer online and phone peer support to people with mental illnesses and their family members, and one thing that has become very clear to me as I’ve engaged with them, is that almost no one knows what schizophrenia really is. Even mothers whose adult children have been diagnosed with schizophrenia after a mental health crisis and treatment in a psychiatric hospital, do not know what it is, in particular they often do not know that their adult child experienced psychosis, or understand what psychosis is. They saw that their child said strange things and exhibited strange behaviors, but they don’t know really what it is they were seeing, and that psychosis was causing many of these strange behaviors. In not knowing about psychosis, they are failing to see and understand the core component of their child’s experience that lead to a mental health crisis and resulted in hospitalization.

They’re completely missing what actually happened.

My Gratefulness to God and to the Psychiatric Community for Restoring My Sanity
I first want to explain that my sanity and possibly my life was saved in a psychiatric hospital when a good psychiatrist put me on lithium that brought me out of a psychotic break, and gave me back the use of logic so I could understand God and His truth again.

I believe God uses doctors and hospitals as His agents. We need psychiatric hospitals the way we need ERs and they save lives.

I’m very grateful that psychiatric hospitals and involuntary hospitalization exists! In fact, I even think that involuntary hospitalization needs to be increased to 2-4 weeks from the 72 hours that is usually the law in most states.

Personally I came out of psychosis within 5 days time, but the average time one comes out of it is closer to two weeks, so I believe it should be increased as so many families have the sad story of their psychotic loved one being released too early before the meds kicked in, and racing back to the streets to a lifestyle of illogical living, hiding out in tends from the FBI or refusing to re-establish relationships with family because they believe their family is poisoning them. Some of these people are on the streets in the middle of winter, in dangerous conditions, and some die in such a state.

So we actually need longer involuntary hospitalizations for people with schizophrenia in my opinion.

Lack of Education a Major Deficit in Care
Acknowledging the importance of emergency care in psychiatric hospitals, I also want to draw attention to the deficits and areas that need to be improved. If you have a loved one with schizophrenia, it’s important you understand how the system works and what to expect, what its deficits are, and how to navigate them in order to get the best possible help for your loved one.

The truth is there is a huge lack of education in psychiatric hospitals. The most common protocol is for them to discharge you with a diagnosis, and medication, and instructions on how to take the medication, and give the sufferer and the family zero education about their mental illness.

Once Discharged, the Person is Often Treated as Though They are Not Psychotic
Thus when the family gets home, and the child continues to act different to how he acted before the mental breakdown and hospitalization, families usually deal with him as though he does not have psychosis, as they are unaware he has psychosis, or do not know enough about it to know how to interact with him. When their adult child does things like argues with them about Bible doctrines they used to believe, using nonsensical arguments, or mentions Satan and demons (because they are hearing demonic voices), the mother will tell me that she is going to pray that God will convict her child that he is believing something that goes against the Bible, and convert him back to the faith.

She asks God to appeal to his reason, not understanding that her son is in psychosis, and that the definition of delusions, one of the three core components of psychosis, is that the person’s brain malfunctions, there is reduced neural signaling between the regions of the brain, and the frontal lobe of the brain – the part responsible for reasoning – gets dialed down and disconnected from the other parts, rendering logical thought impossible.

Schizophrenia Similar to a Sleep State, With the Frontal Lobe Under-Active
Psychosis is similar to a sleep state, where there is substantially reduced activity of the frontal lobe and it nearly shuts off, and dreams are highly emotional and nonsensical because emotional centers of the brain are activated, but the frontal lobe, where reason happens, is dialed down.

Such a person needs a lot of understanding and grace, and ongoing medical treatment, but that can’t be given if the parents haven’t been educated on what their child went through and what psychosis is, and they still think his ability to tell right from wrong is fully in tact, and that he was experiencing other kinds of symptoms, but they don’t know about psychosis specifically.

Pressure to Go Off Meds too Soon
If the parents don’t understand their child has been psychotic, and often still is to a large degree after returning home, they can’t adequately support the adult child in taking medication and reducing neuroinflammation so the parts of his brain can connect again, and he can regain the use of his reason. It’s common for parents to want their child off medication, not understanding he’s psychotic and that it’s not safe for his psychosis to go untreated because he can’t reason and will make errors in judgment that can make him a danger to himself or others, and give him untold amounts of mental and psychological suffering. They also often don’t know that anti-psychotic medications are the fastest way to bring a person out of psychosis and work better than natural treatments for this (natural treatments are better for continual improvement; anti-psychotics tend to max out after a few weeks to a few months and continued improvement past that is rare, but they are good for maintaining mental stability and preventing psychotic breaks). The side effects of antipsychotics are atrocious as anyone who has ever been on them will tell you, and the kid will complain and ask to be taken off them, but they are often a necessary evil, as human beings are complex and intelligent beings, and if they lack judgment they can get into all kinds of trouble and danger.

Sometimes pastors may see it as a denial of faith to be on meds, and encourage the person to just pray and seek God. I’ve even experienced pressure from people in the natural health community to not go on medication and use natural approaches, when I was clearly at a point where supplements weren’t working to control my symptoms, and I needed something stronger to pull me out of some residual psychotic symptoms.

There’s pressure from many different sources to take the child off meds before he comes out of psychosis enough to gain awareness of his condition and can be pro-active in his ongoing treatment.

It’s not uncommon that the person goes off meds, and goes back into full-blown psychosis, and enters another crisis situation.

All due to the fact that the family wasn’t educated about psychosis. If they knew what it is, and how serious it is, they would be unlikely to let their child go off the meds and would do everything in their power to keep him on them, until his sanity returned.

Core Beliefs Return to Normal Once Sanity is Restored
Psychosis affects a person’s core beliefs, not because they suddenly believe differently or have made a willful choice to adopt new beliefs, but because losing their ability to reason they now string together information about reality in nonsensical – and often very creative – ways. They change in personality and in values due to it, and adopt strange beliefs and religious practices that aren’t like them, sometimes even holding outright contradictory beliefs. The way to get them to go back to who they were and the beliefs and values they cherished prior to psychosis – back to the real “them” – is to treat their brain. When they see the world correctly, they will return to their usual way of interacting in it and their core beliefs. If in psychosis, the person hasn’t committed sin when they adopt strange beliefs about God or when they stop going to church due to catatonia (inability to move). You can’t act normally with God or anyone else when your basic understanding of the world and of Bible doctrine has been twisted and distorted due to psychosis.

It feels like your brain and sense of self is fragmented. You can’t even adequately connect with yourself, let alone other people, or even God. You can’t even correctly conceptualize who you are, and the person often believes delusions about the self such as that they are secretly famous or have famous people as their friends, or that they are Mary and pregnant with Jesus, and other delusions.

If they were a Christian prior to developing psychosis, a person will start living a Christian life that aligns with the Bible again when their brain goes back to aligning with reality again.

If they were an atheist by choice before entering psychosis, they will return to atheism once sanity returns.

If they were Buddhist before psychosis, they will return to being Buddhist once sanity is restored.

From there they can then decide whether to stay atheist, or stay Buddhist, or to choose to believe in God. When sanity is restored moral agency is restored, they will once again be able to hear and understand the Holy Spirit’s convictions, and they can then be prayed for to become converted.

My Psychosis Taken as Rebellion When it Was Mental Confusion
In my own life, I had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and my family was still not educated or told about psychosis. My bizarre behavior and adoption of strange beliefs was often (though not always as some did know I was suffering) seen as teenage rebellion and angst, and even many years later during my worst psychotic break I’ve ever had, when at age 32 I ran down the street at 5 am and acted impulsively and bizarrely, and my very logical mother knew something serious was wrong, she still didn’t know it was psychosis. (I had enough awareness to know if I shared my belief with her that I was called by God to open dimension portals to save the world that she would not believe me, but not enough awareness to know that my beliefs were delusional.) After coming out of psychosis in the hospital, I knew immediately I had been experiencing psychosis as the new thought patterns that aligned with reality were so obviously on-point, and my old distorted thought patterns now seemed nonsensical, but there was much I still needed to know about psychosis, and some of the other symptoms I needed to monitor and watch out for, and I didn’t know to do that or how to do that, and the doctors and staff did not educate me about my psychotic break and my mental illness (I was diagnosed with bipolar 1 at that time, and then later schizoaffective, both of which are very similar to schizophrenia). I was just discharged and sent home, and this is the norm for mental health treatment. I had to educate myself when I got home, and I found it difficult to find adequate information about my illness and other similar psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia. There’s a huge lack of education on this mental illness in society, and a huge need for it. Even when I explain to them what it is, they are so unfamiliar with it that much confusion still exists in their mind. So I decided to write a whole article on what schizophrenia is, to endeavor to make the condition more familiar and less shrouded in darkness.

What Society Thinks Schizophrenia Is
The commonly-held misconception in society is that schizophrenia is when a person has multiple personalities. When they express one personality for a while and then involuntarily switch and express another personality; it kind of comes over them. You may have heard friends tease each other, referencing the condition in a joking and inaccurate way, when their friend makes quick changes in preferences. One says “I want to go to Subway, no wait let’s go bowling instead.” Their friend jokes “You’re so schizophrenic, make up your mind!”

Multiple personalities is not schizophrenia. Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder – DID), is a different condition from schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia do not have multiple personalities. Rather they experience something that feels like a fragmentation of the self, a fragmentation of their perception of reality, along with auditory hallucinations (voices), or visual hallucinations. Not everyone with schizophrenia has both hallucinations and delusions. Only one is needed to get a diagnosis of schizophrenia, or you can also get a diagnosis from having a thought disorder with no hallucinations or delusions. Word salad which is where you can’t string together a coherent sentence, and other forms of incoherent speech are usually the indicators psychiatrists use to determine the person is experiencing thought disorder, as it reveals their thoughts and not just their words are incoherent. (The reason behind why the person is speaking unintelligible words is because their thoughts are disjointed and incoherent).

Disintegrated or fragmented is a good descriptor of what it feels like to have schizophrenia. Your perception can’t integrate and you can’t see reality as one coherent picture. You don’t have a sense of self that is coherent either and may think you’re God and yourself, or that you’re famous or somehow connected with famous people and can’t see that doesn’t make sense.

Brain scans of people with the condition show the frontal lobe – the part of the brain that allows people to reason and think logically – is dialed down and not signaling properly with the other regions of the brain. The person enters a mental state that is similar to dreaming where the frontal lobe is similarly dialed down and there’s emotion and activity going on in other regions of the brain, but not in the logical center.

Schizophrenia is not an ultra-rare condition, and somewhere around 1.5-2% of the population have it. Let’s just take the number on the higher end…in a church with 100 people, you’ll have two members with schizophrenia. Bipolar 1 is a similar illness to schizophrenia, and it affects 3.5% of the population. That’s 3 people in a church of 100. So in a church of 100, there will be 5 people with a psychotic disorder in your midst.

The truth is you have probably already come in contact with someone with schizophrenia.


Homeless and Schizophrenic?
You know that homeless person on the side of the road, that you drive by on your way to work? The red head with the slight build who is very charismatic and looks like he could be an actor or a speaker? The one who looks like he’s talking to himself, or maybe speaking out loud to God, who folds his hands to pray and then shouts? If you walk by him he calls out to you to prepare for the end of the world, and people often wonder why he doesn’t try to better himself and get a job instead of being hyper-focused on the end. Doesn’t he want to eat? He looks famished. The one that when people engage with him in conversation they find out he has unconventional ideas about God and science, claims to belong to a religion that no one else is a part of. He thinks he’s somehow related to John the Baptist. At first you think this means he thinks he shares DNA with the prophet and is an ancestor, but if you talk more with him you find out he thinks he’s the successor of John the Baptist and has the prophetic gift. But his prophecies don’t make logical sense and definitely don’t line up with the scriptures.

He claims to have been a concert violinist in the past, but most people doubt that’s true, because they’ve grown used to the fact that much of what he says doesn’t add up or make sense. Then one day someone gives him a violin and you see him on the street corner playing it in beautiful tones. Clearly he’s not a novice. So what is he doing on the streets; why isn’t he still playing in the concert halls?

This man has schizophrenia.

The Word is The Source of Truth
But what is schizophrenia? Well the way to conceptualize anything is by the Word of God alone. We don’t want human opinions when it comes to truth, because human ideas of what is true outside of and apart from the Word of God, will just be error and not true at all.

As explained in an earlier article, the Bible does support that mental illnesses exist, that the brain is a physical organ that responds to psychological stress or physical stressors such as Lyme disease with dysfunction and malfunction, just as every other part of the body can do. Because we have that basis from the Word of God, we can study the human brain using MRI imaging machines and blood tests, and questionnaires to gauge mental acuity and analyze a person’s perception and processing. Because the brain is physical and people do not possess and immaterial spirit, we can study the brain, even the parts that make up the self and the personality, and our perception of the self.

When the brain malfunctions it’s much more complex than when a kidney malfunctions. Our brain is involved in all of our perceptions of the world around us. Our eyes merely take in information; they don’t conceptualize. To even look at a computer screen and know it’s a computer, involves brain processing. The eyes only take in the image; they don’t recognize it as a computer.

Every thing that we look at with our eyes in this world, has a corresponding neural circuitry in our brain that recognizes that thing and tells us what it is. Not only does it tell us what it is, but it tells us what attributes and qualities it possesses – whether it is blue or black, whether it is large or small, how many inches high it is, and how it relates to other things and what attributes it shares in common with them. For instance, our brain categorizes information and can conclude that a hammer and a wrench are both tools, categorizing them based on functionality.

Our brain tells us when we’ve said something that is an exaggeration, and sends an impulse to us, if we are a Christian, to correct our mistake, and to make a point to be accurate. It tells us also when we under-emphasize something important and need to put more emphasis on it.

Involuntary, unconscious processes in our brain tell us when we’re sitting upright and when we’re too far to the side, and the result is we never fall over or stumble out of control.

Our brain does all of this, and so much more, every day. But when someone has psychosis, all of these categorizations get misplaced and connected in the wrong ways. Incoherence and illogical thinking results. A person may see a wrench and hammer and conclude that the common denominator between the two is that they are used by a person, rather than that they are tools. The person can no longer see what things are, and the connections between ideas; can no longer categorize information into the right concepts.

A good definition for the distorted thinking that occurs in psychosis is that it is when your brain makes the wrong connections between things and ideas, and when it fails to see what things are, often combining two things or concepts into one idea. For instance, the FBI which is a purely human organization, will get conflated with a divine mind, and the person will believe the FBI is basically an omnipresent, omniscient organization with more than human power to spy on them at all times and always know where they are.

Or the person may believe something like they are God, or a famous person and themselves at the same time.

Hardware and Software Analogy
Let’s use the analogy of hardware and software with computers. Let’s say that a “hardware” problem is a brain problem – the biochemistry and neural signaling is disrupted and contorted, and this is happening at the biological level. This is causing the person to come to false beliefs.

And let’s say a “software” problem is something psychological, like an atheist who doesn’t want to believe there is a God because he has sins he wants to keep doing. So he adopts a false belief due to a spiritual and psychological reason.

Or a software problem can also be a lack of education or being taught misinformation. Someone in a Buddhist country has never had access to a Bible, therefore they lack the knowledge necessary to adopt Christian beliefs.

Psychosis a “Hardware” problem, Not a “Software” Problem
Using this analogy psychosis is not a “software” problem. The person isn’t coming to the wrong conclusions about what things are and how they are interrelated, categorized, and connected because they have been raised with falsehoods, and they need to have access to the truth in order to come to the right conclusions, or something purely psychological such as they don’t feel ready to hear the truth so they are blocking it out and choosing to believe a lie instead. Of course, this happens to people all the time. Such people are merely misinformed and need education, or they are dealing with psychological pain that needs to be addressed and they may need encouragement and to develop resolve to embrace the truth, knowing truth will eventually set us free, even if there’s pain along the way, and facing and embracing the truth is the only way to peace.

It’s even possible for a person to believe very nonsensical things due to psychological reasons. A person involved in pantheistic religions, may want to believe they are a divine being, part of the divine consciousness that permeates and lives inside all things. Or someone may reject Christianity to believe in evolution, that they are no more than a highly evolved animal and there is no God.

It’s true that people can believe very disjointed, nonsensical things for psychological reasons, perhaps a desire to be the highest authority in their life and not to submit to God’s authority and His moral law. A young man may want to sleep around in college, and he knows it’s wrong, and so he embraces evolution and secularism as a way to justify his actions and continue his immoral behaviors.

A young woman growing up in a Buddhist part of the world like Bangladesh for instance, may believe in pantheism because she hasn’t had access to knowledge of the Bible. She may be innocently ignorant.

But people in full psychosis are different. They are not choosing to believe nonsensical things. And they aren’t believing nonsensical things due to misinformation or a lack of education. These things aren’t the cause behind their nonsensical conclusions. They are dealing with a “hardware” problem, not a “software” problem. No, in their case, the brain has been rewired due to the altered neurochemistry, and electrical waves and other physical factors, and it can’t operate with the correct neural connections needed to arrive at true conclusions that allow it to rightly interpret and understand reality

This is a hardware problem. The person’s brain is malfunctioning, rendering sane, logical thought impossible.

Another term for the laws of logic, is the laws of understanding. It is the laws of logic that allow us to understand anything. When your physical brain malfunctions in such a severe way to render logical thought completely impossible, as happens during a psychotic break, understanding becomes impossible.

Thus the person can’t understand what things are and how they work and how they are connected with one another.

Thus the person wrongly concludes something like the FBI is inserting messages into their minds when they hear audible voices, because they can’t rightly conceptualize what the FBI is, giving them divine properties such as the ability to read and understand one’s thoughts, to always know where they are at all times, rather than seeing them as finite human beings in an organization limited by the current technology of the time period. They lose the ability to understand the current technology. Even if they study it, their mind forms wrong connections and conclusions, such as that the technology definitely can read our thoughts and insert thoughts into our mind, because if we can put thoughts and concepts into a computer through internet signals, then the FBI could use such signals to insert thoughts into our minds which will be picked up like a radio frequency and projected into our mind.

They can’t see that the human brain doesn’t have receptors radio signals, and has the completely wrong configuration to pick up such signals and interpret them as messages.

They also can’t rightly conceptualize what schizophrenia or mental illness is, and so they can’t make the connection that voices in your head could be mental illness.

When we’re talking about perception we’re basically talking about consciousness. And who knows all that is involved in consciousness? No one but God can understand something so complex. To be conscious involves God giving the breath of life into our body.

“For in him we live and move and have our being.”
Acts 17:28

“…He who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and its offspring, who gives breath to the people on it and life to those who walk in it:”
Isaiah 42:5

“In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”
Job 12:10

Our bodies are made of atoms, but these atoms are not conscious on their own. It takes the power of God to make us conscious. The mystery of how the Holy Spirit infuses the body and brain with life and gives us consciousness can never be known, and is outside of the ability of a human being to understand. That is God’s domain and only a divine Being can understand it.


However, while we can’t study the Holy Spirit who gives us consciousness and life, we can study our physical brain and how it operates while alive with science.

Imagine the complexity of the thought patterns and perceptions of a human being. Now imagine that due to the fall, malfunction of this brain is introduced and becomes possible (illness and malfunction were not possible before Adam introduced sin into this world). Now imagine that a specific individual person is healthy and happy in their early years, until they experience very real personal stressors in their life, such as they get bit by a tick and develop Lyme disease, or they live in a house with copper pipes, and they become copper toxic, and this affects the epigenetic expression of their body and they develop a mental illness. As you can guess, the possible ways their brain could malfunction and their perception could become distorted, could be almost endless.

This is why when a person develops schizophrenia, their perceptions and ideas about many different topics and concepts in the world can be distorted in almost endless ways. They can be illogical in an almost endless amount of ways, and there are an almost endless about of delusions they can believe. The delusions can be things that are incorrect but make some sense as they could be possible but simply aren’t, such as believing one is famous, or they can be things even more incoherent and disjointed in logic such as believing one is literally the devil and God at the same time, or that one can open dimension portals by swiping their hand. Depending on the unique neural wiring the inflammation from the underlying illness is giving you, you will have different connections, and they may be only slightly disjointed and disconnected from reality, or they may be very disjointed and very disconnected with the logical connections we see in reality.

Grouping of Symptoms
Schizophrenia is a grouping of mental symptoms. Psychiatry has simply grouped together a set of mental malfunction and given it the name schizophrenia. In mainstream psychiatry, the mental illnesses recognized in the DSM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which is the book Drs. use for diagnosing and treating patients), are defined by clusters of symptoms. There’s many different overlapping symptoms among diagnoses. For instance, post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) has many overlapping symptoms with schizophrenia. But in order for one to be said to have schizophrenia, they must have a certain number of symptoms listed in the schizophrenia diagnosis. They can’t get a schizophrenia diagnosis from having some of the symptoms of schizophrenia; they must meet a certain base amount of the schizophrenia symptoms in order to be said to have it.

In mainstream psychiatry, medical tests are not done to determine if one has schizophrenia, and there are no physical markers that can be said to be schizophrenia. What I mean by this is that while schizophrenia has been linked to things like high dopamine, and this is known in psychiatry and can be found in the medical literature, and it’s also been linked to high glutamate. So there isn’t one biomarker that has been shown to cause schizophrenia. There’s a number of different imbalances that can be involved, and there’s evidence for different kinds of schizophrenia. Someone can get the same symptoms of schizophrenia from high dopamine, another from high glutamate.

No medical testing is done to diagnose someone with schizophrenia, however. Diagnosis is given based on an interview with a psychiatrist, and written tests. And while high dopamine is involved in schizophrenia, high dopamine is also involved in anxiety disorders and other mental illnesses. Thus there are a number of mental disorders that can be produced by high dopamine, and just which symptoms the person develops from the high dopamine will vary from person to person, due to genetics, and their unique individuality.

This is very different from say getting a diagnosis of cancer, where a biopsy is taken, and that specific form of cancer is found in your body, and you’re diagnosed based on that. But this way of diagnosing is similar to the way something like an autoimmune disease is diagnosed. Sometimes CRP (inflammation) markers are raised and a person is diagnosed with an autoimmune disease based on that, but many times there are no physical markers when a person has an autoimmune disease and they are diagnosed based on symptoms alone.

So, really schizophrenia is just a cluster of mental symptoms a person is suffering with.

Which is why it’s so common to start off with one diagnosis – say depression – and then later your low mood and lack of energy develops into seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, and you get a schizophrenia diagnosis. If depression and schizophrenia were biochemically completely different, it wouldn’t be so common that depression develops into schizophrenia. This happens because many of the same imbalances that cause depression also cause schizophrenia, such as weakened immunity, histamine toxicity, Lyme disease.

All Mental Illnesses in DSM 5 Epigenetic in Nature, Not Purely Genetic
Mainstream psychiatry as well as Functional Medicine recognizes that all the mental illnesses in the DSM 5 are epigenetic in nature. What this means is one is not born with them and they aren’t purely genetic. They come about as a result of genetic susceptibility (usually) and environmental stressors. These stressors can be purely psychological, such as verbal abuse, or physical such as Lyme disease.

What this means is if you shift the body towards health and balance, you can shift the epigenetic expression of the body, and your symptoms can become less severe and you can improve. Conversely, if you come in contact with more toxins or stressors, symptoms will worsen.

Yet unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists often say things to their newly diagnosed patients like “You will have schizophrenia for the rest of your life.” While it is common that by the time a person has had a complete psychotic break that their body is very toxic and there’s lots of inflammation and weakened immunity, and that many of these people won’t return to how they were before developing schizophrenia, and their condition is very serious, it’s inaccurate to say they definitely won’t recover completely. Spontaneous recovery due to reduction in the stressors that brought on the condition does happen, in fact there is a study that says the spontaneous recovery rate is 50% in underdeveloped countries.

Many Functional Medicine doctors believe the toxins in industrialized countries is what contributes to us having more mental conditions and a lesser rate of spontaneous recovery from conditions like schizophrenia.

Hollywood made a movie called a Beautiful Mind about the mathematician John Nash who had schizophrenia. But they left out that he was actually one of those people who spontaneously recovered.

It does happen, and if you add in nutrient protocols, and detox protocols that get toxins out of your cells and brain and treat your condition, there’s an even higher chance you will recover.

Schizophrenia is like depression. Perhaps you’ve known someone with a life-long tendency towards depression who had decades where they were fine and happy, then when major stressors in life hit such as a death in the family, they would slip into depression again for 4 or 5 years, then come out of it and be fine again. That’s how epigenetic conditions work. The greater the stressors, the more it turns on the expression of the faulty genes and symptoms worsen; the less the stress the lighter the symptoms, and it some cases it’s possible to completely recover.

That person with depression may never experience it again in a chronic way if they are treated with nutrient therapy. I know my depression has improved greatly from amino acids and b6 which is the cofactor the body uses to make calming neurotransmitters like Gaba and serotonin.

If you do happen to mostly or fully recover from schizophrenia, mainstream psychiatrists will say you had brief psychotic disorder if your psychosis didn’t last more than 6 months and that you didn’t really have schizophrenia after all.

If your psychosis lasted longer than 6 months, but you’ve now recovered they will usually just change your diagnosis with no explanation about it, from schizophrenia to something like Borderline Personality Disorder (this happened to a friend of mine), leaving you to assume that they must have decided they got your initial diagnosis wrong.

A mistake in diagnosis does happen, but if someone gets better from their condition they weren’t simply misdiagnosed. Their condition has improved. They’ve experienced a partial or full recovery from it. This is not usually acknowledged by mainstream psychiatry, sadly, even though they definitely believe in this concept as it follows from the belief that these conditions are epigenetic in nature, and if you were to point out their epigenetic nature, they would in fact agree with you when directly questioned.

But it’s part of the mainstream psychiatry culture to be silent about this fact and not make people aware of this.

How Functional Medicine Diagnoses Mental Conditions

In Functional Medicine a person is diagnosed based on testing, but they are not diagnosed with an illness based on the testing. So you wouldn’t go to a Functional Medicine doctor and have your copper levels tested and maybe your methylation tested or get tested for mercury toxicity, have these tests come back positive, and then get a schizophrenia diagnosis. They also wouldn’t give you an MS diagnosis or anything like that either. Rather, your diagnosis would be copper toxicity, overmethylation (if you tested as overmethylating), and mercury toxicity. This would be your diagnosis, and then the mental symptoms you had – say delusions and hallucinations – would be seen as symptoms. You would then work to reduce your delusions and hallucinations by getting the heavy metals out of your body and correcting the biochemical imbalance of overmethylation with supplements that slow down the methylation cycle. You would then likely experience a reduction in delusions and hallucinations.

Seeing Functional Medicine practitioners and being tested and put on supplement protocols to balance my biochemical imbalances was a huge part of my healing, and I see continual improvement in my thinking even today. I keep getting better as I do different treatments, most recently herbs that boost something called BDNF that enables the body to heal and repair neurons.

Schizophrenia is a Syndrome, or Condition, Not an Illness
I prefer to refer to the Functional Medicine way of referring to mental conditions. I don’t think it’s accurate to conceptualize schizophrenia as an illness of its own. It’s a white lie to say it’s its own illness, because an illness requires known pathology that is unique to that illness. If you have ovarian cancer for instance, it’s diagnosed based on the actual presence of the cancer and the location. No other condition has that pathology except cancer. But with schizophrenia there are multiple known pathologies, not just one. For instance, both low and high dopamine contribute to schizophrenia symptoms, high histamine does too, as do many other things. I think it’s honest to think of schizophrenia as a condition or syndrome, or a set of symptoms. Like how Chronic Fatigue syndrome can be caused by many different things and is referred to as a syndrome, we really should be referring to schizophrenia as a syndrome as well, caused by things like heavy metal toxicity, or abuse experienced as a child, or Lyme disease, etc.

The term ‘schizophrenia’ is helpful as it allows for a person to quickly refer to a set of symptoms all at once, rather than having to list out 10-15 symptoms every time they want to mention what they are experiencing or refer to their condition. But we need to be calling this schizophrenia syndrome and conceptualize it as a syndrome. I think this is the honest way to look at it.

Symptoms of Schizophrenia

But which symptoms are we talking about here? Which symptoms make up schizophrenia?

There are a number of them, but I would say that the symptom of psychosis is the most important one. It’s the one that affects a person’s ability to tell right from wrong and function as a moral agent. As Christians we understand that this function is the most important one that God gave us, and it’s far superior to other functions such as the ability to feel emotions, that if they are compromised is not nearly as serious of an issue, though it’s still a problem. Moral perception is involved in our ability to glorify God, to make choices to repent of sin, have faith in a Savior, and walk in obedience to His commands. It’s this perception more than any other that separates us from the animals and makes us in the image of God, though every part of our design is also involved in us being in the image of God, this one is the most central.

Psychosis is the symptom that can lead to things like a suicide because a person is under the delusion that they must kill themselves in order to save the world. It’s the symptom that involves errors in judgment and in the understanding of the world and how it works.

Psychosis is three main symptoms: delusions, thought disorder, and hallucinations. Delusions are nonsensical beliefs that a person cannot see around or reason to know they are untrue. The person comes to these nonsensical conclusions and beliefs because their brain is biochemically imbalanced, and the imbalance makes it so they cannot use the laws of logic (the laws required to understand anything). Their brain malfunctions and becomes incapable of logic. Thus they deduce and add up many things wrong. The more severe the illness, the more things they get wrong and can’t add up logically.

Thought disorders are ontologically the same concept as delusions. Ontology is the study in philosophy of what things are. For instance, the definition of a square being a shape with 4 equal sides and corners at each end, is ontology. So what I mean by referring to ontology is that thought disorders (most of them; there are a few that don’t fit into the same category), and delusions are the same concept. They are when the brain breaks the laws of logic, and thus the person can’t understand things, or make sense when they speak. An example of a thought disorder is something like incoherent speech, also known as word salad. The person seems disoriented, and gives random incoherent words, like “Eat, figurines. I must solution for ever.” Another example of a thought disorder is clanging speech, where a person uses words with the same consonants and general sound, sometimes in a sing-songy poetic way. So you may ask them how they are doing, and they may reply “Cocacola clutters the counter-top, but I like a crisp sip of soda.”

There are some thought disorders that ontologically are not the same concept as delusions. One of these is poverty of speech, which is just where the brain is devoid of conscious, intentional thinking, and the person is zoning out due to inflammation that has become so strong it’s made it impossible or very hard for the person to access thoughts and retrieve information. This obviously isn’t the same thing as a delusion that involves neural wiring distorting logic. It can be from extreme stress and inflammation and parts of the brain just stop working due to fear or stress and are temporarily “paralyzed”.

But the thought disorders that are at the heart of psychotic disorders are the ones where there’s a break-down in logic. In psychiatry they break up delusions and the thought disorders that also involve a loss of logic and problems with logic, and list them as separate symptoms. This is probably done to distinguish them from each other, so a family member or a doctor can distinguish between when a person is more loosely connected with reality as is the case when a person has word salad and can’t even form a coherent sentence, and when they are more closely connected with reality, as is the case with say a persecutory delusion that the FBI is inserting thoughts into their mind, and the person can form these thoughts into sentences and talk about them. In both cases – word salad and a persecutory delusion – the person’s brain is incapable of logic, but definitely with word salad their logic is even more disjointed than with the persecutory delusion.

It’s important to understand and point out that when a person has word salad or other incoherent speech, that their brain is malfunctioning and this is why the speech isn’t coherent. This is not a problem with the mouth or the ability to speak. The person can form words fine, and they have no speech impediment. The reason nonsense is spoken is because the brain is confused and is processing ideas and concepts in a disjointed, nonsensical way.

Hallucinations are when the part of the brain involved in imagery and sound is over-activated, often due to brain inflammation. Just as your computer can have images and music pop up randomly when you haven’t clicked on anything, when you get a computer virus, then brain when inflamed can have random images and voices pop up and see and hear things that aren’t there.

Of these symptoms, the most important is delusions and thought disorder. This is not to say that auditory or visual hallucinations are not a series problem and do not need to be treated – they are definitely very serious and cause a lot of distress to a person with a psychotic disorder, and they definitely need to be treated. But the most important symptoms are delusions and thought disorders – the symptoms where there is a loss of understanding and logic. If someone sees a vision they think is from God, but it’s a delusion, and in this vision “God” tells them to kill themselves in order to save the world, if they still have the ability to be logical and they have moral understanding, they can check that message with the scriptures, and know there is no way God would actually want them to do that, and that it goes against God’s Word to take their life – the Bible sees it as self-murder and instead our admonition in the scriptures is to take care of our bodies because Christ loves us and died for us.

But if they lose judgment and moral perception, then they cannot check the hallucination with the truth in God’s Word. They may study their Bible and come to wrong conclusions, and may determine that they do need to take their life.

A delusion such as this one is known as a delusion of persecution or martyrdom, and this is a common symptom people in full psychosis experience.

Other symptoms of schizophrenia include things like intense fatigue, catatonia which is where the person is frozen in a position and cannot move, which is very debilitating as sometimes people in such a state cannot even get up to go to the bathroom or to eat or drink, cognitive symptoms which mean it’s hard for them to figure out how to do basic tasks such as how to load a CD onto a computer, or they can’t process the meaning of the words when they read a book, and they have to keep reading a sentence over-and-over, racing thoughts, anxiety, insomnia, flat affect, which is where your face does not show emotion, anhedonia which is where you can’t feel your emotions and you just feel completely numb.

Schizophrenia isn’t the only mental illness that involves psychosis (delusions, though disorder, and hallucinations). PTSD can also sometimes involve hallucinations. Bipolar 1 disorder always involves psychosis. Even anxiety disorders and depression are now known to sometimes involve psychosis, and I think psychosis is on the rise so some of this may not just be psychiatrists becoming more aware of psychosis occurring in depression and anxiety disorders, but that there’s just more people developing psychosis than in the past.

The illnesses with psychosis as a main symptom are really schizophrenia, bipolar 1, schizoaffective, and delusional disorder. But once again, I believe it’s honest to think of these as conditions or syndromes, not as individual illnesses.

Bipolar 1 and schizoaffective, are basically just schizophrenia with mood symptoms. Both involve mania – periods of elevated mood and energy – and depression – periods of reduction in mood and energy. In bipolar 1 the person only has psychotic symptoms when either in depression or mania, and not when cycling out of depression and into mania, or the reverse, cycling out of mania and into depression. In schizoaffective, the person has psychotic symptoms the entire time, whether in depression, mania, or in-between.

The Simplest Way to Explain Psychotic Disorders Medically

After seeing doctors – both mainstream psychiatrists and being put on medication – and Functional Medicine doctors and doing supplement protocols, and doing personal research about psychotic disorders over the course of about 8 years now, my conclusion is that the simplest way to explain psychotic disorders like schizophrenia from a medical standpoint is to say that a dysregulated immune system is the underlying common denominator behind all cases of psychosis.

It’s the dysregulated immunity that you will see mentioned in the medical literature as the cause of both the positive symptoms like voices and delusions, and negative symptoms like catatonia, poverty of speech, and anhedonia.

In cases of systemic inflammation it’s common for part of the immune response to be revved up too high. This is a state the body goes into when killing off infections and protecting itself against pathogens or psychological stressors. This brings on the fight-or-flight response, which is a state of heightened alertness that leads into the psychotic symptoms.

In fight-or-flight other parts of the immune response are dialed down. This brings on the negative symptoms.

If the person stays too long in fight-or-flight they can have a chronic psychotic disorder.

Not everyone who enters fight-or-flight will develop psychosis. Some people in chronic fight-or-flight will get anxiety disorders, cancer, and other illnesses and not a psychotic disorder. The specific condition you get is different, and things like genetics, your unique brain temperament and biochemistry, and the types of exposures and stressors you’re exposed to play a factor in which illnesses and which symptoms you will develop.

When the under-activated part of the immune system is balanced out and boosted by to health, negative symptoms reduce and are eliminated.

When the overactive immune response which is giving brain inflammation, is calmed back down and balanced out, the positive symptoms like delusions and voices abate.

When the immune system is dysregulated, neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol get thrown out of whack. The exact way in which they are thrown off is different and varies person-by-person due to factors like your unique genetics, the type of brain and temperament you have, etc. Some people are naturally, even when healthy, higher in dopamine than other people. These people tend to be very creative. When in a state of chronic fight-or-flight when dopamine usually rises even higher, these people experience much higher dopamine levels than the general population and are more prone to developing psychotic disorders specifically as a result of stress, as opposed to developing cancer.

Even among people who develop psychotic disorders, there’s variation. Some of them experience histamine being too high, rather than dopamine. Besides genetic factors and brain temperament and natural biochemistry, which can be histamine-dominant even in a healthy person and predispose the person to histamine toxicity when in a chronic state of fight-or-flight (histamine-dominant people tend to be your very ambitious and highly motivated people), exposure to mold mycotoxins is another factor that tends to cause people to develop psychosis from histamine rather than other neurotransmitters. A history of allergies and sensitivities also makes a person more likely to develop psychosis from histamine.

Fun-loving, life of the party people are often naturally high in serotonin. They do very poorly on SSRIs, which can make them manic and psychotic. When in the fight-or-flight response such people tend to overproduce serotonin and can become psychotic from serotonin going too high.

You can see how there are biochemical types of psychosis, and even within each profile, there’s variation, for instance two people may both dopamine and histamine dominant psychosis, but one of them may have dopamine and histamine at the same levels, and the other may have dopamine higher than histamine. Or maybe the second person also has slightly high serotonin levels that are also contributing to their psychosis and revved up state.

No two people are exactly alike. And there’s more variation than just neurotransmitters too. One person may have lead toxicity contributing to the immune dysregulation, and the other person may have mercury toxicity. These variations will affect how the psychosis manifests and also which neurotransmitters are dysregulated and in what way.

But the common denominator between all cases of psychotic conditions, is the immune dysregulation.

I’ve found that taking herbs to boost and modulate my immune response has been one of my most effective treatments for my mental symptoms. In particular, my anhedonia, which is a state of total emotional numbness, did not respond very well to medications, which is common, but it responded excellently to supplements that boost the immune response and get blood flow into the deep regions of the brain to restore cell-signaling and neurotransmitters to those parts, which resulted in feelings coming back.

It’s well-known in the medical literature that negative symptoms don’t respond as well to anti-psychotic medications as the positive symptoms do, thus many people who have been brought out of psychosis with antipsychotics are left in a state where they aren’t delusional and their voices are greatly reduced, but they still have no emotions, and have symptoms like flat affect where they have little facial expression, and poverty of thought where they don’t have access to thoughts and their brain is very dialed down so they can’t participate in life and communicate with loved ones.

The immune-modulating supplements like bovine colostrum and ginkgo biloba can help greatly in such cases.

The Walsh protocol for mental illnesses and conditions helps greatly too. Walsh has identified 5 different biotypes that can cause everything from ADHD and depression to schizophrenia and bipolar. He focuses mainly on neurotransmitters and biological processes that affect neurotransmitters, such as methylation which if too low can cause a person to have too high levels of histamine, and if too high causes a person too have too low levels of histamine (too high or too low is not good; balance is key), and causes dopamine and norepinephrine to be too high.

I have psychosis from 3 different Walsh biotypes, and taking supplements to correct these 3 different imbalances helped me with mood swings and logic, in particular. But the immune-modulating supplements helped me most with the anhedonia.

Everyone is different in how they respond but many people have seen a moderate to great improvement from the Walsh protocol. It’s often the case that a person with a psychotic condition can greatly reduce their antipsychotic medication after getting on Walsh supplements, and some can go off meds completely and supplements are enough to control symptoms. This is me most of the time. Most of the time I don’t need medication and can control my symptoms with supplements alone, but when exposed to mold or ragweed, which I’m very sensitive to, histamine goes too high for me and brings on compulsions and psychosis, and I need to get on antihistamine antipsychotics at a low dose.

But for the most part I only take supplements and have good mental processing.

If you’re interested in learning about supplement protocols, I recommend a book called ‘Natural Healing for Schizophrenia’ by Eva Edelman. In it she includes all of the currently-known natural protocols for schizophrenia. It’s very comprehensive, and I found it very helpful in my recovery.

It is at first quite overwhelming, so don’t take it all in at once, but try a few things in it and see if they help you, and if not try a few more.

Here is a link to purchase the book:

Natural Healing for Schizophrenia & Other Common Mental Disorders | Borage Books

I also recommend William Walsh’s book called ‘Nutrient Power’. He developed the Walsh protocol, so his book includes only one protocol and is a lot less comprehensive than Eva Edelman’s book (The Walsh protocol is in Eva’s book too). However, his protocol is very helpful and his book is more intellectual and scientific, so it appeals to that kind of reader. Eva’s book is written in a way that is tailored more to the average person without a scientific background.

Nutrient Power – Walsh Research Institute

But, If My Loved One is Hearing Demon Voices, Doesn’t That Mean They are Being Harassed by Demons?

It’s common when a loved one is found to be hearing voices, especially if the loved one reports hearing demon voices, and is diagnosed with a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia, that family members will ask the question: “How can this not be demons when my loved one is hearing demonic voices and the nature of the things they are commanding him to do are immoral things like suicide?”

They see the voices as having evil intent, however, they aren’t taking into account a couple of very important things.

Everyone Hears Demons, but In Cases of Real Demons, They Flee When We Resist Them
For one, everyone hears demons in some way and is tempted by demons and yet we aren’t all troubled over the voices to the extent that the loved one who has been hospitalized is troubled.

There are actual mediums who channel spirits every day (this is a serious sin don’t do it! I’m just bringing it up to make a point), and yet who do not experience the loud voices that people diagnosed with schizophrenia here, making it hard or impossible to sleep, troubling them 24/7.

There are over a billion Catholics in the world who practice sorcery and mediumship by praying to Mary and the saints. They are not all troubled in the way people diagnosed with schizophrenia are troubled.

I’m not making the argument here that demons can’t trouble someone mentally or insert loud voices into their minds…in fact there are accounts of people involved in witchcraft and other false religions where people report they are mentally harassed by demons…I’m just endeavoring to stimulate logical thought when it comes to this subject.

I think there’s far too much emotional thinking when it comes to the subject of demon-possession, and not enough sound logic.

The Bible says every Christian will be tempted by Satan. This is a normal part of life in this world. That’s not to say it isn’t difficult or awful to have Satan here in this world with us, but due to the fall and the situation we’re in now as a result of the fall, Christians are daily tempted by demons directly everyday. Even Jesus was tempted by Satan daily when He walked on earth as a man. The Bible doesn’t say that we’re supposed to consider temptation to mean there’s anything wrong with us or our relationship with God. We aren’t supposed to pray away the tempting voice of Satan; we are supposed to resist it, and we’re told that in resisting that voice it will flee from us. But then we’re told it will return again later to tempt us again. Nothing has gone wrong if we’re tempted and we aren’t supposed to try to pray away all temptation. Rather the answer given is to pray for strength to resist the temptations that Satan will send us throughout our lives.

Demon Voices From Psychosis Do Not Flee for a Time When Resisted
However, with the person experiencing psychosis they will tell you the demon voices do not fit this pattern where if you resist the temptation they go away for a time. During a psychotic episode I had in 2005, I heard demonic voices screaming at me 24/7, all through the night and day. They told me they were going to kill me. I tried to pray them away, called up pastors and had them pray for me, resisted anything I thought was evil, and yet the voices kept coming. I could only sleep 3 hours per night the voices were so loud and I also had extreme anxiety that made it almost impossible to sleep.

If these had been real demons, they would have fled when I resisted their temptations and prayed to God and had others pray for me. Real demons always flee when a person resists them in Christ’s strength.

Satan Doesn’t Usually Let People Know it’s Him When He Temps People; This is Not Usually His First-Line Strategy

Another important thing to keep in mind is that usually when Satan tempts someone, he doesn’t let them know it’s him. He tries to come to people in the most deceptive way possible, introducing temptations in a way where you think it was your idea to engage in the immoral action you’re being tempted with.

In false religions, demons may appear to people in visions or communications, but they rarely claim to be demons. They usually claim to be ascended masters, or holy angels, or deceased loved ones, or gods and deities.

Satan rarely comes to people and says “Hey it’s me; I want you to kill yourself and here are my arguments as to why you should do it.”

However, this isn’t to say that demons will never disclose themselves for who they are. We know from the scriptures that demons at the time of Christ revealed themselves to be demons on more than one occasion.

“When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way.

“What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”

The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.”

He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water.”
Matthew 8:28-32

“Moreover, demons came out of many people, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew he was the Messiah.”
Luke 4:41

The demons in these accounts let everyone know they were demons. Satan will do what he perceives to be advantageous to himself. He can take on the form of a snake or he can reveal himself to be who he really is, whichever he thinks will be most advantageous.

So if a loved one is hearing voices that claim to be demons or sound obviously demonic, it’s worth asking the question why would demons be so avert? And consider the possibility that maybe it’s not demons.

The Voices Are Nonsensical
One of the most important points to this discussion is that what loved ones don’t realize is that the voices are nonsensical. This is something the psychiatrist understands however, but unfortunately doctors don’t usually teach and inform the family, even if their loved one signed for them to have access to their records and to speak with doctors. There’s a huge lack of education.

The voices that communicate with them aren’t logical voices, directly going against Bible truth, and trying to get the person to disobey God. For instance, the demon voices that screamed at me for 3 weeks in 2005, and sounded just as audible as if there were people in the room with me screaming at me, screamed “We’re going to kill you before your prayers break Eminem out of the secret society he’s in! Before this wonderful thing comes to pass we’re going to kill you and give you a tragedy instead of the wonderful happy ending the Lord wants!” But the thing is I hadn’t really been communicating with Eminem through the Holy Spirit for the past couple years like I thought I’d been, and I wasn’t really praying Eminem out of a secret society of demon worshippers in the music industry that he was trapped in. In real life, he wasn’t trapped, and was choosing of his own volition to be a musician who made music about immoral themes. He could leave the music business at any time and stop releasing new records.

Some might give the argument “Well Satan can lie, so he could have invented this whole story about Eminem to get you to believe it.” But when Satan gives us false ideas we compare these ideas with the Word of God to check for accuracy and this is how we know they are lies. Every Christian has the ability to do this and the responsibility to do this. So why didn’t I question these beliefs? Why had I believed them whole-heartedly in a steady way for over 3 years? Because I didn’t even think to question them. I thought about these beliefs all the time, but for me they added up with the scriptures, because I’d lost the ability to be logical, and so I came to wrong conclusions when I studied the Bible.

The Bible is a logical book! And I learned this in a profound way after coming out of psychosis and seeing how I couldn’t understand its truths when my brain lost the ability to use logic.

These demon voices believed the same things I did, and had the same fault in adding up logic that I had. They weren’t demons; it was my own brain generating these voices.

The auditory centers of the brain can be over-activated due to inflammation, when a person is psychotic. During this break I had nerve zaps and very painful inflammation through my whole nervous system, including my brain.

The Temptations the Voices Give Have No Clear Motive and are Nonsensical
The “temptations” the demonic voices give aren’t things like “Tell a lie that paints you in a good light so you can get hired for this job.” Or, “Life is hard, you should kill yourself to escape all this crippling responsibility.”

No, what they are experiencing are things like “You are the chosen one who must save the world, and the only way to save the world is to jump off the roof; everyone’s life depends on you”, something no one in their right mind could be tempted by because there’s no one who would actually believe that. Or things like “You are a metaphor, and God is calling you to become a physical human being and the process of transformation is done by dying.”

There’s Lots of Other Nonsensical Chatter That Doesn’t Involve Suicide or Dark Themes Going on All the Time
There’s also a whole lot of other nonsensical “chatter” from the voices that don’t involve death or dying or violence. Things like “God is going to make you into a square today, so believe with all your heart so you can change in shape into a square because this is the shape people are in heaven and it’s your ideal form.” The person may shut themselves in their room all day praying to become a square and taking on their true form.

These are nonsensical things that break the laws of logic. The person may honestly believe it’s a good thing to take their own life, and may think they are doing the right thing by taking their life, may experience false guilt if they don’t do it. They can’t be convicted by God’s Holy Spirit if they lose their moral judgment, and so they can’t respond to conviction.

This is why psychosis is such a dangerous state for a person to be in.

For Something to be a Temptation, the Person Must be Able to Understand God’s Will From the Bible and Go Against His Will
For something to be a temptation, and for one to be said to be tempted, according to how the process of temptation works in the Bible, the person must be able to understand the temptation is a sin. If a person understands the difference between right and wrong, between God’s will and Word and things that go against His will and His Word, it’s only then that a person can give their informed consent to sin. They must be able to be convicted by God’s Holy Spirit not to sin, and be tempted by the devil at the same time, and use their will to make their choice. They can either call on God for help to resist the temptation, or they can give in to the temptation and grieve the Holy Spirit by doing the sin. If they give in, it’s then the Bible defines their action as sin.

“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”
James 4:17

This Bible principle is why animals are not said to have given in to temptation when they harm one another. When a lion has a strong impulse to kill and eat a gazelle, and carries out that impulse and kills the gazelle, we don’t say the devil tempted the lion to do that and the lion gave into the devil’s temptations.

We don’t call the lion ‘guilty’ and sentence him to a court hearing.

This is because the principle of what makes something a temptation and a sin is that the tempted one must have the ability to understand right from wrong, in order to consent to sin, or to consent to take hold of God’s help to resist sin.

But a person in full psychosis loses the ability to discern right from wrong. (Moral perception is not always lost if psychosis is mild.)

Our brain is responsible for all of our perceptions, including judgment and moral perception. Including our ability to understand the concept of sin, and differentiate sin from an obedient, holy action and choice.

While the eyes take in visuals, and the ears take in sound, these visuals and sound are interpreted and really “heard” and “seen” by the brain, not really the eyes and the ears. The eyes and ears are only transporters of the information, not processors or interpreters of the information, thus it’s our brain that gives us the experience of hearing and seeing, and what it feels like to exist in a certain environment and setting, and what it feels like to have a body in a physical world.

Auditory Centers of the Brain Can Generate Sounds, and Visual Centers Can Generate Moving Images On Their Own When Overstimulated
And then the memory auditory and visual files are stored in the brain. They can pop up if the brain is neuro-toxic, and a person can “hear” voices coming from their memory when no person is actually present, or “see” images of people, sometimes as realistic as if an actual person where standing in front of them, even when no other person is present.

These symptoms happen in cases of psychosis, when the auditory and visual centers of the brain are overstimulated due to inflammation.

So when family members think that because their loved one with psychosis is hearing voices, they must be real demons, they are not realizing the brain itself is capable of generating images and sounds all on its own.

The brain is a magnificent organ capable of great things. It is the handiwork of God. Our whole experience in this world is made possible by our brain, and subject to the errors and malfunctioning of our brain if our brain goes haywire. This is why people in psychosis cannot tell they are in psychosis; when our brain interprets and projects our reality a certain way, we’re limited by the interpretation. Being finite, we can’t see around our perception.

Going into psychosis can feel like having a spiritual awakening. One of the big reasons for this, is that when you’re slipping into psychosis, the science of the world and its systems changes. You look at a table, and the way you understand matter and what matter is has changed. Many of the perceptions we use to understand the world around us we can’t put into words and we aren’t even aware of. When these perceptions start getting reconnected in a different way, we suddenly become very aware of all the different perceptions and the amazing capabilities of the brain as it interprets concepts in science, both seen and unseen things like radio waves, theological concepts like the nature of God.

We see from a first-hand perspective what perception entails, and become aware of parts of our perception that are often missed or taken for granted when we’re in our right mind and don’t study or think about perception at all.

Due to how intelligent the brain is, and seeing this first-hand, and also the increase in dopamine, adrenaline, and sometimes histamine that occurs during psychosis and causes the brain to work even faster than normal and be smarter in many ways, although psychotic at the same time, it’s common for the person in psychosis to conclude they are gaining supernatural abilities, or that God Himself is communicating with them, especially if they hear a voice that claims to be God or sounds like God.

Once again, the God-voice is as nonsensical as the demon voices that some people hear. I realized this immediately after coming out of psychosis with lithium in the hospital. The grand dreams and communications I had received, which had been very vivid and looked like blue-ray definition, could no longer fool me, because they were total and complete nonsense.

For instance, I had dreams and communications that I was the chosen one to use the gift of faith to open dimension portals and let angels into our world to fight off demons who were already here, and tip the war in God’s favor and bring about the Second Coming of Christ.

Once out of psychosis, I could see clearly this isn’t the gift of faith as described by the Bible, nor how it works, that both angels and demons were already in our world according to the Bible, and that angels could protect us and had this capability, and God sent them for this purpose, they didn’t need to be let into our world.

I could tell both the science and the theology was off completely and that it was just complete nonsense.

But when in psychosis, the psychotic person can’t tell this, and with the brain inflammation accessing new parts of their brain and bringing up images and information that they didn’t have access to before, It’s a common conclusion people in psychosis make that “There’s no way I’m this smart; God must be communicating with me, or giving me a supernatural ability I didn’t have before”

They can’t tell their brain is making wrong connections though. Psychosis gives them a symptom of unawareness called anosognosia, so they can’t see that their thought patterns are nonsensical and they are believing delusions.

God created our human brain with the ability to understand every category of information and science in our world. Even immaterial things like radio waves, even deep scientific truths like matter and how it’s really energy, and how space is really another dimension connected in relationship with time.

We can also understand spiritual realities. We don’t of course, understand as much as God does, and we have finite understanding, but we were actually created to be in the very Presence of God, and to understand what it’s possible for a person to understand about God Himself, the angels He created, and the other worlds and the nature of life in those worlds and other creations. So even though we’ve never been to those other worlds and creations of God, our brain was created with the capacity to understand those beings and creations.

When a person goes into psychosis, the parts of the brain responsible for understanding all of these amazing things – both spiritual and scientific – get rewired, and the neural circuitry is changed, so they perceive things out of alignment with reality.

What can happen then, is a person can believe they are God, because their brain is contemplating spiritual themes, but doing so in an illogical way, and coming to an illogical conclusion. The person can feel like they are in another realm, because all the perceptions involved in helping them understand their experience in space and time have been disrupted and wrongly connected. You can have the wrong perception of what time is, and how time works. You can believe you are a metaphor, or that you’re a T Rex in the Triassic period and also yourself at the same time.

Due to the highly creative nature of psychosis, and the radical perceptual changes, some people have sought to induce the activation of these perceptions using hallucinogens like LSD and magic mushrooms. I don’t think this is the right route to take, and I believe this to be a sin, because they are knowingly and actively unbalancing their brain. I do think though that studying psychosis from people with psychotic illness who did not induce it or bring it onto themselves can be a way to understand perception and what the brain is capable of. It’s often the case that studying when things go wrong helps us understand what makes them go right and really understand all that is involved in accurate perception.

The Link Between Genius and Madness

Having the genes that contribute to the development of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders is not all bad. There’s a link between psychosis and creativity that has been known for a long time. It’s also true that people with psychotic disorders have a higher than average intelligence and tend to be very smart. There’s also a link between the mood changes that come with genes associated with mania, and productivity. Some of the people with the most successful and productive companies are not in full-blown mania but live in a state of hypomania (a less severe form of mania that is between the normal energy the typical person has, and full-blown mania).

Robert Schuman, the superb classical music composer of the romantic period, had psychosis. The mathematician John Nash had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Van Gogh was thought to be psychotic. And there are too many others to mention. Some of the greatest contributors to the fields of science and to music and art were thought to have psychotic disorders, and one of my doctors told me that his patients who had the genes associated with bipolar and psychotic disorders, were among the movers and shakers of society.

The connection between genius and madness is not just a stereotype made up by society; it’s real and has been known in the medical and psychiatric communities for a long time.

I’m in schizoaffective and schizophrenia support groups online, and the creativity in there is amazing. Many of the people there draw strikingly gorgeous paintings and drawings. Many of them are gifted musically too. The typical schizophrenic is very skilled at something, if not multiple things.

Abram Hoffer, one of the first psychiatrists, and the founder of Orthomolecular psychiatry, who treated schizophrenics with high dose niacin and vitamin C, and brought many of them out of psychosis, loved his schizophrenic patients. He was continually impressed by them, and he helped many of them balance their bodies in a way that allowed them to function normally in society. I recommend reading his books for positive statements about the minds and personalities of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. I also recommend learning about the natural treatments he presents in his books.

Functional Medicine doctors often take the view that no set of genes are bad or good. They all have their weaknesses and strengths. The key is to balance your epigenetic expression so that you maximize the advantages of your genetics, and diminish and control the disadvantages. If you can do that, then the person can live a life where they aren’t out-of-control or completely disabled by their illness, and they can utilize their talents and skills to contribute to their families and communities and churches, and some people with treatments have recovered completely, especially when natural treatments and protocols are used, as natural protocols cause continued improvement over the months and years. Medication tends to reach its maximum effectiveness within weeks, sometimes months, but rarely continues to improve a person’s symptoms after that. Usually you reach a kind of controlled baseline and stay at that baseline after that without further improvement.

It’s very important that when you support a family member with schizophrenia or related syndromes, that you emphasize that they aren’t flawed biochemically beyond repair, and that their genetics aren’t just negative and bad, but that there are advantages to their unique genetics that can be maximized and will give them abilities that are unique and that not everyone else has.

It’s really important that the person suffering from a psychotic condition sees themselves as a whole person and not just their illness, and has avenues and outlets to use their giftings and abilities, and that their whole life doesn’t center around their condition. This builds morale, which is necessary for health and which helps provide the motivation to fight through health obstacles and commit to seeing doctors and doing treatments, and gives over-arching purpose to their life.

Logic and Faith The Basis of Christianity

It’s deeply upsetting when care takers of people in full psychosis ask me to pray God will sent the Holy Spirit to convict their psychotic family member of doing wrong by having wrong beliefs about God, or by sitting in the corner all day and neglecting Bible study and church attendance, and get them back on track with their relationship with God.

While a person going through other kinds of serious problems – say cancer – can pray and seek God, psychosis affects a person’s ability to understand God and the Bible, so you may see them praying to angels or praying to trees, or believing God doesn’t exist when prior to psychosis they had great faith, or cussing and not thinking it’s wrong, or engaging in promiscuity and thinking God’s Word supports it and allows it.

I finally found a way to explain in a short sentence why it’s so troubling when care takers and family members pray God will speak to and convict their family member in psychosis to return to Him. It’s because their request implies that Christianity and one’s relationship with God is based on something other than reason and faith.

Their Request Implies Christianity and One’s Relationship With God is Based on Something Other Than Reason and Faith

The truth is that reason and faith serve as the whole basis of the Christian faith. This what makes Christianity different from false religions; it is the truth, and the only kind of worship God accepts is willing worship, given out of an understanding and appreciation of His love for us. Reason is the core component of our humanity that makes us in God’s image. This isn’t to say other aspects of us aren’t in His image – our whole body and person is in His image – but this function of the human brain, this design built into our brain to reason is the most important part of our humanity.

He doesn’t want robots. He doesn’t want people who think He’s evil but worship Him anyway due to fear of Him. He doesn’t want people who worship Him to get favors and to be flattered by Him, and not out of love and reverence for His character. It’s Satan that wants those other kinds of worship, and these are principles on which his kingdom of darkness and evil is based.

An Even More Serious Problem
So I think there’s a huge lack of education and understanding about what schizophrenia is, and what psychosis is specifically, but sadly there’s an even more serious problem going on in society:

Sane people – people without mental conditions, the general populace – have not studied logic and reason, aren’t aware of what it is, aren’t making decisions and forming their beliefs based on it. It’s common for Christians, especially in charismatic Christian circles to think they have lost the Holy Spirit because they go through periods of time where they don’t feel God’s presence. Some of them conclude they must be lost and hopeless. The whole basis of their relationship was not truth and faith, but feelings. This is not Christianity. It’s building on sand, not on the eternal truths of God’s Word that can never be shaken or destroyed. (Hebrews 12:27-28, Matthew 24:34)


Sadly, logic courses were taken out of public schools a long time ago and never brought back. Logic is how you understand every other subject. It’s the basis for how to understand the scriptures. Indeed ‘understanding’ and ‘logic’ are basically synonymous when we’re talking about a human person and not a computer (a computer can be logical and not be said to understand, but in a being when we are logical it’s synonymous with us understanding something). And without a good grasp of the laws of logic, students will not be quick to see error and can fall for many fallacies, and swayed one way or the other, and their beliefs won’t be formed based on evidence and reason, but on quicksand.

(To read an excellent introductory book on Logic I recommend Jason Lisle’s – a Christian astrophysicist’s book – Introduction to Logic.)

What are the Laws of Logic?

When I say God is logical and all His Bible truths are based on the laws of logic, I’m not talking about human logic. I don’t mean human reasoning where because we aren’t familiar with something some people may lack faith in God and don’t believe it could have happened.

Some people have a very hard time believing God created the world in six literal days. It logically does follow that if God is omnipotent He could easily create the world in six days, in fact He could have created the world instantly, so the question that really arises is why did God create the world in six days and not instantly? But since some people lack the faith to believe God is that powerful, belief in evolution has been adopted by some people who take on the name Christian. They believe God started things in motion and then animals and humanity evolved from there over a period of millions of years.

They may then claim that it doesn’t make sense to their human reasoning that God could create the world in six days.

Or let’s say a hurricane blows through and devastates a city. A person may be unlikely to believe it was a judgment from God, and had a supernatural cause, because they’ve never seen God send an angel to stir up a hurricane. In their experience they’ve only seen natural causes – the laws of thermodynamics and physics create hurricanes.

This kind of reasoning where you assume the things that are most common in your every day experience are the likely cause or answer to why something happened, is called inductive reasoning. It’s an important skill to have, but it can be a lack of faith to use inductive reasoning in accounts the Bible tells us were actually miraculous. To not believe in that is clearly a lack of faith in God’s power, and desire to give us eternal life. For instance, to not believe Jesus became a man and was born of Mary, or that He resurrected and is in heaven, is to have a lack of faith. Someone may claim rationality and science as the basis for their conclusion that these events couldn’t have happened; but they aren’t being scientific at all; they are just doubting, and this is an issue of faith.

For the same omnipotent God of which the whole created world stands as a kind of footprint of evidence of Him, testifying to His omnipotent power and divinity, could certainly create a human body for Himself and come as our Savior and be resurrected after His victory on the cross.

Inductive reasoning is a skill but it’s not a law of logic. It’s not an absolute law, and can be factually wrong or show a lack of faith at times to use it. Rather inductive reasoning is really just a broad strokes way to make an educated guess, and is all about probability.

So what are the laws of logic?

The laws of logic are really two things, which are very closely related to one another:

1. They are the laws that govern reality and explain and make up truth.
2. They are the laws that govern thought and cause us to arrive at truth when we think.

The reason a cat in the real world around us is only a cat and not also a dog at the same time, is logic. The set-in-stone laws of logic, not just any kind of reasoning.

When you deduce that a cat is only a cat and can’t also be a dog, it’s because your brain is capable of understanding the laws of logic and using them to understand truth. Your brain can arrive at truth.

The laws of logic could also be called the laws of understanding. They are what we use when we understand. When we look at a cat and see it has different attributes from a dog, and thus can’t be a dog, or we read that Jesus is the only way to the Father, and conclude that since this is true there can’t be multiple ways to the Father, such as Jesus or pantheism, or Jesus and Buddhism, we are using the laws of logic – or understanding – and coming to truth by using them. We are understanding reality, both tangible concepts in the world around us that we can see and touch like the cat, and intangible, spiritual concepts like salvation, and how salvation works.

The laws of logic are what makes something true.

It would not be possible for truth to exist if there were no laws of logic, thus every time ‘truth’ is mentioned in the scriptures, the laws of logic are being referenced too as they are a core component of truth itself.

The 3 Laws of Logic

There are 3 main laws of logic.

The first is the law of non-contradiction, which states that if something is true, its opposite can’t also be true.

The second is the law of identity which states that a thing or concept is only itself.

And the third is the law of the excluded middle which states that for any given proposition or thing or truth, either the proposition (or thing or concept) is true, or its negation is true. There’s no middle ground or third possibility. For instance, I’m either dead or alive; I can’t be both alive and dead at the same time.

Logic is a component of truth. Because truth by nature is exclusionary, and by nature it has a set of definable attributes and properties. The 3 main laws of logic are what make something true. It isn’t just created things that have definable set properties, like the cat. But Bible truth – eternal abstract concepts – have a clear definition and set of properties that distinguish them from other things. For instance, even with abstract concepts such as right and wrong, stealing has a set definition. We can know when we’ve done the immoral action of stealing, and when we haven’t. An employer can know that when he purposefully withholds a paycheck to an employee who worked for that money, and puts it in his own pocket instead, that he’s stolen from the employee. Jealousy has a set definition and specific attributes. We can know when we’re being jealous and then we can surrender the jealous attitude to God to be changed by Him.

When I went into psychosis I lost the ability to understand any core Bible doctrine. I came to nonsensical conclusions about all of them. I learned first-hand that logic and truth is the foundation of every Bible doctrine. You can’t arrive at truth when your brain can’t make true connections.

Jesus calls Himself “The Truth.” The devil, His accuser and war enemy, is “a liar from the beginning.” If truth wasn’t exclusionary, didn’t have certain definable qualities, then it wouldn’t be possible to lie. What is lying? It’s when a person intentionally distorts the truth, adds in falsehoods that aren’t qualities of the truth, or leaves out vital components of truth and distorts it by omission. (It’s important to note that there’s always a selfish motive behind lying. To give incorrect information unknowingly doesn’t make someone a liar. To be in psychosis and tell people stealing is ok, because you can’t see that it’s wrong isn’t lying.)

If truth wasn’t logical, then anything could be truth, and it wouldn’t be possible to lie and distort the truth.

So the Bible gives us the basis for logic and it being a core component of truth.

What happens to someone in psychosis is that they lose the ability to tell a cat isn’t also a dog. They think a cat can be a cat and a dog at the same time. Or, maybe they believe they can be God and themselves at the same time. They lose their sense of self, their ability to correctly deduce the world around them, their ability to understand the scriptures, and their ability to arrive at truth.

It goes without saying that the laws of logic will always govern the created world and all of reality. So even if a psychotic person loses the ability to tell they aren’t God and themselves at once, clearly it’s true that they are just themselves and not God, no matter what they think or how confused they become. The world is logically coherent, even if people suffering with mental conditions aren’t. 

However, while the laws of logic are always in tact, and God Himself will never break them, the scientific laws God does break and go beyond. God can walk on water and break the laws of gravity and physics.

When God does this, it shows His divinity and gives Him glory.

Some people in their hatred for God have mocked Him saying “Can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift? or Can God create a round square or a married bachelor?”

This is asking the question “Can God do things that break the laws of logic?”

I like C.S. Lewis’ response to this. He said miracles can be attributed to God but never nonsense. A married bachelor is just word play. It’s a logical impossibility. Because the definition and requirements to be a bachelor contradict the ones required to be married. The minute a bachelor gets married, he is no longer a bachelor and is instead a husband. He cannot be a husband and a bachelor at once.

I think you’ll be able to see here that the laws of logic are deeper than the laws of science. Jesus can walk on water and turn water into wine, breaking the laws of science, but He can’t make a round square or a married bachelor. Jesus could make a bush burn and not be consumed, breaking the laws of science and going beyond and outside of them, but He could not make a bush that was both burning and not burning at the same time.

The laws of logic are part of the Word of God. The Word that created the world and everything that exists. They are part of the eternal truth that goes deeper than mere created reality.

Why do we live in a universe that keeps the laws of logic – where a cat can’t be a dog and a cat at the same time, and married bachelors are an impossibility.

Because God is logical and the laws of logic come from His own nature. Before anything existed or was created, including the laws of science that govern our own bodies and every living thing in the world, God existed, and He is logical, both in thought, and in nature. For instance, Jesus is not also the Father. He is Jesus only. This is a law of logic stemming from the nature of God and the Godhead.

Like the moral law – the ten commandments – that are eternal because they exist in God, and God existed before any created thing came into being and He was good, the laws of logic are also eternal, existing in the nature of God.

His moral law is His character.
The laws of logic are His nature.

God, is infinite, does not exist in space and time, and thus laws of physics do not apply to Him or stem directly from His nature. Rather the laws of physics are created things. But the laws of logic do apply to God, and like the moral law He always keeps them and they are a part of Him, originating in Him.

While the Holy Spirit is omnipresent and does not exist in time and place and the laws of science do not apply to Him, laws of logic do apply to Him. For instance, the Holy Spirit is omnipotent, and has definable attributes and qualities in His nature. It can’t be said that the Holy Spirit is both omnipotent and finite possessing limited power. When we say He’s omnipotent, this excludes the possibility that He is also finite. The exclusive nature of the Holy Spirit’s attributes are part of the laws of logic, particularly the law of non-contradiction.

If the laws of logic did not apply to the Holy Spirit, then it could true that He’s both omnipotent and He’s not omnipotent and has only finite power. And that doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t align with scripture at all. It strips the Holy Spirit of His divinity.

So even with an infinite God who is not limited to space, time, tangibility, or material matter, the laws of logic apply to Him and He’s never outside of the laws of logic, because these laws stem from His own nature and make up His own person.

So the reason it’s so upsetting when care takers ask for this is they are, probably unknowingly, asking God to operate on the principles of Satan’s kingdom; that God wants to make their kid believe in Him mindlessly, without understanding, as a dog obeys its master. God will not answer prayers like this. God is good and just.

To be clear, I don’t think they’re really meaning to ask this of God; they just aren’t reasoning through the belief they hold to its logical conclusion. But this is the logical conclusion of the belief, and it paints a tyrannical God who wants to force people to worship Him mindlessly.

But what does the Bible say about God?

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.

Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you.
Psalm 32:8-9

His way of dealing with us is instructing and teaching, functions that require reason and logic. The obedience and worship we offer Him must be given with logic and reason, because this is what love is. Love is a principle; and principles are understood with logic. This is why a dog’s love for its master is not the same as our love for God. The same dog will love and serve a criminal if a criminal happens to be its master, or it will love and serve a police officer who arrests criminals if a police officer happens to be its master.

The dog has only one goal: to obey and serve. It’s not discerning about the character of the master, and can just as readily be trained to steal and commit crimes as it can be trained to sniff out drugs and aid a police officer in catching criminals.

God asks us to be discerning, and love Him because He is good, from an intelligent knowledge of His character and His just law. This is what true faith and worship is. It’s done in spirit and in truth. With the heart and also with the understanding.

The Real Prayer That’s Needed

The prayer that is needed when you’re family member enters psychosis, is not for God to convict their conscience, as they do not have an operating conscious, but for God to restore sanity and the ability to reason to the psychotic family member. To heal their brain, and then cooperate with Him by giving the psychotic person care and medical treatments to reduce inflammation and help the brain regions to signal in a connected way, rather than the disconnected way that occurs in psychosis. This is an excellent prayer to pray, and the only one that really makes sense.

When care takers ask me to pray God will convict their family member of sin, I start to think that their own Christian faith and experience is not founded on reason and is founded on something less sure, something like emotions or inclination, and I become concerned for them, because a walk with God that is not founded on the truth of His Word can be shaken, and I know Satan will send them deceptions and temptations that will beat against their “house” as the parable says, and will be able to knock it down. It’s only “houses” built on the foundation of God’s Word that won’t be able to fall down when the storms of life get severe.

I wouldn’t want that kind of experience for anyone, where their religion and walk with God is based on emotions or inclination or suppositions and not on reason, and their faith falls apart when tested because it wasn’t on the only sure foundation.

Let’s really break this down…

Jesus is the truth. The Bible is His authoritative written Word, the source of truth. Truth is logical and reasonable. That’s how we know it’s truth. Logic is a core component of truth, so much so that if something is not logical it by definition cannot be and is not true.

When I lost the ability to be logical after I had a full psychotic break, I couldn’t understand the doctrines of the Bible. I learned after coming out of psychosis, why I couldn’t understand them and what was going on. It takes logic to understand every doctrine in the Bible. All of the Bible’s doctrines are logical and logic is the basis of them.

Faith is a choice we make based on reason, based on truth. Blind faith that is not based on reason is presumption, one of the principles of Satan’s kingdom and at odds with God’s principles.

Faith is not logic. Logic is the ability to understand God and His Word. Faith is the choice we make with our will when we decide to believe in Him and surrender our lives to Him.

As many intelligent atheists have unfortunately shown us, a person can have the ability to be very logical, and yet choose not to surrender their lives to God.

Logic is not surrender and faith. But it is needed in order to have a will and a choice. If someone’s brain has lost the capacity to understand logic, they can’t see and understand the goodness of God, the plan of salvation, and surrender their lives to Him. This is one of the biggest reasons why if we have a loved one who has slipped into psychosis – especially if we have reason to believe that loved one had not surrendered their lives to God prior to slipping into psychosis and was living in a state of rebellion towards God – we need to do everything in their power to get them effective treatment, so they can come out of psychosis, regain their understanding and the ability to have a working will, so they can have the opportunity to choose Christ.

If your loved one thinks Jesus is the Queen of England, how can they believe in Him? They can’t. If your loved one thinks evil is blue, and good is red, and has lost use of the neural pathways needed to understand the concept of sin and righteousness, how can they repent of their sins and trust in a Savior? They can’t.

Bringing them out of the psychosis is thus crucial to their salvation.

Faith and Presumption

“And that’s the way it was with us before Christ came. We were like children; we were slaves to the basic spiritual principles of this world.”
Galatians 4:3

Galatians 4:3 is often translated elemental spiritual forces’, or ‘elements of the world’, but if you go to the original Greek you’ll see the word here is actually ‘principles’. It’s saying before conversion you were held in bondage to be actuated by the principles of the world (world here means Satan’s kingdom), rather than the principles of God’s kingdom that actuate Him.

It’s principles that are the dividing line between God’s kingdom and Satan’s kingdom. God’s kingdom has the principle of love and self-sacrifice as its foundation; Satan’s kingdom has the principle of selfishness as its foundation and core make-up.

“If you have died with Christ, away from the principles of the world, why as if living in the world do you submit to decrees:
Colossians 2:20
Berean Literal Bible translation

This verse here in Colossians is often translated ‘rudiments of the world’ in the KJV, or ‘elemental spirits of the world’ in the ESV, but if you go to the original Greek, the word is ‘principles of the world’.

Once again, the Bible is telling us that when we are converted, we die to the principles that actuate Satan and his kingdom, and we are given a new heart that is actuated by the principles of love.

Love is a principle. It’s not a mindless choice. Let me explain…

Love and worship is a choice made with understanding. That’s the principle behind what makes something love. If you make a choice that is not based on understanding, it’s not love.

Faith works the same way. God’s principles – the ones at the foundation of His character, law, and kingdom – involve faith; Satan’s principles involve presumption. Just as a person with advanced dementia signing away their inheritance cannot sign a contract that holds up in court, because a just court would never accept such a contract and would punish the one who took advantage of the elderly person with dementia, so God’s court will not accept faith and worship that isn’t given from intelligent knowledge, with the person’s understanding. For God to accept such faith would be for God’s kingdom to be unjust; for His court to be corrupt.

But since Satan is corrupt, this is the kind of worship Satan desires and he will accept mindless, forced worship.

For instance, if someone were to believe in God without ever hearing anything about Him or reading His Word, knowing nothing about Him and His character of love, the Bible says this isn’t faith. Faith is a choice we make based on truth, based on God’s existence and His goodness. We choose to love and serve Him because He is a good and just God; the opposite of evil and selfishness; because He loved us enough to lay down His life for us, truths that require reason in order to be able to understand. We may not see Jesus in front of us, but we see the evidence of His creative works, which the Bible says is sufficient logical evidence of His existence, so much so that those who choose not to believe in the face of such overwhelming evidence are without excuse. 

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

Romans 1:20

We also have the witness of the Holy Spirit convicting our hearts of right and wrong. If we go to lie to our boss, the Holy Spirit convicts us lying is wrong and that we shouldn’t do it. This is as powerful a witness – if not more so – than God’s created works.

“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)”
Romans 2:15

But a person in full psychosis often loses the ability to tell right from wrong. Their brain loses moral perception, because moral perception is based on logic. And the person due to inflammation and neurotransmitter dysregulation and connectivity issues between important brain regions that can no longer effectively signal one another due to the psychosis, cannot understand logic, cannot understand truth. Cannot see the difference between the principles of selfishness and those of love, cannot choose to worship God.

Of course, they also can’t choose to rebel against God either or to be evil, since they can no longer discern the difference between good and evil. They exist in a morally innocent state, similar to a baby forming in the womb or someone in late state dementia who has lost the capacity to reason. Such a person isn’t evil and has done no wrong; they are innocent.

Whatever choice they made – whether for or against God – when they had their reasoning powers, is the choice God takes as their final choice. But of course if their brain can be treated and they regain their sanity, then their agency and choice can resume.

If a fully psychotic person were to choose to believe in God when they can’t reason that this choice wouldn’t count. This is also true of someone in late stage dementia. God is not unjust to count those choices as legitimate.

Human beings are made in God’s image, possessing reason and it’s through reason that they are able to make choices. Reason is not the will. The will – what we use to have faith – is when we choose to believe the truth that our mind already knows to be true because it’s added things up logically and sees Jesus is the Son of God, the Savior of the world. We use our will to repent of our sins and surrender to His Lordship in our lives.

But there is no use of the will possible – no ability to have choice – without reasoning ability. 

People in this condition are like little children or the elderly and need to be cared for and, if possible brought back into sanity with treatment, and it’s the job of the sane people in their families and in society to give them that treatment. God will give the families and the communities wisdom if they will recognize their important role and responsibility, and pray for His divine wisdom and help and depend on Him.

Mental Congruence Affected by the Fall

While our mind was created to be logical and to be congruent with the world around us, and there is a normal, healthy design and proper functioning of the brain, due to the fall we’ve seen a break-down of the human mind. I don’t believe this is only true of people with diagnosable mental illnesses. ‘Normal’ – the original mental normal that Adam and Eve had, doesn’t today fully exist in anyone, though some people are closer to it than others. 

There are times when a person in a good state of mental health becomes irrational and resorts to emotion to deduce truth rather than logic. I believe that our tendency – even in mentally healthy individuals – to be irrational and emotion-oriented over logic is probably due to the fall affecting our brain function and our characters. However, people do this knowing what the rational truth is.

I believe irrationality and logical inconsistency actually has it’s basis within the fundamental nature of sin. Satan, knowing he was a created being, refers to himself as a god and seeks worship that only makes sense for God to have. It isn’t rationality driving his beliefs here, it’s selfish ambition. So there is an element of delusion within selfishness. Anyone who is selfish treats others as less-than and adopts a superiority that really makes no sense. They know they are equal to others, yet they choose to see themselves as superior.

This is a kind of chosen delusion.

The Difference Between Spiritual and Mental Delusion

But sin leads to a chosen delusion, not a mental delusion. This is unlike delusion created by an inability to tell what things are from mental illness. That’s mental delusion and it’s not a moral failure on the part of the person suffering from this symptom. 

Sin is moral wrongdoing; it’s not a mental illness.

An example of a chosen delusion is the pope. It’s blasphemy for the pope to declare to be God on earth; it’s not blasphemy when someone with schizophrenia really believes they are God. The pope needs humility and a good Bible study and to be brought to repentance; the person with schizophrenia needs medical treatment to bring them out of the delusion. If you try to do a Bible study with them they won’t be able to deduce the logic from the scriptures and it won’t be helpful, since their mind is breaking the laws of logic due to mental illness.

Spiritual delusion is different from mental delusion, and it happens when the person knows right from wrong and chooses the lie and the sin anyway, and God then gives them over to be controlled and confused by a strong delusion. Knowledge of right and wrong must be present, or the person cannot choose the sin and God will not give them over to the delusion.

“They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

2 Thessalonians 2:10-12

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.”

Romans 1:25-28

Those who choose sin do unnatural and logically inconsistent things (such as Satan a created angel accepting and demanding worship) that go against God’s created design. They also reach a point where they actually believe the delusion. Initially it’s a chosen delusion and they can tell right from wrong when they make their choice to embrace the lie, but once God gives them over to be deceived by the delusion, they lose their bearings on what is truth and become lost in the thick forest of deception.

It’s interesting that atheist scientists made great claims in America that they were the logical and rational ones, the ones who loved science and that Christianity was inconsistent with science. This lie has been unmasked in a marked way with the transgender movement. We now see that atheists are willing to deny and sacrifice even the most basic scientific knowledge for a purely philosophical belief that has no basis in science. They claimed to love science, but we can see they love their own human ideas more. It’s the Christians who love truth and worship their Creator who acknowledge science and truly love science and are scientifically and logically consistent. Here we see that love for God produces a proper respect and love for science and logic. This is because “All things were created for Him and by Him”, the “Him” being Christ. All things – and this includes science – are for Christ and find their proper bearings and place in relation to the worship of Christ, and if you take Christ out of the equation, then a person cannot truly love science or be honest about it or do it correctly for its intended purpose. There is an abuse of science that takes place when Christ is taken out of the picture. It is twisted to serve worship of self above God. Atheists may claim to love science, but they have become science deniers! 

Human beings have motives and a will. We can use our will to choose illogical ideologies if we believe they will serve some selfish purpose. An example of how our character can make us choose ideas that are illogical, is when Christians lack faith in God’s divinity and it causes them to embrace evolution, that I mentioned earlier in the book. Even though it’s nonsensical to believe a process that relies on death could be set in motion by God in a perfect world, if a person lacks the faith to believe God truly is omnipotent and can create a world in 6 days, they may default to the illogical belief due to lack of faith.

Satan fell from heaven for cherishing an immoral, and a completely illogical belief – that he was god. He knew he was a created being. He knew he couldn’t do the divine things God did. He knew God was in the right and He was in the wrong, that God was immortal and he was mortal. But he wanted to be a god so badly that he embraced a nonsensical philosophy and waged an entire war of evil vs. good against the true God. He knew he could never win the war, didn’t have truth on his side, but his love for being his own god was so strong he was stubbornly willing to wage it anyway.

Satan didn’t have a mental illness; he had a moral one – sin, particularly pride. So we can see that sin can lead people to believe and support things they know can’t be true. 

It’s actually the will that is the governing force in man. The will is the choice. And if our character is weak, it can be hard to make the choice to fall on our knees and pray for the moral strength to believe God is divine and omnipotent and that His Word is true about the creation of the world happening in 6 days. Satan will tempt the person to disbelief, and the person’s weak moral character will prove a temptation in itself, and the person must then make a choice.

The will is the choice and the individual decides whether to have faith in God or not; really he chooses whether to call God to His side to infuse him with strength or not (without God we can do nothing on our own). No one can make that choice for that person except the individual themselves.

Those in full psychosis cannot use the will, because logic is needed in order to discern morality. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said without logic a person would just as willingly serve a tyrant as a benevolent God. To love and worship we need the ability to be logical, otherwise we’d just as easily worship a tyrant as we would a benevolent God and we can’t discern the difference and thus the worship given isn’t genuine or real.

How Our Finite Nature is Behind Why We Have Unconscious, Involuntary Brain Processes. And What Happens When This Part of the Brain Malfunctions.

We are finite beings. This means that in order to have voluntary processes, processes involved in choosing to move your hand, choosing to think a thought, choosing to surrender a selfish attitude to God, or to choose to believe in Christ as one’s Savior, we must have involuntary, inaccessible areas of the brain and body that operate without our direct choice. Voluntary processes are made possible by involuntary biochemistry and physicality that is outside of our control.

Behind the decision to say “Thank you” to your mother when she buys you a nice gift, there are brain settings that enable you to choose “Thank you”, or to choose not to say thank you, or to choose to say something else. If these settings didn’t exist beneath your conscious thoughts, you couldn’t choose whether to say Thank you or not. You wouldn’t even think of it, which is what occurs when people with psychotic disorders have a symptom called poverty of thought and poverty of speech. These settings stop operating due to brain inflammation, thus conscious thoughts are no longer accessible to choose to think. The person shuts down, and when questioned as to why thy never communicate, they may eventually say during a time when thoughts are more accessible “I don’t know why but I just can’t respond.”

With every designed machine, there’s a hidden, internal part of the machinery that allows the part you manually operate to exist and to work.

Since human beings are living “machines”, creations of God, we are no different in this respect.

To choose to think a thought one must have involuntary parts of the brain that store information and store it in a way that it’s easily retrievable so you can then choose to consciously grab a thought or idea and start thinking about it.

God not being finite, has a brain that can operate without any finite constraints, and that is not dependent on anything to work.

The Holy Spirit can think without a physical brain, and is immaterial. For us to think though, we can’t do it in a vacuum of immaterial space. We don’t exist and can’t think without a brain. In giving us a brain, God is giving us the ability to think. God can think without a brain, but we cannot. God isn’t arbitrarily constraining us by giving us a brain, rather He’s making thought possible for us by giving us a brain, and thought is not possible for us (or existence) without a brain.

Malfunction is not possible with God’s divine mind.

Malfunction didn’t happen in Adam’s pre-fallen brain either, but not due to anything inherent in Adam or in his power, but due to God’s almighty power holding Adam’s brain in a state of perfect functioning.

However, after Adam’s sin the curse rested on the earth and there was a degree of separation from God. This meant that God no longer kept people’s brains in a state of perfect health. We could now experience brain dysfunction.

Jesus who took on human nature after the fall, could experience mental malfunction in His humanity. His brain could forget things or experience brain fog. I’m sure the mental changes he experienced from the horror of the cross were extreme.

Jesus knows what it is to have a finite brain capable of malfunction due to the fall. He experienced it in His person while He walked in this world, and He knows it by experience. He can sympathize with us in our mental conditions, and understand us from personal experience having a body like our own.

Unlike God’s divine mind which is dependent on nothing to operate, with us, we are dependent on our physical body in order to think. Our physical brain is what makes thinking possible for us. Thus we must have unconscious parts of our brain and body, which make the conscious parts possible to work.

With mental illnesses there can be malfunction between the two parts of ourselves – between the conscious and unconscious parts. Unconscious thoughts and memory storage can cross-over to conscious thinking, and a person can experience vivid memories from a past trauma as though they are happening right now. Auditory voices from bits and pieces of memory can be heard if the auditory centers of the brain are over-activated while unconscious parts of the brain are overlapping with conscious centers.

Many different conditions involve this specific kind of malfunction of these two types of regions cross talking with one another. From PTSD, to psychotic disorders, to depression with psychotic features, to OCD where a person doesn’t hear voices but they experience strong intrusive thoughts.

As mentioned previously, this kind of malfunction is possible because we are finite beings. We are constructed and created with a set physical design. Thus that design that has parts that are meant to be unconscious and operating under the surface, can malfunction in a way that under-the-surface processes break into conscious thought and become consciously experienced.

What’s the difference between involuntary processes and voluntary ones?

One key difference is that involuntary processes must involve physiological changes that are best controlled by the body itself without our involvement.

They must be the kinds of processes that would impede or interrupt our human experience if we had to go in and manually control them.
And when they become conscious this is exactly what they do – they impede and interrupt regular living and keep a person from experiencing life in the world as a human being in the way God designed and intended. Instead the person becomes like a living machine that is stuck repeating certain actions or assaulted with disturbing images all day long, and can’t break out of the cycle of malfunction. At least not without some help or aids.

If a process is best controlled “manually” or consciously, then God has our brain do it consciously; if it’s best controlled automatically or unconsciously then God built it into our design to operate automatically.

The other distinct difference is that conscious processes are ones that involve the higher parts of the brain. Things like study of the scriptures, communion with God, the selection of values, and goals, and plans. These things can’t be unconscious processes because if they were that would go against free will and being made in the image of God to will and to do. It would make it so people were not moral agents, just flesh robots without any agency.

What kinds of processes fit the bill? Well let’s think about something like romantic love. This is a higher-level conscious thought process. Admiring how your spouse is in the image of God and the attributes they possess, both physical and moral ones. Being drawn to them as a person, establishing that they can be trusted based on their past history of faithfulness and acts of kindness and love, and then choosing to love them and marry them and join them in the union of marriage. This is all higher-level conscious brain function.

But when it comes to readying the body to engage in the sexual act, it doesn’t make sense for people to be consciously choosing to do that. If it had to be consciously chosen they’d have to take their mind off of the deeper, more important thoughts like wanting to be one with this person, wanting to experience a deep love and connection. Or, if both were consciously experienced together, you’d have something similar to OCD where intrusive sexual impulses and loud thoughts would clutter your mind, making it hard to focus on the act itself and the bond it brings.

So instead God designed that unconscious processes bring about the fast physiological changes needed to prepare your body for the act. This is instigated when the person gets close to us, begins kissing us, or showing skin, etc.

You can see how it wouldn’t work for these changes to occur psychologically and consciously. Our conscious psychological processes are too slow. We can’t sit there for 10 minutes talking our body into readiness. There would be no passion if it worked like that. Physical passion is needed for the act, and this comes about due to unconscious processes.

And a mistake many couples make when sex dies out in their marriage is to think it’s always a psychological problem. It can sometimes be a purely physiological one. If one’s hormones are not working properly you really can’t talk your body into being ready for sex or into desire for sex. It is controlled by hormones and physiology.

There are many, many more involuntary unconscious processes the brain is responsible for. These are signals and impulses and communications that lie under the surface – underneath the consciously chosen thoughts. These signals, and information, and communications do not operate like regular thoughts, and they don’t look like regular thoughts. The reason why is because these are the signals that make those conscious thoughts possible and readily available to be accessed and chosen.

These signals are the back-end infrastructure that supports the user-facing parts. These signals aren’t fully-formed thoughts and they don’t look or sound like real thoughts. They are distinctly different in form, structure, and essence. When they come to the surface and into the conscious thinking, and since there is usually a lot of inflammation and alarm neurotransmitters involved when this happens – they are startling to the person, and often dark. Violent impulses or thoughts that are part of what should be the hidden impulses of the fight-or-flight response, when these become conscious can be frightening to the person. This is what happens with OCD – violent, intrusive thoughts of the person harming someone.

These impulses to harm someone are what the body involuntarily does when you are cornered and there’s no hope of escape except to kill your attacker and prevail over him so you can break free. These get kicked into action not by conscious thought, but when involuntary parts of your perception perceive that you’re cornered. It wouldn’t work if you had to psyche yourself up into a state strong enough to fight off an aggressor before they kill you. It’s not something you can talk yourself into. Physiological changes must occur for you to do it fast enough and strong enough to have a change at winning the fight and escaping.

These are powerful urges to “finish off” your attacker. Not just to make attempts to win the fight, but to fight with urges to “off” the aggressor so you can survive, as it’s often the only way to survive is to fully win the fight and “off” him. But those with OCD often interpret these powerful urges and involuntary thoughts as homicidal thoughts. They are not homicidal. Self-defense is not homicide.

But since involuntary thoughts have crossed over into the conscious part of the brain – the part that makes moral judgments and decides what to think about things, the person mistakenly concludes they are choosing to think the violent thoughts and that they have homicidal desires or attitudes towards others.

Things get confusing because they are not supposed to be seeing violent images in their brain, or have repetitive consciously-processed and known thoughts of violence. These are just supposed to be impulses under the surface and away from their conscious perception, but the parts of the brain have seeped into each other due to inflammation.

Ways the Fight or Flight Response is Activated
Let’s talk about why the fight-or-flight response is being activated. It can happen from an onslaught of toxic black mold exposure. day-after-day facing an attacker – in this case mycotoxins which assault the immune and nervous systems – pushes the person into fight-or-flight because fight-or-flight is not a voluntary process; it’s involuntary.

This is also why you can’t have total success addressing this response psychologically. You can to a certain extent talk yourself down from aggressive thoughts, but as long as the attacker is still there, you’re going to have some of the intrusive violent thoughts or impulses.

To get out of fight-or-flight in such situations you need to send the signals to the body and brain that you’re safe and there’s no attacker. This is not done psychologically. It’s done by removing the stressor, or physiological things like taking supplements that calm the response, or sensory things like smelling essential oils or wrapping yourself in a soft blanket that sends signals to the nervous system that all is soft and relaxed and calm.

I learned from personal experience that there isn’t one type of fight-or-flight response. There’s a response the body goes into when it gets the signal that an attacker is lurking around, trying to get to you, where you actually go into a kind of subconscious planning stage of planning out how to attack first. There’s a kind of alertness that the brain goes into that is different from the alertness needed to attack instantly someone who has fully cornered you.

This second type of fight or flight displays itself as involuntary images and thoughts of jumping someone when they expect nothing and inflicting harm, and also of having involuntary fixated thoughts about where they are and how and when to do this, that occur around-the-clock. It’s like an around-the-clock surveillance type of fight-or-flight that would actually be very helpful if you’re a soldier hiding in enemy territory and striking first can be the difference between life and death and you have to know where your enemy is at all times.

I’ve noticed that I get the overpowering urges to fight to the death when molds or pollens in the environment are especially high.

Then after treating myself and coming out of some of these intense urges, I get the other kind of fight-or-flight where I feel ok, but my body doesn’t feel safe, since I’m kind of just barely controlling symptoms, and I get break-through histamine attacks. This puts my body in the high alert state of scouting our threats 24/7 and feeling like I need to plan an attack.

Then if I continue to treat myself with supplements or medication, my body calms down even more as symptoms lower, and I enter a state where I’m no longer having urges to harm or look for threats, and I can relax into my day.

There’s not just two types of fight-or-flight either. There’s many different variations and kinds, that can morph and modify to the situation you find yourself in.

The immune system is involved in fight-or-flight. Even if you have fear from an actual physical person attacking you, or a bear or something like that, it’s still the immune and endocrine systems that rev your body up to fight. This is why a revved up immune system from an attacker like black mold, is very similar to the revved up state one experiences when there’s a physical bear attacking you. They are pretty much indistinguishable because they are the same response.

Psychosis Makes Involuntary Impulses and Compulsions Very Dangerous

I have experienced how when I lost my frontal lobe activity and it was shutting down due to entering psychosis, the strong intrusive impulses and compulsions became impossible to not do. If my frontal lobe activity and higher-level thinking were intact, then even if I had violent or suicidal images or compulsions, I wouldn’t act on them. At times my compulsions were so overpowering, they were impossible to shut off, but I found I could direct my energy to something safe. Such as going for a walk or going to the mall, where I could walk and shop and burn off energy that way. Or working compulsively on a song I was writing.

But when my frontal lobe stopped working due to psychosis, I couldn’t redirect the energy, I just started acting out the compulsions. My whole self and body was fueled and operated by involuntary impulses and no longer voluntary ones. It was a terrifying experience! Without that frontal lobe we are all like someone who is drunk and out-of-control. In that state I did things like jump out of my window (thankfully my window was on the first floor and our house was only one floor at the time), cutting myself open with scissors, started running erratically at random times, because the impulses just took over, verbally abusing other people because my brain saw everything as a threat and I would yell at people in an out-of-control way and could no longer tell that cussing was vulgar or discern that certain tones were disrespectful or rude. I lost perception of those kinds of things and thought I was just being clear and giving a sound of urgency to a serious situation. Plus I didn’t really have control anyway.

Such behaviors are common in people in psychosis. They are also common in kids with extreme ADHD, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Personality disorders, autism, and similar conditions where the lower-level impulses can take over the brain for short periods (or longer ones in some cases), and the frontal lobe is temporarily hi-jacked and overpowered.

The person temporarily is operating basically only via involuntary impulses and compulsions, with no real voluntary ones.

Some people even fall on the floor and start seizing, and seizures are another example of an involuntary response that accompanies brain inflammation and can be seen alongside psychosis symptoms, bipolar, ADHD and many of these explosive conditions.

Infact many bipolar medications are anti-seizure medications that were found to work for mood symptoms along with stopping seizures.

I have a friend whose son would go into psychosis and he would become completely disoriented and roll around on the ground, and get into his poop and do other very strange things while going to the bathroom in this state.

He was put on antipsychotic medication and got his sanity and his life back.

Disorientation, where the frontal love becomes confused and nearly shuts off, and the involuntary processes in the brain take over, is one of the symptoms of psychotic disorders.

What We Can Learn
When you see the cases of catatonia, aggression, psychosis, and the involuntary symptoms, you get a look into the interior design of a person.

It’s as though the back-end of our design, the inner part, comes to the forefront and the person just becomes only involuntary unconscious processes. The conscious, voluntary ones take a back-seat and are immobilized when inflammation gets to severe.

Like going on a tour of the back part of a studio and seeing the lights and the sets and all the cameras involved that are not visible when you’re watching the program, or having an electrical engineer strip your house of its walls and show you the electrical infrastructure of your home, and explain how all the parts work and interact with each other, and make each other’s functions possible, these conditions where a person loses agency and is controlled by involuntary unconscious processes give us a “tour” of the infrastructure of human beings.

This can give us a view and understanding of what we are in the interior, of what parts of us make possible our conscious parts and how that works.

It gives us a view into God, the designer and His genius wisdom.

Catatonia or kleptomania show us that there’s a part of us involved in motivation. We always knew this, but it shows it in a more profound way. A person can’t even move if their dopamine receptors are hi-jacked by inflammation and aren’t working properly. With kleptomania, a person can’t stop moving and doing specific compulsive actions if the dopamine receptors are overstimulated in specific ways.

It’s in our body that motivation, agency, energy, impulses, and desires all exist. Both the deeper psychological “drives”, and the more superficial, primitive ones. We always knew this, but I think we have a tendency to think of ourselves as more psychological, and less of the raw “bare-bones” part of us, but it’s that raw part of us that is so much of what we are as a person, a living being with an operable and functional design, and that powers and controls the whole organism.

Help, I Can’t Stop Thinking Violent or Blasphemous Thoughts! Does This Mean I’m Lost or That I’ve Committed the Unpardonable Sin?

There is a symptom that many people with mental illness get of unwanted violent or highly sexualized or blasphemous thoughts or images popping into their mind. Mainstream psychiatry calls this Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. OCD also involves outward compulsions such as handwashing due to a fear of germs, or compulsively touching certain places in the house to stop one’s family from dying, an irrational fear that is common with this condition. But not everyone has the kind that involves the outward compulsions. Some people have only the disturbing intrusive thoughts, and inner compulsions, such as saying a prayer asking for forgiveness every time the violent thought comes into their mind. This is unofficially referred to as “Pure O” by therapists (pure obsessions). And it’s possible and very common for a person to have both compulsive thoughts and outer compulsions, and they often have more than one fear through their years of suffering from this condition. For instance, they may start out with a fear their family will die if they don’t touch certain places in the house, and then 5 years later have hand-washing obsessions instead, and the condition often morphs in this way.

As explained in an earlier article entitled ‘What is Schizophrenia’ mainstream psychiatry groups mental illnesses by their symptoms, not medical testing. For instance, they don’t test you for something like low serotonin, and if you’re found to have low serotonin then they give you a diagnosis of OCD. Instead you meet with a psychiatrist and are evaluated based on an interview, or you fill out a written questionnaire and you’re diagnosed with OCD based on the interview or the questionnaire (an interview is the much more common way diagnoses are given).

Due to the definition of an illness, that of being a condition of known pathology, I don’t believe mental illnesses in the DSM 5, the diagnostic book for the field of psychiatry, fit the definition of being distinct illnesses. Rather they are just symptoms people can get, that are often seen together, and it’s more accurate to call each of them syndromes. For instance, a person may be said to have schizophrenia syndrome, or obsessive compulsive syndrome.

So I will refer to these symptoms of unwanted violent, blasphemous, or sexual images or thoughts as ‘obsessive compulsive syndrome’, or ‘obsessive compulsive symptoms’, or just ‘intrusive thoughts’.

While there’s not one biochemical imbalance or pathology that causes obsessive compulsive symptoms, these symptoms have been linked in the medical literature with two well-documented imbalances…low serotonin and high histamine. Low serotonin causing obsessive thoughts and compulsions, is the imbalance that most psychiatrists treat for, and that most therapists know about, and while there is much medical literature about high histamine causing obsessive thoughts and compulsions, high histamine has not really made it’s way into public knowledge yet. Psychiatrists don’t usually treat for it, choosing to give SSRIs as treatment, and it’s not really common knowledge yet that high histamine causes obsessions and compulsions, except among Functional Medicine doctors and natural health communities, where it is becoming more commonly known.

Back when I was being treated for my obsessive thoughts and compulsions, I was put on SSRIs which can make people with mood swings and mania (which I had) worse, and that’s exactly what happened to me. When I complained about my thoughts and compulsions not lessening or going away, doctors wanted to increase my dose of the SSRIs, which made me manic and out-of-control. However, many people do see a reduction in intrusive thoughts with SSRIs. They are usually the people without mania and mood swings.

It wasn’t until I was put on antihistamine medications that I experienced relief from my obsessive and compulsive thoughts (later I switched to antihistamine supplements which are much more healthy for the body). I researched the medical literature and found that it’s well-documented that high histamine is a common cause of obsessions and compulsions, and that antihistamine medications and supplements have shown to be effective at reducing the obsessions and compulsions.

This was certainly the case with me. At one point I was having intrusive graphic images of violence and murder and sexual acts popping up into my head non-stop. This was also during my psychotic break. Nothing stopped the images except medication, and once on the right medication, the thoughts abated without effort on my part.

In the medical literature, and known to people in the natural health communities, it’s been documented that PANDAS in children has been linked to obsessive thoughts and compulsions. PANDAS is an acronym for Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections. It’s a strep infection that goes to the brain and affects the entire nervous system. Mothers have seen improvement in their kids with obsessive thoughts and compulsions when they treat the underlying strep infection, and some of kids are now completely free of obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Lyme disease has also been linked with obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and so has mold illness.

When there is a systemic infection of any kind, or systemic toxicity from exposure to toxins, and the cells become overloaded, the toxins or infections will get into the blood stream. A person can become septic and die if the body does not fight off the infections and keep them out of the blood stream where they can damage vital organs. So the body has a defense mechanism. That defense mechanism is to rev up a part of the immune system involved in fighting acute infection, and to quickly kill off the infection or neutralize the toxins. To do this the body uses histamine which is an immune modulator and signaler and it’s involved in “zapping” the toxins or infections and killing or neutralizing them.

When histamine is shot out in high amounts, it can bring on psychiatric symptoms in the brain, including obsessive-compulsive symptoms and psychosis (delusions, disjointed thoughts, confusion, auditory and visual hallucinations).

Toxic black mold was the major player in my obsessive-compulsive symptoms, but really any pathogen or toxin can cause a rise in histamine if the infection or toxicity goes systemic and the body needs to neutralize or kill it quickly with histamine as a protective measure.

The Typical Course The Sufferer Takes
When a person begins to really greatly suffer from distressing obsessive thoughts, it’s common that they will go to parents or pastors for help. (It’s common for this condition to begin in adolescence; but some have it as younger children). They will usually say something to the effect of “Help! I keep thinking highly sexual thoughts or very blasphemous thoughts or very violent thoughts, and I need your prayers that God will give me the self-control to stop thinking these things and get the victory over them.”

They may request to be prayed over or anointed. Usually by the time they come to you for help, they have spent months or even years of obsessively trying to stop thinking the thoughts for several hours or more every day. This isn’t the kind of thing that they want to reach out for help with, as they feel guilty and morally polluted for having these thoughts, and they had hoped to get the victory over the thoughts in their own prayer time, but haven’t been able to get control of the thoughts, and so they are coming to you in a state of desperation, often worried they have either backslidden from God or that they have committed the unpardonable sin. It doesn’t make sense to them that they could have such wicked thoughts on a consistent basis, and still be a Christian, as God calls on us in His Word to take every thought captive, and not being able to do that, they often fear or conclude that they are backslidden or have committed the unpardonable sin.

When they bring their request for help to a pastor, parent, or mentor, there are two responses that are common. 1. The parent or mentor may pray over them, and encourage them to keep trying to take their thoughts captive, and that Jesus will give them the eventual victory. It’s common for the person to think that this is a young adolescent dealing with some new sexual thoughts and temptations, that they didn’t have as a kid, and they just need encouragement and to be reminded of Christ’s promises in the Word and His faithfulness and sufficiency to give them self-control in this new area of life – sexuality – that they are awakening to. If violent thoughts are mentioned the parent may attribute these to changes in testosterone levels going up during puberty if it’s a son, or hormonal mood swings if it’s a daughter.

Usually the parent doesn’t know their kid has been praying over the thoughts for hours every day for months or even years, and they misjudge how much investment the kid has already put into overcoming these thoughts.

2. The other common response is for a parent to try to balance out the overly-dramatic response their kid is having to the thoughts, to put their fears in perspective, and push back against the excessive blame the kid is placing on themselves, and the out-of-proportion significance the kid is giving to the thoughts. The parent may say something like “Carl, they are just thoughts, don’t let them dominate your life.” Or “Every kid your age has some crazy thoughts with hormonal changes going on and you’ll grow out of this and come into your own soon.” The parent is going for a balancing effect – and honestly it’s very good for the parent to counteract and call into question the faulty reasoning, and conclusions the kid with the condition is making, – but the parent doesn’t realize their kid isn’t having the normal intrusive thoughts everyone experiences. Their kid has a condition, and is being bombarded much more frequently with distressing thoughts and also heavy and false emotions, like false guilt, and cognitive distortions like attributing blame to themselves for the thoughts. While adolescence is difficult for everyone, some people develop mental conditions in adolescence, and have an experience that is pathological and out of the norm for what is healthy and normal, which requires hey intervention and treatment. For kids with mental conditions, they may not naturally stabilize and become a well-balanced adult and left untreated may develop psychosis, or continue to have distressing intrusive thoughts in their adult life that doesn’t abate unless successfully treated. The kid may be battling through hundreds or thousands of these thoughts every day, depending on how severe their condition is. They may be highly graphic images, or very detailed accounts of murder or blasphemy or sexual acts.

This is the real reason why the kid is so distressed by them. But usually the kid will not put their situation into such words, and will mention “intrusive thoughts” or “immoral thoughts”, but will not mention the graphic nature of the thoughts or the frequency, due to guilt, and also kids just aren’t very articulate in their teens and it takes time to learn how to bring up sensitive topics like this, and so they may lack the skills and experience to articulate their suffering in a way that allows the parent to see how severe it is. I’ve had obsessive-compulsive thoughts since I was very young (as a young kid my intrusive thoughts were mostly a fear of my family dying and fear of death), and as an adolescent they became sexual, violent, and blasphemous in nature – a new turn that commonly happens – and it took me many years to be able to accurately communicate the severity and level of distress of my intrusive thoughts.

If the kid mentions violent thoughts, the adult in their life may think they are referring to the common temptations to be angry or jealous with siblings, to want to break away from the restraint of their parents, and the need to surrender those fallen desires to God so He can implant His holy desires in them.

If the kid mentions sexual thoughts, the parent may think they are just struggling with the common temptations to lust that kids their age go through, and the parent will encourage them to pray for strength and help from God. Not realizing these are intrusive thoughts are pathological, symptoms of a mental condition.

Unknown to the parent or mentor, the adolescent is not struggling with unholy thoughts. The adolescent is experiencing intrusive involuntary “wild ball” brain signals coming from the unconscious parts of the brain that are distressing in nature. The problem lies in the kid’s inability to tell that what he is experiencing is not in fact a thought, and then using the word ‘thought’ to communicate his struggle.

There is a breakdown in communication due to this, and the teenager feels his distress is dismissed and swept under the rug, or that he is a failure and a hopeless rebel, because he’s sought God in prayer for strength as recommended by mentors, and the thoughts are still as frequent and distressing as before the intense prayer sessions he’s engaged in. He thinks it’s likely he is at odds with God or has committed the unpardonable sin, that there must be some rebellious part of himself that insists on rejecting God, because he can’t seem to get the victory over the thoughts no matter how hard he tries and how committed he is.

When your typical person without obsessive compulsive syndrome has an intrusive thought, the intrusive thought looks like a “wild ball” to them. In sports a wild ball is when the ball slips from the hands of the person throwing it, and instead of going in the intended direction it misses it’s target by a “mile”, and goes in a completely random direction. It’s so erratic it’s often humorous, and when it happens, everyone knew the player didn’t mean to throw it like that and that the ball slipped.

People without obsessive compulsive syndrome can easily tell the intrusive thought is a “wild ball” thought that is a mental glitch taking place. Everything about the thought, the exaggerated content, the way it forms, how it enters the mind – everything about the nature of the thought – just looks like a complete outlier to them. The same way a series of erratic heart palpitations feel and look like a glitch from the normal steady heart pattern, they can see right away these thoughts are different.

This awareness is why they don’t give the thought significance or take blame for the thought.

But those with obsessive compulsive syndrome have compromised mental processing in the area of something self-referential processing. This causes them to lose that awareness that the intrusive thought is a “wild ball thought” coming from an unconscious part of their mind – a different part of their mind than thoughts they choose to think come from – and they see it as no different in nature from our normal thoughts. They lack this perception the way someone with autism might lack the ability to read emotions from looking at someone’s facial expression. They have a very real deficit in this area, and can’t see the thought is coming erratically from left field, and that it’s clearly an involuntary glitch.

Self-referential processing errors also occur in conditions like schizophrenia where the person may lose the ability to tell that their thoughts are coming from their own brain, and may believe a parent or a demon is inserting thoughts into their brain. This is a common symptom of psychosis called thought insertion.

Another common error in self-referential processing is when a person in psychosis believes people can see inside their mind and read their thoughts. They lose the ability to tell their thoughts are private and known by them alone and that another person’s consciousness isn’t involved in reading what goes on in their head.

These two examples are more extreme than what is seen in obsessive compulsive syndrome, but I listed them to give an idea of what self-referential processing is, and how errors in it can cause guilt or fear based on an altered sense of one’s self and their agency over their self and thoughts.

So, because the person with intrusive thoughts loses that awareness that the intrusive thought isn’t coming from their conscious brain, they group the intrusive thought in with their consciously chosen thoughts, desires, and motives, and blame themselves for the thought and identify with it as their own, rather than the brain glitch that it is.

Education can help! Once the person comes to realize they’ve lost accurate perception when it comes to self-referential processing, they’ve lost the perception that the thought is coming out of the blue from the unconscious, involuntary parts of the brain, that the thought is a wild thought, just knowing this truth, will help them recognize what is actually going on, and a brand new pathway in the brain will form, that they then have the option of strengthening by repetition. It’s when we don’t know something that we can’t train our brain to see around the deficit, because we don’t even know there’s a deficit, but once we know the truth, we can then begin working that new pathway, and coming more and more out of the false perception that all our thoughts are the same and they are all chosen, and begin to identify the “wild ball” thoughts more clearly.

Then they won’t experience as much guilt, when this fact can be clearly seen.

The human brain is neuroplastic, meaning we can form new brain pathways, and train our brain to learn new skills and perceptions in areas where there has been a deficit.

Of course, false guilt isn’t the only concern here; it’s also important they get help at the biochemical level to balance their brain and reduce inflammation, and I will talk more about that at the end of the article.

As far as what is going on in the brain of someone with this condition, brain scans show similar neural circuitry to schizophrenia, although not as pronounced or severe. And some people with obsessive compulsive symptoms do go on to develop full schizophrenia (and the medical literature shows the same biochemical imbalances can cause everything from anxiety disorders, to depression, to intrusive thoughts, to schizophrenia), but it’s not everyone, so having intrusive thoughts doesn’t automatically mean you’ll go on to develop hallucinations or delusions as are seen in schizophrenia syndrome. But in some people it does happen, so it’s important to be aware of the risk, and to take action to manage symptoms in the early stages.

But people with this condition of intrusive thoughts have dialed down frontal lobes – the part of the brain where judgment and reason take place – and the emotional centers of the brain are highly activated. This causes them to be in a dreamlike state where images and thoughts pop up involuntarily into their consciousness out of their control, and since the frontal lobe is dialed down, they do not have moral judgment and the thoughts are not being screened for their moral content. They also don’t have the ability to be logical, so the thoughts that pop up will be nonsensical, violent, or sexual thoughts, as well as some benign, morally neutral thoughts – content without moral discretion and without a filter – the intrusive thoughts are not processed by the frontal lobe and thus are not evaluated based on morals. They just flow in and out involuntarily. The person will often not respond to the morally neutral thoughts and fail to really notice them, and it’s just the immoral ones that get their attention because they find them disturbing.

There is an interconnected part of the brain called the Default Mode Network (DMN). The DMN is active when a person is daydreaming and not in a fully alert state. In normal people without mental conditions, the DMN shuts off when they get engaged in active tasks, such as writing a paper, planning, talking actively with friends, etc. But in people with obsessive compulsive syndrome the DMN does not shut off when engaged in active tasks. There’s still much “clutter” and involuntary “talk” from the DMN going on at the same time.

A person with this condition may have the DMN insert say an image of a man raping a woman into their brain – the person then responds in alarm with “That was sickening; how could I have thought that?!” The intrusive image of the man raping the woman was the unconscious thought, and the alarmed and disgusted response was the conscious part of the brain – the frontal lobe. Or the DMN may wander around and settle on the thought “I’m going to sell my soul to the devil soon”, and then the person in alarm prays “Lord, I can’t believe I thought of doing that, please forgive me.”

They have the DMN and the conscious parts of the brain going on at the same time, but they can’t see the stark difference in nature from the involuntary thought that is just a brain glitch and random signal, and their consciously chosen thought.

The medical literature also shows a link between distressing intrusive thoughts and brain inflammation. Histamine is a neurotransmitter and immune modulatory involved in pain. If it’s high you feel pain more keenly. It’s also involved in the fight-or-flight distress signaling of the body. If it’s too high the body will feel like it’s in a state of fight or flight. It’s also involved in wakefulness and contributes to insomnia. It also plays a role in paranoia and in anger. When we get angry with someone, and shout at them, or harbor thoughts of anger, there is a histamine dump that takes place in our brain.

If histamine is chronically too high in the brain thoughts will turn dark in nature, violent, in keeping with the fight or flight response, paranoid, and things of the like. While a Christian can control their conscious thoughts, even when in a state of chronic brain inflammation, and choose not to yell angrily at someone or throw something just because they feel pain and stress in their head and emotions, the unconscious thoughts that take place in the Default Mode Network are not under their control, and these thoughts will change due to the excess histamine and become darker in nature and more violent. The same way that a person with high histamine will have nightmares in their sleep that can be very violent or scary, the person with obsessive compulsive syndrome will have violent involuntary day-time “dreaming” coming from the DMN.

Likewise, high dopamine has been linked in the medical literature with an increase in sexualized thoughts. Once again, the Christian will be able to control their conscious sexual thoughts (though not perfectly as we’re still sinners this side of heaven; through Christ they can do a very good job of this), however they will find themselves unable to control the involuntary roaming of the DMN which will settle on very sexualized thinking if dopamine is too high.

Add violent thoughts and sexual thoughts together without the frontal lobe to do moral judgment and sifting, and you can end up with some pretty distressing and disturbing “clutter” thoughts from the DMN, that are in no way the fault of the adolescent suffering from them.

A pastor or mentor can help the young person reality-check, by asking them a series of questions and pointing out the reality that the young person can’t see – the deficit in their self-referential processing.

For instance, you can ask them…”Ok tell me the next time you think one of these thoughts.” And the young person may go to tell them, but find that they have already thought the thought before they can even say “I’m thinking one of those thoughts again”. You could then point out that the quick speed of the thought reveals it’s not a consciously chosen thought. If one is experiencing a temptation to think a violent thought, there’s always a period of Satan tempting you with it before you give in. The thought kind of knocks on the door of your heart and asks to be let in and chosen and cherished; it doesn’t barge in without your consent.

This is how temptation works according to the Bible. We have a chance to resist the devil, and he will flee from us if we resist him.

But with involuntary thoughts they do barge in without consent. And you could point out the difference. You can also educate them about the Default Mode Network and how the thoughts that come from there don’t involve the desires and the will. They don’t involve higher thinking where moral judgment takes place. They are just random impulses dictated by mood and neurotransmitters, not by moral judgment.

Help the young person to change the terminology to be more accurate. Have them start calling the thoughts, “brain glitches” or something similar.

Take them through situations in their life where God has helped them control their conscious thoughts, say for instance they were tempted to be jealous of their brother because he got a new bicycle and they didn’t get one, or he’s doing better in school than they are. Take them through how they were tempted to be jealous, but then they surrendered to God and resisted the temptation to be jealous, choosing to be grateful for the things God had done in their life instead, knowing He loves them personally and gave His own life for them. They chose to be happy for their brother’s school success, and to ask God to help them do their best, not out of a desire to outperform their brother, but just out of a desire to give things their all out of a desire to please God.

Take them through how God did help them, and took their jealousy away, and gave them new desires. Remind them of how the process of taking every thought captive, and surrendering sinful motives and desires works according to the Bible. Take them through this process step-by-step.

Help them see that when it comes to conscious thoughts, God always gives us the victory. But He doesn’t always stop “brain glitches” aka intrusive thoughts because these are a health condition, and there’s no promise in the Bible that God won’t allow a person to suffer from a health condition.

Explain how the Bible doctrine is different for overcoming sin and for recovering from a health condition. Jesus’ perfect life and death in this world – and the fact that He is God – gave Himself the authority to forgive all sin, and to provide Christians with moral power to overcome sin and to live holy, self-controlled lives. They won’t be perfect of course, until the sanctification process is complete, but they will exhibit real self-control and genuine godliness that will be distinctly different from people of the world who do not believe in and follow God. Victory and fruits of obedience are promised and guaranteed to the Christian.

But good mental and physical health is not a guarantee. God may permit mental conditions to bear sway in your life. There’s many different reasons why He may do this. One big reason is often to test our faith, another is to teach us to have a deeper reliance on God, and not on self. When you have faulty mental processing and cognitive distortions, it really hits directly at pride and self-sufficiency. You learn you can ve wrong – very wrong – about things. That your mind is finite, fallible, and human. That you need a God who is infinite, infallible, and divine to steer the course of your life and make the decisions reserved for God alone.

One of the big benefits I’ve seen in my own mental health journey has been gaining knowledge. If I had not had distressing obsessions and compulsions I wouldn’t have done thorough research into the condition, wouldn’t understand the brain at the level I do now, which is a huge blessing as we are made in the image of God so studying the brain allows us to see the handiwork of God in His most important creation, I wouldn’t have helpful information to share with others who suffer from the condition. It’s hard to be committed to a deep and thorough of something that isn’t personal. It’s when it’s personal that you hunger and thirst for the answers, and God promises that those who seek shall find, and those who ask moral questions and hunger and thirst after righteousness shall not only have their questions answers, but they shall be filled with His righteousness.

I have certainly found the answers in the Bible and in neuroscience involving the important questions intrusive thoughts raise, to be answered in a very satisfying way, showing God to be just and good, even when we lack important brain perceptions and really do think we are guilty, God will never hold someone guilty for something they didn’t do and that is an illness. He always does right by us, always, even when we can’t understand what is going on and are limited due to our finite human nature and the symptoms of an illness that distorts our perception.

God and His truth is not limited by our malfunction. Truth exists outside of us and beyond us, and is eternal. Truth is not under threat when we’re experiencing delusions or lacking important perceptions. Jesus defended truth by His perfect life and death in this world, defeating lies, and lawlessness and evil. Truth and goodness are held up by the very arms of God Himself, the very life of God Almighty. So even when our perception distorts the picture and we fear terrifying things like that we have committed the unpardonable sin, God is outside of our opinions, perception, and self, and His truth is indestructible, always perfect and right. This is one of the important lessons that going through mental conditions like obsessive-compulsive syndrome and psychosis have taught me.

There is a requirement for Christians to take the best care of their health that they possibly can, out of appreciation for Christ who bought them back with His own life.

It’s important to help the sufferer improve their health in any way they can, such as eating a healthier diet, starting supplements that have been proven to help with lowering histamine and thus lowering intrusive thoughts, and if they have the funds for it, encourage them to see a Functional Medicine doctor and be tested and treated for their condition, or try medication if absolutely needed with a mainstream doctor.

They will gain a sense of responsibility and of agency in learning it’s their job to take care of their health, both of which are healing and tend to balance the mind. People need purpose. They need to know God created them for a deeply significant purpose and that learning to care for their body is a core part of that purpose we have as Christians in living for the glory of God.

When they see the supplements and treatments helping, they will start to feel a sense of agency, and relief, knowing they have tools that can tip their thoughts in healthy directions and take control of the turbulent intrusive thoughts and mental clutter and mood swings (if present) going on in their brain. They have weapons to help them win the brain inflammation battle and tip things in their favor.

And of course, it’s crucial you go over what sin is from the Bible. The mental condition has caused imbalanced thinking and cognitive distortions, and so they may have lost basic Bible knowledge such as how the Bible defines sin and what it is. The Bible doesn’t call everything sin. For instance, to be blunt for the sake of clarity in this important issue, when a man has a wet dream, this is not considered sin. There are some sexual things that happen that aren’t sin. Biologically driven sexual desire can be very strong and yet is not sinful. It’s only lust that is sin. Urges aren’t sin. Involuntary sexual responses aren’t sin. And involuntary thoughts aren’t sin either.

And so people who are sexual beings and have sexual expressions that aren’t chosen such as a wet dream, or a sexual urge, when these people become mentally ill, one of the ways their body and brain malfunctions is sexually.

The sexual urges and rumination done by the unconscious part of the brain, that is just part of being a sexual being, and isn’t lust, isn’t chosen fantasizing, comes to the forefront when inflammation is present, and the frontal lobe shuts off. As explained earlier, the person is in almost a dream-like state, with lower passions and impulses dominating, and higher thoughts are dialed down and inactive.

This isn’t sin. It’s a malfunction of the sexual system. Our brain and neuro-hormones are involved in our sexuality. And these can malfunction and go haywire.

Thus the Christian with this condition, who desires to obey God and live a pure life, will find they have much control over their conscious thoughts. They won’t engage in much sexual fantasy when it comes to chosen thoughts. They won’t dehumanize people and see them as sex objects. They will treat people with dignity and value them. They will have concern and care in their motives and expression when they talk with people, their experience in having a mental illness often increases compassion and love in them. But when it comes to unconscious thoughts and impulses, these may be very out-of-control with lots of intrusive sexual or violent thoughts. Because they have a mental condition.

Biblical Philosophy of Sin

What we really need is the correct Biblical philosophy of sin. It’s important that we get this right and clear up any misconceptions that we might have that aren’t Biblical.

What is sin according to the Bible?

Sin is how the fall happened, it’s the moral evil that entered the cosmos and brought natural evil such as cancer and disease. It’s why Christ had to come and die to redeem us – it’s the crux of everything, or rather God’s law is, and breaking His law is the cause of disorder and destruction. What is it?

Sin is anything that goes against God’s perfectly loving character/nature. The Bible tells us “God is love” John 4:8, then it says “The commandments, do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet and any other commandment, are summed up in this one decree: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Romans 13:9-10

God is love and his law is love. Sin is the transgression of the law (1 John 3:4); love is the fulfillment of the law. Sin then is the opposite of love.

Anything that is not Christlike, not loving, not moral and good, is sin.

The 10 commandments contain the inherent rights of God and man. God, being the true God, the Creator who brought all things into being, and who died for man to redeem him to Himself, has a right to our worship for being the Creator, for being a perfect Standard; for having a character of perfect self-sacrificial love for His children. To worship any other God denies God the love and worship that is his by right.

People have a right to being treated with dignity because they are beings made in God’s image. It would be wrong to treat a person the way you would treat a dog; it would deny a person their inherent right to dignity. People have a right to sow and to reap what they sow. To engage in work and reap the results of that work, whether it be monetary or otherwise – and not have their work stolen from them by someone who did not do the work and who has no right to the results of their labor. To steal from them is inherently immoral as it denies the rights of an individual.

People have to life – to not be murdered. This is one of the most basic rights. Not only does a murderer violate a person’s right to life when they kill them, but it steals from God who is the Giver of all Life and the Creator of that person.

Fornication is wrong because it takes from someone privileges reserved for marriage without fulfilling the responsibilities of being that person’s husband or wife. It merges two people into one flesh in a union that is designed for marriage alone. It is not merely a physical act but a spiritual union is created when two people have sex.

So you can see how the breaking of the 1st, 8th, 6th, and 7th commandments is a violation of inherent rights of God and man. And the other commandments similarly are inherent rights of God and man, but I won’t go into all of them here.

What this means is that right and wrong exist as principles inherent within the very fabric of moral reality, coming from the character of God Himself. There is objective right and there is objective wrong. They are not subjective ideas and preferences in the minds of individual people – they exist outside of us.

Jesus explains that the 10 commandments are really 10 categories that encompass far more than just the literal breaking of the written law. For instance, hate is murder, and lust is adultery. (Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28)

The moral law – the 10 commandments – involves all of our thoughts, motives, desires, choices, and actions. This law judges and evaluates every thought and desire, and God categorizes each as either holy or unholy, moral or immoral, good or evil.

Let’s say we make plans to buy our mom a card for mother’s day. That’s a good and right desire that keeps the 5th commandment about the importance of honoring our parents.

Or let’s say we think a mean thought about a school bully and want them to get a bad grade on a test. That’s a thought that breaks the 6th commandment about hate and murder.

So this moral law is very relevant to our lives. By it we have a knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20), and can know when a thought or desire or action is one that God approves of, and is right for a Christian to have, or whether it’s immoral and wrong for a Christian to have.

The Bible says the Word of God, which contains His 10 Commandment law, is – through the power of the Holy Spirit – “alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”
Hebrews 4:12

Thus we can use the Word of God to know right from wrong, and depending on God for help, His Spirit whose role it is to teach us all the Words of Christ, will teach us when a thought or attitude, or desire is a moral one or an immoral one.

God has given us a conscience, through the Holy Spirit convicting our hearts.

“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)”
Romans 2:15

Because we have this conscience made possible by God’s Spirit interacting with our mind and consciousness, we can judge our thoughts and motives and actions to know if they are moral or immoral. We have a compass.

However our conscience isn’t always perfect. If we have incomplete knowledge of right and wrong, our conscience will reflect our knowledge and understanding. It’s possible for a more mature Christian to have a better grasp of right and wrong than a baby Christian, for instance, and learning and growing in the Word of God is crucial for the Christian. And while our conscience is subject to error because we are fallible human beings who do not always have a perfect knowledge of God’s Word (and some people do not have access to the Bible), and only God’s judgment is infallible and perfect (1 Corinthians 4:4), God does give us guidance and knowledge to live a godly life in this world. To follow Him and obey Him and to be a faithful Christian. He gives us enough knowledge of moral truth to do that.

With the knowledge He gives us from His Word and the help of His Spirit teaching us His Word and giving us a conscience that aligns with His law…we can then surrender wrong attitudes, desires, thoughts to God, and repent of wrong actions and choices, and our High Priest will forgive us and change those immoral things about us.

However, for a person to be said to be sinning, there are a couple other dimensions to this that the Bible specifies.

In Romans 14, Paul speaks of how we should not eat or drink something that could cause a brother to stumble. This can be something that is ok and not a violation of a commandment, but because it would cause confusion and doubt to the new believer and your brother in Christ, it becomes wrong to engage in it around that person. He explains that whatever we do that is not of faith is sin.

21 It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.

22 Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God. Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.

23 And he that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith: for whatsoever is not of faith is sin.

What does this mean that whatsoever is not of faith is sin? Even though objective right and wrong exists and everything is either right or wrong (there are a lot of things that are right so we have a lot of moral options as we engage in life in this world), as human beings we don’t always have perfect knowledge of the scriptures or of right and wrong, and we may not completely understand what is right or wrong. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, only that we understand it imperfectly. We may for instance disagree with a brother about what is right and wrong. This scripture tells us that if there is any doubt that an action is wrong, doing it would be a sin. It’s also a sin to do something completely innocent around a brother who himself has doubts as this could cause him to engage in it before he has adequate Bible knowledge on the subject and could cause him to be tempted to go against his conscience and do something he has doubts about.

This adds another dimension to sin. It’s not merely the actions that are sinful, but also if one in their limited human knowledge isn’t sure but suspects something is sinful, then they sin by engaging in it. Tempting or encouraging someone to engage in something they have doubts about is also sin. We are each stewards of ourselves under God and we have a one-on-one relationship with Him, and an individual conscience. Therefore no person should ever assume the role of conscience for another person. To do this is to make oneself a god and to violate the human rights of another person, treating them as less than human.

It’s also true that if someone does not have enough knowledge to know something is sinful, or they are lied to, that it’s not a sin for someone to do something they really don’t think is a sin.

Mothers for instance from other time periods were told by doctors of their day that medical practices were safe that we now know to be very unsafe, such as taking mercury for colds and flues. These mothers weren’t sinning who gave their children these treatments because they didn’t know they were harmful and thought they were giving their children the best that medicine had to offer.

Now, for a mother to know mercury is a poison and hire a physician to give it to her child – would be a sin, because she knows it’s harmful and she’s giving it anyway.

It would also be a sin for a mother to worship the doctor and blindly do whatever he suggests, without doing her own research and praying to God for wisdom. Her child has been entrusted to her by God and she’s responsible for its well-being, not the doctor. Doctors are helpers not dictators. Therefore she goes against her responsibility of stewardship if she blindly listens to a doctor and obeys him like a robot.

There have doubtless then been many cases through history of people not sinning and yet causing harm without realizing it. Human knowledge is limited and we’re not omniscient. It’s also possible to do an inherently good thing with a selfish motive and sin. Giving money to help the poor so that people will praise you and like you, for instance, rather than doing it to actually alleviate suffering and caring about the sufferers. Paul talks about this when he says “if I give my body to be burned but have not love, what does it profit me?” showing that one can do inherently good acts from a selfish motive and it’s therefore not love.

So to not be sinning it’s not enough that we do inherently good things. Knowledge is also part of this, and motive is as well.

James 4:17 speaks again about this other dimension: “He who knows the good he ought to do and does it not, to him it is sin.”

The person must have knowledge, or they aren’t sinning. They also must have the ability to know and to reason, so someone who has lost the ability to reason due to a stroke or due to severe mental illness cannot choose to sin.

Jesus speaks about this concept:

“If you were blind,” Jesus replied, “you would not be guilty of sin. But since you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”
John 9:41

One must be able to “see” to do the right thing, in order for it to be a sin for them to fail to do the right thing.

Notice also in James 4:17 that the person must be able to choose to do or not to do, in order to sin.

There is not an instance in scripture where someone is declared guilty by God for something they didn’t do.

Fornication for instance is a sin, and rape is a sin, but being raped is not a sin. In the case of being raped fornication is happening and it is very sexual and it can certainly feel “wrong”, but the victim is innocent. It is only the rapist who is guilty.

25 But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.

26 But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:

27 For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.

Deuteronomy 22

Like murder which is certainly not the fault of the one who is murdered, so rape is not the fault of the one who is raped, and the guilt and sin lies only with the rapist. So you can see how something sexual and even violent and impure doesn’t make it a sin. It’s only if the person does that thing. If that thing is done TO that person against their will, as in the case of rape, the victim is innocent.

The Bible definitely tells us that a person can sin in their thoughts.

Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
Isaiah 55:6-7

We can sin even in our attitudes and intents of our heart, our motives.

Repent, therefore, of your wickedness, and pray to the Lord. Perhaps He will forgive you for the intent of your heart.
Acts 8:22

21 Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:

22 But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Matthew 5:

Someone who desires to murder another – even if they never act on it – is sinning in the intents of their heart.

Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.
1 John 3:15

So, it is NOT just our outward actions that we can sin with, but also our attitudes and intents and motives in our heart. Our thoughts.

However, even in our thoughts they must be chosen in order for them to be sin. There is not a place in scripture where someone is pronounced guilty by God for something they did not choose to think or to do.

Explain how we are born with a fallen nature and so we inevitably will sin, yet sin is active.

As in the rape example, the question now becomes “are these thoughts I’m experiencing more like rape, or are they more like fornication?” Are these thoughts happening to me, or am I making them happen?

The truth is from the Bible it’s clear that if you know right from wrong, and you’re still choosing to make these thoughts happen, then it’s a sin. If however, you have lost your ability to tell right from wrong and don’t know these thoughts are immoral then it wouldn’t be a sin for you (as may possibly be the case in some people with brain injury and mental illness), OR if you know they are immoral but you’re not making them happen.

This is the Bible criteria for sin. If you know it’s wrong, and you’re choosing to do it, it’s sin. If you don’t know it’s wrong and don’t suspect it’s wrong and you choose to do it it’s not sin. If you aren’t doing it and it’s something that’s happening to you, then it’s not sin.

“How could these be my own thoughts and yet I’m not the one choosing them” you might ask? Well, it turns out there are a lot of involuntary processes in the human body. And Christians have always drawn a line between involuntary processes and sin. For instance, when pastors counsel young men not to lust after young women, they don’t count physical sexual desire as a sin, even though it can be a very intense feeling, nor do they count erections as sin that happen naturally as a result of the man having a healthy nervous system and hormonal system that works that way. If he brought about the arousal by thinking lustful thoughts, then it’s a sin. If he brought about the arousal by looking at half-naked pictures of women, then it’s a sin. But if it just happened spontaneously due to hormones, it’s not a sin.

Similarly pastors don’t tell someone with a gay attraction that they are sinning by simply being tempted by that desire. It’s only if they think gay thoughts or act on those thoughts that they have sinned. It’s also not a sin to be tempted to be violent or to be jealous. It’s only a sin if you deliberately think a jealous or violent thought.

Sin is always deliberate and chosen, even in cases where it’s a sin of omission (meaning something that you should have done that you neglected), it’s deliberately neglected.

So the next question that follows is: “Are these voluntary or involuntary thoughts I’m having?” and another question that is very relevant “what even is a thought? Do these things flooding my mind even fit the definition of a thought, or are they some other phenomenon?” In order to try to get to the bottom of this I met online with neuroscience tutors and had conversations with a neurologist.

Not everything that our brain does is a thought. Our brain takes in images and interprets them – this wouldn’t be classified as a thought. Our brain makes sure we are walking upright and keeps track of our position – this isn’t a thought. Our brain stores memories – even of sins we’ve done or had done to us – and these aren’t considered thoughts. We wouldn’t consider our brain storing memories of sins we’ve done as our brain sinning. If we couldn’t remember our sins we couldn’t bring them to Christ and ask for strength to help with those specific fallen desires and inclinations. We couldn’t ask Jesus to help us make right the wrongs we’d done to others if we couldn’t remember what we’d done to them that was wrong. We do need to remember those things, but not dwell on them or delight in them of course. And it’s not a sin to have memories. It would be a sin to think in detail about the fornication we committed before our conversion. To actively engage in fantasy of past sins, to enjoy and delight in them, is definitely sin. But to know and recount the details the way a police officer might report a case is not sin. To know the details of what happened and store them in one’s memory, and then to bring them up and confess them to Christ, is certainly not sin.

What about hallucinations – are these thoughts? What about dreams? These are very important questions.

There are lots of involuntary processes in the brain and body – are these blasphemous ideas and images voluntary or involuntary? And are they even thoughts or are they something else?

Severe Mental Illness Involves Loss of Control

There are some conditions where a person has irresistible compulsions, such as during full psychosis, or when there’s been damage from a stroke or dementia. I want to talk briefly about compulsions that involve actions, rather than just compulsions in the thoughts. A compulsion in the thoughts might be something like praying “Lord forgive me” every time you see a violent intrusive image pop into your head.

But a compulsive action could be something like a person in psychosis has a hallucination that their father is an alien, along with strong compulsions to assault the alien to protect their family. They may commit a crime and assault their father in the midst of their delusion and irresistible compulsions.

Severe Mental Illness often involves loss of control and loss of function in various ways. Coming back from being treated for a severe mental illness and regaining function, but still having a loss of some function, I’ve been able to see that I really am a living machine of sorts. I’ve been able to see the perimeters of my finite nature.

God is an infinite being with moral agency.
We are finite beings with moral agency.

God’s brain is an eternal, infinite, indestructible brain, that can never err and is infallible.
Our brain is a created, finite, physical structure, that has limited knowledge, often errs, and due to sin is subject to breaking down and malfunctioning in its structure.

When my symptoms get worse I sometimes lose impulse control or I am bombarded with intrusive images. Then when I take supplements or medication the symptoms come back to a place where I can control my actions and my thoughts again.

We are held accountable for the things within our control, not the things outside of our control. This is always the Biblical rule. Everyone is finite, some have more agency and control than others and others have a lot less. But if we are faithful with what is within our control then we are still Christians in good standing and right relationship with Christ. Those of us with awareness into our condition have an obligation to seek out effective treatments to help us manage symptoms, but even as we do this, not everyone with severe mental illness will have complete control and agency over their impulses at all times. This is why they need to inform family of their condition and be supported in their illness. It’s necessary for the church and the community also to become educated and informed about how to help and provide resources for those with SMI and protection for the community.

The truth is if rest homes were not provided for the elderly we would actually see crimes being committed by older people in dementia. But thankfully we have a good system in place for those who lose control of their impulses due to dementia and the community is kept safe from them while they are cared for. But unfortunately the same services are not always provided for those who are younger who have severe mental illness, and this is why we see more crimes committed by younger people with mental symptoms.

The Question Our Illness Keeps Us From Asking

After writing this chapter I ran this question by someone I know “If you started getting intrusive violent or blasphemous thoughts, as someone with sound reasoning, what would your reaction be?” I wanted to know what a normal reaction would be for someone who doesn’t have a mental illness and who is thinking clearly, if this happened to them. And she responded “I’d be asking what’s wrong with my brain?” She went on to explain that she’d be very worried her brain was damaged and she’d developed a mental condition, and that her next step would be seeing a doctor and asking them what could be wrong with her.

This answer hit me hard. Wow, how unfortunate it is that those of us with these conditions have our reasoning and our awareness hijacked by the illness so that we can’t ask the simple question “what’s wrong with my brain?” and be concerned about our health. The illness traps us in our room for months and months trying to control the violent and blasphemous thoughts, feeling intense guilt, never addressing the real issue, that hey maybe there’s something wrong with my brain’s hardware – maybe I’m ill – and maybe I need to see a psychiatrist or Functional Medicine doctor and be treated. It is unfortunate that so many times mental illnesses hijack our cognitive function and impair our perception so we can’t see our problems for what they really are and problem solve effectively and get help sooner than we usually do. It often takes an intervention on the part of family to get the person to a doctor.

Does it Show a Lack of Faith in God if I See a Doctor and Take Medication for My Mental Condition? How About the Reverse, Is it a Sin if I Don’t See a Doctor When I am Unwell or I Don’t Do Medical Treatments? Which is True?

Human beings were created to exist in relationship with God. Before sin our minds worked perfectly and we could understand exactly enough about God for our relationship to have a perfect dynamic based on truth – the truth of human nature and what a human being was created to be and what makes a human being perfect, and the truth about God’s nature and who God is and what makes Him perfect and what makes our relationship perfect. When God pronounced the created world, along with man in it “very good” he was speaking of it being perfect. Mrs. White explains that Lucifer was created to be as near as possible like God Himself (add reference). This was the perfect design for angels and human beings, as near as possible like God (but without divinity for only God is divine and divinity is not something that can be created) for a created, finite being to be, which is of course actually exponentially lower than God Himself. So much so that we have a finite nature and God has an infinite one. In creating us as close as possible to Himself it shows God’s love and that He wasn’t hoarding everything for Himself and making us defective and ugly. 

Due to sin affecting our physical brain and processing (we aren’t as smart as Adam was and don’t have perfect health, or a perfectly functioning brain), we likely can’t understand God the way we were created to in a perfect way, but people can still understand enough about Him in order to actually have a relationship built on faith with our Creator. We can understand the spiritual nature of faith and miracles. We can believe God can part the Red Sea, that He can raise the dead, that He can stop the mouths of lions, and we can also believe He can do things in a more natural way if He chooses to, healing through doctors or herbal medicine. People are able to have faith in both situations because we can understand enough about the concept of God’s omnipotence, and His character and what faith is, to choose to believe in Him. We really were created to be in relationship with God Himself, and our brain was designed to be able to commune with Him and exercise faith in Him. The sons of God (I believe this is a reference to the angels) praised God and sang for joy at the creation of the world. Yes, God’s created beings witnessed the creation of the world and could understand enough about the things God had created to see their goodness and respond with shouts of praise and adoration. And the human mind too can understand the created works of God. We can know something about each field of science, physics, chemistry, etc. and even things like logic and the laws of thought.

We’re also able to understand angels and other worlds that God has created, even if these worlds are very different from our own. We have to see and study these worlds in order to understand them as God’s creativity is not something we can invent or think up and is far beyond our own, but if we could be taken to those other worlds we would find our mind can study the science of those other worlds like we do our own.

Throughout the Bible, God did miraculous healings and works, and He also did more natural ones. One of the biggest and most essential lessons through the scriptures is that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God. It is God that infuses us with life moment-by-moment. He uses bread to nourishes us because it is a metaphor of the bread of life, Christ Himself, and I believe because as finite beings it makes sense we would require finite food. We are made of the dust – the minerals and nutrients in the soil – and so we replace these nutrients and minerals when they run low with the food we eat, and this causes our physical bodies to function. He does this by choice; He doesn’t really technically need to use bread, but it does bring us in touch with our finite nature and with the earth we were created from to use bread to sustain us. He sustained Moses on the mountain for 40 days without bread and water and kept him alive miraculously, for instance.

God put His children through different tests and trials to teach them reliance on Himself for life, for salvation, and for their every need. If there was no bread or no water, but He had promised their bread and water would be sure, they could trust He would provide for them, whether it meant leading them to the promised land to naturally grow their own wheat, or miraculously sending manna down from heaven to feed them as they journeyed through the wilderness.

Because God’s goal was to teach them reliance upon Himself and on no other person or food source or temporal advantage, He often changed up his manner of working, and did not always provide in the same ways each time.

The only real question to be asked was “Lord, I seek you to provide for my needs. Please tell me how you’d like to do that. Lead me and guide me. Show me what your Word says.”

Abraham had a huge denial of faith when he tried to have a child the natural way, by resorting to taking another wife who was younger than old Sarah and was fertile. God wanted to work in miraculous fashion this time and give an elderly Sarah fertility, at a time He decided on, which was later than Abraham and Sarah wanted it to be. But at other times he caused the lineage that brought the Messiah to occur in the natural way without complications. God’s work has moved forward in both natural and supernatural ways through history, but God’s power always attends it whether it appears natural on the surface or not. 

The underlying denominator is God’s people always sought His will, and surrendered their own. They searched the scriptures to find the promises of God. Abraham had been specifically promised his heir would come from Sarah. He should have believed God and not resorted to human methods. Resorting to human methods when God has spelled out in his Word how He wants to do things is a denial of faith.

So the question “is it a denial of faith to seek doctors for my mental illness”, while usually not a denial of faith and this is the typical way that God works in these end times (see EGW quotes about how God will not do many miracles in these last days), could at times be a denial of faith. It depends. If you are putting your faith solely in these physicians to heal you and you are not putting your faith in God, then you’ve made idols of your doctors and this is a denial of faith. God told James White through a prophecy he gave to Ellen White that God did not want James to depend on the doctors at the sanitarium to get him well, but to get well at home. James was being tempted to trust in men and not in God, and so God healed him another way that required dependence on God for healing. For those who depend too much on doctors God often does not allow the doctors to get you completely well. We each have individual stewardship under God to take care of our bodies and minds, and God will often leave you somewhat sick so that you have to come to Him in prayer for your answers, and take charge of your health to get well, changing your diet to be healthy, taking time for adequate rest, taking supplements if needed and really investing of yourself in your healing. 

It could also be a denial of faith not to see a doctor if you really need to see one. Definitely neglecting one’s health is a denial of faith. So they need to attend to their health in some way, whether at home studying on their own and doing treatments for their condition, or by seeing a doctor and getting put on a healing protocol. Some people want to go it alone and don’t want to cooperate with the church or a physician or anyone at all. I could see how someone with an individualistic mindset that has become an idol God could direct to see a physician, and seek help from members of the church. While we should never primarily rely on another person to heal us, and God ultimately is our Healer, the Bible is clear that people have a role in God’s work and that we are to cooperate with the church. The church was established by Christ and it is a core Bible doctrine. So someone who thinks they are sufficient in and of themselves and doesn’t need anyone, God might convict them of these doctrines and humble them and teach them by convicting them that they need to see a Christian doctor.

He does different things for different people, depending on what they need. And God’s big goal in all of this is our sanctification, which is much more important than even our physical health.

In order to get well it’s often the case that you will have to develop virtues you didn’t have before. Things like perseverance. If there is a need for perseverance, God often won’t allow the first physician or health worker you see to diagnose you accurately and give you all the right supplements to recover health. Because then you’d become physically healthy, but you wouldn’t have changed in character. No, for the person who needs to develop perseverance and commitment to health treatments and caring for their health, God will often gives bits and pieces of helpful information from one source here and another source there. The person may have to see doctors, and read articles, and study books by people in the health field, and pray for wisdom while doing all this. Then over time God helps them put all the pieces together and they regain their health.

For the person prone to pride, God may not enable them to get fully well. He may give them back some of their health, but leave them a bit fragile and dependent on Him so they will remember that they are a person and they aren’t God. Like Paul they may have a thorn that God uses to keep their characters grounded in love and truth and not pride and delusion.

As we read God’s Word we become convicted of these core truths – things like we should not look to a doctor to be our Savior. Cursed is the man who trusts in flesh. We become convicted that people play a role in God’s plan as counselors and helpers, and that it’s wrong to go it alone. Then once we understand these core Bible truths, we can make wise choices in our lives about how to pursue healing. If for instance you are idolizing a certain doctor, seeing him as the one who is going to get you well, making you into a savior. It may be a really good idea to not see that particular doctor. Remind yourself that health truth comes from God, not man. God is your source of help. And God has blessed many different doctors and health workers with truth. Then maybe see someone else, trusting that God is able to work through others too and that there is no one person whose job it is to get you well. People are helpers but ultimately you’re the steward over your body and God will help you get yourself well with their help, but not relying on them, relying on God alone.

Unlike in Bible days (and it was rare then too), God often does not speak to us in vision and tell us the exact course of action to pursue. If He told us our every move, this would be micromanagement. This wouldn’t establish us as stewards and sons and daughters of God. Remember that God is preparing us to tend and to keep the new earth where we will live after going to heaven for 1000 years when we come back to earth for the judgment of the wicked and the recreation of the world. It wouldn’t be good preparation for training us to reign over the new earth and to tend and keep it if God didn’t teach us good judgement and how to move from principle, managing our lives according to Bible principles.

We have to practice these things in order to get skilled at them. God doesn’t treat us in a way that is less than human. Satan certainly does, and fallen people under His control often treat each other this way. The domineering boss who never lets his employee think for himself and barks complicated orders to him all day long – God is not this kind of God.

There were cases in the scriptures though where God did sometimes give people exact instruction, however, we’re not in that boat. Unless we have a vision and it meets all the Bible requirements for being valid and for knowing it is the exact voice of God (this is very rare), we are not under obligation to follow any specific commands.

However, we can be under obligation to do specific actions, but we don’t determine this by visions or auditory commands (and if you’re prone to auditory hallucinations following voice commands and visions can be especially dangerous as it’s your own mind giving them to you in these cases and when one is hallucinating often their judgment is very impaired also as this is a symptom that often accompanies hallucinations). How do we know when a certain specific course of action is required by God? When it’s definitely the right thing to do, and there’s no other right options. If you find yourself in a situation where say you’re praying about meeting someone you can marry, and you meet a kind atheist but he’s not interested in God at all, you can know it’s absolutely God’s will for you not to date or marry Him, because God’s Word is very firm about not being yoked with unbelievers. You can know you would actually be going against God to marry this person. You are under obligation to turn this man down and not marry him.

There are situations in life where there’s only one right move, and this is when you know you’re under obligation to do a certain, specific action. 

There’s also a lot of situations where there are multiple right moves. Let’s say you attend a Christian college and you’re not sure which degree to pursue. You could become a nutritionist or you could go into culinary arts and open a healthy restaurant. You know from the Bible that both of these occupations benefit humanity and build up their health. God wants us to care for our bodies and encourage and teach others to do so too. You can do this work with either degree. You would want to go with the degree where you can do the most good, based on the Bible, but having finite knowledge and not being omniscient you may not be able to know which degree would be most beneficial to people. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not. In cases where it’s not it’s not wrong or a sin to simply choose one of the degrees. You don’t want to be trapped in indecisiveness over a decision when both answers are right according to the Bible. Pick one, go forward, and know God will bless your choice because you made a choice that aligns with the principles in the scriptures.

How do we know when a certain choice or course is God’s will and in alignment with faith? By conviction. And how does conviction happen? By the Word of God, and the Holy Spirit making the Word clear to us. Not by a feeling, a desire, or human opinion. We must check all our desires and thoughts and our planning with the scriptures to see if there is a thus saith the Lord about the subject and choice we’re facing. And then do what the Word says is right. 

We have a responsibility to care for our bodies and one way to do that is to see doctors and be put on treatment. It could be unfaithful stewardship not to see a doctor. It depends. It’s definitely unfaithful stewardship to not eat and live healthfully.

When it comes to treatment it is a denial of faith to blindly take whatever medication your doctor prescribes, without thought and prayer. Not every treatment is right for everyone and wisdom is needed – not just the doctor’s wisdom but also the wisdom God gives to you personally to make the choice. Since you are the steward of your body, you are ultimately the one God will give this wisdom too. He may send you doctors and wise counselors to give input, but when it comes to making the final choice you are the one who will be blessed with wisdom to make it, not your doctors or therapists or friends or family. It is very important that you seek out and take to heart godly counsel of people you trust. That you don’t develop a proud attitude that your judgment by itself is sufficient to make important decisions. At the end of the day you get the final say, but these people are on your team.

It could definitely be a denial of faith not to see doctors and take medication. Let’s say that you know you have a severe mental illness (SMI). Schizophrenia. And that when you’re not medicated you believe homicidal aliens are impersonating your family members. You get dangerous delusions like this that could cause you to make an error in judgment and physically attack a family member in what you believe to be self defense since your mind really believes your family is aliens. Or let’s say you have an impulse control problem that causes you to lose control of yourself and you could assault someone. If you know you need medication in order to be sane, or in order to maintain control over your compulsions, and you willfully refuse to take medication or to see doctors, then by refusing medication you are putting other people in harm’s way knowingly. This is no different morally from an alcoholic knowingly getting black-out drunk. When one gets black out drunk they become responsible for everything they do while drunk because they were the ones that chose to put themselves into an inebriated state. In the case of someone with a psychotic disorder it’s a sin of omission not commission. They aren’t the one making themselves psychotic, their illness is. But they know medication can help bring them out of that psychotic state and they knowingly refuse medication. It’s the same sin as the alcoholic, one is just committed via commission and one via omission.

It’s worth noting that one of the essential verses in the Bible that defines sin defines it using omission. While this verse also applies to sins of commission it’s interesting that God chose to use omission as the example. Perhaps it is because people have a tendency to think sins of omission are not sins or at least they aren’t as morally wrong as sins of commission. God’s Word clears up this common human misconception, showing sins of omission to be as morally wrong as sins of commission.

“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”

James 4:17

However for someone who is in full psychosis, I believe since they have lost their moral agency, they also lose their moral autonomy. It is not the responsibility or job of those in complete psychosis to check themselves into a psychiatric hospital, or to talk themselves out of doing something immoral or dangerous. You can’t usually talk yourself into taking medication when you’re in that state. Taking medication just doesn’t make sense once you lose the ability to be logical and common delusions include things like thinking your medication is poisoned or that your doctors are lying to you and part of an elaborate scheme to get you institutionalized or killed. They have no ability to be logical and thus cannot talk themselves out of dangerous things or talk themselves into doing safe and right things. It is the job of society to protect its citizens from people in full psychosis, and to protect and provide mental health services to those in psychosis. The person in full psychosis is like someone in late state dementia. No contract signed by such a person is valid because the person cannot consent to an agreement (if they could people would take advantage of them). Similarly the person in full psychosis is not going to agree to spend time in the hospital because their complete psychosis does not allow them to see that they are experiencing psychosis (the nature of psychosis is it changes your perception and logic so you can’t see what things are accurately or deduce what is happening to you), and they need to be involuntarily hospitalized. It is the job of the family and of society to do this service on their behalf when they have lost the ability to give their consent due to being out of their minds. And a good and just society will take care of the weak and handicapped and needy in society.

“We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.” Romans 15:1Is the principle that must govern us.