To the extent the foregoing essays have adequately demonstrated that consciousness requires the existence and immanence of a biblically-defined God, it is reasonable to assume that the health of society as a whole will similarly depend upon his presence in a biblically mandated way. After all, people participate in their family structure on the basis of their images and the value these images have, moment by moment, for restraining disorder and thus, by implication, preventing violence, disease or death. It follows that the integrity of every family depends upon the presence of God – and, therefore, the measure to which God is welcome in the home. Much as the integrity of quantum events and the neurological harmony of the brain depend upon an image, so the mental stability and emotional wellbeing of every family is dependent upon the presence of God – and, while I realize it is not politically correct to say it, specifically a biblical God insofar as consciousness is only adequately explained by an invisible, transcendent yet personal God who at critical juncture in history manifested himself to the world in the person of Jesus Christ.
This final essay speculates on how the absence of God in the home affects the mental, emotional and physical health of individuals as a result of the way they interact as members of the family triangle: mother, father and child – a triunity not unlike the triune nature of God. It becomes apparent that one’s health and the health of the family as a whole depend upon the freedom God is given to manifest his nature in the home, thereby – since God is love – giving each family member the freedom and capacity to love themselves and each other to the maximum. But first, let’s refresh our sense for how the immanence of God applies to everything from subatomic activity to the forces which are at work within the Universe as a whole.
Unity amongst the various levels can be envisioned in various ways. For example, physicists are beginning to recognize that the tiniest constituents of matter are innately if strangely dependent upon an observer; yet they fall short of acknowledging the full implications of this dependence and most, since the Bible is off limits, resist any reference to “God” – despite how the Bible defines him in a way that makes perfect sense for understanding some of the deeper mysteries of quantum physics. It is not a huge leap to then realize that our brains and social institutions are, physically speaking, but a vast array of atomic activity. Thus it is, assuming that God is love, that apart from inviting him into our hearts and homes, love and its many fruits – will be compromised. This means that God – biblically a triunity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – can manifest fully only if the Trinity is reflected, no, actually present, in the family. Stop now and prepare your mind to allow an idea that is not exactly political correct – for this in turn means that when the father as a conduit of love does not adequately represent God the Father, and the mother, also as a conduit of God’s love, does not adequately represent the submissive, nurturing love of Jesus, chaos to one measure or another will predictably reign. Liberals may not like the inference, but Jesus was in all ways submitted to the Father.[i] And the cold truth is that a failure on the part of family members to manifest the triune nature of God is evidenced by a divorce rate approaching 50%, and also by the way violence is exploding in the home and everywhere else where the God of the Bible is no longer welcome. Indeed, the family as we have known it is facing extinction, a possibility some liberal groups are now actively pushing.
Before looking more deeply into the ramifications of a unbiblical home, there is one important caveat: a father’s authority is to be grounded in, and an ongoing expression of the unconditional, agape love of God apart from which his authority as husband or parent can in fact be dangerous – a fact which liberals, having rarely or never experienced that love for themselves, and consequently failing to see the big picture, use to justify their disdain for the Bible. When an agape-type authority is lacking in the father and the mother, and where he has in effect become a spiritual wimp and the mother has assumed equal or greater authority, especially of a spiritual nature – the reversal of the biblical blueprint – there exists a perfect storm and strategy for the breakdown of the family and society. This tragic outcome, as I will be explaining further, is consequent to a quagmire of lowered self-esteem and gender confusion – all resulting from the father having lost his biblically-defined manhood and the family having thus deviated from the biblical triune model.
We can add some further depth by inserting here a few comments about the brain – the organ which is mediating both one’s images and emotions – in order to amplify how the integrity of everything from superstrings to society as a whole depends upon the immanence of God – and the way that the restraint of disorder (in the brain and therefore in the home as well) is thwarted by a failure to achieve optimal immersion by the nature of the particular images which permeate the minds and hearts within a given home. In a nutshell, immersion and harmony within our brains cannot be separated from the quality of one’s images – and this quality in turn cannot be separated from the love (i.e., God) as experienced in the home. Just as an example, note again how the reciprocal connections between the future-looking prefrontal cortex and the limbic brain play a central role in our daily behavior, which you will recall is that of delaying instinctual behavior – the very thing which, given that every sentence we utter requires some prefrontal restraint, will cause some degree of chaos if not optimally suppressed. It becomes an obvious fact that this part of our neuroanatomy is necessary for moral behavior – and here is the point with respect to this essay – the resulting self-esteem or lack thereof is critical important to one’s harmony and health.
Now, quickly note, that self-esteem cannot be separated from one’s God-given sexual identity. Everyone is more than just a person; we are either male or female persons – which means that societal morality and thus our survival as a nation depend upon a godly home and the raising of children capable of experiencing images conducive to maximal self-esteem and optimal health as a man or woman, boy or girl.
Let’s look more deeply at the interactive mechanics. It is easy to understand that, with lowered self-esteem, personal confidence breaks down and emotional needs intensify. And, whether or not yet obvious, there is no escaping that this loss of confidence is bound to one’s femininity or masculinity – a fact pointing to the importance of gender-based roles and the way happiness and harmony in a family is, when all is said and done, bound to the father’s self-esteem. Problems arise when the father feels less than a man, a state of mind sharply exacerbated when the mother, as a result of her upbringing, does not feel good about herself as a woman – and to this measure is too needy to be a supportive and nurturing partner or mother. Put it this way – her willingness to provide nurture, as only a woman can, is compromised to the exact measure she has lost self-esteem. This means, protestations by modern women notwithstanding, that her capacity to be a woman who encourages her husband’s manhood is equivalently compromised. Indeed, anything short of the biblical ideal compromises everyone’s self-esteem – with predictable results. To sum, when family dynamics deviate from a biblical model, and the wife insists upon having equal authority with her husband (the result, incidentally of her lowered self-esteem and the consequent need to feel important by assume a different role), the result is predictably a loss of peace, joy and harmony within the home.
But hold everything! Before going bonkers, hear what I have to say about biblical equality. Have I not perhaps too easily dismissed the contemporary mantra that the father and mother are to have equal authority in a home? I don’t think so, not if we understand that authority has little or nothing to do with equality or worth – at least not in the eyes of God which should be what counts. Note, also, that the meaning of equality is distorted in women with lowered self-esteem, such that they attempt to retrieve their self-esteem in an unbiblical manner – striving to be like men, thus losing their feminine advantage. So, when all is said and done, what exactly is “equality” when it comes to a husband and wife who are biologically so different? Is Jesus, because he was in all ways submitted to the Father, inferior to the Father in any way? No – according to the Bible, Jesus is coequal with God.[ii] And we learn from yet other verses that Jesus is God![iii] How’s that for equality?
The Bible also teaches that the husband is to love his wife as Christ loves his Church”[iv] – with success in this regard obviously contributing to his wife’s self-esteem. This achieved, we can easily sense, that a mother’s love and nurture is the glue that holds the family together. Is it then coincidental that the Bible proclaims Jesus to be the one through whom all things were created and in whom all things hold together?[v] And the truth, lest we forget, the entire Universe was created by Jesus.[vi] The bottom line is that the husband and wife have different, but equally godly roles. And woe to the society that blurs the distinction between them!
When this distinction is lost, a downward trend occurs as husbands blame their wives and wives blame their husbands for their problems. And the children are not unscathed as, absent self-esteem in their parents, they suffer from the lack of nurture God intended them to receive. They develop an increasing inability (and unwillingness) to love and respect their parents – as biblically prophesied[vii] – making it increasingly difficult for well-meaning parents to bring up their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” – and “not provoke them to anger.”[viii] A general failure to manifest the love of God reverberates around the family. And, like ripples on a pond, the effects spread out through society as a whole.
Not having a clue as to the root cause of the increasing chaos, parents do their best, muddling along and putting up a good front until “irreconciliable differences” cause separation or divorce – and all the more likely as the “the sins of the fathers (merely including the abrogation of their paternal authority) are transmitted down to the third and fourth generations.”[ix]
The ideal solution to this downward spiral is for the father to take the bull by the horns and accept full responsibility, bow down before God and humbly confess his failure – perhaps most of all his inability (apart from self-esteem) to love his wife as Christ loves the church. Or, if he just can’t do that, and the wife has the wherewithal and knows Scripture, she can take the initiative and be the one to make a confession before God, forgive her husband and resolve to be more a loving, more submissive and nurturing wife. And, since many if not most women secretly blame themselves, they need to forgive themselves – for starters, for feeling they have failed to see themselves as righteous and pleasing to God, new creatures in Christ,[x] a strong antidote for low self-esteem! If she succeeds in forgiving herself, she will help restore her husband to his God-given place in the family and will, perhaps for the first time, discover the joy God intended for her as a woman. Without this healing, one’s capacity for overturning generations of inherited hatred and despair is just about nil – especially, nowadays, insofar as emotional and spiritual maturity may in fact depend upon acknowledging and implementing the biblical model and related biblical promises. For Christians, the truth is not what we feel about ourselves, but who we are in Christ. Short of confessing the truth as God sees it, husbands and wives will continue blaming the other for being less than the person they deserve – which, in effect, is the parent they never had.
In my experience with families, the blame game stops only when both husband and wife are freed from the oppressive grip of low self-esteem, guilt and needing the other to be the perfect spouse – a feat only possible if Jesus has become the center of their home. Not willy-nilly because of religious doctrine but because of who we are as men and women and the corresponding importance, if we expect success, to do things God’s way. Some powerful Scripture is relevant here: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.”[xi] And, when asked how one can please God, Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: believe in the one he sent.” Unbelievers ought to meditate on these promises and reconsider their worldview since they too, despite their attempts to do away with sin, are prone to be hard on themselves. Worse yet, should they fail to repent, they will – apart from Jesus – enter the next life condemned by the very law they are striving to fulfill.[xii] This is tragic insofar as the Bible teaches that there is no righteousness apart from Jesus. It is just unfortunate that most unbelievers haven’t a clue about the truth of real biblical Christianity or that such striving – essentially pulling oneself up by the bootstraps – is the antithesis of biblical Christianity.
As for our nation, there is only one course of action that might reverse the current downward spiral. It is summed up by this familiar Bible verse from the Old Testament:
“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”[xiii]
Unfortunately, the percentage of the population open to this instruction may not be enough to offset the evil and immorality that is now rampant in our society. And in many situations, the oppression is so deep that in order to experience real healing, all or most members of a family will need the fourth ministry of Jesus – the ministry of deliverance from impure or unclean spirits. The problem here is that modern psychology and psychiatry have usurped and ridiculed this ministry, causing people to believe that science and modern psychology are superior to biblical revelation – thereby making it very difficult to appreciate that destructive negative emotions, according to the Bible, are really “demons” or “spirits”[xiv] over which every believer has authority. Unfortunately few churches – otherwise preaching a solid biblical message – teach this distinction. To use the words of Jesus, they “have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof.”[xv] For example, they do not teach their parishioners that every believer has the power to “demolish (emotional) strongholds which go contrary to the knowledge of God.”[xvi] And so even believers today rarely achieve a biblical understanding of demonology, or why Jesus sent his disciples out to spend most of the day casting out demons – in one instance, many at sunset.[xvii] This kind of healing, in the words of Jesus, is the “children’s bread”[xviii] – meaning that the deliverance ministry is for believers (“children of Abraham”). If you’re inclined to look into this further, be advised that the term “demon possession” is nowhere to be found in the original Bible manuscripts – it is a liberal translation of the Greek word daimonizomai which means “to have (or be oppressed by) a demon.”
Let’s move on now to the more extreme significance of low self-esteem: gender confusion. In preparation for marriage a child (or young adult) identifies with the parent of the same sex – an impending disaster if this same-sex parent has low self-esteem or, which is essentially the same, self-rejection. We see, assuming a biblical understanding of manhood and womanhood, that when a parent has low self-esteem the same sex child is more likely to experience a sexual reversal – the consequence, I am proposing, of the father having lost his place of authority in the home, together with a loss of his self-esteem. This means, for example, that if a girl grows up with a mother who is spiritually speaking a man and a father who spiritually speaking is a woman (spiritually castrated so to speak), she is likely to seek a mate who is similarly reversed – setting the stage for further and more serious self-esteem issues in her marriage. Sooner or later, perhaps in a succeeding generation (where reversal has deepened), “emotional” comfort will be found in a homosexual relationship where, strange as it may sound and thanks to spiritual reversal, a “normal” heterosexual relationship is spiritually achieved – for it comes as no surprise that in most if not all homosexual relationships one partner is the dominant “male” while the other is the more submissive “female” – as biblically prescribed! We are becoming a nation where to a grievous extent men are becoming more and more like women and women are becoming more and more like men – women in men’s bodies and men in women’s bodies.
Further variations occur. For example, incest can be explained as the consequence of low self-esteem and related unmet needs on the part of the husband or wife, causing one or both to look to their children for the missing intimacy; and, conversely, causing a child with low self-esteem to be sexually attracted to a parent – in the ilk of a Freudian Oedipus or Electra complex. As a physician, I have been stunned with the frequency with which actual incest does in fact occur – almost never between mother and son, given the strong taboo against this in all cultures, but with an alarming frequency between father and daughter; or between the child and some non-nuclear family member. I recall one daughter describing an affair with her father that lasted well into her college years.
Now for a biological and neuroscientific slant. Given that every state of mind has its parallel in the brain, there is yet another consequence of spiritual reversal – “emotional” and physical disease. And this is not all that surprising when you think about the neurological changes produced in a reversed individual – between brain activity and the truth of one’s procreative anatomy down below. When, for example, guilt (defined in previous posts as an intensified tension between the two divisions of the autonomic nervous system) is prolonged, our God-given defense mechanisms can be easily overwhelmed. After all, we have not lived a life in line with God’s instruction manual. Should self-rejection (closely tied to guilt) be strong, the immune system will begin, quite logically, to attack normal tissue as if that part of the body had become foreign – as if an intruding antigen. Autoimmune diseases – logically linked to self-rejection – are in fact increasing at an alarming rate. Many, understandably, will seek medication, fulfilling a prophecy in Revelation that all nations will fall prey to the deceptions of pharmacology.[xix]
Breast cancer may develop when, consequent to sexual reversal and related self-rejection, women lose their sense of self worth as a nurturer – statistically linked (as studies around the world confirm[xx]) with the loss of a loved one – with whom the woman played a nurturing role. Indeed, research shows that in women experiencing such a loss, the electrical signal from brain to breast is significantly altered[xxi] – perhaps to the exact measure that with the loss of a loved one, it is (with respect to brain activity) as though the breast were no longer there or had lost its significance. It is unlikely to be pure coincidence that, with the passing of several generations, there has been a sharp rise in breast cancer, to all appearances paralleling an increase in guilt and self-rejection, a change linked in time to increasing societal disrespect for paternal authority – and, not surprisingly, for the true, biblical worth and equality of women.
Meanwhile, gurus in ivory towers, replete with their own spiritual reversals, proclaim disease to be “environmental” or “genetic” – failing to consider that the one sure cure for at least some disease is reconciliation with God through the guilt-neutralizing blood of Jesus. Unfortunately, because of increasing disdain for the Bible – in large measure because evolution has “proven” it to be false – there is little recourse other than to search for new and more powerful medicines, whose side effects can be worse than the disease.
Liberals attempt to resolve the problem of guilt and rejection by denying the existence of sin – an anti-god belief nicely accommodated by an evolution perspective – while, ironically, reprimanding Bible believers as the worst kind of hypocrites or sinners: misogynists and hate mongers – even picking and choosing Scripture to “prove” that their point of view is godly! The truth is that everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God[xxii] and therefore needs to reconnect with their Creator, Jesus. (Formal religion, especially that which replaces true, blood-based Christianity with the Golden Rule, makes matters worse by preaching that all will be well if people will just do their best to tolerate others – a message that puts political correctness above principle and whitewashes the guilt and chaos engendered by spiritual reversal.[xxiii] )
As violence increases, new gun laws will be enacted. Executive orders will be given, not coincidentally by a President who was raised in a spiritually reversed home and whose anger and personal guilt have caused him to be intent upon saving the world with his own ideology – seemingly oblivious that in the eyes of a holy God our most righteous acts are but “filthy rags.”[xxiv] As the Bible puts, we can only please God by faith and “not by works lest anyone should boast”[xxv] – a teaching which expresses the fundamental faith-based nature of the Universe. It is, at any rate, revealing that liberals (which I define as those who take liberties with the Word of God) are, increasingly promoting tolerance for all religions – with the exception of biblical Christianity!
Not coincidentally, an increasingly tyrannical government is doing its best to turn us all into mindless zombies, a government no longer of the people, by the people, or for the people[xxvi] – or under God in whom we live, a God who sustains everything from superstrings to the complexities of the human brain by the anticipated, immersive nature of an image.
[i] John 5:19, 30; 8:28.
[ii] John 5:18; Philippians 2:6.
[iii] John 1:1, 18.
[iv] Ephesians 5:28-30.
[v] Colossians 1:16, 17.
[vi] Hebrews 1:3; 2:10; 1 Corinthians 8:6.
[vii] Romans 1:28-32.
[viii] Ephesians 6:4.
[ix] Numbers 14:18.
[x] 2 Corinthians 5:17.
[xi] Romans 8:1; John 3:18.
[xii] John 3:18.
[xiii] 2 Chronicles 7:14.
[xiv] The ministry of deliverance from “demons,” “unclean” or “impure” spirits as revealed in the Gospels – e.g., Luke. If one reads Luke carefully, it becomes apparent that these three descriptors are one and the same. Just for the record, this ministry can be sharply contrasted with “exorcism” – which I personally believe is a counterfeit to the real ministry of Jesus.
[xv] 2 Timothy 3:5.
[xvi] 2 Corinthians 10:4.
[xvii] Luke 4:40-41.
[xviii] Matthew 15:21-28.
[xix] Revelation 1:23 is most likely a reference to pharmacology (from the Greek pharmacopeia).
[xx] As an Instructor in Psychiatry at the Tufts New England Medical Center I spent a year researching the world’s literature on this subject.
[xxi] No reference available but as I recall this work was done in Italy by Nemeth and Mezei.
[xxii] Romans 3:23.
[xxiii] John 3:18.
[xxiv] Isaiah 64:6.
[xxv] Ephesians 2:8, 9.
Comments are closed.