No letters after my name. Free to be me.

Fallen

“This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” Romans 3:22-23

There are heaps of Christian “bashers” who love using this verse against us who believe. They like using comments like “what if I was the most caring and loving person on this planet but I didn’t believe in your Jesus, would I still go to hell?”To the carnal mind, this logic is logical. You do good, you ought to be rewarded. This is how we as humans define righteous behaviour - you have to do good. You can’t be righteous and still end up in hell. And therefore your religion sucks - they conclude.

I’m going to try keep this short and hopefully expand on it later. What if righteousness means something completely different to what we think it means? In the bible, when people do “good” things to earn salvation, it describes these things as “works leading to death.”

In contrast, when people believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, God credits this as righteous behaviour. Take Abraham’s example with Isaac as a case in point. It’s not what Abraham did or didn’t do, it’s what happened in his mind that was credited to him as “righteousness”.

So what’s my point and how does it relate to the scripture quoted? It states that we have fallen short of the Glory of God. This is despite our best intentions and in many cases, “world-class human morals”.

Now is where I draw your attention to the picture at the top of this post. We are created in the image of God. Only Jesus, Angels and Adam are listed in the bible as a “child” of God. We will become bona fide children at the resurrection.

Most people probably think that mankind has “evolved” - ie we are now more technologically advanced then ever before. This may be the case in many areas. But what about in the area of mind and spirit?

If Adam was made in the image of God, he would have a spiritual connection with God. Remember God walked with them in the garden. He was unique in creation in that he was able to communicate and have a relationship with his Creator.

And secondly, his mind must have been far more powerful. Some scientists like to speculate at the memory required by Adam simply to name all the animals on the planet. We use a small fraction of our brains. Some say it’s like one tenth of one percent of our total capacity.

I was reading a book one day where these autistic twins are described at having incredible brain power. A person dropped a box of matches in front of them and the moment the matches hit the floor, both kids said 38. Puzzled, the person counted the matches and found that there were in fact 38 matches. He asked the boys how they counted the matches so quickly and they replied that they didn’t count them, the simply saw 38.

And then we have the nerve to call these kids disabled! Autistic kids are bombarded by sensory input that you and I simply filter out. But if our mind has the capacity to absorb this input as well as everything else we filter, our experience in life would be vastly different from that which it is now.

So have we fallen short from the glory of God? Like the picture at the top of this entry, even the most well meaning, highest moral standing person ever, is simply a broken vessel when compared to the original creation.

And how does this relate to righteousness? I will have to continue another time.

humanity, fallen, mind,

The Piano & The Piano Player

In time, I will elaborate on the piano and and the piano player analogy. For now, I will invite you to think of the piano as the physical brain and the piano player as the soul, the spirit, the heart and the mind - ie. the metaphysical.

Without the other, each part is redundant. When the other doesn’t function in it’s proper capacity, the music is warped - this represents mental illness.

We can tune the piano with medication, however if a sick piano player stomps on the keyboard, the piano will be out of tune rather quickly.

In mental illness, there are a number of theories as to why people become mentally ill. I once had dinner with a very respected psychiatrist and mentioned this analogy. In the back of my mind, I thought he was going to dismiss it out right. To my surprise, he said that it had merit.

My brother is a psychologist and is extremely interested in the Christian view on mental illness. We both agree that in many, if not most cases of mental illness, there is a spiritual connection. In the gospels, there are many examples of people being healed of mental and physical illnesses by Jesus casting out a demon.

This doesn’t mean that all these people were demon possessed - in most cases they were - but I strongly believe that some of these people were demon oppressed. With the above piano analogy, the player is afflicted by his enemy and as he interacts with the keyboard - the brain - he is not using it properly. He is stomping on the keys, not hitting the right ones, out of melody, out of sync.

The result of this is manifested in the physical world as mental illness - be it depression, anxiety, psychosis, whatever. The bible says that we have the mind of Christ. So our piano player should be Christ Himself. But we are also asked to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

Just because we became Christians doesn’t mean we automatically became the mind of Christ - we have the capacity to become like this. And when the Mind of Christ is our piano player, the music in our lives will be the fruits of the Spirit.

mental illness, christian perspective, piano, mind, brain