Welcome to The Conquering Truth. I'm Dan Horne. I'm Jonathan Seitz. I'm Charles Churchill. And I'm Joshua Horne. According to Johns Hopkins, there's about 26% of Americans over the age of 18 that in any given year have a diagnosable mental illness. So in the census, starting in 1840, they used to ask the question, and they'd word it that how many people in your household were either insane or idiotic. And the total number, which is considered to be skewed higher because a lot of people were trying to support slavery, so they said a lot of blacks were insane, so that it would say that slavery needed to continue. But the total number reported back was 17,456 out of 17 million. So basically 0.1%, potentially even less. So how did we go from 0.1% of the population being considered to have mental illness to be up to the point where we have 26%, which is basically a 260-fold increase in 180 years? there's been a real change in perspective about how we think about what a person is, what we think mental illness is, what we think sin is. I mean, all of those things together have changed in a great, in a huge way. There's been a huge shift in how we think of, you know, the world as being materialistic versus being ordered by God versus God being the chief cause of all things to matter being the chief cause of all things. And so there's this part of it where even within the church, the view that spiritual things are more powerful or are above physical things has really shifted. And we even look at thinking about spiritual things as sort of having an, even within the church, as having an aspect of being supernatural to it or superstitious to think of certain things. So there's been a whole host of perspective shifts that I think has caused us to think about what mental illness is to just change pretty dramatically. And that we don't see scripture in the Bible as the answer for everything. Instead we see it as having this little space over to the side that it can answer questions about. And we've turned to, we've kind of turned to science and we've turned to materialism to answer questions about how our mind works. Right, I mean, you look at why is there this drastic increase? Well, most people today would say, well, that's because they didn't understand mental illness back then, and there were all these, you know, they probably had 26% of people that had mental illness too, and they just, you know, didn't realize it. And we're not trying to argue against that from the sense that you know, people didn't have problems in the, you know, only 1% of, 0.1% of people had problems in the 1840s. But the point is that, is the framework that we're using in our society biblical? Does it match the way the scripture says things? Defining, you know, real problems that people have, how does it define those? Does it define those as, you know, physical problems? Does it define those as spiritual problems? How should we be thinking about these things? And I do think part of the difference is just that we have this view now that nothing should hurt. And so in the 1840s, they expected things to hurt. It was pretty common for a woman to die on childbirth. It was common for young children to die. Infant mortality was very high. So they weren't looking and saying that we should have this world that has no pain. And so when they look at somebody and say who's insane or who's idiotic, they're looking at somebody who's basically incapable of being a member of society. not that they have problems. And now we've shifted it so we're saying anybody that has problems, it's a mental illness in a lot of ways because we have this utopia vision that there should be no pain in the world. So I would say when you want to talk about defining something as a mental illness, what you're trying to do is you're trying to do probably two major things. You're trying to get some kind of explanatory power to give you a handle on aberrant human behavior. So that's just it. And that's what we would say is kind of the scientific side of things, is in order to understand why people are going bad or abnormal is to be able to put them in a category where we say they're mentally ill. The other thing it's trying to do is it's trying to at least set some kind of a course towards therapy for that person. Because if you say, all right, this person is aberrant, what can we do to help them? What can we do to move them along? And what Joshua and Charles have been saying on this is that we've had just this massive worldview shift. And when you have such a massive worldview shift like that, your understanding of human behavior and what's normal and what's abnormal is going to change. And when that changes, your definitions of mental illness are gonna change along with it. Also, when you're trying to provide therapy for somebody, when you're trying to help somebody and your understanding of what a good life is and how much pain somebody should be experiencing, what it's like to struggle through life, when that changes, you're going to see a change in the cases of mental illness. And I think when you look at this, even you look at the number of mental illnesses that have been defined. So the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I mean, when it first came out, it was like 1960 or something like that. And there were something like 80. And now they're up to almost 400. And so one thing that you have to recognize is that they keep adding to it, not necessarily because there's new things that are discovered about mental illness, but there's some real advantage to the people writing that book to define things as mental illnesses. Because the point of the book is to drive people towards therapy, which means it's driving towards their pocketbook. medical stuff, you normally think of, you got a broken bone, you have cancer, and there's physical treatments that you need to do to solve it. The thing about mental illness is, it's rare that any of those treatments actually solve it, they just kind of keep going. So it's almost that you're bringing people into the system by creating other categories of mental illness. And yeah, I think as we kind of start to get into this, you know, it's important to understand, you know, the reality behind, you know, modern medicine's understanding of the mind and disorders of the mind and what that really is because They have these hundreds and hundreds of pages of all these different disorders you can have. But how are they arriving at that? They have the theories behind it. But the theories are not really to the same standard of what you might have in other areas of medical research. You have a lot of things that are thrown out there and stated as facts and accepted as facts by virtually everyone these days. But actually, they're a lot closer to hypothesis that don't have much evidence behind them. and they're not really verifiable in a lot of ways. It's much more, how do you feel, how do you think about things, as opposed to concrete things that you go, well, here's something I can see, here's something I can measure. Instead it's, well, do you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning? Well, you must be depressed, as opposed to, and I know that's simplistic, but it's questioning, it's asking, it's not rigorous in its definitions. It's not rigorous in how it measures things. There's a huge hole kind of in the very basis of the medical and scientific definition or approach to how the brain works. No one understands consciousness. There's an understanding of how the neurons are firing to some level, but how does that go from actual thoughts in your head? We know there is some connection there. that, you know, if certain parts of your brain are removed, then you're gonna have trouble with certain things, you know, if you have damage to certain, you know, areas of the vertebrae, you're gonna have certain bodily, you know, issues, but to actually influence how the thoughts are changed, you know, we have like the barest glimpse of it, but to actually understand how that connection is made just isn't there. And you have the world these days, and science is based off of a materialistic worldview, where there's not, you know, I mean, a lot of doctors believe in, you know, the afterlife and the soul and things like that. But there's no, like, that's that's not in your medical textbook, is that there is a spiritual side, and there is a, you know, something that lives beyond death. And so they don't have, they are completely excluding this part of it and saying, well, we have to, it's all physical and we're not gonna tell you this, but we do not understand it at all. Right, and really after Darwin, right, that just takes over everything and everybody starts, I was even reading a physicist that's trying to argue that obviously consciousness comes from the physical properties of the things and that it's not real. Well, we all know it's real. people make these theories up that make absolutely no sense when you actually think about it. But yet, because of their materialism, they have to reject any other possibility. And so they get to conclusions that are obviously false. One of the things I think we should kind of talk about up front as well is, from a Christian perspective, the reason why there are problems in the world is because of sin. It doesn't mean that every problem in the world is because of an individual specific sin. There are lots of things that are in the world just because sin exists, but it is one of those things where I think there's just been this denial that sin is involved. And in fact, a large part of psychiatry, a large part of just the study of how the mind works, the purpose of it is to deny the existence of sin. And part of the reason why there's so much volatility in what's going on is because you've got people who have a problem. And this is probably a theme of our, this might be a theme of the podcast. You've got a problem, you want to deal with the problem, but you don't actually want to deal with the reality of the problem. You don't want to deal with where the problem actually came from. You just want something that will let you deal with it, that will just let you push it off to the side or let you deal with the symptoms of it. And so frequently what you have is you have someone who can say, hey, I'm going to give you a way of dealing with this without actually having to wrap your arms around it and actually come to grips with what's going on. And I think homosexuality is a great example of that. Because when the DSM first came out, homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Now think about that. The scripture says exactly what it is. It is sin. That is the problem. But the DSM, right from the beginning, made it so that it wasn't sin. and then in 1974 a bunch of people protested at their meeting where they were updating the DSM and so they removed it so they said it's not even mental illness anymore. So in something like 14 years they took it from everybody in America saying this is sin and the problem is sin to this is acceptable. I mean, that's what the medical community did through this. And just think of how, you know, even the people who put out the DSM, they even go, yes, this has political aspects to this document. We write it because we have to deal with the political climate. And when we got protests in 74, we changed it to say homosexuality wasn't a mental illness anymore. And the same thing is happening or is going to happen with the transgender stuff, where it's defined as a mental illness to have gender confusion. And I guarantee that that's going to be changing, if it hasn't already, because I don't keep up to date on their regular updates. You don't read it all the time. I do not. I get a new DSM every year. They don't put it out that frequently. It used to be that the people who got caught in the crosshairs of this were adults, because adults were trying to deal with their sin. And they were trying to say, how do I justify this sin, or how do I rationalize this sin, or how do I deal with the actual consequences of the sin in my life that I don't want to stop the sin. And sometimes it was even, the sin has gotten so out of control, I want to figure out how to stop the sin, but I don't want to call it sin. But now what's happened is it's become so accepted that it's affecting children. I mean, if you read pretty much any parenting group, you go to any Facebook group, you read posts, you will not, you can't read three posts without finding, a couple of them usually, are my kid, and they start listing, and you know, everything, I mean, just every single child that you run into not as dealing with this issue that you can talk about in a theological way. It's something that, how do I understand he has this, this, this, and this, so I can't do any of the things that the Bible says I should do. And it's become so incredibly pervasive that from the time a kid is born, they're already starting to be categorized with, you are this, And none of this is biblical language. None of this is what God says about man. None of this is about how God says to love someone. And if you even want to go back to therapy, it just means to help someone. None of this is how God says we should help one another. And so it's become incredibly damaging that the way we think about people has been shaped by this practice that's largely based around, like you said, marketing and a... Pure subjectivity. And a false view of who man is in the eyes of God. And it's something that is really, really common, you know, from children all the way up. And it matters. It matters to redefine something that the Bible says is sin as a medical disorder. And, you know, not that every... And we're not saying, you know, to be clear, that every single thing, you know, in the in the DSM that every one of those is actually sin. Maybe by the end of this we'll get a little more clarity, but we're not going to go point by point because it's not even possible. But it's really destructive to say there's not sin. And you look at popular culture, there's so much of it. You go on social media, people talking about, I have anxiety, I have depression, I need to see my therapist every week. uh... and and that and to say that these things that i have are not you know back back years ago not a lot of people in deal with their worries correctly but uh... but when you get to the point where it's not your fault where it's a medical condition that you just need help to work through and mitigate but it's not your fault i mean that as a major change even you know you take two unsafe people one from decades ago and one from now the one from now is really hurt in their ability to deal with this, when they're saying that this is not something that's wrong, that is a character flaw that I need to try to work through, but to say that this is a medical condition that I need to try to mitigate. And what it really does is create bias and judgment. And God hates partiality. And it creates bias and judgment because all of a sudden, this one child's misbehaving. And so you go, oh, he has ADHD. And this other child, who's doing exactly the same thing with him, doesn't have ADHD or, as parents wisely said, you're not going to be diagnosed with it. And so the one is guilty and the other is innocent for the same behavior. When we start to do those things, that gets to be very dangerous because, and that's kind of all this labeling. The reason it's for is to excuse sin, which means one party gets away with it and the other party does not. And that is not how God says we're to deal with sin. I mean, we're getting to the point where more and more sins that aren't socially acceptable are being labeled as mental illness. You know, you look at, you know, I think it was just, you know, in the mid-1800s was the first time that someone in the United States got off of a murder charge because of, you know, temporary insanity. And now that's increased so that more and more people are, you know, they're, especially in other countries, but even in the United States as well, they're getting off or having their punishment mitigated for murder because they were insane. And it's getting to the point where, you know, soon, would anyone in their right mind kill someone? I mean, that has to be, I mean, if you kill someone, that seems like you could define that as a mental illness. Especially when it's arbitrary, right? When it's arbitrary, then you go, well, did you mean to kill him? No. Well, then you have a mental illness because he didn't know. And so, I mean, that's what's so frightening to me about the DSM, is it's totally arbitrary. And they want to pretend like it's scientific. But here's another example from it, and I think it was in 1970, although I might have the year wrong. They looked at a group of people that, and the list of symptoms in New York, and the list of symptoms in in London, both of them using the DSM, in one, 80% of the people were diagnosed differently between London and New York. It's arbitrary, and they want to pretend like it's not, but the reality is there's a lot of different things that you can put them in whatever category is fashionable, and the category was a different fashion in London than it was in New York. I mean, this is not a scientific document. It's not a document that's very useful because all it's doing is trying to get information that you then regurgitate it in a different way to categorize. Right. And I think it's important to understand that, you know, that the psychology is not the same type of science as normal medicine. You know, how do they get these disorders? There's some stuff in there, you know, like sleep apnea and things like that. But in terms of things that are just mental conditions, that aren't like a physical symptom you're trying to treat. But, but they have, there's not a, any type of physical test for them. It's all a list of behaviors, a list of, you know, questions. You're talking to the person and you try to figure out what category they're in. There's no chemical test for it. for any of these disorders. And so what they have is they have all these people, all these symptoms, and they're just deciding, I'm going to categorize these things as a disorder with these symptoms. And you have to have a certain percentage of the symptoms, which means it's completely, completely arbitrary. You know, I mean, they are, they have experience in talking to people, but they have no foundation for what they're doing there. So, so which is one of the things that this means is if you're trying to look at this from a biblical perspective, it makes it really hard. because especially some of these things they've broadened out a lot. You know, you could have two people that are diagnosed with the same thing and maybe biblically they're in very different categories because a psychologist diagnosed them as two people in the same category but their category was on completely different foundations. You know, autism, I think, is a good example of something that different, very different people are categorized the same. I know two young people that were categorized as being autistic. One had Down syndrome, and he couldn't speak. He had lots of physical problems from his, you know, extra chromosome. And so, because of that, yes, they were saying that he's autistic. And, but then there was another child that was diagnosed as autistic, but he didn't have anything physical in terms of like Down syndrome, but yet they're putting him in the same category. And the one, if you use the rod on it, on that child, like with somebody that's down, you're not going to fix his quote unquote autism because it's really a symptom of Downs. And you can't cause him to speak. I mean, the rod can't do that. But in the other case, I mean, this woman that I know, she basically said, you know, the Bible says, spare the rod, despise my child. And so she said, why am I, my younger child, I'm being, you know, I'm being careful. When he disobeys, I use the rod on him, like the Bible says. But the older child, when he disobeys, I go, oh, he's autistic. And so she said, really, the Bible doesn't make that distinction. And so when he misbehaved, she started to use the rod on him. And then they were coming to the United States. They were from Chile. So they were coming from the United States once a year. And a year later, after I had this conversation with her, I mean, the boy was substantially different. Before, anybody could look at him and go, oh, he'd be diagnosed as autistic. And a year later, people would not have said he was autistic, even though he was a little slower than other children. But by dealing with the situation as it is, rather than dealing with it in the category that the DSM puts it in, the therapy is a lot different between the two. And so I think it's worth even spending a few minutes talking about, you know, so when you talk about using the rod. It's a parent's job to look at their child and say, what does my child understand and what can they do? The issue that we're addressing here is what's happened is, is this parent who looks at this child and says, I know my child understands this, is tempted to not pretend like they can't be responsible for what they understand because of some external factor. You know what I mean? They have this child. You have your child. You know your child. You spend time with your child. You watch your child. I mean, you've talked about this before. I've seen this with my kid. I've had kids, when they're little, you'll see them, they'll pitch a fit. And they'll bang their head on the floor. But you move them over from a carpeted floor to a hardwood floor, and they're banging their head on the floor. I used to do that with Joshua all the time. And all of a sudden, they stop. He learned after about three times. They stop banging their head. I mean, because there's times where, I mean, I have a kid, and I'm asking myself, What should I hold him accountable for? Is he out, you know, what's he doing? Where should I draw the line? And you can do things to figure out what your child knows and what your child understands. But once you know what they understand, once you know where they are, you should not let some external factor make you go, oh, he can't understand things. I mean, and this is just, this is really important for the child because the child starts to use this as something to go, I don't have to, I can't be held accountable. And to think that children don't understand this. Right, my parents will be biased in judgment towards me, right? I mean, to use the biblical terms, they're gonna be partial towards me. And that is so damaging for the child. Right, and so I mean, I just, I mean, I think I'm sure I've said this before, but one of the most useful conversations I've had with people, and with myself, is to ask, within myself, And I ask about who I am, what things in me are part of my personality, what things are intrinsic, and what things are related to sin. And this is really useful for adults to do, is look at your life, look at the things in you, where you go, well, people say, oh, he's pushy, oh, he's bossy, oh, he's, and they'll use these terms to describe character qualities. And, you know, you can put a positive spin on one, you can put a negative spin on one, and sometimes you can look at things and you can see that this has been with you since you were a child. And it's been something that you haven't dealt with. There are some things that have been constrained. Some things have gotten worse as you've got older. And some have been yoked so that they're useful. Right, and so there's this part of it where we've, instead of looking at ourselves using God's Word, instead of saying, what does God's Word say about what things are virtuous, what things are useful, what things are not, what things lead to sin, what things cause sin, what things are the fruit of sin, Instead, we've gone, we shouldn't think about things in that way. We should instead think about this in this completely other way. And I think there's this part of it where that shift really needs to happen. And instead of looking at your children as if they're driven by something other than God's word said, you should look at them as if they're driven by exactly what God's word says and how God says, you know, how he has fashioned us. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how do you get to a point where you have all these people with mental illnesses? And I think part of it is everyone saying, lowering their view of what what sin is, you know, because our point here isn't Oh, look at all these crazy people. They're all, you know, they're all sinners. And look at us, we're not sinners. I mean, the thing is, even in a believer, there's a lot of sin in a believer's life. Sin isn't just murder, adultery. You know, it's pride, it's selfishness, all kinds of things that permeate your life as an unbeliever. And as a believer, you still have a lot of those things you have to continue to struggle with through your entire life. And there are a lot of things that are labeled as mental illnesses that are just, a little bit less constrained on tendencies that a lot of people have. Probably everyone has, but they're less constrained on them or they're more focused or honest about them. And so it's labeled as this disorder when it's, the disorder is the sin. Or the disorders in courage, right? Like chronic fatigue syndrome. Somebody tells you you have chronic fatigue syndrome and then you get up in the morning and you go, I'm still tired. Well, I should just stay in bed. I mean, we shouldn't think these aren't self-perpetuating. They very much are self-perpetuating. You define somebody as ADHD, where he can't control himself, and you tell a child, well, I know you just can't control yourself. Guess what you're going to get? You're going to get an out-of-control child. This is how it works. And we want to pretend like the things that are said to them doesn't affect them. And of course it affects them. We all know that it affects them. You know, your mother says to you when you're a kid, oh, you look pale today. Do you feel sick? And all of a sudden, if you don't want to go to school, you go, yeah, I feel sick. And you may not even be lying, but she put it, you know, it was still enough to shift your perception of yourself. And we act like people's perception of themselves fixed and it's not. It's changed by all these things and it's really dangerous when we tell people these things. So one of the things that's really dominated this conversation is how we are replacing biblical categories of sin with mental illness categories. And it's not to say that there aren't mental illnesses. It's not to say there's not sin. We're just saying that this shift that's happened from 1840 to now has been a shift in, we used to call things sin, and now we're coming up with some neutral terms so that you're not saying something about somebody that could potentially be sending them to hell. You're coming up with a materialistic understanding of that. And part of it could be self-perpetuating. say, hey, you know, really, you're just lazy, and you need to stop being lazy. You know, that's the biblical category for it. But no, we'd like to come up with something else for that to explain our sin away so we don't have to deal with it. But, you know, when we do that, it makes me think all the way back to our original question of how did we go from defining people as mentally ill roughly one in a thousand to now roughly one in four, century and a half later. And if mental illnesses, if many mental illnesses that we call illnesses now really are sins, then okay, perhaps it's the case that we've just inflated our categories and we're catching more things. It's also possible and probably likely that we're a culture that sins more. or that is sinning in these particular kinds of ways. It's committing these sorts of sins of the mind more than was happening then. So on one hand, yes, we're inflating the definitions. But on the other hand, part of that inflating the definitions is actually feeding itself. And we're sinning more in these ways. Right. You have a society where you tear down the religious institutions where even, you know, years ago even unbelievers or people who were not converted would still have a belief in God, a belief that perhaps God was, you know, looking over the world. And, you know, you tear that down and replace it with materialism and now you have people worried about things a lot more. I mean that seems like a pretty pretty natural consequence that if you don't have these beliefs and higher powers then of course you're going to be more anxious as a very basic one. And I mean to go back to the example of somebody who's lazy that you say oh you've got chronic fatigue syndrome so it's okay that you're lazy well all of a sudden you get more laziness and then when one person's lazy we know what the bible says sin is like leaven the next person gets to be lazy and so when we're looking I think both of there we're expanding our categories and sin is acting like leaven through our society. So there's more people that fall into those categories because instead of saying that's sin, we're saying it's acceptable. And so it just, you know, so of course you're going to get more of it. What you say is acceptable, you get more of. I mean, and part of this is it's, it goes, they go hand in hand. Because like you're saying, sin is like leaven. So what we've said is, is there's been this shift in how you think about things. because there's been a shift in how you think about things. Before, when people thought about sin, there was an understanding that sin needs to be constrained. The way that you, I mean, the Bible talks about you're the salt of the earth. One of the things that salt does is it prevents the growth of bacteria. It prevents decay. There were things that could be done to prevent sin from spreading. So then you change your perspective. You stop doing the things that you used to do that stop sin from spreading. And so, I mean, if you go back and you read Get a copy of Tom Sawyer and look up the section in the book where Tom Sawyer is laying in bed one morning and he's trying to figure out how to stay home from school. Mark Twain, an obviously unsaved man, is writing a passage about the thought process as he lays in bed and he begins to do a mental inventory of his body, looking for something that he can present as a malady. he think oh maybe he's got a tooth that's a little bit loose no no nothing there no i mean it's and he's going through and he finally you know and you see him and he sells his he sells his cousin and i think you know on on how horrible he is he's got a toe that that's mortifying and and then his aunt finds out about it and you know and like i think she throws something at him and he ends up going i mean but i mean when you read that First of all, you read it and you go, I get this. I mean, you read this and you can see yourself in it. But you can understand that at this point, an unsaved man writing a book about a child described these things in these terms. And he expected everyone to hear it and go, yep, that's how humans are. The suggestion here isn't that the people who have been diagnosed with mental illness don't have real problems. But the question is, how do you handle the problems? Because, as we've said, it's powerful to be told and tell yourself, this is something that is not my fault and I have no responsibility for. That's a very, very powerful thing. And there's been a big shift in how it used to be when I was growing up that the answer was that you sat down on the couch, right? You know, like the Bob Newhart show was on then. Everybody sat down on the couch and they talked to Bob Newhart and all their problems weren't actually ever changed, which is pretty much psychiatry. But anyway, but now there's been a huge shift. So now most of it's done with drugs. And so I don't know therapy. I hear ads all the time for therapy. therapists most of it is done at least with a drug aspect to it because 26% of the people in any given year have a diagnosable mental illness in one out of six according to Scientific America in 2016 one in six Americans take a psychiatric drug Antidepressants were most common, followed by anxiety relievers and antipsychotics. So 25% have something, 16% take a drug for it. Yeah, so that's pretty close. I mean, when you think about it, because of those people that have it, some of them, they never see anybody. And so when you see somebody now, it is far more likely that they will give you a drug than they would have 20 years ago or 30 years ago. And you know, so the answer is, well, that's great. We understand the chemistry of the brain and how the chemistry works and how it's misfiring. And so now we're giving the drugs to fix the brain chemistry, which is what they tell you. But the reality is we don't, that's not really true. I mean, there's not, they're not doing chemical tests to see whether your brain has the right balance of chemicals because the whole brain chemical thing is a theory, you know, is there some basis to it? There's not evidence that you can affect people's thoughts and fix people's disorders through addressing the brain chemicals. We all know that, right, you get nervous and your stomach all of a sudden feels upset, and maybe your bowels loosen, and all kinds of things happen. We know that spiritual things have really serious physical consequences. But they're just automatically saying, well, anything quote unquote spiritual, because spiritual things don't exist, depression must be flowing from the physical, because they've rejected it, and they have no idea. Right. I mean, one of the basis for a lot of this stuff is, you know, brain activity and you're, you're, you're not able to make the full connections in the brain that you're supposed to. So they do things like take people who have been diagnosed as psychopaths. They put them in the brain scanner and they say, Oh, look, see, this area of the brain has less activity. So that's their problem. That area of the brain is malfunctioning. Well, you know, that, okay. That's one theory. The other possibility is there are people who are filled with you know, they're so self-centered that they're not using the part of the brain that's supposed to be thinking about other people. And so they're, the problem isn't with their brain, the problem is with them and their soul. And, and they're sinning in this way that's not using the part of the brain that they have. And you know, maybe it's even underdeveloped because they don't use it. And so why would it need to be, to be bigger? So it's, so I mean, the thing is, is you can't really know, at least with, the things that I've seen that are out there now, you can't know. How do you know the difference between the cause and the effect? And it's been some years since I've looked at it, not that many, but I mean, antidepressants are really powerful psychotropic drugs. I mean, they are, and basically, if you give somebody a sugar pill and say, this will solve your problem, it is equally likely as giving them an antidepressant, but it's illegal to do that. So they give them antidepressants because you're not allowed to lie and say that that sugar pill will solve their problem, even though it will if they believe your lie. So they even, they've done enough studies to know how these things will shift, but yet they still give these incredibly powerful drugs that have all kinds of unknown side effects, when what they really just need to do is, you know, it's kind of like, stop it. right? Take this pill and you'll stop it. You know that's what they're doing and yet they do all this other stuff because of the way our laws are set up, because of the way the medical community is set up, all these other things and we should just be really cautious about this. So during the Civil War they'd have the medical call and they would have you, everybody would line up, they'd talk to you for like a minute and then they'd either give you a pinch of the blue medicine or the red medicine. They had two choices. You got the blue medicine or the red medicine and you know the The psychiatric drugs are kind of used the same way. They don't totally know what they do. They know they help some people. They know they hurt some people. And they, you know, there's not much basis for it. But here, this will fix you. Take this. Because the placebo effect is so powerful. And the problem is, the things they're giving for the psychiatric drugs are far more powerful than the stuff that they were giving during the Civil War. I mean, it has real negative effects for a lot of people. A lot of it's highly addictive. If you try to come off of it, you can even die from some of this stuff. So it's very serious drugs, and they don't quite know how it works. And I do think it's worthwhile taking and resetting back to what are the biblical categories for these things, right? I mean, one in six take it because of depression, because of anxiety, and because of psychotics. And if you just start with depression, is depression a bad thing? And I'm going to argue, absolutely not. Depression is not a bad thing. And here's how I would argue it. I know that I have preached gospel to people that were in the church for years, and they realized they weren't saved, and they became very depressed, and that's how they were saved, was through depression. When we say nobody should be depressed, we're trying to say the gospel is everywhere for everyone, and you should have joy. Well, no, some people should be depressed. If you recognize you're going to go to hell, you should be depressed. So it says in Isaiah 35, 10, and the ransom to the Lord, right, those that are saved, shall return and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy in their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. The reality is, is sorrow and sighing are not bad things. They're part of how God moves you to accept the gospel. They're part of salvation, and we're saying you should take a pill so that you have a fake joy instead of the real joy of the Lord. Right, and I mean, and so they are bad in the sense that they're a good consequence of bad things that are happening. You know, you are far from God and so you're sad because of it. Well, the problem, there is a serious problem there, but it's not the sadness. And it's not a problem that will be solved by an antidepressant. Right. All that will do is make you have this euphoric feeling so that you can pretend like you have true joy when all you're really doing is covering it up with a drug. You know, Solomon, in writing Ecclesiastes, in Ecclesiastes 7, 2, and 3, says, better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting. For that is the end of all man, and the living will take it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter. For a sad countenance, the heart is made better. Almost everybody that's saved goes through sorrow first. If we say nobody should be depressed, what we're actually doing is saying nobody should take the normal path to salvation. And that's a really dangerous thing to be saying, because, yes, it's not good to be sorrowful, but if you are in a position where you should be sorrowful, it's better to be sorrowful than it is to be joyful. But the reason that you can say something like that is because you believe that there is a God who rules the earth, and that you believe that there are such things as sin and righteousness, and if you don't believe that, You know, if you're far from God and you don't have that kind of a worldview, then, I mean, yeah, sorrow and sadness are bad. They make me feel bad. They make other people feel bad. I don't like being in a world like that. And so whatever tool I can use that mitigates sorrow and sadness, as things in and of themselves, and I don't have any better explanation for them as some kind of, well, they must be caused by some sort of physical thing somewhere. And whatever I can use to poke that physical thing, I mean, that's why we are in the place where we are, where we want to treat those things. So you're saying your usual line, it's the church's fault. I mean, yeah, it's the point where the church has let the categories get away with them. Going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, the church used to be able to define these sorts of things for the world, and the world understood things through the categories of providence, of sin, of salvation, of eternal rest. And now we don't have those anymore. All we're left with is man is physical stuff, and we live in a physical world, and all problems reduced to some kind of physical problem. So why not solve those problems with drugs? And there's a part of it where, I mean, Solomon writing here in Ecclesiastes 7, 2-3, he's not really writing to Christians. He's actually writing to everybody. And I think there's an important part here that I mean, and you can see this in our culture. He says, it's better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men, and the living will take it to heart. And when you look at our culture, I mean, people don't know what to do when they get old anymore. I mean, if you chase laughing and joking and sex and pleasure, what are you going to do when you're 60? try to ride it out with Viagra, try to, I mean, you know what I mean? I mean, there's this part of it where when you get to the later stages in life, what is there? And you can look at it, and you go, there's nothing but despair. And I've never learned to deal with sorrow. There's nothing but sadness. The people I know are dying. I mean, my parents are in the stage of life where I'll get a text from my mom periodically, so and so is now with the Lord. And there are people that were her friends, and people that were a little older than her, and people that are. And this is the stage of life that she's in, where the people she knows are dying. Or you reach the stage that my parents are in, where everybody they know is already dead. Right, right. And they're looking at it, and they They don't see any message other than, of course, they should be miserable, because what else would they be? And it's because of the rejection of the gospel. What we think of as the sweet old grandma, it's going to vanish. It's already kind of going away. Instead, you're going to have depressed people who are in the end of their life Oh, the cranky old man. That's been a classic for a long time. But it's going to get a lot worse than that. And you look, and the numbers already bear this out. I mean, the largest group of people who are on antidepressants are older women. So that's what's happening already. In the blueness of the wound, there is much healing, is what the Bible says about using the rod. and as a culture, and even in the church, the church culture has lost the idea that sometimes the best thing for somebody is for them to really hurt. But the reality is, depression is God really hurting somebody, and we can't turn around and say, that makes God evil. So that means that just like there's a point where a parent should be disciplining their child to the point where they have real pain, there is a place that God does this, and we're trying to mitigate it instead of using it. Because the reality is, as it says in Ecclesiastes 7, God uses this to change their heart, the sorrow. And so we just need to recognize these are things that God does, and we just want to go, we have to get in the way. And the church doesn't say, stop it. You're destroying the testimony of the gospel. I mean, it can be the books that the kid puts in their pants to try to make the spanking not hurt. I mean, that's what you can be doing by pursuing the world's remedies for depression. And I think that's really, I mean, even if you look at the flow of our culture, there's been a rejection of spanking for longer than there's been embracing the mental illness, and they tie together. So I remember My daughter, my oldest daughter, she was fairly young. We were sitting at the table, and I had to spank her for something. It wasn't even anything. I don't even remember what the initial spanking was for. I spanked her, sent her back to her seat, and she starts crying uncontrollably. And I told her, and I remember you having this kind of debate in your head. Do I spank her for crying? And I'm like, you know what? She can control herself. I'm sure she can control herself. You need to stop crying. So I call her back over to me and I spank her again. Send her back over there. She starts crying harder. Call her back over to me. I spank her again. I send her back over there. And in my head, I'm having this debate with myself. Do I spank her? What should I do? And at this point, she's close to... What's the movie with the head spinning around? I mean, she's... And I'm like, you need to stop crying. And so I'm like, and so we're up to like five or six iterations. I'm not, this isn't like the hardest, I mean, spanking each time. It's just continued. I'm not going to put up with this. You need to stop. And in my head, I'm sitting there going, Oh my God, you know, I hope she can actually stop. I hope I'm doing the right thing. And there's this part of me going, but I know I, you know, yourself, you know, how the, how you were, After a number of times, she goes over there, she sits down, and I say, you need to stop. And she goes, ah, ah, ah. And I remember, I remember that moment. I remember, I mean, right then, I mean, first of all, just total relief. But you're also sitting there, and I looked at her. And I told her brothers and sisters, I said, I want you to look. I said, your sister was lying. She was lying to me, she was lying to everyone in this room, and she was lying to herself. And if this had been allowed to persist, imagine someone who gets to be 40 years old and they believe they can't control themselves. They may have ruined relationships, they may have ruined friendships, they may have had divorces, and they've told themselves, I cannot control myself. By the time they're 40 years old, it took that much work for her to admit, at that age, that she could control herself. A 40-year-old would rather die than admit that the things that had happened in their life, that they could control themselves. And I mean, and I remember that moment right there going, I mean, it was like me seeing my, this is what I mean when you look at yourself, when you actually ask yourself, who am I? And what are the things in my life? Are there things I haven't dealt with? And when you look at your child, it's not that you look at your child and go, I'm going to beat that out of you. It's not that at all. I would be horrible to let you keep some of those things. I would be horrible not to push you in a loving way so that you can understand that you are not a creature that can't control themselves. That you can, and I'm going to be that thing in your life that helps you deal with it. And that's what's been lost. And really, from psychiatry, I mean, back to Freud, it was always about, can I find an external source for your problems? It was never an internal source. What happened in your childhood? Let's talk about your childhood. Let's figure out what hidden memory there is. And let me implant it in there if you don't have one, so that way you can be convinced that it was because your father raped you, or et cetera, et cetera. And it was always about taking their sin and making an external cause of it. now we're much bigger into, it's a chemical cause. And I'm not saying that there's never chemical causes, but what I am saying is, that's the go-to answer. Is it's outside of you, maybe it's not something that your parents did when you were little, maybe it's just a chemical imbalance, but it's not your fault. You can embrace it, just take this drug to deal with it. or just find out who sinned against you, etc., etc. Instead of, this is your sin, you need to deal with it. Right, and but, you know, as you're kind of referencing, you know, past things in your past, I mean, you know, those are real and those can affect you, but you can look at the scripture and you don't get a pass for sinning because of what people have done to you. You know, you might be tempted in certain ways that other people aren't, But you don't get a pass, you know? That's just the reality. You don't find the verse that says, you know, you shall not do this, you know, unless, you know, you were assaulted as a child. It's not there. Because you're commanded to trust in the Lord. And for some people, it's harder because of things that happen to them. But in the end, the command's the same, to trust in the Lord. You know, we talked some about, you know, the most prescribed one is for antidepressants. The next one is for anxiety medicine. And again, the Bible's super clear on this. Anxiety is a sin. The DSM wants to say, prescribe this drug for it. It's sin. Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. This is a command. Be anxious for nothing. So when people go, I have an anxiety disorder. The church, instead of going, that sin says, oh, you should go talk to a counselor. Maybe he can help you with that. Instead of saying, repent. And the church is lost. the call to repentance for these things because the medical community, which isn't, as we've talked about, it's not very scientific how they do any of this stuff, the quote-unquote medical community says, oh, it's a disorder. It's not their fault that they're anxious. And this verse outlines the repentance. This isn't hard. I mean, it's hard work, but it's not something mysterious. Prayer, supplication, thanksgiving. If you want to combat anxiety- Instead of a pill, just- Yeah. Prayer, supplication, and thanksgiving. And I mean, all of that would be in the context of you have to believe God. And we really should understand how tied this is to faith. I mean, like, I was talking to my wife in preparation for this, and I was talking to her, you know, there's this, the old joke, the wife comes to her husband and says, I'm really worried about this. And the husband goes, don't worry about that. And she goes, oh, that's super helpful, thanks. I didn't think of that, don't worry about it. And we were joking about it, but we were talking, she goes, you know, there are things that I start worrying about, and I ask you, and you say, I'm going to take care of that, don't worry about it. She goes, and I know you're going to take care of it. And as soon as you tell me you're going to take care of it, I stop worrying about it. She goes, there are other things you tell me to stop worrying about it, and I know you're not going to take care of it. And I start worrying about it, and I keep worrying about it. I mean, and this is- You should stop doing that, Charles. I should stop doing that. I mean, but this is the truth. When it says prayer and supplication at Thanksgiving, God is faithful. There is no question. Sometimes what we're really anxious about is we don't want what God is going to allow to happen. And there's other times where we don't actually believe that God is actually in control. But when we really do, I mean, and you can look, I mean, if some people work in different jobs, they work in different type of stress, high stress jobs, and some people who work in the high stress job, they have learned to deal with certain situations that other people have not. And you could put someone else in that situation and they would be incredibly stressed. You could take the person from that high stress situation, put them in a different situation they're not used to, and they'll fall apart. And so there's this part of it where, I mean, we know it's faith. We know it's tied to faith. There's a certain point where you say, I am comfortable with who God is, who I know him to be, and I'm faithful, and your anxiety goes away. And so, I mean, we shouldn't pretend that we don't have laboratory-level evidence in our life of the reality of what faith does. I think it's just really easy for us to look at these things. We know that they're spiritual. Let me put it that way. And yet we want to make them out to be physical. Right? I mean, everybody knows that you can get your stomach tied up in knots by thinking about things. And then we go, oh, I'm nervous because of something physical. But you know the physical is following the spiritual. It's following the mental. And I think it's very easy for us to quickly assign physical causes to things that frequently are mental. And there might be people listening who are saying, you know, I believe in the psychologist's definition of anxiety and depression. I think they are, you know, real medical things that are there. And the question is, if you're a believer, you know, do you believe the Bible? Do you believe the scripture? Because the Bible talks a lot about sadness. It talks a lot about, about, you know, worry, anxiety. And the question is, do you believe what the Bible says about it? Or do you believe what modern medicine says based off of some, you know... Jeremiah 17, 7 and 8. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose hope is in the Lord, for he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the rivers and will not fear when the heat comes. But its leaf will be green and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will it cease from yielding fruit. if you trust in the Lord. Those other things go away. And what you need to be working on is increasing your faith. That's the solution to not being anxious. Not a drug. It's to increase your trust in the Lord. To look and say, can I really trust him? Do I really have faith in him? That's the solution to anxiety. Not, oh no, I need some drug. It's trust in the Lord. I mean, Jeremiah 17 is very clear. Those who trust in the Lord, they won't be anxious in the year of drought. Right. And the suggestion here isn't that it's a simple fix. No. You trust in God and then your problems will be over. Because while that is true, you know, it's not that simple because there's sin that is within us that we spend our whole lifetime fighting. We have the old man in us and we need to be – God gives us victory over sin. He frees us from slavery to sin, but it's not an immediate thing. And you know, it is true that different people struggle with different sins. So you know, there's people who have a lot more trouble with this and it's a temptation that they have that they will have to fight potentially for a long time. You know, hopefully they will see progress in these areas, but it's not that if you don't, if you are ever anxious again, you're not a believer. It's that you need to be recognizing what the scripture says about it and putting it into practice. And you need to look at it and not say, when I'm anxious, I should just cover it up. It's the opposite. It's when you're anxious, this is a sin that is indicating a shortcoming of your faith. Not that you don't have faith, but it's a shortcoming of your faith. And instead of looking at it and going, oh, well, I should just take a pill for it, you should say, what I need to do is do those things that increase faith, because that's the solution to the problem is an increase of faith. You know, there's been pretty, pretty famous people and important people in church history where, you know, you read their diary and people say, oh, they definitely, they'd be diagnosed with depression. You know, how could they be such great people in the faith? And, you know, and part of it is, I mean, definitely their faith was weaker than it should have been. You know, if they're depressed over these things in their life, then, you know, that is a weakness. But on the other hand, were they more weaker when they were seeing sin in their life and saying, you know, how can I trust God when he's not ending the sin in my life? Or are they in a stronger place? Or someone who is happy-go-lucky, doesn't, not a care in the world about their sin. I mean, who is actually stronger? And so there are certain times where, you know, kind of like you were saying that it's not always bad and it can even be something that's bad, but it's, it's only coming out because you're pursuing godliness in good ways. And so it doesn't mean that you're weaker than someone who doesn't have this problem with depression. In the, you know, an example of that would be like, you know, somebody who goes to try to witness to the cannibals, you can understand why he might have more anxiety going to witness to the cannibals. And that doesn't mean that he had weak faith because he went to witness to the cannibals. He went to witness because he had strong faith. And so a lot of times, when we look at these things, it has to be contextual. I mean, it's very complicated. But even in that case, he's supposed to trust. But look what God took Paul through before Paul said, whether I abound or whether I abase, I'm fine. I mean, it took God taking Paul through a lot of things before he had that faith that he could go, I trust in the Lord. I'll be anxious for nothing. Another category that's frequently treated in the U.S. is antipsychotics or the drug it's giving. What historically would have been considered more the mental illnesses, right? I mean, somebody that was depressed or anxious, they wouldn't call that in 1840, they wouldn't have called that mental illness. But somebody who is schizophrenic, somebody who's bipolar, somebody who's these type things where there's clearly mental things going on there. And again, we've gone to, instead of it being a spiritual thing, we've gone to a physical thing. But we forget, like when Jesus Christ came, there were a lot of people that were demon-possessed. And we wanna pretend like that doesn't happen today. And I'm not saying everybody is demon-possessed, but I think we, again, because we've rejected the spiritual, the church has even rejected the idea that some of these things that we assign to mental illness, it's really a demon possession. I mean, we just have to state the fact that we live in a world that God created. And within that world that God created, he has recorded stories for us about people who, if you did not know what we know about those stories, and we're trying to describe with the categories we use to describe things, we would describe them as being psychotic of some variety or other. But the Bible says, no, their problem was that there was this force that was taking over the person. They were demon-possessed. And we've got to recognize it's the same world that we live in now. And we can't rule out that as a possible explanation for some of these episodes. If the church isn't going to shine forth a light, we should expect America to become more like that and not less like that. Because the reality is that a lot of the times that we don't see all this is because there was light here. You go to Nigeria, and I would argue that I've run into a lot more people in Nigeria that I would consider demon-possessed than I have in the U.S. Now, part of it is we put them into nice little buildings and stuff like that. but still we should expect, as the darkness declines in America, that we'll become more like ancient Israel, where there was a lot more demon possession. Let's just, you know, read an example of this, Mark 9 20 through 22. about Jesus casting a demon out of a man, then they brought him to him, that is, Jesus. And when he saw him, immediately the spirit convulsed him and he fell on the ground and wallowed, foaming at the mouth. So he asked his father, how long has this been happening to him? And he said, from childhood. And often he has thrown him both into the fire and into the water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us. And you see there that, you know, this child, this boy has very real symptoms. You know, there's other passages that talk about deaf and dumb demons, where the demon is inhabiting this person, rendering them unable to speak, unable to hear. Things that are very physical symptoms. And, you know, we have several different terms for this that you can find in the DSM, but God says for some of these people, that's demon possession. And you look at some of the, you know, schizophrenia, you know, multiple personalities, hearing voices, you know, the idea that those are not demon possession in a large number of of people. Especially the multiple personality disorder. Or people faking what some of them have been, right? Some of them have been, but I'm saying if it's real, that sure sounds like demon possession. We want to go, oh no, they're just multiple people coming out of the same brain. Scripture is pretty clear. It talks about these exact things and says, for those people, it was demon possession. So we should not expect that, oh, well now we've realized actually all the people that have those same symptoms now, it's not demon possession. And we should understand that as we were talking about the DSM and things like this as a marketing tool, it's also a tool used by Satan. Because in the end, when you read this story, You either say, Scripture is true, and this person had a demon in them, or this person had a mental illness. I mean, those two things are directly at odds with each other. That it was a purely mental illness caused by some chemical thing, and Jesus is talking about demons, and... You know, I mean, because basically there's a part where you go, how can they say people have demons today? The reason you don't even want to consider it is because of the shift in thinking about how the world has been. And it's been a deliberate attempt to cause people to not think about the world the way God has framed it. In my experience, you know, somebody that's in this state in America, the psychiatrists are going to work with them for the rest of their life and make no progress. Because this is just way beyond anything they can do. All you can do is do something to cause the person to be comatose some of the time. Right. Sometimes that's what the antipsychotics, they're basically just trying to bring the person down so that they're kind of half awake instead of actually being engaged. And I think, you know, that's kind of a question. So how come you can give someone who hears voices a drug and they stop hearing voices? You know, if it is demon possession, how does the drug affect the demon? I think one thing that people need to realize when you look at scripture and you look at, you know, history is that, you know, idol worship, some often demon worship and drugs and alcohol are very connected. You know, the most famous, you know, prophetic site in Greece, Oracle of Delphi, you know, they, there's a pretty good evidence that that was actually over a volcanic event that was giving off these gases. And so the drug use was involved in that prophecy. And so you have all these, this connection here. And so that the fact that drugs influence and control demons is not now the ordinary. But if you look, what is the goal of demons? I think one of the basic goals would be to drive people away from God, to lead people to rebel against God, to prevent people from being saved. And so if you have a culture where people, many people don't believe in demons, especially, you know, why wouldn't a demon allow, uh, once someone is, is on drugs that render them unable to think clearly and unable to, to, to really feel like themselves to unable to reason, you know, they put them on these powerful drugs. Why would the demon continue to bother this person, even if they had the ability, because their mission in one sense is accomplished. This person is not going to be saved. You know, I mean, God can do whatever he wants, but this is not a person who is receptive to the gospel because they're, it's like someone who's drunk, you know, God could save someone who's drunk, but they're not someone who's set up to hear the word of God and belief. And I think it's, you know, you, you look at these things and like you were talking about the drug use. I mean, everybody knows that there are certain drugs that you can take that just increase your strength unbelievably so that they're incredibly dangerous to be around people that have taken them. And then you read the story about the, the pigs and that guy who was put on chains and he broke the chains, and we just don't want to assign what was happening 2,000 years ago to what's happening now. We want to create this dichotomy that, like you were saying, that it's all the same world. It's not a different world, but we want to create it to be a different world where God never talks about mental illness. He talks about when he came to heal, he healed those that were lame, those that were sick, those that were diseased, and those that were demon-possessed. If he came to heal vast multitudes of people, wouldn't that have been one of the categories if that was a quote-unquote normal category? If, say, in Galilee, one out of four people were ill with a mental illness, do we think that that's not under Jesus's control? Because he healed everything else. Right. I think another category that people who have like really severe manifestations, not, you know, depression or something like that, but something that is really severe and is, you know, consuming their life in very obvious ways. You know, if we say, so let's say, let's cut out the demon possession. You know, there are real ways where people can, Scripture says that people are slaves to sin and that manifests itself in different ways for different people. But there are people who cannot control their sinning because they have given themselves over to it. And, you know, maybe at one point they didn't want to and now, in a sense, they might want to and they can't because they have lost the ability to control that. But it can be things that were clearly sent. Conditions where people will compulsively swear. Well, that, you know, are we going to say that that is not sin? You know, to compulsively do something that is clearly a sin in scripture. You know, can they control it? You know, maybe you ask them to stop and they're not able to. But that's because of a history in their past. And what historically would have been done is punishment would have been done against them to constrain them. And now instead we go, oh, he's got a mental illness. We shouldn't do anything for him. Maybe take this drug and maybe it will help you. But if you don't take it, we're not going to do anything. Instead of going, as a society, we have a duty to constrain sin. So you're not going to stand on the street corner cursing. which is what I've seen, you've seen, these people. Yeah, especially Waffle House. There's a plug. But part of the problem is that when we take it out of the scope of what the Bible says to do about it, which is to constrain the sin, if somebody can't constrain themselves, you put a master over them that can constrain them. Instead we just go, oh yeah, this is, you know. People need the ability to have somebody else come alongside of them that will break the power of sin over them, not like in a salvific way, but cause them that sin to not continue to be driving their life, that it's constrained. And that's what the church is supposed to do. That's what the civil magistrate's supposed to do. And instead, with the psychology stuff, what we're doing is going, oh no, that's just okay. Maybe we'll use a drug to constrain it if it's really bad, but really it's okay. Instead of saying, and it's such an incredibly hopeless position. Because like I said, somebody in this state, nobody's, no psychiatrist is ever going to think they're actually going to help them. And so all they do is leave them in that state. Yes, they can do some short-term help, but they're not going to actually solve the problem. And they all know they're not going to solve the problem, but yet they do this and they leave people in this state for 10, 20, 30, 40. I mean, I know people that have been in that state for 40 years. And this is not merciful. This is cruel. And the church needs to start rising up and saying, we need to stop calling evil, we need to stop calling good what is evil. Because to just leave somebody in that hopeless state their whole life is evil. There's resources out there where people are criticizing a lot of things with psychology. But a lot of these people, they end up with, well, everything we've been trying to do isn't working. So what we need to do is kind of accept that this is the way that people are, which is, you know, is equally hopeless. So as we think of why we have these problems in the world, I think one of the we should think of why God would cause there to be all these mental illnesses. And we kind of touched on this, but one thing that I think is important to recognize is God uses the world to testify to his nature and to the gospel. And even why are there people who can't understand things? Why are there people that have mental deficiencies? Isaiah 6, 9, and 10, and he said, We turn around and we go, oh, the blind person is a picture of somebody who needs the gospel. The deaf person is a picture of somebody who needs to hear the gospel. So is the mentally handicapped person. He's the picture of somebody who doesn't have the capability of understanding the gospel. God has to give that capability. So God puts people like that in the world so that the church can go, God has put this person in the world so we can understand what the gospel does. It makes the person who can't possibly understand be able to understand. Just like the person who can't possibly see, he can all of a sudden see. And so God is ordering this not because it's some random thing, it's because he's testifying to the gospel. The other thing that's going on with it, and we've talked about this on other podcasts, but when you see a spread of sin like this, you know, let's stop calling it mineral oil, let's call it spread of sin, you have to say, hey, this is the judgment of God. I mean, Romans 1, where it's talking about what happens when people turn their back on God, when they stop honoring God as God, among the many things that God does is it says that God gives them over to a debased mind. they stop thinking rationally, they stop thinking normally. And among all of the other things that are happening to them is they go insane. And it's right there in your Bible. I mean, debased mind, I mean, that's what we've been talking about all evening. a mind that doesn't have any basis or anything to be based on. And I think one of the things that we're also saying is you look at the DSM and you look at the psychiatric industry, if you will, you look at that and that is by definition a debased mind. It's detached itself from the basis of all things, which is God, because it does not want to retain God and its knowledge. So it's floating all over the place. It has no foundation that it's connected to. I mean, this is a debased mind. And that's what these things, and as a culture, we're embracing these scientists that don't have much science. They have some, but not much. These scientists, so-called scientists, that really have debased themselves, they've detached themselves from reality, and now they're turning around and saying, follow after me. And it's a very dangerous thing. Right, you look at Exodus, you look at Pharaoh, and you kind of have this explanation or this case study in the interplay between God hardening people's hearts, God debasing people's minds, and his responsibility. He was doing it to himself. It says both he was hardening his heart and God was hardening his heart. and you know if you want to find an example of an insane person in scripture you know you you look you look at pharaoh and you know i'm sure you could find quite a few labels in the dsm that applies to him where he has the situation and he is not handling it rationally rationally he has very confused ideas of his own power and his own grandeur um and it was he was doing it to himself god was doing it to him but we need to make sure that as individuals as the church that we're not hardening people's hearts by telling them that where they are sinning, that it is not their fault, and it is something that their body is doing to them. And that they don't have a responsibility towards God. And when they go into the house of mourning, when they're in depression, which is the most widespread quote-unquote mental illness, the most widespread one is depression, and we need to be saying there is hope, and the hope is not in some drug. The hope is in Jesus Christ. One of the things that we need to recognize with the things that we call mental illness, it is the nature of sin. In 1 Timothy 3, it says, wicked men grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. Now, people make that eschatological, which makes no sense because the context is Timothy, go read the Bible. So it makes no sense at all. But they want to make it eschatological. But it's not. It's about individual people. And if all you do is push them towards their sin, say their sin's okay, not constrain their sin, and just let it run wild, the Bible says what happens to them. A lot of the reason that we have what we're calling mental illness, what as a society we call mental illness, is because we say sin shouldn't be constrained, and when sin isn't constrained, it gets worse and worse and worse and worse, and then we look and say 26% of the people have mental illness. We need to recognize you have to deal with sin when it's early before people wax worse and worse. And wouldn't you think that if the devil were in charge that he would just love it if we just stopped calling sins sins and just lost that category and then came up with some other explanation for those kinds of behaviors? Woe to those who call good evil and evil good. You start spanking them probably earlier than, I mean, there are people who say you shouldn't spank a child before he's two. That's absolute nonsense. If you wait until they are two, you will have lost, I mean, I've seen it. We've, you know, we had some things go on in our house and there were children that we had where we did not discipline them and did not stay on top of them. Massive differences, huge differences. And so, I mean, it is not – no, we're not talking about spanking a baby, you know, but it is a real, real thing that you start disciplining them from the moment that they come into your house because sin begins right away. When you bring them home from the hospital, they have already started sinning. And you make a choice. You either feed it or you constrain it. And the mental health industry feeds it, and the church needs to be about the business of constraining it. Thank you for listening. We do want you to consider when you have problems in your life, don't think those problems aren't sent by God. When people you know have problems in their life, don't think those problems are not sent by God. And if you're saved, those problems are sent by God for your good. That's a promise of Romans 8, 28. And to do what the medical community says to do, to do what psychiatrists say to do, so often is contrary to what God says to do. The solution to most of these problems is to deal with your sin. Thank you for listening. This has been The Conquering Truth, a project of Reformation Baptist Church. If you found this helpful, you can visit us online at theconqueringtruth.com and subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.