I think another
appropriately silly title for this post could be "Spiritual abuse, part
9287249-C" or "Spiritual abuse, part azillion," because I'm
going to talk about spiritual abuse yet again in this post. My disclaimer is
that I am not an ordained minister or mental health professional. I'm just a
chick who has lived through some crazy stuff, learned some crazy things, and
formed some crazy opinions. Thank you in advance for reading them.
If you've never heard of
the term "spiritual abuse," I will define it here in a nutshell. (As
if it were possible to describe such a humongous, varied monster in a
nutshell.) Spiritual abuse is basically manipulating a person spiritually,
neglecting them spiritually, trying to control their spiritual beliefs, or
basically just trying to be God for them. I personally think spiritual abuse is
just as bad as physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, mental abuse, or
any other type of abuse you can think of, because it's a way of forcing
yourself on a person or forcing yourself into a person's life in a way that you
were not meant to infiltrate. Spiritual abuse messed me up pretty badly, and
God has had a heck of a time fixing me.
"Now the serpent
was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to
the woman, 'Did God really say, "You must not eat from any tree in the
garden"?' " (Genesis 3:1, NIV)
I was not a very social
little girl, and in retrospect, I think I understand part of the reason why: I
was too honest. If I didn't like a person, I didn't make any effort to be
around them. I remember sometime in elementary school, I was clothes-shopping
with my mother, and suddenly I heard a voice yell, "Tirzah!" It was a
classmate who seemed excited to see me in a setting other than school. I looked
at her nonchalantly, was like, "Oh, hi," and continued clothes-shopping.
My mother tried to explain to me that I acted rudely, but sorry, I wasn't
really fond of that chick.
In the second grade,
another classmate invited me to hang out with her and her friends at recess. I
accepted, and we ended up trekking across the school field to hang out with her
sister, who was in an older grade. This seemed like such a superficial activity
to me. I was so bored. The next day, my classmate invited me to hang out with
her and her friends at recess again, and I declined quite rudely, and I
explained why. Then about an hour or so later, another classmate came running
toward me on the playground and exclaimed cheerfully that my inviting classmate
had called me a [expletive deleted]. I am truly sorry for my rude behavior; I
did not mean to offend you. But I was just being honest. If you get to know me
as an adult, you'll discover that I'm really into deep relationship-building,
not social mingling.
So, now that I'm
developing my relationship with God, He and I are very honest with each other,
too. God is honest because He is 100% holy, 100% pure, 100% sinless, and 100%
incapable of lying. I'm honest because He's all I've got, and if I can't be
myself around Him, who the heck can I be myself around?
So, if I'm honest with a
friend and I tell them about the conversations that I have with God, I've
discovered that some people won't believe me. If I tell them about something
that God told me to do, and I obeyed Him, a friend might not always support me.
In fact, the friend might try to talk me out of it. They might even use one of the
devil's classic lines: "Did God really say that?"
In the Garden of Eden,
Adam and Eve had a totally, completely, 100% flawless relationship with God,
and the devil came along and planted a doubt seed with "Did God really say
to not to eat from any tree in this garden?" Um, actually, He said to not eat from EVERY tree, and I believe His voice was as clear as a bell. He was quite specific about Adam and Eve getting
to eat from all the trees except one, which led to the demise of all of
humanity that came after them. Thanks a
lot, the blogger added sarcastically under her typing breath.
But Jesus restored my
relationship with Father God. He can still talk to me as clear as a bell or as vague
as a cloud or as in-between as He likes. My Father and I have a relationship,
so we talk to each other. Yes, I'm a fallible human being who often needs help
discerning whether or not she's heard from God or not. I need the Bible, I need
other Christians, and I need time in order to confirm whether or not God has
really spoken to me sometimes. So, yes, to a degree, we human beings definitely
need each other in order to hear God.
But we don't all the
time, and we certainly don't need to plant seeds of doubt inside one another in
the devil's classic "Did God really say that?" style.
What prompted me to
think about this lately is a conflict that I had with a friend, of course. This
particular friendship had been gasping its dying breaths for a very long time,
and I finally put it out of its misery and ended it myself. This friend pulled
the classic line "Did God really say that?" out of the blue,
regarding something that He told me to do several years ago. Um, this was a
decision that I wrestled with years ago, without your help. You didn't walk
with me when God asked me to do this, you didn't help me discern His voice, and
you didn't offer a shoulder for me to cry on when I was hurting with the
results of my obeying Him. I have already been living with the results of my obeying Him for several years now. To come along several years later and ask, "Did
God really say that?" was kind of a slap in the face. The window of
opportunity for counseling me in this particular area has already closed. This particular
ship has already sailed. As Carole King would say, it's too late, baby, yeah,
it's too late.
Perhaps it's a good
thing that this particular friend wasn't around for me several years ago when I
was trying to discern whether I had heard God or not. I think this particular
friend would have accidentally spiritually abused me. To pull the devil's
classic "Did God really say that?" would have been, in my opinion,
spiritually abusive in this particular case. How would you know whether or not
He really said that? You weren't around when He was speaking to me. I would
know. So, I proceeded with the information that I had, and I obeyed as best I could.
The Bible says that as a
human being, I can't live by bread alone. I have to live by every word that
proceeds out of the mouth of God. So, if God truly speaks to me, and you try to
take His words away from me, you may as well snatch the bread out of my mouth
and watch me starve to death. If you plant seeds of doubt inside me about
whether or not I can actually hear my God's voice, you may as well chop my legs
off and wonder why can't walk anymore.
If you're reading this
and you truly, literally don't have legs, I apologize if this is an insensitive
metaphor for me to use. I'm just trying to use my imagination to describe something
that has happened to me invisibly.
I think if a person uses
spiritual abuse to cut off my connection to God, this person has basically
chopped my legs off. I would be almost completely helpless if I didn't have any
legs. I would hobble around aimlessly, and it would take me forever to
accomplish anything. Perhaps if I grew up without legs, I would know how to
survive, but if I had lived all my life with legs, and suddenly they were gone,
I would probably spiral down into a major depression. Perhaps a first-class
spiritual abuser would place the legless me in a wheelchair and insist on
pushing me around himself or herself. Oh, how I would need to leech off this
person for guidance. I think I'm going to
throw up, the blogger added under her typing breath.
"Then the Lord said
to Moses, 'Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that
everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.' So Moses made a
bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten
anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived." (Numbers 21:8-9)
"And he did what
was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father David had
done. He removed the high places and broke the sacred pillars, cut down the
wooden image and broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made; for
until those days the children of Israel burned incense to it, and called it
Nehushtan." (2 Kings 18:3-4, talking about King Hezekiah)
I've read the Bible at
least once or twice through already, so I thought I had already seen everything
in it. Nope. New stuff keeps springing up. Or the Holy Spirit keeps taking a
giant highlighter and making things new for me when I read it, because it isn't
new to Him. (He's the Author. He knows His work.) Earlier this week, this verse in 2 Kings about the bronze serpent
popped out at me. What the heck?
So, in the Book of
Numbers, when the Israelites were in the wilderness, they made God mad, so He
sent snakes that bit them and killed many of them. Then He had compassion on
them and gave Moses the cure for the snake bites: Just make a bronze snake, put
it on a pole, and any snake-bite victims who would look at the bronze snake would
be healed.
In the Books of 1 Kings
and 2 Kings, there's this terrible pattern of kings in Israel and Judah
following God, and then not following God, then following God, and then not
following God. It's disturbing to read about. And then many of the kings who
followed God still allowed the people to worship other gods. It's disturbing
and confusing to read about. Everything goes fine in Israel and Judah until the
kings don't use their authority to close these doors of spiritual attack.
Then King Hezekiah comes
along and finally gets rid of all the false gods that his people were
worshiping. One of them happened to be the bronze snake that Moses made in
the wilderness. That was my What-the-heck moment. All that time, some of the
people had been worshiping the cure instead of the Healer. They called it Nehushtan,
which my NKJV Bible says is Hebrew for "Bronze Thing." I wonder what
their worship songs to it sounded like. "Bronze thing..." [electric
guitar plays] "You make my heart sing..." [electric guitar continues]
"You make everything groovy..." [electric guitar continues, with
apologies to The Troggs]
But I've done the same
thing. I've latched onto something that God gave me that helped me a lot, and
I've taken it way too far, to the point that I worshiped it (or worshiped him/her),
to the point that it squelched my ability to hear God's voice and follow Him. I
think many of us Christians have done it. It's called idolatry. It's called
religion. It's called tradition. I think some people would also call it a
monument.
Of course, this is
something that breaks God's heart, because He wants me to worship Him, not His cure.
God does a variety of different things to heal me and help me. He did lots of different
types of things to help people and heal them in the Bible, and He keeps doing
cool crazy things like that today.
So, if my way of hearing
my God's voice doesn't compute with your formula, I'm sorry if I offended you.
Please don't take it too far and insist that I gawk at your bronze serpent.
Your bronze serpent probably helped you quite significantly in your past, but
that was a one-time cure. That season is over. That bronze serpent isn't God.
Please don't try to influence me to worship it.
And please don't chop
off my legs. I need my legs. I can't walk without my legs. I don't want your
prosthetics. I want my own legs, so that I can walk, run, skip, dance, and
stand up on my own. I need my own legs if I'm going to follow God and go
wherever He wants me to go.
I don't want to starve
to death spiritually. I need to listen to my God and cling to Him, not you. You
aren't my god anymore. He's my God. Whatever He says goes. Wherever He tells me
to go is where I want to go. Whatever He tells me to do is what I want to do.
Whoever He tells me to be is who I want to be. If you can support me in that,
awesome. Thank you. If you can't support me in that, I don't know what else to
say, except that I need my God more than I need food, more than I need a bronze
serpent, and more than I need legs.
So there, the blogger added under her typing breath.
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