Transcription
Well, we'll start over here with Rick Mlan and that line and give me your name and then your question.
Yes. Uh my name is Stan and first of all, I'm very grateful for your teaching and um my question is with all the mass shootings and the homeless and a culture that believes uh men can get pregnant. We live in a crazy world and I have relatives in my family who are mentally ill. So I went to the Bible to you know try and get some guidance and I find that um for such a huge problem that really affects such huge parts of our so there's very little in the Bible. So the one thing I did find was in Luke chapter 8 when uh Christ is dealing with the uh demonic guy lives in the tombs and it says you know Christ uh cast out the demons and then it says and out of the guy and then it says and then he was sane. Mhm.
So, uh I guess my question is, is every mental illness um have a demonic uh component or is there such a thing as just a mental illness? And if so, why didn't Christ ever heal somebody who had a mental illness? You know, apart from demonic activity.
Right, really good question. Let me let me see if I can't come at it this way. Every person without God is in a dire mental condition. doesn't mean their rational faculties are not functioning, but it does mean that they are in the kingdom of darkness, right? It does mean that they are under the power of the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience. So, we have to understand that anyone who is not a believer is operating in some sense with a demonic influence. It it may be external coming at them through the culture, but there's something in them in their corruption, in their fallenness, in their natural perversion that deceives them. The heart is desperately wicked, deceitful, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? So even the prophet Jeremiah says it's hard to understand the heart. It's hard to understand. It's hard to diagnose to what degree is someone functioning under the direct or indirect influence of Satan and to what degree is just this the flesh having found a path of perversion and following that perversion.
There there was a um a longstanding sense that people who were out of control needed to be cared for in our culture. And those were the days when we had mental institutions and uh people were placed into those institutions for their own safety and for the safety of others. That has all disappeared. There there was for example in the state of California a whole group of mental institutions where people would be rounded up who were a danger to themselves or to society or who eventually would find themselves in a homeless condition unable to fend for themselves and survive or who were on drugs or whatever it was that made them incapable of living any kind of functional life. They were rounded up and they were cared for. That was one of the effects originally of of Christianity in the western world. That has all died with the kind of neopaganism of our modern world. Um, in some illconceived notion that these people are better to live uh on the street and try to carve out an existence in the middle of all of the uh drugs and all of the consequences of their sins and to whatever degree the direct or indirect influence of Satan. Ought to leave them there because that's more compassionate when the fact of the matter is it's less compassionate. It's not compassionate at all. They ought to be cared for. One of the marks of a society like ours that shows how pagan it is is we don't care about those people. The authorities don't care about those people. If they did, they would put them in a situation where they were cared for, where they were protected from themselves and from others, and where the influences that destroy their lives would be to some degree mitigated.
But going back to the original question, to what degree is an unconverted person under the influence of Satan? And that had to be answered in any individual situation. There was in the New Testament, you remember uh the young man throwing himself into the fire because demons were controlling him. I think far more of that is demonic than people would want to believe. I I think far more of it is demonic than people would want to believe. But I also think that Satan operates in ways that aren't so manifest. In fact, what speaks to that is when Jesus began his ministry and went into the to the synagogue to teach, there were times when demons started screaming at him out of the mouths of the people in the synagogues. This must have been a shock to the synagogue people because these would be people who were part of the synagogue community and it wouldn't have been necessarily known that these people were possessed to some degree by Satan or by demons but the presence of Christ elicited that as under his influence the demons sort of gave up their cover. So I think it's far more common than we would think. And it's far more common in a more refined part of the population than we would understand. It's not just the people that are homeless, the people that are drug addicts, the people that have lost their reasoning faculties. It's not just those people. Satan operates in everyone. And even in leaders, he operates in leaders. We see this illustrations of this in the prophets in the Old Testament. So I I think to try to diagnose that is very difficult because Satan is elusive and there is so much deception.
So the way that I would approach that is to say it doesn't matter to what degree you are under the influence of Satan. Whether it's to the point where he's taken over your rational faculties, or whether it's to the point that you're just a perverse person, even though you look pretty normal on the outside, to whatever degree Satan has taken you over, the solution is the same. Whether you're in the synagogue and you're appearing to everybody around you as a responsible worshshiping Jew or whether you're the maniac of Gera cutting himself living in a cave and bereft of any rational thought, the solution is the same, right? The solution is the same. What needed to happen to that synagogue attender, that self-righteous Jew, was that he needed to recognize his sin and embrace Christ as savior. And when Christ came into the life of the maniac, he was immediately sane. He immediately became an evangel for the gospel as that account indicates to us. So, I don't know that it's in our power to be able to diagnose everyone, but I think the the horror of the way those people are treated now is that we leave them we leave them to fend for themselves on the streets. Th this is a this is a pagan way to treat people who were made in the image of God and falls far short of the kind of compassion that our Lord exhibited toward those kinds of people. Um again, it's not for us to be able to know that and I don't think you want to go poking around trying to see if you can discover demons in people.
Now, one other comment on this. Mental illness is something else. If something's wrong with your brain, that can be diagnosed. That that can be that can be read by certain tests and evaluations, electroinsphilogram of the brain. If you have a brain problem that that can be objectively diagnosed, but what we're talking about are things that in some case could be objectively diagnosed because they're the product of drug addiction, long-term drug addiction, which does have a a an effect on the function of the brain. It's it's not it's not possible to take drugs or be an alcoholic without it deteriorating your mental faculties. But again the the issue is not to be able to diagnose every single individual but to understand that the solution for everyone is the same. But from a cultural standpoint, from the standpoint of compassion, any compassionate society, any compassionate culture would find a way to gather these people together to bring them to some level of sanity, to some level of health, to some level of well-being and care for them as those created in the image of God. And then we would have opportunities to perhaps expose them to the gospel. Used to be I remember many times going for example to the mental hospital in Camaro. There was a massive mental hospital hospital in Camaro. It's now been turned to part of the campus of Cal State University system. They shut it down. It was filled with hundreds and hundreds of people and there were many of similar hospitals and you could go there and you could talk with those people. I went I met with those people. I had the opportunity to give the gospel to some of those people. I went into the mental ward at UCLA and had the opportunity to give the gospel to a young lady there uh who had had her life taken over by Satan.
Um, if uh if this society had any compassion at all for those people, they would be treating them in the way that they should be treated and put them in situation where they could be cared for and where they could be reached with the gospel. I remember going to UCLA one time and there was a girl who had been in our church and she had been put in the mental ward at UCLA. She was in a padded cell. I don't even know if you have that anymore. They they just give them drugs which turns them into addicts which winds cause causes them to wind up on the street. She was in a padded cell. And I went to see her. Her name was Tommy Joe. I'll never forget it. And I I went into the UCLA hospital and I said, "I'm I'm here to see Tommy Joe." And they said, "You can't see her." I said, "Well, I'm her pastor. You" They said, "You can't see her. You might harm her. She's she's in profound depths of despair." I said, "Well, where is she?" "Well, she's in a special room, a special padded cell." I said, "Well, it wouldn't seem that I could do any much more damage to her than has already been done. Where do you go from there? So I I pushed the issue and I went into that padded cell and I sat down with her and looked her in the eye and I spoke to her as a normal person and I asked her to set aside the game that she had been playing which made it appear that she was out of control when in fact she wasn't. And I just talked to her. I talked to her about Christ. I talked to her about the gospel. She completely calmed down. This was a totally transforming kind of situation. So it would be so helpful if there was a way to care for these people so these people could be reached with the gospel. But that again I have to say part of the judgment of God on this nation shows up in the indifference that this country has and this society has to people who need special care. I mean we kill babies, we throw people who are unable to function socially in the street on the gutter and um then we want to protect the rights of the women to kill the babies and the rights of the homeless to live in the gutter. Th this is the uh perversion of the system that we have. So again, I think far more of what you see in those people's lives is the direct uh activity of Satan than people would think.
Okay. Good.