Does the Spirit of God Convict or Convince …?

First, is there a difference? If you are convinced there is something wrong with your character and behavior, are you a convict? Not necessarily, it would seem.

To be convicted there has to be some kind of criminal charge brought and presumably a sentence that can be given; being convinced of wrongful behavior or thought can – and usually does —come way before any of that.

The crimes here are called “sins”. Sin is a concept that is of Judeo/Christian origin and before the successful proliferation of Christian thought it was only among a tiny tribal Mediterranean kingdom that it held any sway whatsoever.

“The wages of sin is death,” describes the punishment ascribed to transgression of the Law of Moses, according to the Bible; “The soul that sins it shall die,” is the Word the Lord spoke to the prophet Ezekiel. The concept was actually introduced in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – at least that’s the Christian take on it, calling the disobedience of Adam “Original Sin”. Most mistake the “death” that God promised if Adam ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to be biological death. But God warned that on the “Day you eat of it you shall surely die.” Adam and Eve didn’t die physically for many decades, but the close familial relationship with God that they had enjoyed up until that very day ended rather abruptly, as the story goes. And so we should be assuming that the Judeo/Christian “death” that is the reward for disobedience is a living separation from God.

The positing of such a formula in the Kingdom of Israel was an integral part of the priestly sacrificial system. It was sin and redemption by ritual cleansing and animal immolation. But Jesus was (is) Prophet/Priest/Victim all-in-one. And habitual sin was never an obstacle for Him establishing an intimate relationship with anyone, according to the Gospel accounts. Two things were such impediments, however: attachment to worldly riches and a self-righteous/judgmental attitude.

The widespread concern about the eternal effects of one’s errant choices of thought and/or behavior is a particularly Christian phenomena, although, given the assurances of the words and actions of Christ and His Apostles, this should seem peculiar. In fact, the situation appears to have been completely turned on its head. A Christian pastor/confessor is likely to give great spiritual import to admissions of what general modern society would consider acts and thoughts of low level concern while the genealogical descendants of the hard-line judgmentalist Jews and Pharisees of Jesus day – i.e. modern Jewish rabbis – are more likely to respond, “So you messed up this time. At least you realized it. Do what you can to clean up the mess you made and do better next time.”

Of course, we get into the miasma of theological debates that have caused denominational schisms of varying proportions when we venture into the area of who gets Eternal Salvation and how. But, while none of us has any verifiable experience with God’s decision making on the fate of the immortal soul, we can see who gets saved now. We can call this temporal salvation “the healing power of God.”

The Gospel accounts show Jesus of Nazareth unhesitatingly wading right into the Israeli towns and villages healing every kind of disease and mental illness (the former called “having demons” back there). There were only two things that stopped Him: lack of faith in Him in His own hometown where they thought they knew all about this local boy, and lack of desire and knowledge of need because of spiritual pride.

In my own experience there is only one spiritual venue where I have seen this kind of indiscriminate salvation from mental illness. It is among anonymous 12-Step groups that spontaneous healings of this nature frequently occur in the name of God. Of course this is the generic “Higher Power”, aka  “God as we understand Him.” This “God of our understanding” is the only One who “can restore us to sanity” from the “unmanageable” chaos that the disease of alcoholism* has wrought on our lives. [*These days you can replace this particular addictive ailment identified as the guilty perpetrator in the first AA Step with just about any other human psychological/behavioral syndrome.] Later on in this step-by-step spiritual healing process the suggestion is (nothing is mandated within these spiritual support groups) that we seek “through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.” (Step 11)

The clinical definition of addictive behavior can be summed up thusly: Any behavior that is known to the actor as being destructive to himself and others that he or she doesn’t want to do but keeps doing anyway. There is no better prosaic portrayal of this than by the Apostle Paul speaking of his own experience with “sin” after his dramatic conversion to Christianity:

“So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from the this body of death?” Rom. 7:21-24

There is an unfortunate chapter split after the next two verses that has somewhat obscured the tenor of the text as to what the Christian solution to this dilemma is as Paul experienced it:

“Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.* Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit set me free from the law of sin and death.” [*The new chapter heading was set here.]

In the next line Paul refers to the “law of sin and death” – aka, the Law of Moses – as being “powerless” to accomplish what it seemingly was set forth to do – i.e., making us good, productive people. The Law of Moses relied on the individual human will which, having been “weakened by the sinful nature,” is bound to be overpowered by the psycho/spiritual maladies we acquire and pass on from and to each other. Admitting to being “powerless” to resist these devastating forces is the First-Step threshold to the healing “bridge over troubled waters” that 12-Step groups offer.

What Paul posits is where he sees the real battle to be. The battle for the body is already lost for now, but the victory is in the minds of the believers.  If your mind is set on the things of God it no longer matters what you end up doing with your body – “… there is now no condemnation …” i.e., our own misbehavior cannot separate us from God’s healing and life-giving presence.

Good thing that, since we all need God to restore us to sanity after we have habitually messed up. And if the mere act of messing things up condemns us to the death which is the living separation from God – well then, we are certainly most screwed.

The first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous describe the process by which we get “rescued from this body of death.” In 12-Step circles it is alternately shortened to “I can’t; He can; Let Him do it,” and ‘”I came; I came to; I came to believe.”

The “you” who is “not controlled by the sinful nature but by the Spirit” is the mind, not the body, according to Paul. And with the Spirit backed by the assent of the mind, we are to “put to death the acts of the body,” not try to control them. This is the task set forth in putting into practice the middle steps and going to meetings, as it is obvious from experience that God will not let us get better alone. We must accept and offer help and support. After all, according to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the Godhead Itself is a group of three and Jesus did not embark on His mission until He had a 12 member support group with Him.

My experience with the healing salvation is like that of my lifelong experience as a commercial fisherman. As I’ve heard from old-time Long Island baymen and their sons since I first got into this, “The fish are where you find them.” These are men who have been dragging and setting nets in the same waters for generations, and still they don’t know with any degree of certainty where and when the schools of their sought after prey will show. And the Gospels portray Jesus as having been the same way. None of the Apostles knew what He was going to do next and where.

All I have learned in my search for where I can be assured of finding the saving action of God is that He will be where I find Him – and that has most often been at 12-Step meetings.

While there are many kinds of addictions, perhaps the best one to illustrate the problem of dealing with them from the standard Christian sinful-behavior point of view is the habit of self-gratification with Internet pornography. At the very least it can be a colossal waste of time and at worst can drain finances, destroy relationships and poison attitudes. But from the viewpoint of “sin” as violation of Biblical Law, it is adultery as Jesus magnified the Law to cover: “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Mat. 5:28 This verse and that which follows — about gouging out the offending eye if it is the cause of the offense — are used to instill the guilt ridden impetus in Christian minded souls to get rid of personal Internet access as a way of ending the sinful activity which leads to Eternal damnation.

However, this does not address the fact that there are very real and very attractive beautiful men and women all over the place. (If the sin is just looking at them “lustfully” I guess I just revealed my own sinful nature, since I notice the sexually attractive members of the opposite sex around me.)

According to Christ Himself, obsessive use of Internet porn is not any more sinful than the one time lustful glance at a nearby woman. But the former is far more destructive. And in the light of the freedom purported by the Apostle Paul in Romans 7 & 8 and elsewhere, the addiction diagnosis is likely to be more curative. So rather than taking the standard avoidance/deterrence strategy advocated by many Christian spiritual advisors (and other codependent controlling enablers) the detached, safe, loving and supporting atmosphere of 12-Step groups where the suggestion is to “Let go and let God” seems much more appropriate.

Martin Luther began his journey of protest and reformation after being an overtly devout Roman Catholic monk suffering from a scrupulosity that caused him to frequent his confessor with every errant thought– an attitude now condemned by Catholic dogma. The theological line being taken herein might resultantly be identified with Lutheran teaching on sin and redemption. But I would go even further than that:

Some would say that God is dead – but I say this: Sin is dead – for Christ became Sin itself and put it to death on the Cross. And not only is Sin dead but so is Disease. In fact, Sin is a kind of disease since we catch it from each other and from our progenitors. The Cure has walked among us and still moves about the earth, healing whomever He wishes. It is not that physiological, moral and psychological maladies are no longer active; God has chosen not to heal everyone and everything all at once, but He is building His Kingdom piece by piece and with His transformative healing power killing all manner of human debility  in them and transforming the results of the ailments into life-giving attributes from the death dealing infections they once were.

Death, disease and destructive impulses still reign in the body for now, but by faith we can have a continuing conscious contact with and understanding of the healing, life-giving and loving Higher Power, transforming what was once seen as the effects of a wasted, sin-ridden existence to a life whose intrinsic purpose  has always been to show forth the Glory of God.