Note from Pastor: “Addicted to God” New Ways of Seeing and Walking Free Part 3
“The unfolding of Your words gives life; it gives understanding to the simple.” (Psalm 119:130) The world uses only one metaphor to describe our struggle with addiction: “disease.” But the world does not say, “Addiction is like disease.” The world says, “Addiction is disease,” which is neither theologically nor medically correct. To truly “recover” from addiction, sinful addiction must be replaced with holy addiction, for addiction is merely a perverted form of worship. Even organizations like AA confess that addiction is a “spiritual struggle that needs spiritual healing.” The word “disease” certainly does describe how addiction makes us feel controlled by something, but it omits that the control of addiction is a voluntary enslavement by the addict. The Bible gives us five metaphors to describe addictive behavior: idolatry, adultery, foolishness, attacks by a wild beast, and disease. One of the most common biblical pictures of the human condition, both when we are in control and when we are out of control, is that of idolatry, which we learned about last week. The second metaphor Scripture uses to describe addiction is adultery. Adultery is a companion metaphor with idolatry because idolatry is ultimately a personal relationship gone wrong. Adultery emphasizes the more intimate features of idolatry. If you go to an AA meeting and listen to the language being used, you would think that people were having affairs. They are talking about something they loved. They once thought of nothing but that object. They felt complete when they were with it. They made a conscious choice in favor of their most beloved. There was control, lies, obsession; all the things that describe an illicit relationship. Proverbs 7 describes the whole process of addiction in terms of a foolish young man who intentionally walks into the neighborhood of his forbidden lover, being seduced, enjoying the temporary pleasure, and then learning that he was trapped by the desires that were controlling and dominating him. The Bible says it is “a banquet in the grave” and “an animal eating meat from a deadly trap.” The biblical language of adultery describes addiction. The addict indulges in a secret life that will eventually be exposed. Deception is commonplace. The addict is unfaithful, and hurts others because he loves the desires and pleasure above all else. The addict’s relationship with his object of desire becomes his life. It is what he lives for. We may be tempted to ask the addict, “Why did you throw away everything you had for this?” There is never a satisfactory answer for this because sin is never rational. Sin doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t look into the future. It doesn’t consider the consequences. All it knows is “I WANT – I WANT MORE.” To help the addict, we must help him find something more beautiful, more desirable than his current love. It is tempting to spend countless hours with the addict talking about everything that went wrong, but that is not enough, we must talk about Jesus, who is to be his first love. And the only way to learn to love Jesus is to know Him in the Bible. Adultery is a complex metaphor; we move toward it because of our own selfish desires, but in the end the “adulteress,” whatever “she” may be, controls us. We have to commit to fight against not only the things we see such as alcohol, drugs, pornography, and etc., but also against the desires of our hearts (Matthew 5:28; James 4:1ff). Learning to love Jesus more is the best first step in fighting any addiction, and we would be well served that the Apostle James in his epistle, reminds us that none of us is far from the addict’s life. More next time.
