When God is Sufficient, Other gods Are Not
When your relationship with your wife is really really good; she’s the bee’s knees, the most beautiful woman in the world, the one you want to rush home after work to visit, the last thing you want to do is to look around at other women in a lusty way. When what you have at home is the best, nothing else is even worth looking at.
In a similar way, but much more ramped up, when Jesus is all our hope and stay; when Jesus is our all in all; when Jesus is our glorious Lord and Savior; when we have been filled with joy inexpressible, when we know, down in our bones that God is God and we are not and it is really really good, we don’t need to look at any other gods for help in our relationship with him.
If the Bible is all we need for life and godliness (2 Pet 1:3); if we find joy and life and light in the Scriptures and in the presence of the Lord (Ps 19:8; 27:1); if it is in the Scriptures that we find wisdom (Rom 11:33); if it is in Scripture that we find help in our time of need (Heb 4:16); if it is in the Bible that we learn how to avoid sin and to pursue righteousness (Psa 119:9-11; 1 Tim 6:11); if it is in the Word of God that we learn how to live with one another in peace and harmony, then why would we ever want to look to outside sources for any of these things?
It occurs to me that even to entertain the thought that politics, other religions, psychology, etc. might have something positive to offer our relationships with God and one another means that we have already fallen away from him. There are some temptations that are sinful in themselves and to think or to be tempted to think that something can add to what we have in Christ in the Scriptures is to have sinned already. We have already bit the dust, as they say.
But you say, “All truth is God’s truth and not all truth is in the Bible.” To which I assent. But the system you are looking into is clearly not the system God set up. In the case of psychology, for example, it was established and continues to be a rival kingdom to the Kingdom of God (Freud was not only not a Christian, he created his method in order to combat Christianity). To think about examining it to gain wisdom and knowledge is to abandon what God has provided in Scripture.
Ah, you say, “but there are Christians who use psychology to help people.” To which I respond. Yes, and there were Jews in the Bible who worshipped the Baals alongside YHWH. It doesn’t make it right and in fact it is still sinful. Using the tools of Satan to do God’s work makes no sense at all.
What about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)? Some folks say that even Jay Adams used that kind of counseling in his work. I don’t know Jay, but I would bet you a zillion dollars that he would adamantly deny using CBT in any aspect of his counseling. He is a giant in the Biblical counseling world. He is celebrating his 90th birthday today. He wrote over 200 books and is the most influential person in the Biblical Counseling movement. But I digress from your question.
CBT is the practice of helping people change the way they think or behave by changing the other. For example, if someone wants to change how they act, they need to change how they think. If they want to change how they think, they change how they act. Simple. And it works to a large extent. But where does it come from and what is actually going on? CBT exists in a world where God does not exist. It is an expression of the worship of the false god psyche. It is one therapy of over 300 official psychological therapies in the world.
CBT is attractive to Christians for many reasons, one of which is that we are interested in how people think (Rom. 13:1) and how people behave (Acts 17:30). Many pastors counsel people in ways that looks a lot like CBT. For example, someone might tell a woman that she needs to respect her husband even though she doesn’t feel like it because when she obeys God her emotions will follow, and she will feel like respecting him. But if this is all that is happening in the pastor’s office, he is doing psychology, not Christianity. The Bible does not teach that if we change what we think we’ll be able to stop sinning (Rom 3:23). In fact, it teaches the opposite (Cf. Rom. 7).
The Bible tells us that if we will meet with the Holy One, he will transform our heart and then we will stop sinning. It is about relationship and about love and worship and submission and obedience and the active living presence of the Holy Spirit acting in our lives. It is about heart transformation and thus behavioral transformation. If we only tell people to think right and they will act right, we’re falling short of what God has called us to.
But to get back to the beginning. If we have the best, we don’t need to entertain the thought that there might be something better out there. We have Jesus. We don’t need to think about or talk about or, for sure, act on thinking that those other systems have anything to offer.