More To It Than Mere Words
I came across this blog post today and it made me sad. It made me sad for two reasons: first, I have a lot of books by Bob Kellemen (who’s blog it is) and he is condoning and published the article. And second, because the author seems to be so ignorant of the world in which he lives.
According to the Bible, there are two spheres or kingdoms operating at the same time. The world that God made and the world that is in rebellion against God. In the Old Testament, we see this illustrated over and over again; the serpent and God, obedience and disobedience, Cain and Able, people in the Ark people outside the Ark, Egypt and Israel, YHWH and the Baals, and on and on. In the New Testament, this same theme is carried on; Jesus and the pharisees, light and dark, truth and error, Spirit and world/flesh/devil, life and death, Heaven and Hell.
This same division of light and dark, truth and error are illustrated or carried on in the difference between Biblical counseling and counseling psychology. Both are working to help people, but they are both also working to help people live in their very different systems; both are recruiting. Biblical counselors’ main aim or goal is to help people live with God in the world that he made in a way that helps them deal with the struggles and suffering that the sin in the world has produced. Counseling psychology is also trying to help people live in the world with all its trouble, but in a way that ignores or deems irrelevant God and his presence, power, and Lordship. In other words, Biblical counseling and counseling psychology are two opposing religious systems.
If you made a list all the religions of the world and compared them to Christianity, you would find two basic religions. Christianity and the rest. You might list Mormonism, Jehovah’s witnesses, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity. But you should also list counseling psychology. And psychology is much more closely related to Mormonism and JW than the others because those others are so distinct from Christianity that no one confuses them. But when you are talking to a Mormon, for example, you need to constantly redefine the words you use because the Mormons use all the same words the Bible uses, but with very different meanings (It’s the same with Jehovah’s Witnesses or counseling psychologists). If you don’t, you can easily find yourself buying in to the system without even knowing you’ve shifted. This is because there is just enough that sounds right, but isn’t, to sucker you into great error.
An easy example of this, from the Bible, would be when Moses was on the mountain getting the Law from God (Ex 32). He was away for a longer time than the people thought he should be gone, and they got restless and asked Aaron to make them gods who could go before them and that they could worship. So, Aaron, Moses’ brother, took all their gold and made a golden calf for them. In verse 4 he said, “This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!” and the next day the people brought offerings of every kind to the cow (this was surely in line with what they had learnt about worship while they lived in Egypt) and danced and played and ate and drank. But here’s the thing, “So when Aaron saw it [the calf he had made], he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord”” (Ex 32:5). That word LORD is the name of the God who rescued them from Egypt. They had conflated the gods and thus the systems, and were trying a to act like the God of Israel was the same god as any of the Egyptian gods. You call it tomato; I call it tomato. What’s the problem?
God’s reaction was this,
And the Lord said to Moses, “Go, get down! For your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made themselves a molded calf, and worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!’ ” And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and indeed it is a stiff-necked people! Now therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them. And I will make of you a great nation.” (Ex 32:7–10)
Only Moses’ intervention saved them that day.
The point is this, God does not like it when we pretend that the world’s system is just as good as, or better than, what he has created. He is not pleased when we put the idols of our day alongside his Lordship. When the philistines brought the ark of God and put next to Dagon, their main god, God kept knocking to the ground. Every morning the philistines would come into the temple and find Dagon on his face in the dirt. All this time, the people of Ashdod were being ravaged by tumors until they finally took the ark and sent it back to Israel.
In Numbers 25 God becomes angry with the Israelites because they were worshipping the Baals, the gods of the land.
This pattern is followed all over the place in the Bible and in history. The people are saved by God, make friends with the pagans around them, begin thinking that “they’re not so bad,” start becoming like them (cloths, hair, language, tattoos, etc.), and begin to worship their gods. And then God comes and smacks them and tells them he won’t share his glory with another. They repent and start the cycle all over again.
Here we are, in the 21st century, repeating the process in how we help people in need. The bible gives sufficient answers to all of life’s problems (2 Tim 3:16). The non-Christians come up with their own system—Counseling psychology—that begins as an anti-Christian entity (Freud, Jung, and the rest). Then Christians, who were just fine using the Bible to help people, thought they are being scientific (which is also a Baal of our day) begin to say, “Hey, those guys sound like they know what they’re talking about, let’s be like them.” So, they went to non-Christian colleges or brought non-Christians into their Christian colleges, and they got degrees in psychology without any discernment at all. As a result, they become Christians who are practicing non-Christian, actually, anti-Christian counseling. They’re doing what Aaron did with the Israelites, “behold your God, the God who died on the cross and rose from the dead. Bow down and worship.” While those who aren’t paying attention are being led away from Christ and his kingdom and into the kingdom of darkness.
The words may be the same, but they don’t mean the same thing. Yahweh, Yahweh, depression, depression. One word leads you into glory, the other leads you into Hell.
Back to the article for a minute. The answer to the question is, Yes! Depression (coming with all the non-Christian, counseling psychological baggage that you are bringing with it) is not a Biblical category. Coming with the freight you’re bringing with you; it is an attempt to get godly people to worship the false gods of our day.
This issue exactly the same thing as when a Mormon missionary invites to worship Jesus. It’s the same word, but the Jesus of Mormonism is not the Jesus of the Bible.