Unconscious Thought

Part 1

Jeremiah 17:10 NIV

"I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve."

What Do You Know About Yourself?

The past few weeks I have been aware of long and elaborate dreams that seem to last through the night.  In them are people I can’t ever remember seeing but they impact me in some dramatic way as my dream progresses.  The dreams aren’t frightening but sometimes they are troubling.  I have difficulty in many trying to find my way somewhere or I get confused about what I need to do.  The plotlines within my dreams are complex and the characters speak and act in surprising ways that don’t remind me of any of my recent experiences.  I could not write stories that are as creative and interesting as my dreams and so I wonder how they come about and what the source of them is.  Of course they could be sent to me by God or they may simply be the product of unconscious thinking that is working even while I am asleep.  One thing is certain.  There is much about me that I do not understand, especially what is found deep in my heart.

Perhaps you are like me and find yourself wondering what to make of the hidden parts of your mind.  It seems so complex and strange, like a cave filled with mysterious creatures, indecipherable writings and strange pictures on the walls.  Unpredictable forces are at work within you that push you about like a bully on the playground.  Do you just let them have their way with you, impacting what you feel about things and how you react to situations?  Can you do something about the internal forces that affect your life in hidden ways?  Should you be concerned about them or live as if your unconscious thoughts don’t matter?  What does the Bible have to say about the unconscious world?

Two terms in the Bible, when combined, are what describe the place of our “inner world”.  The first Hebrew term, lev, is generally translated heart and is what modern culture thinks of as the mind.  The second, Kilya is difficult to translate but in older English Bibles is called the “reins” or “kidneys”.  It is the inner place of the self; the deep part of us that includes our thinking, our unconscious world, our passion and our will.  Jeremiah 17: 10 puts both these terms together and reminds us that God has access to all the hidden places of the inner being.  "I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve." (Jeremiah 17:10 NIV)

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You don’t need proof that there are depths to you that you cannot explore with just the mental skills available to you.  You have dreams you can’t explain.  You experience emotions that do not have a recognizable source.  Memories suddenly pop to the surface without warning.  A smell or a taste of something brings back to mind an experience you have long forgotten.  The Bible says that God has made that deep, unseen world.  For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. (Psalm 139:13 NIV)  “Inmost being” is the translation of our Hebrew word, “Kilya” or kidneys, the place where your thoughts are found.  The very next verse proclaims that the way God put together your inmost being is wonderful.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139:14 NIV)  What Freud and many in the psychoanalytic field saw as the enemy of happiness, the unconscious world found in each person, the Bible says is a great benefit or even a tremendous treasure.

We do though face a great problem when it comes to our unconscious thought life.  It is corrupted.  Jeremiah 17:9 says this about the heart.  The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?  (Jeremiah 17:9 NIV)  The effect of Sin at every area of our thinking, both conscious as well as unconscious, is devastating.  It impacts us at every turn in life from how we feel about things to the way we make our decisions.  Our heart is wrecked and we cannot trust it to effectively take us through life.  No one, not Freud or Jung or Watson or any of the “thinkers” in the study of psychology understand fully the chaos found in the heart.

There is an interesting term the Bible uses to describe God’s plan for us.  Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place. (Psalm 51:6 NIV)  The word translated “truth” is the Hebrew word “emeth” and means firmness, reliability, faithfulness.  As the heart is now, you cannot count on it.  The thoughts that are generated by the heart are at best unreliable; at worst destructive.  You cannot count on what comes out of your heart and have confidence that what comes out of it will be good.  God’s plan for you is to make your heart trustworthy and the thoughts in it productive and beneficial to your being.  The only way that is possible is if God gets at the root of the problem, the Sin that corrupts the heart.

We are reminded in Jeremiah 17: 10, that only God is the great psychologist because He is capable of seeing into the deepest and most broken parts of the heart and knowing what to do about it.  "I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind…”  The prayer of the Psalmist takes this ability of God into account.  Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. (Psalm 139:23 NIV)  Why is this important?   What does the psalmist really want?  We have no tools for figuring out the effect of our unconscious thinking upon what we do and how we react to things.  God though does and yet He will not simply take over your unconscious like some hypnotist if we don’t want Him there.  He waits for our praying to begin working in us at the unconscious level. 

Consider carefully God’s ability to do something about your unconscious mind.  Psalm 51: 6 insists, you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.  This is not just insight into how to fix a lawn mower.  You and I want much more than that in the inmost place, in the unconscious parts of the heart.  You want the supernatural thinking of God that combats the broken thinking of your unconscious mind.  "Where then does wisdom come from?  Where does understanding dwell? ... God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, (Job 28:20, 23 NIV)  With your permission, God will reshape and remake your unconscious mind so that His wisdom rises up out of it.

Consider the irony found in Isaiah 44. He (a carpenter) cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak.  He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow.  It is man's fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread.  But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it.  Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill.  He also warms himself and says, "Ah! I am warm; I see the fire."  From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships.  He prays to it and says, "Save me; you are my god." (Isaiah 44: 14-17 NIV)  Of course this points out the ridiculous nature of idol construction!  With part of the wood the carpenter carves an idol and from the rest of the very same wood he builds a fire and warms his cold feet.  Your unconscious built within your heart is much like this.  Part of it generates lustful feelings.  “I want this and I want it now!”  It can incite bitter anger as well as deep depression.  Another part of the unconscious produces inspiring thoughts, actions and plans.  You might treat these ideas as if they come from God but they may not be from Him.  They may simply be a product of a corrupted unconscious.    The unconscious is the power behind many of our opinions, actions and creative ideas and tragically, you can treat them as the ruling force of your life, a god.  Some of the most horrifying people of history were ruled by an unconscious they neither understood nor could control.  They thought though that everything they did was good and right.  We too can be fooled by a heart that is not seen or understood.  Our unconscious is both a danger to us and a support.  Next week we shall look at what can be done to have an unconscious that works for us and not against us.

Miracles Today

We think of the healings of the blind, the raising of the dead and the removal of the Assyrians from Jerusalem as first order miracles when in fact they are minor supernatural events compared to the matters of the heart.  Jesus' demands of us are plainly beyond human capabilities and yet He still holds them up to us as how we are to live.  He warns us that anyone who murders is subject to judgment and none of us would argue that point.  But then he goes on to say that if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First be reconciled to your brother before returning with your gift.  Above all else, we are to keep our lives free of conflict with our fellow children of God.  This seems absurd and even unnatural but that is the normal pattern of behavior within God's Kingdom.  How can we manage such expectations?  We can't.  We must operate within the sphere of Christ where inside the human heart, both in its conscious and unconscious parts He breaks apart the barriers between people.  At every turn we are to pray and be guided by the Holy Spirit in how to respond to what we face with our fellow broken human beings.  We may lack the faith needed for reconciliation but God does not excuse our spiritual laziness.  Get back up, pray for Christ to heal the psychological wounds and eventually the relationship will be restored.  There is your part and there is God's part.  Your part is to forgive the offence you hold.  His part is to take out of the hearts of others the weight of your offending actions.  The great miracles are always the ones that put people back together into a love relationship based in forgiveness and reconciliation.  For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:20 NIV

Chaos to Order

Genesis 1:2 NIV

 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

What Do You Do About the Chaos?

Several years ago I was leading a Bible Study in a home and when we finished, I walked out to my van but it wasn’t there.  Up and down the street I wandered, hoping I had just forgotten where I parked but the truth was that it was gone.  Someone had stolen it while I was “doing God’s work”.  Inside it was my laptop, an IPod and my digital camera.  I am not sure what hurt the most, the loss of the van which I often had griped about or the fact that it happened while I was hopefully pleasing God.  The chaos in my head was I am certain easily seen as I struggled to make sense of what had just happened. This was unreasonable and not fair and infuriating.  It did not seem right that God would let this happen to me.  

Chaos comes to all of us some time or another. It is usually unexpected and unnerving.  Some seem to manage chaos well but others of us have a tough time coping with it.  We like order.  We want to know what to expect and have a plan in place when troubles come.  Perhaps you handle chaos well.  You rather like chaos and the adrenalin rush it brings.  But it might be that the unexpected storm rattles you.  Suddenly you crack your tooth or you lose your wallet or you get in a car wreck.  In a world broken by sin and thrown into chaos as a result of the rebellion of humanity, we can never assume everything will go smoothly or all our plans will come to pass as we hope.  It is more than just “drama” that you face; it is without warning out and out madness.

Before God created humanity and the creatures of the earth, the Bible says that the world was literally as the Hebrew words indicate, chaotic and disordered.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:2 NIV)  It was in this state of disarray that the Lord in six days structured the universe and brought to the earth order.  Water was in its place.  Land was separated from the oceans.  Day and night were structured and species of land, air and sea creatures were separated from each other.  Everything was put in place and love and peace ruled the earth.  But then Adam sinned and the world was again in chaos with animals attacking each other, diseases bringing terror and humanity unstable and tossed about by anger and lust and jealousy.

Into this world entered God.  Jesus Christ was born of a virgin and built His life in an isolated part of the world that was largely ignored by all the great civilizations.  God by coming to us, did so in order to make the world once more rational and in every way good.  Jesus had a single mission; to take out of you and me sin and by doing so remove the chaos of Sin from the world. David perfectly describes the chaos of this world and how difficult it can get for you.  …my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and my body with grief.  My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak. (Psalm 31:9-10 NIV)

Not every day is like this but enough are to paint a picture of how far chaos can go in this world.  It is frustrating and sometimes overwhelming; the chaos we encounter and like I struggled trying to make sense of the loss of my van, it is normal to wonder why there is so much chaos.  After Jesus sent His disciples off in a boat to cross the Sea of Galilee with Jesus peacefully asleep, chaos erupted.   Without warning, a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. (Matthew 8: 24 NIV)  It astounded the disciples that Jesus could sleep through all that wild commotion but privately many of them must have wondered why God let such a great storm come upon them when they were doing God’s work. 

While He was teaching some in the crowd mentioned the tragic slaughter of some Galileans by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.  It seems that they wanted Jesus to explain why God let them be killed.  Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.  Jesus answered, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way?  I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.  Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them — do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:1-5 NIV)  Jesus does not welcome at all the hunt for blame when tragedy strikes!  Yes, the world is filled with both sinners and chaos but one person’s sin is not the cause of the chaos we find.  The disciples had a similar question for Jesus when they came upon a man who had been born blind.  His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2 NIV) Jesus’ response was perhaps not what they expected. "Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” (John 9:3 NIV)

When we look at the chaos all about us, we are asking the wrong question if we are trying to draw a straight line cause-and-effect relationship between who we are and what we face.  The assumption or at least the expectation must be in every case that chaos is to be expected but every time chaos occurs, we must look for God to see what He does.  Why the storm?  Why the massacre?  Why the blindness?  We cannot give an explanation for it other than that we live in a wrecked and chaotic world.  But when you see chaos, always look about for God too.

There is an illustration of how you can gradually develop this approach to chaos.  During a different storm on the same lake, Peter, along with the other disciples was in a boat crossing the Sea of Galilee when a storm developed and the winds began to blow strongly.  The chaos however went beyond the storm.  During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake.  When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. "It's a ghost," they said, and cried out in fear. (Matthew 14:25-26 NIV)  Jesus though reassured them.  But Jesus immediately said to them: "Take courage! It is I.  Don't be afraid." (Matthew 14: 27 NIV)  Famously, Peter, trusting Jesus to take care of him, got out of the boat and started walking on the water just like he saw Jesus doing.  At that moment, Peter recognized the chaos but looked for God in it.  Soon though, the storm was all he saw and he started sinking into the water.  Chaos has that effect on us.  We can let it overwhelm our sensitivity to God.

Peter had another opportunity to look past the chaos and see God in it but he didn’t make use of the opportunity.  When Jesus was arrested by the Jewish leaders, Peter thought all was lost and even though our Lord told him and the others that this was part of God’s plan, Peter panicked when He saw Jesus beaten and humiliated.  Three times he denied to the people watching with him that he even knew Jesus.  It was a lost cause to Peter and he could not see God in what was happening.  In just a couple years though, Peter was not so lost.

What turned everything around for Peter was that Jesus rose from the dead after He was crucified and as for all other true Christians, the Holy Spirit became a part of his personality.  From that point forward, all the mental strength and moral power of God was a part of him and can be a part of you too, Peter could never get completely lost in chaos.  Although it may not seem traumatic like being caught in a storm or watching as Christ was being beaten there was nonetheless a tremendous challenge Peter faced after the Holy Spirit came on him and the others the day of Pentecost.  The disciples started facing persecution.  James the Apostle was executed for his faith in Christ as was the deacon Stephen and Peter was more than once arrested and threatened with death.  Peter had started to make a regular practice of trying to see God in whatever he faced and after having moved away from Jerusalem he stayed with some friends in the Roman dominated town of Caesarea.  While there, some messengers came to him from a Roman centurion, asking Peter to come to the centurion’s home.  There were two problems with the invitation.  One, Peter was Jewish and Jewish people did not go into the homes of those who weren’t Jewish. More importantly though it was a centurion who wanted to see Peter and this was a great challenge for Peter.  It was the Roman soldiers who executed Jesus.  This quite possibly could have been a threat.  What was Peter to do?  Would he trust Christ within the chaos of going to see the Centurion or let his fear rule him and stay home?

The decision Peter finally made enabled Peter to see God in the chaos he faced.  Before that, God was in the storm, He was there to trust too but he did not see it.  After that, God was in the crucifixion of Christ and He was there to trust but Peter didn’t see it then either.  Now, the invitation to go to the centurion’s house, although frightening and risky had God there too just like with the other two chaotic moments.  There is a crisis of faith for you every time you face chaos.  Do you believe God will see you through this?  Will you trust Him to help you and carry you?  Do you believe He loves you and that the chaos you have now will be worked out by Christ and that although it might be hard now and very hard, He will stay with you no matter how rough it gets?  Peter had to go through some rugged and painful experiences before he became convinced that the Lord was good enough to trust within the storm and not just when the warm and gentle breezes were blowing.  God’s peace is not theoretical, it is practical.  It is of no use if you cannot have God’s peace when chaos comes.  Your chaos is your opportunity to test the Lord’s power to see you through it and as you trust Christ in the chaos, He is proven to be good and really good.  When you see Him there, in the middle of your chaos, you will learn and learn completely, that your Lord is bigger, and stronger and kinder than you ever imagined.

Getting it Done

The rise of civilization came through the murderous line of Cain.  It was his descendants who gave themselves to the arts, tool-making and warfare.  Cain was the inspiration behind the first recorded example of honor killing.  Organized ranching and farming was developed by the line of Cain as were the proliferation of cities.  The world order began with one man's determination to do away with his chief rival and create a monopoly for himself.  The line of Seth out of which came Noah and his family, was known for a solitary accomplishment.  One from their number, "walked with God".    If you assess all that has been accomplished since Adam sinned and transformed the course of human history, you must decide how to properly evaluate everything that has taken place.  Does it look more like it came from Cain or Abel?  Are your accomplishments along the lines of Seth or his older brother Cain?  What we decide is "getting things done" may rather be the unraveling of our Lord's agenda.  It is strange to think that the impoverished widow who gave her few pennies to the offering accomplished far more than Herod who led the reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem.  What we call civilization may be nothing of the sort.  Whether we consider the construction of Babel or Solomon's great palace, it seems that civilized thinking rarely generates a civilized heart.  Start with your mind on Christ and do whatever you can to keep it on Him throughout your day.  Then, whatever you do,  work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men... (Colossians 3:23 NIV)