What is the Difference Between Nature and Character and Why Does This Distinction Matter in Understanding Mental Conditions?

I can’t tell you how frequently it happens that I come in contact with Christians who conclude they’ve lost their relationship with God because they feel angry or jealous or depressed much or all of the time, or because they can’t feel His Presence or His peace. They also may find it difficult to focus long enough to study their Bible, and may experience very low levels of motivation to engage in the spiritual activities they once loved.

Their conclusion is often that they really don’t love God after all, or that He has left them. Some even fear they have committed the unpardonable sin.

And the opposite is also true. If they go through a period of time where they feel great joy and peace, and a feeling they determine to be the Presence of God when they are worshipping in church, they conclude God is with them, and if they feel feelings of love or holiness they conclude that they have a good heart with right desires put there by God. Why did they jump from feeling a sense of holiness to the conclusion that their heart is in the right place?

Are feelings of holiness actual holiness?

Do feelings indicate our spiritual state? Similarly atheists and unbelievers will often conclude the same. When a woman has a baby, and feels no emotions of bonding and love for that baby, and instead she feels complete emotional numbness and zero feelings of attachment, it’s common that women in such a condition conclude they are a monster, and make a character judgment about themselves. Regardless of her religious beliefs or lack of them.

But, are feelings (or the lack of them) character?

As Christians we really do have answers to these important and pertinent questions in God’s Word! Answers that are satisfying and give real clarity. We don’t need to be living as the atheist or humanist lives, and coming to their same conclusions. But unfortunately one of the biggest temptations people face and one of our strongest fallen desires, is to live for feelings, and to place an inordinate focus on emotions. These things have crept into Christian churches – not just the world – and gained traction in a big way, and are exerting an influence to lead people to embrace false doctrine and to measure our Christian experience by our feelings. The difference is that secular hedonists look to things like promiscuity and alcohol or drugs to feel good, and Christians often look to deeply spiritual feelings and experiences to feel happy, and as the indicators of our spiritual state. We may discard feelings that we would consider to be more superficial and rudimentary, and we may stay away from drugs, but we’re still measuring our spiritual state by feelings, and we’re still centering our faith around feelings when we expect to feel strong elation or feelings of holiness at church.

Can someone be a hedonist if they pursue feelings of holiness?

I believe so. What many do not know is that hedonism simply means that feelings become the focus of your life. They become the thing you value most or which you pursue the most. Any kind of feelings or emotions, if they are the focus and aim of one’s life, makes someone a hedonist. It’s not wrong to feel good feelings or emotions. It is wrong to make those feelings an end in and of themselves. And this is what hedonism is.

Hedonism is basically synonymous by living without principle. If a person doesn’t value principles or make them their aim, they end up living an unprincipled life, and all that’s left is feelings and inclinations and passions. Just going with what feels natural or good to you. What Paul describes in the Bible as being dead even while being alive.”

“But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives.”

1 Timothy 5:6

It is exactly this state, that Christ desires to free people of. Such a person is devoid of meaning, living nihilistically.

While it may feel wonderful to have feelings of strong holiness and love for God and others while worshipping at church, there is no actual relationship with God unless one is living by principle.

And really this is what separates Christianity from false religions. Christianity is the true religion, because it’s the one built around the true principles of love, goodness, justice, mercy, and truth in all its forms. The others are founded on false principles of selfishness, inclination, passion, possessing no real truth and no real virtue.

And the whole point to what our lives in this world are for, is that this world is a training ground where God transforms our character and teaches us to live according to His truth and for His glory. We learn how to have a faith and relationship with God that is based on principle. Because in heaven, while we will see our Father face-to-face, we will be living by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, in a state of perfect faith, obedience, and trust in God. Yes even with powerful holy emotions and feelings, we won’t be living by those feelings. We will have formed a relationship built on the principles and truths found in God’s Word.

Only such a relationship is a true relationship with God.

What the Two Adams Tell Us About Nature and Character

We ended the last chapter discussing the Fall of man, and how it was the fall that brought mental dysfunction into the world, conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.

Now let’s pick back up and look at the role of Christ in our redemption, and how the roles of the two Adams show us the difference between nature and character.

It’s interesting and important to understand, that there are distinct differences between Adam’s role and Jesus’ role. Adam is referred to in the scriptures as the first Adam, and Jesus is called the Second Adam. The first Adam and Second Adam share some similarities, but they are also diametrically different in major ways that are core to Jesus’ identity and role as divine Savior of the world.

Let’s read Romans 5:12…

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned

Romans 5:12

Notice how sin entered the world through Adam, but it wasn’t Adam’s sin that condemned each of us to the eternal death sentence. It was our own sin! The Bible is careful here to make the distinction that sin is not something someone can do to you. Just as Satan cannot force us to sin, he can only heavily tempt us, so even Adam could not directly force us to sin. Because we all sinned, we all individually came under the death penalty of the law. This happened when we committed our first sin.

Here we see what Adam’s sin did to mankind. What Adam did to us wasn’t direct; it was indirect. Adam did not enter into our minds and take hold of our agency and our will and force us to sin. Just as Adam’s sin changed the nature of the whole world so that disease and dysfunction and death were now a part of life in this world, just as Adam’s sin changed the nature of the animals so they fought with one another and ate one another, rather than existing peacefully together as they had done before the Fall, so Adam’s sin changed the nature of human beings.

Adam could not actually affect our character – no one has the power to do that – but he did change our nature. Since the seed of all mankind existed in Adam, when Adam sinned and his nature changed, the nature of his seed changed as well.

We read in chapter 1 that everything about us is physical and man does not possess an immaterial spirit. When Adam’s physicality changed in nature, his physical sperm and Eve’s physical eggs also changed in nature, and since people do not possess immaterial spirits and are 100% physical, this caused our nature to change along with Adam’s. Adam could only pass down a fallen nature now, not an unfallen one.

But nature is not exactly the same thing as character. Animals, like us, have a nature, but they do not form characters. Only human beings form characters.

Another way of saying this is that all of God’s creation is under natural law, such as the laws of physics, but only mankind is under moral law – right and wrong. The stars do not have agency and are inanimate. It is God who guides them on their courses. Animals have consciousness and personality, and a sort of agency, but they do not understand right and wrong. A dog can choose whether to bark at a squirrel or chase it. It has its favorite toy. But it can’t choose whether to believe in Christ and be saved or whether to rebel against Him and go its own way. It can’t choose whether to do a crime, or turn away from doing a crime. It can choose actions only, but it lacks the moral understanding to know which actions are morally right and which ones are morally wrong. Everyone intuitively knows this. We don’t send a dog to court and prison if he bites someone. But we do hold people accountable for their actions.

Only man in all of God’s creation understands right and wrong and can choose through Christ living in the heart to do the right, and reject the wrong, and glorify God in so doing.

And only man can become a monster. But what makes someone a monster? Is it their nature, or is it their character?

Well let’s think about this. A dog which has a nature, cannot ever become a monster. No matter how angry or dysregulated a dog gets – no matter how violent – the dog will either be rehabilitated or in extreme situations the dog will be put down to protect people. But the dog will never get sent to prison with a life sentence, even if it were to kill someone.

So it doesn’t appear to be nature that makes someone a monster.

It has to be character doesn’t it?

If having a fallen nature were synonymous with sinning, then Christ would be a sinner for having Mary’s genetic material and possessing a fallen nature in His humanity. And we know that is not true.

The beauty of Christ is that He was a man just like us with a fallen body, and yet because He was divine He had not sinned and fallen under the power of death, and thus He could resist sin and be victorious so that He could transfer His perfect life to our account and serve as the unblemished sacrifice on the cross.

“For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.

Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

Hebrews 2:17-18

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”

Hebrews 4:15

When we inherited a fallen nature, it meant that all people would inevitably sin. But nature is still not the same thing as sin. While nature can cause us to sin, sin is always active.

The Bible defines sin as the active transgression of His moral law, either through omission or commission. Omission is when we know the good and right things that we ought to do – our inherent responsibilities to God and our fellow man – and we actively choose to neglect them. Commission is when we know the wrong things we ought not to think or to do, and we actively do them anyway.

“Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.”

1 John 3:4 NIV

“Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.”

1 John 3:4 KJV

Notice the language here: “breaks”, “commits”, “transgresses”. These are all active verbs, showing agency.

Sin always happens with a moral agent conscious and present, and carrying out the sin either in thought, word, or deed. Sin is always active. You aren’t sinning simply by sitting there. Sin is not the same thing as your fallen state. People in comas who lack full consciousness aren’t sinning by merely existing. Sin is not synonymous with being a fallen person in a fallen world. Sin is when you’re sitting there, and you see a girl who has prettier hair than yours, and you start thinking jealous thoughts, covetous thoughts about wanting what she has. Or you know you should thank your mom for buying something for you at the store that you really needed, but you choose to harbor an attitude of indifference to her rather than love, because you’re busy engaged in activities you enjoy and your focus is on yourself, and you let these little acts of appreciation go undone.

Sin is always active.

At this point you might be asking, “But even if I’m just sitting there, aren’t I a sinful person, even without actions? It can’t only be when I’m actively sinning that I’m sinful.” Yes, and what you’re referring to here is character. Character is the state of your heart. Our characters before conversion are sinful – an adjective. Character is a state of being. It’s the moral value of your heart. Characters are not all at the same level of evil. Both the devil and people in this world are fallen beings, yet the devil has formed a fully evil character and committed the unpardonable sin, and most everyone alive today has not sinned to such an extent that they’ve committed the unpardonable sin and filled up the cup of God’s wrath towards them (though people groups in the Old Testament did accomplish this. More on the unpardonable sin later). A character can be very sinful, as we all are before we come to Christ, or if can be a lot less sinful, with a lot of good in it, as we are after conversion and after we’ve walked with God through the sanctification process over time.

Sin itself is an evil act, or thought, a transgression, something we commit and do. Being sinful is a state of being, a measurement of our character, which changes over time according to the choices we make in life.

But, It’s So Unfair What Adam Did!

This may seem unfair that Adam could bring about a condition of things where we would all inevitably sin. And I do believe Adam did a great wrong to us, and probably committed the worst sin that’s ever been committed when he ate from the fruit and gave us all a fallen nature as a result. But it makes sense that this would be possible if you ask the question “What are people? What is a person?” The answer is a person is a physical being that has a mind that can understand morality and spirituality and make a choice of loyalty or disloyalty to God.

We are physical beings made in the image of God.

Put another way, we are physical beings who can choose to be children of God, or monsters.

Thus in man there is always a purely physical element, that can experience natural dysfunction, and corruption just as the world and the animals do, and there’s always the element of moral agency, through which a person makes the decision to form a holy character through Christ, or to form an unholy one and follow down the devil’s path.

A person has moral agency through their physicality. It’s our brain and its perceptions and abilities that enables us to make moral choices, aided by the Holy Spirit of course. No one can choose a good thought, word, or action in the right spirit and with the right motives without the Holy Spirit’s influence on our minds, convicting us and prodding us towards God.

But a dog while a physical being, does not possess moral perception. A dog’s brain is very different from a person’s brain. The wonder of the human mind is truly amazing if you really think about it. How is it that a physical organ can understand abstract moral truths like justice, mercy, freedom? It’s really unfathomable that a physical brain can understand abstract, non-physical truths. But if you’re someone who has ever lost your moral perception through a mental condition such as psychosis, you’ll know from experience that it is the brain that processes these things, and we really do have these capabilities, and we can lose them if our brain is not healthy.

Unlike animals, due to our moral agency, people are both physical and moral beings. All people are both physical and moral. Animals are only physical, and not in any way moral.

Every man, always has this choice. Thus you can see that being 100% physical and existing in Adam, the very nature of being human is what makes it possible for us to inherit a fallen nature.

God couldn’t make people who weren’t physical and thus weren’t under natural law…people who couldn’t have fallen natures as a result of sin.

When the rest of the natural law, including the laws of physics were changed and warped by sin, it wasn’t possible that man as a physical race, wouldn’t be physically changed the same way the rest of the world was.

Such an idea is an impossibility.

The truth is that what it means to be a human being is that we are under both natural and moral law.

So this is a deeper truth than it first appears on the surface. We’re talking about the very nature of what makes us human, and how due to the inherent properties of that nature, a fallen nature is inherent with how sin affects us.

The Physical Came First, and Then the Spiritual

The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.”

1 Corinthians 15:46

In the Bible, this deep eternal truth about how people are first physical beings, and then only after they have lived for some time and made a choice to follow Christ are they spiritual, is central to Christ’s mission and in showing the difference between the two Adams. The unconverted person who uses their moral agency to reject Christ is referred to as being carnal. The carnal person is not filled by the Holy Spirit and is either an empty vessel, or if this person yields more and more to Satan they can even become possessed and filled with demons. Such a person uses their moral agency to grieve the Spirit and be controlled by the carnal nature and the temptations of demons. The Bible tells us a carnal person cannot even understand God’s Word and the deep spiritual subjects in it, for “spiritual things are spiritually discerned.”

The first Adam provided the genetic material for our bodies. He is our ancestor and the father of all humanity.

But he did not provide for us a record or a character. We each form our own character and it is formed when we make choices, and we each have our own record in heaven of wrongs done and right things done like when we respond to God’s Holy Spirit.

We did not inherit Adam’s record, nor his character. We inherited only his fallen nature.

“So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.”

The last Adam – Christ – became a life-giving spirit.

The first Adam was himself bound by and under natural law. The last Adam was divine, the author of natural law and in His divinity not bound by it in the slightest. Fully God, He took on human nature and flesh in order to free us from sin and the devil. His humanity was of course under natural law as Adam’s was.

Speaking of our bodies Paul says:

“it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”

He then goes on to say:

“The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.”

“The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven.”

1 Corinthians 15:44-47

Adam was quite literally made of dust. Jesus as God is not a created being and is omnipresent, outside of space and time, and not composed of any created material.

The two Adams are not to same. One was able to bring sin into this world only. And once he brought it into our world he could do nothing to save or help us after we each sinned. Adam had zero power to help us with our sin problem. He couldn’t forgive us of sin or live a life of obedience in our stead. Only Someone who was God, the Law-Giver could die in our stead and free us from the penalty of the law. The “Second Adam” lived a perfect life in our stead, and died as our Substitute. He possesses the divine authority to forgive sins and give us daily victory over temptation. The Second Adam holds power to affect our character, not just our nature (the first Adam effects our nature only and not character). This Second Adam is more than human. Rather than depending on someone for life – as Adam did – He is the Source of all life, a life-giving spirit through being both Creator and becoming our Savior.

For All Moral Beings the Natural Comes First, and Then the Spiritual

Here in these verses we see an eternal principle at work in the universe when it comes to beings with moral understanding. For all of us, the natural comes first. We are born, and then we must be born again in order to be spiritual.

We even see this play out with the angels in heaven. They were created physical beings with moral understanding. And then they had to choose whether they would worship God eternally or side with Satan.

How Do We Know Angels Are Moral Beings?

You might be asking “How do you know angels are moral beings?” Well the Bible actually tells us directly that Satan and his evil angel followers sinned. It doesn’t leave this fact ambiguous or hazy.

“The one who practices sin is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the very start. This is why the Son of God was revealed, to destroy the works of the devil.”

1 John 3:8

Speaking of Satan the Bible says:

“You were anointed as a guardian cherub,

for so I ordained you.

You were on the holy mount of God;

you walked among the fiery stones.

You were blameless in your ways

from the day you were created

till wickedness was found in you.”

Ezekiel 28:14-15 NIV

Wickedness, or iniquity as some translations say, is another word for sin.

And sin is something only a moral being can do. As we discussed earlier, if a dog bites someone, it’s never a sin, but if a person physically assaults someone and injures them, it’s a sin. The opposite of sin – righteous works that glorify God – is something only a moral being can do too. Dogs cannot glorify God by their choices and actions, by their submission to His will, and by their faith. While the Bible explains that all the created universe reveals and declares the glory of God (Romans 1:20, Psalm 19:1-6), and God glorifies Himself through them, only beings with moral agency can themselves glorify God. This is a profound distinction, and this is why human beings hold the weighty value that they hold. This is also the purpose of our lives – to glorify God – and no other purpose is sufficient to give a person meaning and happiness. There is happiness in no other way of life, and living for self makes a person nihilistic and miserable, even though they do not often realize this as Satan has them in a deluded state.

While created perfect and without sin, the angels hadn’t yet formed characters. They had to decide whether to form holy and loving characters or unholy, evil ones.

And here we see how Lucifer, a holy and good angel, became the monster Satan and the devil. He chose to sin in an unrepentant way. He grieved God’s Spirit away with his sin, until all that’s awaiting him now is judgment (Jude 1:6).

And this is also how people become monsters.

The Pharisees in Jesus’ day had become monsters. They were planning the murder of Christ, that is how evil they had become. Jesus told them the truth in an endeavor to cut through Satan’s lies and reach their hearts.

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

John 8:44

Unlike us, the angels have already fully formed their characters either for good or evil. The loyal angels will live forever and have been given immortality by God, and the evil angels have committed the unpardonable sin and are reserved for punishment and death.

But human beings have not committed the unpardonable sin (except for people who have already died in a state of rejecting God), and we can choose to be saved and recreated in heart.

So this is an eternal truth that beings with moral agency are first physical and then must decide what kind of character they will form.

It’s not possible for God to create a being with moral agency that is both physical and spiritual at its creation. What I mean by this is it’s not possible for God to create a being with moral agency and not give it choice. Giving it moral agency means giving it choice.

Everyone who is on God’s side is there due to their choice. God can’t create someone to be on His side from birth.

How the Cross Solved This Monumental Problem

Through the cross, God won all hearts of every moral agent in the universe to His side. Other than the devil and his angels, and wicked men who reject God, every other being will choose Him, and any newly created beings will side with God, due to the love displayed on Calvary which revealed God to be perfect love and perfect holiness.

In this way, maintaining the free will of moral beings, God wins the universe to His side and ensures sin will never occur again after this war is over.

It is in this way that Christ destroyed he who has the power of death, the devil, and brought life and immortality to light, defeating death itself.

“This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

2 Timothy 1:9-10

After Adam’s sin the law was weakened by the flesh. The law was still holy and good, but people possessing fallen natures would now all inevitably sin, and so in the flesh we were too weak to keep that perfect and holy law.

But Jesus fixed the gulf that existed between God and man and between this problem of the natural and the spiritual, where beings who were natural and were physical were choosing not to become spiritual and instead were choosing to sin and become carnal (as seen first in heaven with Lucifer, and then on earth with Adam).

Jesus bridged this gap between the natural and the spiritual, by Himself becoming a man – a physical created moral being – and living a perfect life which He could then transfer to our account, and give us a nature that through Him could choose to live in obedience. As well as paying our death penalty so He could forgive us, He also creates His own righteous character in us as we are daily sanctified and renewed in holiness. He had to live that perfect life and form that perfect character in order to be able to do that.

And this is why He is called the Second Adam, because like Adam Christ had to form a character, yes He had to in His humanity form a character of love and obedience to His Father. So He did what Adam should have done and gave the obedience Adam should have given, which would have resulted in Adam’s case in Adam fathering children with unfallen natures. But in Christ’s case He didn’t only affect the nature, He affected the character, redeeming people, revealing the love of God, and solving this whole problem of nature and character for all moral beings for all time.

This is the power of Christ and this is the way in which He is nothing like the first Adam.

“For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man, as an offering for sin. He thus condemned sin in the flesh,”

in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

Romans 8:3-4

“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—”

Hebrews 2:14

“He will swallow up death forever.”

Isaiah 25:8

“For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”

1 Corinthians 15:21-22

The cross refuted Satan’s false charges about God’s character and revealed Him to be absolute perfect love and goodness.

Thus intelligent beings the universe over were won to God’s side and a rebellion will never rise up again. Since no sin will ever occur again, the penalty for sin – death – will never happen again. It will be defeated for ever.

Since there has always been two elements – the natural and the moral – with moral beings made in God’s image, Jesus defeated death and ensured all natural beings would now all become spiritual beings.

Jesus bridged the gap that was made when Satan brought sin into the universe, and Christ ensured that every natural being would become a spiritual being.

Every natural, created being, would choose Him and be loyal to Him, and not sin and fall under the penalty of the law, which is death.

What a phenomenal thing Christ did! What amazing power and love!

But Aren’t Nature and Character the Same Thing?

Before I confuse someone I want to clarify something. I know I probably have some readers who are thinking “But the Bible speaks of being given a new nature at conversion, so aren’t nature and character the same thing?”

Actually to be honest, the Bible rarely mentions nature. Speaking of the conversion experience, the Bible mentions the heart, not the nature. ‘Heart’ is referring to the part of our mind that possesses moral agency, where we make moral choices, and in doing so form character.

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

Ezekiel 36:26

Notice that ‘nature’ is not mentioned here. There are two things that are mentioned, being given a new heart, and being filled with the Holy Spirit.

David during his repentance for the sin of adultery and murder asks for these same two things:

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

Psalm 51:10

Jeremiah uses similar language, and adds another important element.

“But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people

Jeremiah 31:33

In Jeremiah God speaks of the importance of having God’s law stored in our minds through the reading of the Word, and how it’s through the Word that the Spirit works to change our hearts.

Jesus described His Word as spirit and life, because the Holy Spirit works through the Word to bring a change to our character and give us holy desires and motives that align with God’s law of love.

Paul speaks of us being a new creation at conversion.

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!”

2 Corinthians 5:19

But clearly we don’t have brand new natures at conversion. There’s a lot that goes into the nature of man. The fact we are physical is a part of our nature. The fact we are finite is a part of our nature. The fact we have gender and there are male and female, that we reproduce and are sexual by nature is a part of our nature, an aspect of nature that angels do not have. The fact we have hands and eyes and ears and take in information through our senses is an aspect of our nature. The inherent majesty in the human physical form, modeled after God and being in His ‘image’ – such as our shoulders, and our head sitting on them, the fact we walk upright rather than on all fours like the animals, the noble, chiseled features of our face, and all that’s involved in the majestic bearing we possess, like the chosen ratios and math that went into our design – all these things are a part of our nature.

The fact that our bodies decay and age and die, is an aspect of our nature after the Fall.

If it were true that our whole nature were changed at conversion, we’d be given new bodies that did not age, new brains that worked perfectly and without error, and that doesn’t happen until we are given our glorified bodies at the resurrection.

It’s at the resurrection that an entire change to our nature – from fallen to unfallen – occurs. We will not see that happen to ourselves or anyone else until Jesus comes in the clouds of heaven.

Jesus explains that being born again means being born of the spirit. Meaning your nature – your body and most of your brain – are still the same fallen nature. You are born of the Spirit when the Spirit comes and lives inside your body and gives you a new heart.

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh is born of flesh, but spirit is born of the Spirit.

John 3:5-6

A beautiful and powerful verse in 2 Peter – one that is very essential to the faith of the Christian – is the only one I can think of that actually uses the word ‘nature’ to describe a person’s conversion and sanctification.

“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”

2 Peter 1:4

Notice here that ‘nature’ must mean specifically the part of the brain where we understand right and wrong, and make moral choices. There are many aspects of God’s divine nature which we do not participate in. We don’t become omnipotent at conversion. We don’t become all-knowing or omnipresent at conversion.

No, it’s clear that we don’t partake in God’s full nature through these promises, only His character at conversion/sanctification. We become like Him in heart.

And character isn’t something that can actually be given, it has to be formed. This is why the Bible verse says “through these precious promises” we partake of the divine nature. The promises referred to are not just the promises of conversion, and justification, but of sanctification. And sanctification is not instant, but is formed over time, because of this fact that character cannot be given, but must be formed by the choices we make over time.

Even Adam in perfect Eden, though sinless, had to form a character over time.

Now after the Fall, we must engage in the same process, although in our case we must not only form a character, but we must also perfect that character because there is sin in us. Our character must undergo a renovation, not just form solidly in place as Adam’s would have done, had he never chosen to sin.

Our choices will also form our character solidly into place too though. So we’re kind of having to do what Adam should have done for himself (our individual choices do not apply to others as his choice did), and the character renovation that becomes necessary now due to our sin.

While we can’t be given character as it must be formed, what can be given is the part of the brain involved in making character choices – this part of the nature – changed at conversion, due to our choice to repent of sin and follow Christ.

This part is referred to as the ‘heart’. Not all aspects of our nature change at conversion.

So while it’s not incorrect to say we are given a new nature at conversion – as the part of the brain involved in character is one part of our nature – I think it’s more accurate to say we are given a new heart at conversion.

You’ll see in a minute why I’m drawing this important distinction. This Bible doctrine has many practical implications with mental illnesses and conditions when it comes to things like determining whether we are sinning by feeling jealous, anger, or depression.

Character a Part of Nature, but Not the Whole Part

A new heart is not exactly synonymous with a new nature, because our nature encompasses much more than just our heart – or character. But it’s not really incorrect to say that we are given a new nature at conversion, because our character is one part of our nature.

Similarly, it’s not really incorrect as you’re assembling a bicycle to ride, to call the handlebars “my bike” as technically they are your bike, but it’s more accurate to refer to them as “handlebars”, since they are only a part of the bicycle.

That is the difference, and that is also why some people get the two confused. Because our character is a part of one nature, but it’s only one component of our nature, and there are other components. So our character is one piece of our nature, but not the whole thing.

And it’s our character specifically that God recreates at conversion; He does not recreate any other part of our nature.

What this means is that at conversion we are given a new heart, but this new heart is in a fallen body. Paul puts it this way:

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”

2 Corinthians 4:7

“That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day.”

2 Corinthians 4:16 NLT

The word here translated “dying” is “decaying” in the Greek. Paul is saying here that while our physical bodies are decaying and aging, our character is being renewed and sanctified day-by-day.

Our nature is not changed at conversion. We still have decaying mortal bodies, but our character is changed at conversion and we become a “new man” in Christ, filled with His Spirit.

So this specific part of our nature is changed.

Character and Its Relationship to Sin

As mentioned earlier, a person is not sinning by simply sitting there, or existing. But are they sinful? If they are old enough to have sinned their first sin, then yes they are sinful. And if they sit there long enough they will eventually start thinking some sinful thoughts and they will be actively sinning. We all sin many times every single day (James 3:2)

While Adam did not come into our brain and force us to sin, our fallen nature meant we would all inevitably sin.

So as soon as our brain is developed enough to understand right and wrong, to be tempted by our fallen nature and its inclinations, and to sin, and we commit our first sin, it’s at that point that we become slaves of Satan, and fall under the penalty of the law, condemned to die. It’s also at that point that we then have a sinful character. Sin is now in us – we are sinful – and we are not just inclined to sin because of our fallen inclinations.

From then on we have not just a fallen nature but also a sinful character. We’ve become evil. And only Jesus’ blood can forgive us of our violation of His perfect law and give us a new character of love. Christ is the only way back to innocence at that point.

So our fallen nature means we will sin, then once we sin we now have a sinful character. We are now sinful as a person, when before we were just oriented towards sin.

The Bible is very clear that desire is not sin.

“Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed.

Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”

James 1:14-15

Notice when the sin occurs. Not at desire.

Desire Can Come From Two Sources

Wrong desires can come from either the fallen nature, or a sinful character. I’m not exactly sure at what point a person’s brain is developed enough to think its first sinful thought, but John the Baptist rejoiced in the womb at 6 months old. If he could rejoice and delight in being in the presence of Christ and was cognizant at that age to respond to the Holy Spirit, it seems reasonable to think that a 6 month old in the womb would also be cognizant enough to commit their first sin.

I’m going to need you to follow me closely here. We’re going to cover some very closely-related but actually different concepts, and I need for you to grasp the difference between them, because this subtle difference has implications with conditions like same-sex attraction, addictive tendencies, depression, anxiety disorders, psychosis, and many other mental health conditions.

Before we sin our first sin we are inclined towards sin because we have a fallen nature. We do not at this point have a sinful character though.

In the womb before even developing mental faculties and reason, a baby may have the generic make-up to be prone in their DNA to anger outbursts, to hate and selfishness, to disrespect parents, and to many other sins, which once their brain is formed that baby will start experiencing the temptation to do.

We are all born with genetic tendencies and inclinations to sin, and the particular sins we’re inclined towards are different for each of us. While all of us will break everyone of the 10 Commandments, we may be more inclined towards certain sins than others, and may sin in greater ways in certain areas than others.

Due to having a fallen nature, we’re all inclined to sin. We’re oriented towards sin. It feels natural to us; it is in fact natural to us.

And we do not have the power or the authority to resist sinning. Adam before sin had the power to resist sin because He was filled with the Holy Spirit and lived in right relationship with God.

But after the human race fell into the hands of the devil – really we were sold to the devil by Adam – we no longer belong to God as a race, and we’re no longer filled with the Holy Spirit. Jesus had to buy us back by His death and life, in order to gain the right to give us the power to choose to live holy lives and to give us a new character.

After we sin our first sin we now have a corrupted character, not just fallen inclinations. This is different from the inclinations that tempt us and which we’re oriented towards doing. This is the result of that inclination, when in our powerlessness to resist sin apart from Christ we carry out the desires of that fallen nature. It results in us sinning and we then have a sinful character. It’s at this point that we have become evil. Evil is now not just an inclination, but a part of us. It’s at this point that we’ve incurred guilt, and we need forgiveness, and if we do not turn to Christ, there’s nothing else in all of creation that can wash away our guilt.

So our fallen nature before we sin our first sin has sinful inclinations, but once we sin we now have a corrupt character. Evil is not just outside of us, tempting us, but it’s now within us.

But while we are now fully fallen and our character is depraved, we haven’t formed a fully evil character. Put another way, fallen people after their first sin are not pure evil. If they were they couldn’t ever be converted. Someone in such a state never again responds to the Holy Spirit’s conviction.

A fully evil character happens when a person over time repeatedly rejects the Holy Spirit and sins willfully again and again and again, forming character for evil with each of these choices, until they solidify their character in evil. This is called the unpardonable sin.

There are whole people groups in the Old Testament who committed the unpardonable sin. The whole earth at the time of the flood did this. We see this fact in the verse “every intent and thought of their hearts was only evil continually”. This verse describes a state of character that was fully formed for evil, there was no goodness left in the character. They no longer thought even a single benevolent thought. They were evil through and through.

There’s also one other way to commit the unpardonable sin and that is to die while rebelling against God, but I won’t go into that here. We’ll return to it a bit later.

Our corrupt character – not just our nature – after we sin our first sin now has desires that are sinful. These desires aren’t coming merely from our fallen nature anymore, but from the character we’ve now formed for evil. The character is now corrupted, and the conscience has now become hardened, and the person wants to do selfish things from the heart now, not just the superficial feelings, or impulses of their body.

So desire for sin can happen due to either of these things.

In both cases, whether before one has committed their first sin, or afterwards, one has not sinned simply by having sinful desires.

Neither has a person sinned if Satan outwardly tempts them with something their sinful character desires.

Temptation is also not sin.

Before our first sin (which I’m sure we do not remember as we were much too young), the body and the feelings and inclinations desire sin. After our first sin when we now possess a corrupt character, our heart and will and character now desire sin.

Before our first sin, we experience temptation, from our natural tendencies and from the devil, but after our first sin we experience temptation not only from our bodies and the devil, but also from our character.

In the first scenario we are an innocent, guilt-free person experiencing temptation, in the second instance, we are a guilty person with a corrupt character who needs forgiveness and redemption who is experiencing temptation.

In neither case is temptation sin, but in the second case the person themselves is sinful, even if they don’t give in to the particular temptation that is currently tempting them.

I’m sure that we don’t remain in our state of innocence for very long, because pretty much as soon as a being with a fallen nature develops enough of their cognition in the womb to think their first selfish thought, I’m sure they think that thought almost immediately after the development has occurred. Because we have no power in that fallen state without Christ to do right and resist the wrong.

Can The Part of the Brain Where the Character Resides Malfunction With Mental Illness?

The frontal lobe – the part where we understand right and wrong and form character – can actually experience dysfunction and become confused, or it can even experience a loss of function and fail to work at all, resulting in a person either experiencing a reduction in moral perception, or it can be completely absent. We see this in psychotic conditions, when a person due to a dysregulated immune response becomes psychotic. We see this with dementia too.

A person in psychosis may lose moral perception and conclude that anything blue is right, and anything red is evil, and so they avid wearing any red shirts or speaking to people wearing red or going into any red brick buildings. And they gravitate to anything blue, and feel that they are right with God because they have avoided red and surrounded themselves with blue.

This is an example of someone who has fully lost all knowledge of right and wrong. They no longer have any knowledge of the underlying principles behind what makes something right and what makes another thing wrong. Thus right and wrong become arbitrary concepts, colors or some other arbitrary category of information that is completely unrelated to morality.

I had this happen to me. When in psychosis I believed that vitality was synonymous with good and that lethargy was synonymous with evil. The devil was a being who wanted to sap life and energy from people and from the world. God was a Creator who wanted to give us life and vitality and save us from lethargy. (Interestingly, I eventually slipped into a completely catatonic state and couldn’t move for several days. I think this is why my brain was obsessed with vitality and lethargy; it could feel I was about to lose energy and slip into a catatonic state. I remember feeling very stiff too and having adrenal pain). I lost the ability to see that the devil wants to corrupt people in heart, by leading them into sin. I lost the ability to understand that decay and lethargy were results and effects of sin, not sin itself.

Some part of me knew something was very wrong, and I feared I’d committed the unpardonable sin. My brain couldn’t connect the dots that I had lost moral perception and was in psychosis, instead my brain thought the thing to be feared was the unpardonable sin. (This was not the only delusion I had during my hospitalization. I also believed at one point that my thoughts were causing hurricanes and killing thousands of people each year, and other terrifying things, I’m just choosing to focus in on this one delusion for now).

I kept praying and asking God to give me a second chance, so I wouldn’t be lost when He came back.

In the hospital I kept seeing hallucinations of squiggly waves and lines in the air and some had vitality and seemed to buzz with a healthy amount of electricity, and others had an artificial buzz to them that reminded me of a city abuzz with neon lights and drugs and alcohol and artificial stimulants that hurt one’s health.

I thought this was God testing me to see whether I was serious about wanting a second chance or not, by showing me the different lines, and I had to choose the one that represented health and vitality, and reject the one that had a tempting artificial excitement and which would lead to lethargy in the end.

I’d lost the ability to tell that a person needs to repent of their sins and believe in and follow Christ in keeping His commandments in order to be right with God. My idea of what sin was was an arbitrary, nonsensical one not rooted in actual morality.

I kept choosing the healthy lines, but not decidedly enough, then I would compulsively choose the artificial ones, and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stop myself from choosing them. I thought it was because I was weak in character.

In reality, I was experiencing hallucinations, along with impossible-to-resist-compulsions because I had lost my mind and I’d lost control of myself. It must have looked strange to the staff to see me darting from one part of the room to the next, reaching my hands out into the air, and then praying to God compulsively, but since it was a psychiatric hospital I’m sure it wasn’t their first time seeing something like this. Other people I’ve talked to who have experienced psychosis report similar experiences.

I was no longer a moral agent. As you can see from the kinds of actions I could do – moving around the room and making arbitrary choices and coming to nonsensical conclusions – and the ones I was incapable of such as repenting of sin – I could no longer glorify God with my life. Neither could I dishonor Him either though. I was in a state of innocence.

I don’t want you to miss the significance of what it’s like to lose one’s moral agency.

Eventually, I calmed down a bit from fatigue and the new meds they put me on, and I could enjoy the food. I remember the food at the mental hospital tasted amazing. Everyone thought so, it wasn’t just me. The veggie burgers in particular were so good that even people who weren’t vegetarian would order them.

I remember how even enjoying a good meal and experiencing some physical comforts was meaningless when I’d lost my perception of right and wrong. Life felt completely nihilistic, and I couldn’t pinpoint why it felt that way, but it was a horrible state to be in.

A person can never lose their benevolent character, except by choice, but the part of the brain that houses the character, and where we make moral decisions and form character can break down due to things like black mold exposure (this was the cause of my psychosis) dysregulating the immune system. My brain was heavily inflamed and my immunity was both too strong and parts of it were too weak and I was very dysregulated which affected my thoughts, perception, and cognition.

But what can never happen, is a person can never lose the record of their character. If a person made a choice to repent of sin and follow Christ before they slipped into full psychosis or late-stage dementia, that choice is recorded in heaven. One’s salvation cannot be lost by slipping into psychosis, and neither can the character that person formed over the years be lost by slipping into psychosis, because the Bible tells us the record of our good deeds is recorded in heaven, and when Jesus comes back He will distribute the reward of those deeds so accurately, that even giving a cup of cold water to a needy person will not be lost track of or go unrewarded.

“And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.”

Matthew 10:42

Not only this, but the good character, not only the deeds, can never be lost. When God re-creates His people at the time of the resurrection, and we have new bodies and brains, the character we formed in this life will be recreated into our frontal lobe. It can never be lost.

The only thing that can cause a righteous character to be lost, is if we possess moral agency, and we willfully choose to start rebelling against God and grieving the Holy Spirit and start down the path of iniquity that leads to death. That is the only way a person can lose their good character.

So you can see here how with a moral agent, there’s more to the picture than just our physical brain or our choices. Our choices form character, and then the Holy Spirit changes our frontal lobe – the part that has the character in it – to be like Christ. And then there’s also a record kept in heaven, of our sins and our righteous deeds – the moral choices we make as moral agents – as well. Christ forgives the sins of those who truly repent and walk with Him, so they are crossed out and have “forgiven” written beside them. He also has the rights to re-create that person at the resurrection with the character they formed while they had moral agency in this world. All of this is secured and watched over by Christ by His blood and with His authority.

His divine authority ensures no one’s record or character can be lost by an accident or illness that damages or dysregulates their brain, or even by death itself. Christ will come back to raise the righteous dead and give them eternal life.

Does Same-Sex Attraction Come from the Character, or From Other More Superficial Parts of the Body and Brain?

Recently I watched a Youtube video where a Christian podcaster was making the argument that if a person has same-sex attraction that this attraction is due to a character that hasn’t been fully sanctified. What she was really saying here is that this desire was not an unfortunate element of a fallen nature, but it is an element of character.

She believed that if same-sex attracted people follow Christ and repent of their sins, that over time as God changes their character that their desires will change, and they will no longer desire the same sex in a sexual way.

Her argument at its heart – which she may not realize she’s making – is that all desires come from the character, and there is no such thing as desires that stem purely from our physicality, which can become warped and changed by simply living in a fallen world capable of decay.

Her argument is really that the decay caused by the fall doesn’t affect every aspect of our physical bodies, just things like aging, but not our brain and neurochemistry, which affect our perception, and feelings of desire.

I don’t believe that the Bible teaches that the fall only causes decay and malfunction to certain parts of our body, and not all parts. I believe the Bible teaches that all parts of our body can now malfunction.

Why would it be possible for our heart to break-down and we have a heart attack, but it wouldn’t be possible for our feelings to malfunction?

If malfunction is possible in this world, then it’s possible for our feelings to malfunction also.

It is true that there are desires that are purely character desires. For instance, an atheist or unbeliever has hate in their heart towards God and His truth. They do not want to come into the light, the Bible says. They have desires to run from God, and rage if they are too long in the presence of a preacher who has love for God and speaks of His love with adoration.

This is true. If this atheist becomes converted, God gives him a new character, and he now desires what he once hated. His desires do a 180 degree turn and he enjoys speaking with the preacher who loves God and they fellowship together and delve deeply into the study of God’s character together.

But does this mean that all our desires are based in the character, and are changed by the process of conversion and sanctification?

I don’t believe the Bible teaches this.

Who as a converted Christian hasn’t experienced weird or dysregulated feelings? Who hasn’t had nights where we had a strange sense come over us that we didn’t choose or cause, that maybe was warped or wrong in some way and we knew it wasn’t a healthy feeling or desire that God created within us, we knew there was something “off” about it?

The truth is, feelings come from nerves and neurochemicals and hormones. While they interact with the part of the brain that is involved in logic, understanding truth, and forming character, feelings are by nature very rudimentary things.

Look at animals for instance. Though they do not have a character, animals have sexual feelings. Studies are showing that mercury in the water is giving ibises gay desires and behavior. Males are mating and nesting with other males rather than females.

Don’t human beings also have a rudimentary part of our nature, basic-level drives and inclinations that are not part of the higher functioning of the mind? But let’s say a person is exposed to mercury and develops the same base-level desires as the ibises to have a sexual relationship with a person of the same sex. A person can choose not to follow these basic desires. A person can see that it would be sinful and wrong to do so, and they can choose to glorify God by abstaining from such a relationship, going against their biological urges.

This is the difference between people and animals. Like them we have basic drives and feelings and biochemistry; unlike them we have the higher parts of the brain that can understand, obey, and worship God.

Let’s look more into the difference between desire and sin.

It is only when desire has conceived that sin has occurred. The Bible is using the metaphor of pregnancy here. The sperm and the egg must meet for a conception to take place. The sperm alone doesn’t cause in a pregnancy. An egg alone doesn’t result in a pregnancy. But when the two meet a pregnancy has occurred. You’ve probably heard the expression “I’m pregnant with an idea.” It’s the same concept here. That of something taking root in the heart of the person. The person agrees with and lets in this idea or this cherished thought of doubt or hate or selfishness. They let it take root in their heart. Instead of just having a desire for something, or an inclination towards something, they actively lust after it and pine after it, allow their thoughts to dwell on it, let their minds become “pregnant” with it, and cherish an unholy attitude of rebellion or doubt against God or another person.

Desire gives birth to sin. This means that if you have a sinful character that character will inevitably cause you to keep sinning, because it has sinful desires, and it will act on those sinful desires because it is itself sinful and corrupt. The only way to stop sinning is to be converted and have your heart renewed and sanctified each and everyday. The selfish character must be changed or you will keep sinning.

And if you’ve been given a new ‘heart’ and have begun to form a new character, you will not continue to sin.

No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.

1 John 3:9

Here John uses the metaphor of a seed, taking root, and springing up first into a tender young plant, and then into a stronger one, until it finally grows into a strong and stately tree.

This is what God does in the heart when we have been set free from the laws that make in impossible for us to do righteousness – the law of sin and death – which requires us to perish and pay the penalty for our sins, and which can give no power to do righteous acts, and through Christ sin now no longer has dominion over us. His Spirit is implanted in us like a seed, a new heart is given, and we can do the righteous acts we could never generate on our own.

The new desires of the renewed heart produce new attitudes, new motives, and express themselves in righteous actions.

“…through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.”

Romans 8:2

“Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death [notice here another reference to being planted like a seed], we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:

Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.

For he that is dead is freed from sin. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.

Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.

For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.”

Romans 6:4-7, 11-14

Desire is not sin, but the desires of a fallen heart will produce sin, and the desires of a renewed heart will produce righteous actions.

Thus the answer to our sins is to be set free from the inability to do righteous actions, which Christ won for us by His death and righteous life. We can now through repentance die to the penalty of the law – the penalty that was on our account – and rise a new person who is not under the death penalty, and who has a new heart that can do righteous actions and has the power to do so through Christ.

So as we are sanctified each day, by surrendering selfish desires and not letting them take root, not allowing yourself to become pregnant with them and entertain them, our character is changed. And we sin less and less because our character is becoming more and more holy.

So character is behind the whole process.

The book of James has some powerful key scriptures that illustrate this truth.

“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?

You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God.

When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”

James 4:1-3

Once again, it’s the desires of the sinful character that produce active sins.

Jesus gives several key statements that really make this truth plain.

“No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.

Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers.

A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”

Luke 6:43-45

“There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”

And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable.

And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him,

since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery,

coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.”

Mark 7:15-23

Where “Within” Is

Notice how Jesus specifies where “within” is. “Within” is the heart or character of the person. The immoral desires of the character produce active sins.

The character is formed when we, knowing right from wrong, use our will to choose to do right. To surrender immoral attitudes to Him rather than cherish them. To give them up.

If we do choose to cherish jealous or evil attitudes in our heart, that choice grieves God’s Spirit and hardens our hearts, making our characters more selfish and evil.

Some Things That are Not the Heart

There are a lot of things that are not the ‘heart.’ If you sick with a strep infection that goes to your brain, and this causes you to have strong emotions of anger and rage, this is not your heart.

If you’re bitten by a tick and develop Lyme disease and it tanks your mood and you become severely depressed, this depression is not your heart.

If you have sexual urges that are biologically based this doesn’t make you a fornicator for having a sexual body. This also is not the heart.

There are many different feelings and experiences that are not the heart or the character.

The character, as mentioned earlier, is in the frontal lobe; it’s the higher parts of the brain that make moral choices. It’s not the involuntary processes and unconscious processes of our brain and body, what might be called the lower or animal feelings and inclinations. If your leg involuntarily twitches that wasn’t a conscious jerk you chose with your will.

If you have the urgency to go to the bathroom, this wasn’t a conscious choice of your will.

If you feel very angry all of a sudden from histamine dumping in your brain, this also wasn’t an act of the will.

If you feel depressed because you have histamine toxicity and it’s chronic, your will and character also aren’t involved in that.

Notice that it is only the desires of the character that can corrupt a person, not the feelings of the person or their emotions.

Character desires are desires that stem from the moral state of a person’s heart. These are either righteous or sinful desires, they aren’t neutral like the lower urges, such as having a sex drive is neutral. If a person has a corrupt character they will have sinful, selfish desires. It’s these desires that are in the heart that defile a person, not the feelings or inclinations of the lower, animal nature of a person.

And even desires are not sin unless the person “conceives” them, choosing to actively fantasize about immoral things, or to do behaviors that are immoral.

However, until we have perfect characters, the desires of our flawed and selfish characters will result in us doing sins. We can begin to change character and put to death these desires through Christ, and so we will have less and less of them as we engage in the sanctification process and are transformed in character.

What Implications Do These Important Concepts Have With Mental Conditions?

What implications does this have with mental conditions? Well, it means we can have mental symptoms, mental malfunction and dysfunction, even while having new characters in Christ.

Mental symptoms can affect cognition as in the case of psychosis, where the person loses the ability to think logically and believes nonsensical things.

And they can affect emotions, as is seen in the case of emotional dysregulation which is often a very core component of mental illness.

Let’s go back to the original scenarios at the start of the chapter, and answer some of those questions.

Is a person a jealous person if they feel a feeling of jealousy? Is a mother a moral monster if she feels no feelings of love for her newborn baby, just numbness?

Are feelings of jealousy jealousy? Are feelings of hate hate?

The answer is no, a person is not a jealous person if they feel feelings of jealousy. They are a jealous person if they choose to think jealous thoughts and have a jealous attitude towards others. Usually feelings will accompany these chosen thoughts and attitudes, but the feelings are not what makes the person jealous.

Remember the definition of sin is an action, thought, or attitude, not a feeling.

Feelings will accompany chosen attitudes and thoughts in a healthy brain.

But in a mentally unwell brain or even for something as simple as insomnia or stress, feelings can be dysregulated and not match up with our chosen attitudes and thoughts. Or feelings can be entirely absent.

Someone has not sinned by having a feeling sweep over them, or even one that persistently stays with them. In major depressive disorder, a person may have a feeling of hate that accompanies them for years or months, caused by their inflammatory rate. They have sinned if they are harboring an attitude or thought of jealousy or hate, not if they have a feeling of hate.

When it comes to emotional dysregulation, I’ve personally experienced the whole spectrum. I was depressed pretty much from day one as a kid, then at age 12 I developed crushing unrelenting depression that felt as sad as if my whole family had died that persisted for 8 years, along with feelings of loneliness that weren’t attached to any real situation. After that at age 20 I developed total and complete emotional numbness where I couldn’t even cry when my father passed away. I felt nothing, no sadness, or joy. I could still feel anxiety and that was it.

I’ve also experienced feelings of guilt when I hadn’t done anything wrong, feelings of strong shame caused by my inflamed physical state when I hadn’t done anything shameful. These are feelings that do usually accompany shameful and wrong actions, and they felt exactly the same as the ones I’d felt when I did actual wrong, only they were much stronger.

Than interestingly, I had an experience a couple years ago when I took a collagen supplement where I felt profound righteous indignation for minor annoyances. My mom making what I perceived to be too much noise in the kitchen, evoked a emotional response from me that felt like Moses throwing down the Ten Commandments in deep, holy anger.

I hadn’t known that righteous indignation could come about from biochemical imbalances – in this case the histamine raise that occurred from the collagen. I’m already histamine dominant and it was too much histamine for my brain.

I was used to more superficial feelings of rage and frustration and agitation coming from histamine toxicity as I had experienced this before, but I didn’t know righteous indignation, which felt so holy and serious – just as it would feel if you found out a church elder had murdered someone or did something else profoundly wrong – could be evoked by biochemical imbalance. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

All of our feelings are at their root physical. And that means that anything that disrupts a person’s physicality and biochemistry could potentially stir up and dysregulate these feelings and emotions.

Don’t Reason Backwards

Rape victims sadly often reason backwards. They feel profound shame, and conclude that they must be shameful in their person. They must be guilty somehow of their rape, because they feel such strong feelings of shame and guilt.

But shame and guilt are common feelings that can be stirred up when a person has been assaulted and there’s lots of inflammation from the assault. The body goes into fight-or-flight and shoots out inflammation and this dysregulates the emotions and feelings.

What does God’s Word say? It says a rape victim is as innocent as a murder victim. Fully innocent. The rapist alone is guilty, the Bible tells us. So a rape victim who feels extreme guilt and shame can know she is actually pure and innocent. The rapist is the guilty one. He is the one who has real shame and real guilt according to God’s record book in heaven. and God has very real wrath for what he did to the victim.

I’ve often wondered if school shooters, slipping into strong feelings of anger due to inflammation from mental illness reasoned backwards and concluded that if they feel hate for everyone that they must be a hateful person and attributed it to their character and who they were as a person, and reasoning backwards that they were a hater, felt hopeless and destined to hate, and then began making plans to act out that hatred.

It can be very dangerous to reason backwards and to use feelings as one’s gauge for their character.

It’s important we reason forwards. I feel a feeling of hate, doesn’t mean I’m a hater. I can choose to love and even if feelings of hate persist, they are just biochemical things at that point. I know God will give me a character that can love so any feelings of hate left over after I’m actively choosing to love are just that, feelings, nothing more.

This is the right way to look at things.

Someone else in my family took collagen too and had the same experience. We have very similar genetics and it caused the same response in us.

A person can experience a symptom called anhedonia where they lose all feelings of love and attachment, all positive feelings and also all negative feelings and they are in a state of total numbness. I had this symptom and when my dad passed away I didn’t even cry. I had severe anhedonia.

Going back to the example in the beginning of this chapter about the woman who did not feel any love or attachment to her newborn baby. This can happen with post-partum depression. It’s also a common symptom of post-partum psychosis. It’s also a common symptom of trauma.

As explained earlier people are physical beings and can have malfunction the same way the animals do, and we are also moral beings. Dysregulated or absent emotions can occur purely as a result of physical problems, and altered physical biochemistry and can have nothing to do with character.

You’re probably asking at this point “But don’t character and emotions share a relationship?” For instance, it’s very common for someone who doesn’t want to repent to have lack of emotions towards God, or even hostile emotions towards him. The atheist may delight in sinful things like self-worship and mocking God, and aren’t emotions involved when we delight in something?

The answer I believe is that yes in a healthy brain emotions flow from and mirror chosen attitudes and the character of the person.

Let’s first look at how feelings and emotions work in a healthy body, according to the Bible, and then we will explore how they can become dysregulated as happens in mental illnesses and conditions.

How Our Emotions Were Created to Work

You will see many texts in the scriptures that say to worship God because He is good, because of his benevolent acts in history culminating on the cross. (1 Chronicles 16:34, Psalm 117:1-2). First the mind grasps the significance and love of the cross, then the emotions well up within the person, and then they give shouts of praise. This is the order God created our mind to work in. He didn’t create us to feel appreciation without understanding and blindly offer praise and then only later intellectually grasp the significance of God’s love. This would be out of order.

You will see this order in Jesus Himself and how His emotions work.

“Then God saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.”

Genesis 6:5-6

Notice how God grasps logically what is happening and then His emotions respond to the tragic truth He is seeing before Him. His emotions respond to truths and reality in the world around Him. His emotions are not something He seeks to stir up apart from the external world and the truth about the situations He is seeing there. He doesn’t lead with emotion and work Himself up into an emotional state, with logic and truth following second.

Responding to the rebellion of His people, and knowing if they do not repent that they will be lost forever, God responds with emotional language in the following verse. You can hear the pathos in the words.

“O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!”

Deuteronomy 32:29

In a similar verse addressing a similar situation God cries these words:

“How can I give thee up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboam (people groups God had to destroy due to their wickedness)? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.”

Hosea 11:8

Jesus is an emotional God, but not in a way that is arbitrary and disconnected from truth and reality. Indeed emotions get their value from truth. There is no value in feeling joy if no significant thing has occurred, but if say a friend of yours has accepted Christ as their Savior and turned from a life of sin the joy is significant and has meaning because of the event and truth that caused the joy.

Jesus tells us there is joy and rejoicing in heaven over a sinner who repents. (Luke 15:7, Luke 15:10)

Emotions do not have value apart from truth and the world around us. They weren’t created to be disconnected things that we work up in order to get an emotional high. In fact it’s Satan who stirs up emotions devoid of reason and works our emotions according to ungodly and evil principles.

“They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and lead astray by various passions”

2 Timothy 3:6

We are not to live for emotional pleasure (or any other kind of pleasure), or use emotions against their correct design.

“She who lives for pleasure is dead even while she is still alive.”

1 Timothy 5:6

There are many passages in the scriptures about pleasure being used for pleasure’s sake rather than being attached to truth that is meaningful and used in its proper sphere and its intended purpose

“For at one time we too were foolish, disobedient, mislead, and enslaved to all sorts of desires and pleasures, living in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.”

Titus 3:3.

You will notice in the scriptures that God describes sinful attitudes as having emotions connected with them.

This aligns with the way attitudes and emotions work according to the verses we read above. We first grasp what’s happening outwardly with the logical part of our mind, and then our emotions respond to that reality and we experience feelings that go with that knowledge.

If we choose to harbor attitudes of jealousy, hatred, and anger, there are emptions that go with those attitudes.

If we choose to harbor attitudes of profound appreciation and gratefulness to God for the gift of His Son and His daily companionship and love, there will be holy emotions that follow those right attitudes.

This is how something like “fits of rage” can be described as one of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5:20.

It’s not the emotion of rage that is the sin. It’s the chosen attitude of unforgiveness, jealousy, or hatred, which results in the fit of rage.

I repeat, it is not the emotion that is the sin, but the chosen attitude.

So if one feels a holy emotion, does this mean the person is holy?

No. Emotions cannot be used to gauge the state of one’s heart. That is not their purpose. While in a healthy person feelings of holiness will often accompany holy choices and actions, it’s those choices and actions that make you holy, not the feelings.

If you’re worshipping in church and all of a sudden emotions of love for others sweep over you, this is not indication you have actually become more loving.

What is it that makes a person more loving? It’s when we surrender jealousy and selfish ambition to God. It’s when we stop fighting His conviction to stop being selfish and we agree to live for the good of others and not just ourselves. Such a surrender will not just manifest as a feeling in church. It will manifest in the life of the person. You will see the person join a Christian ministry and give of their time, energy, and resources to others. You will see them abandon selfish projects and dreams to spread the gospel instead.

There will be a complete change in the life from a heart that is truly surrendered to Christ. There will not be just feelings of holiness and only tiny changes or no changes in the life; there will be a transformation and a daily process of sanctification.

The longer you know the person, the more like Jesus they will be. Or if this person is you, the longer you walk with God the more like Him you will be and there will be obvious, measurable growth from year to year.

If you are having feelings of holiness but no actual change in heart and in life, then you aren’t holy no matter how holy you feel while worshipping.

Facial Expressions

What about our facial reactions, our expressions? Don’t these reveal the chosen attitude of the heart? If someone laughs when they hear someone they know has died, doesn’t this indicate they are harboring hatred in their heart?

The Bible does say the expressions of the face can reflect the character and the chosen attitudes. The Bible tells us the wicked have proud looks on their faces.

“The look on their faces testifies against them;

they parade their sin like Sodom;

they do not hide it.

Woe to them!

They have brought disaster upon themselves.”

Isaiah 3:9

The Bible also tells us the righteous have holy looks of confidence and faith in God on their faces, knowing they are forgiven of their sins. The fact their shame and guilt has been washed away is reflected in their faces.

“Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.”

Psalm 34:5

The Bible speaks of haughty looks in those who are proud.

‘You save the humble but bring low those whose eyes are haughty.”

Psalm 18:27

Indeed the Bible even says God hates haughty, proud eyes, grouping this expression of the face in with sinful things like a lying tongue and hands that shed innocent blood.

“There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him:

haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood,

a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil,

a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.”

Proverbs 6:16-19

But while the face does to an extent reflect the character and responds to the evil in the heart, the Bible is also clear that outward expressions are not a way to gauge character. Only God who reads the heart can distinguish truly proud eyes, from someone who may appear proud due to say high dopamine in the brain or some other condition or situation, but not have pride in the heart. So while our character does influence our facial expression, it does so imperfectly and there are many other things that influence our expression also. Someone can’t look at you and know your character – the face is not a measuring tool of the soul.

Also, it’s not righteous judgment to judge someone as proud who is psychotic and doesn’t understand the difference between pride and humility. Pride is a choice to harbor an attitude of self-righteousness and violence against God or others. It’s not pride if it’s not chosen. A facial expression that comes over someone due to dopamine surging too high in their brain – even if it looks exactly like a proud sneer – is not actually a proud sneer unless they know the difference between pride and humility and make the conscious choice to be proud. It’s not sin for them unless they can tell the difference, and it’s wrong to charge a psychotic person with the sin of pride when they are out of their mind. Perhaps if you know them better and have evaluated them, or they have had a thorough evaluation with a psychiatrist, one could narrow down whether that individual is capable of understanding the difference between pride and humility, and that if it’s determined they are, then a sneer is likely to be chosen pride in their case. But it’s wrong to jump to that conclusion with a psychotic person, based on outward facial expressions and demeanor alone.

In court rooms it is unfortunately all too common for the jury to give the guilty sentence to people based on superficial things like the way the person acted in the court room, whether they showed the appropriate facial expressions, etc. Jesus says to judge with righteous judgment. While the Bible is clear that our feelings and our facial expressions do reflect the state of our heart to an extent, it also tells us these things are not fool-proof and they are incomplete. The Bible is clear that the thoughts of the heart don’t show up perfectly on the expression and that only God can know the thoughts of the heart. God did create our expression and our demeanor and mannerisms to convey the Godly love that exists in our heart, but He made sure that they do this incompletely and imperfectly, so that the thoughts of the mind cannot be fully discerned on the face. This is an issue of individuality and privacy. Only God is allowed to know the inner thoughts and read them with perfect accuracy.

And the Bible says fruit is the way we are to measure and judge others, but that even this is imperfect so we shouldn’t claim to know the heart. When it comes to measuring and judging ourselves, once again facial expression and reactions, do respond to character but not in a perfect way and thus we can’t use them to fully know our heart.

But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.

1 Samuel 16:7

Only God can see what’s in our hearts. To claim that we can gauge what is in someone’s heart by looking at them, or even speaking with them, is to commit 2 big sins:

It means we’re giving ourselves divine traits. We think we have perfect judgment like God does. We aren’t leaving room for God to be the Judge of the heart, acknowledging even with our best judgment we will miss things that only God knows and sees. We’re usurping His position.

“I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.”

Jeremiah 17:10

When it comes to evaluating others, if we think we can know the state of their heart by looking at their face or reactions

It means we don’t respect or believe in right to personal privacy. We are actually charging God with being a God who doesn’t give people personal privacy in their thoughts and airs out all their inner thoughts via their face. This would be a horrible dystopia if it were true. Privacy is a fundamental right. The privacy of our own thoughts is the most important privacy of all. The reason we can’t see inside someone’s mind or judge their thoughts and character with perfect accuracy is because everyone has a right to privacy in God’s government. They have a right to answer to God alone for their secret thoughts and secret sins, and if they are thinking good things and holding good desires, it is God in the secret part of their mind that inspires them and communes with them. No other person can be involved in this communion. Just God and the individual.

How does the Bible say to gauge whether a person is a believer and walking with Christ?

“Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

Matthew 7:16

“Even a young man is known by his actions–whether his conduct is pure and upright.”

Proverbs 20:11

Only God can see into the heart. The rest of us can see only your actions. Actions aren’t a perfect gauge of character, but they are the best we have access to, until the judgment when all the secret things of the heart will be revealed. The things only God knows will be revealed on that day and this is why we are to judge nothing before the time, until those things are revealed.

“Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.”

1 Corinthians 4:5

It is possible for someone to seem to have fruit, to seem to be walking with God, and to be harboring a spirit of rejecting Him in their heart, a spirit of doubt and accusation against God. So even actions aren’t a perfect way to gauge character or the status of whether someone is walking with God or rejecting Him.

There is no way for a person to know for sure who is walking with God and who isn’t. Only God knows with absolute certainty. At the same time, we can know in a general sense how to live a Christian life and be right with God. We know what kinds of fruit (actions) come from being a converted believer.

Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.

1 John 3:7-8

When people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning.

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,

idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions

and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.

Galatians 5:19-21

What Do We Use Then?

So what are we to use to gauge character then, when it comes to ourselves?

The answer according to the Bible is our motives and attitudes and desires gauge character. As explained above, emotions naturally follow motives and desires, and our character has desires which we then act out in the form of thoughts and actions. Once again we’re looking at moral desires – whether we desire righteous things or selfish, unrighteous ones – we’re not looking at our lower-level feelings that aren’t based in morality such one’s sex drive or inflammation from their autoimmune condition giving them feelings of anger. The answer to an imperfect character that desires wrong things, is to develop a new character through Christ. A converted person rejoices in the truth. An unconverted person rejoices and delights in wickedness. Their fallen character results in them having evil desires and motives, and their emotions respond to and flow out of these evil desires, reflecting them.

But while this is true, this doesn’t mean we can use emotions as a way to gauge what kind of character we possess and our standing with God. Rather it’s the motives and desires that the emotions are flowing from that reveal our character and that we are to use to gauge the state of our heart.

What makes something right is when the motive is giving, self-sacrificial love, this is the desire, and when the actions or thoughts focus on or carry out the good desire. Not stealing and respecting other people’s property is love, for instance. Being faithful to one’s spouse is love. Desiring to cheat on one’s spouse would be an unloving or an evil desire. Coveting someone’s things is an unloving or evil desire.

“As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects the man.”

Proverbs 27:19

As always what defines right is the 10 commandments. Taking a deeper look at the 10 Commandments reveals they aren’t just actions, but principles. In other words there is a motive actuating each of them. If your dog grabs a stranger’s bag and runs off with it, we don’t say the dog is stealing. Because we know the dog does not possess moral agency and therefore there is no immoral motive involved when a dog takes something that belongs to someone. But if a person does the same thing it’s stealing. Motive is present in all 10. Lying isn’t lying without a motive to deceive. Simply being incorrect about a fact and unknowingly giving someone false information isn’t lying. Lying is when the intent to deceive for personal gain at the expense of others is present in one’s actions and will. Same thing with all the other 10. If a person learning a new language intends to use a swear word to curse at their parents, but uses the wrong word and ends up saying something loving instead, this is still a violation of the 5th commandment. They intended to curse at their parents so they are disrespecting their parents. Likewise if someone intends to say something kind to their parent as they are learning a new language and they say a swear word by accident, this isn’t a violation of the 5th Commandment as the swearing was an accident. One could go on for some time with such examples about how motive is inherent within the concept of sin and of righteousness.

When we desire to fullfill these commandments and the inherent principles within them actuate us, then the desires and thoughts and motives that go in the direction or way of the commandments are holy and right desires and reveal a good character. If our thoughts and desires and motives (and actions) go in the way of breaking the commandments, then we are having sinful desires and motives and if fostered and not surrendered to God, these will make for a fallen, unconverted character.

It is possible to do the right thing with the wrong motives or to do the wrong thing innocently because of lack of knowledge. It isn’t just the thing done, but the motive behind it that makes an action sin for a person. In earlier chapters of this book we learned how someone in complete psychosis who cannot tell right from wrong is not guilty if they commit crimes while in psychosis, and how if someone has good motives but lacks Bible knowledge about a subject – say they live in a polygamous society that has had polygamy for hundreds of years, and is isolated from the rest of the world and has never had access to the Bible – then they may be innocent of breaking the 7th Commandment due to lack of knowledge.

“To him who knows to do right and does it not to him it is sin.”

James 4:17

Inclinations and Tendencies

Just to reiterate and make this very clear, when I say ‘desires’ I do not mean physical inclinations, like having a physical inclination to cheat on one’s spouse, or a physical desire to engage in a homosexual encounter or a physical desire to eat unhealthy food, or a physical desire to be famous and worship self and feel a thrill from it. Our bodies can have all kinds of faulty physical desires that can be related to things like neurotoxins and histamine and other biochemical imbalances.

Rather I’m speaking of the kinds of desires which comes from the character and are either immoral or moral. Not the basic, rudimentary drives we all have within us and which have nothing to do with the character, and which are subject to dysfunction, such as someone having same-sex attraction from mercury toxicity disrupting their hormones and their mental perception.

“Do not envy the wicked, do not desire their company; for their hearts devise violence, and their lips declare trouble.”

Proverbs 24:2

This text above shows motive. The wicked devise violence. They plan out how to harm others. Their goal is destruction and violence of that person, often due to envy or hatred.

Read the following text and note how motive is written into this entire text, in fact it’s spelled out clearly. You can see how what makes something an evil act and what makes someone a wicked, unrepentant person is when the intent and the motive is to harm another person or God in order to selfishly promote oneself above others and at their expense.

Of course even converted people will have some immoral and selfish motives. They will sometimes sin also. But the whole of their motives will be more like Christ than like Satan, and if unconverted it’s actually the other way around. If the Christian has selfish motives, they will surrender them to God, not foster and encourage or cherish them. They will hate the selfishness that still exists in their character and desire strongly for God to remove it from their character and mold them into His humble and pure character. They will make effort on their knees in prayer to gain the victory over self. They won’t celebrate the sin that still exists in their character or encourage it. The unconverted do the opposite.

“If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause:

Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit:

We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil:

cast lots with us; we will all share the loot”—

my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths;”

Proverbs 1:11-15

In the above verse the wicked covet the material possessions of others and so they kill them and take their goods.

Notice in this verse how the wicked kill and steal from innocent people “without cause”. This doesn’t mean they don’t have a reason or a motive. Their motive is selfishness, and they may have a number of reasons and past history factoring into why they gave into the temptation to do this. But what they are doing is still without cause, because by this the Bible means it’s without just cause. There is no just reason for them to be killing and stealing. A just reason would be something like a group of men capturing Lot and Abraham going and fighting and killing some of those men in order to rescue Lot. Or stealing back from someone something they stole from you (which really isn’t stealing at all; it’s just protecting your property). But when someone does something for an unjust reason such as stealing in order to get that person’s goods, the Bible calls this stealing without cause, meaning without just cause.

“For among My people are wicked men; they watch like fowlers lying in wait; they set a trap to catch men.”

Jeremiah 5:26

Jeremiah 5:26 is another verse depicting that to be evil one must have evil motives and showing clear evil intent.

Notice also the clear motive shown by the sacrifice of Christ.

“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:

Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:

And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

Philippians 2:1-8

“The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again.

No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

John 10:17-18

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.”

John 10:11

The person who biochemically desires a homosexual encounter hasn’t sinned. It only becomes sin if that person allows themselves to pine after and engage in fantasy over that desire, or if they actually go out and have a gay encounter with someone. A physical desire can be just a physical desire; it’s not sin. But if we let that physical desire become a cherished desire of the mind and heart and not just a feeling, then it’s a sin.

So when judging our heart to see if we’re right with God we’re not going to search our emotions or biochemistry to see if our body is oriented toward fornication or anger or any other sin. What we’re searching for is whether we are harboring a desire for fornication or sin that makes it an idol in the heart. Our body may desire wrong things. But our mind may be surrendered to God at the same time. But if our mind is angry at God for not letting us engage in fornication, if our mind is looking for a way to break this commandment and get away with it, if we are pining after it, then we’ve made it an idol, even if we aren’t actually engaging in it.

“For the word of God is alive and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

Hebrews 4:12

“Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”

v. 13

How do we determine whether our heart is right with God? By the Word, not by human reasoning. By searching our motives and intents of the hearts through lining our motives up with God’s Word and measuring them.

However, we cannot do this in our own power. Notice how the verse says the Word is alive and active. What it means by this is that the Spirit works through the Word both to teach us from God’s Word and to reveal the state of our hearts. Only the Spirit can open our understanding and make the Word clear to us. Only God truly knows our hearts. We don’t even know ourselves with 100% accuracy even when lining ourselves up with His Word, but He knows us with perfect knowledge.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

Jeremiah 17:9

Here we see a perplexing problem. Since the heart is deceptive, how can we search our own heart to accurately assess the state of our heart and our motives, if we’re so deceitful that we won’t be completely honest, even when we’re trying to be?

The answer is given in the text that follows:

“I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.”

verse 10

Praise the Lord, God knows our heart through and through; He can both assess and cure our sinful condition.

If we seek to engage in the process of searching our heart and measuring our motives and intents of the heart in our own mental power, we won’t be successful. We need God to try the heart, and to reveal the state of our heart to us through His Spirit working together with the Word (The Bible). This is the only way we can come to an accurate knowledge of the state of our heart. We can’t combine humanism with the Bible and seek to identify and cure our condition without Christ, using our own mental prowess and our will power. We must realize our dependency on God and ask Him to send His Spirit to teach us and reveal the true state of our heart. To see the true state of our heart will require humility. Those who are too proud will miss defects in their characters and evil desires in their hearts because they are too proud to be open to seeing the truth.

It’s necessary to magnify Christ and look to Him as the solution. It won’t be any benefit to us to get weighed down by the sins we see and there’s no reason for this because Jesus is the remedy. The purpose of revealing the evil in our hearts is for a redemptive purpose, to bring us to conversion, and also God periodically does this process with us through life as part of the sanctification process. He shows us our sins and our defects of character for the purpose of us working with Him on these specific weak points to overcome them. The goal is always redemptive, the end result is always victory. Through Christ we can overcome every one of our weak points and character defects.

“All a person’s ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the LORD.”

Proverbs 16:2

What Are Emotions Good for Then?

Now that we’ve established that emotions are not a safe way to gauge character, I think it’s important that we ask the question “Well what are emotions good for then? What is their purpose?.” And also the accompanying question “What are emotions exactly?” If living by principle is what ultimately matters – living with the right motives of love and goodwill for God and man – and this choice is made by the will and the intellect, then why have emotions at all? Why would God create them?

Let’s look at what emotions are. As explained in the verses above where we looked at God’s mind and attitude and how He first intellectually grasps a subject or chain of events, and then responds emotionally, we can see the purpose of emotions.

Emotions allow us to feel in our humanity the deeply significant moral truths in the world around us.

Emotions aren’t valuable in and of themselves. It is truth that is valuable.

To illustrate this point you can ask any parent which scenario they would rather have:

In the first scenario they develop crushing depression and feel terribly sad every day of their life, but their kids are alive and well.

In the second scenario they are somehow given a substance that makes them feel deeply significant peace and joy all of the time and life feels like a profoundly wonderful and significant experience, but their child dies in a tragic car accident and they never see them again.

Parents will always choose the scenario where they feel crushing sadness but their kid is alive and well. They won’t choose the scenario where their emotions feel happy and healthy but their kid is dead and they never see them again.

Why? I think the answer is obvious. Because they want life for their kid. They want good things for the child they love so much. And they value the relationship they have with their kid. The value of the relationship and the well-being of the child is what matters.

This is true of all valuable things. It’s the thing itself that matters. People are made in the image of God, thus what happens to them and how we treat them matters because they are profoundly valuable. If we happen to have anhedonia and feel nothing for the people closest to us, this lack of feelings hasn’t negated their value, neither has it negated our responsibility to love them with actions of kindness.

But people aren’t robots or computers. A computer will just generate information and come to accurate conclusions. A computer will give us the facts. A computer can just as easily tell you it’s 70 degrees outside as it can tally up that 11 million victims died in the Holocaust. Not only does a computer not really grasp the weight of that tragic reality mentally, but it also doesn’t emotionally respond.

It makes sense for people to emotionally respond to great good or to great evil and tragedy. And that’s what emotions are – they are these weighty and important truths reacting upon a human being, a person with heart and soul.

When people do not react with emotion to important things, it definitely feels off both to them and to the people around them. Not only does it feel off, but it creates very real problems. When I had severe anhedonia and could feel no emotion except anxiety, when people I knew experienced a personal tragedy, I still cared and knew how significant it was for them, I just didn’t have an emotional reaction. And I found it much harder to act in a human way with them. I had to put expressions of concern on my face, because they didn’t just naturally form. My arm movements were kind of mechanical. I had to do a lot of acting and even then it was difficult to conjure the human response they needed. Even though I cared deeply, I hadn’t realized how much of our human reactions to console and comfort happen spontaneously as a result of neurohormones and biochemistry in reaction to sad events, and how it’s very difficult to manually create this same outward expression when your biochemistry isn’t cooperating.

When mental illness causes people to lose their emotions, you’ll see them act in a stoic way that makes it hard for them to communicate with one another and do the natural human behaviors that God programmed into our design. And if they are without emotions for too long and the people around them are without emotions also, they may even start to forget how to do these behaviors. This happen in the psychiatric hospital when people are there long-term and only interact with other mentally ill patients and do not interact with healthy individuals.

Of course many people in the psych hospital also have problems with cognition and mental perception, and their social cognition is impaired, so many of their odd behaviors and ways of interacting are stemming from cognitive issues and not from lack of emotion so that needs to be kept in mind, but definitely some of the patients have anhedonia as their only or prominent symptom and are in the hospital for that reason.

Another Reason Emotions Matter

A key reason emotions matter is because people matter. And if a person who matters is sad or troubled, both the situation that caused them to be troubled matters, and their own mental health matters.

The health of a person made in God’s image is significant and important. So the intense feelings of sadness, which cause a form of suffering, matter for that reason.

We should seek to alleviate suffering whenever we can. We shouldn’t try to do this in a vacuum, focusing only on the emotions. It’s unfortunately all too common for psychiatrists to prescribe medication to people who have had years of abuse, and then never offer any other form of help for them. There’s a psychological component when abuse has occurred, that needs to be addressed. The person also needs to be removed from the abusive home, not simply prescribed medication.

Even in cases of abuse, when the psychological element has been addressed, and the person has been removed from the abuse – even though the cause is physical or verbal abuse – supplements and health protocols can help and can be used alongside psychological interventions with great results. Abuse not only disturbs a person mentally, it actually breaks down the brain at a physical level. It causes inflammation, cell damage, dysregulated neurotransmitters, and a dysregulated immune response. Supplement protocols can rebalance these systems that have been thrown off by the abuse, and repair damaged cells. This will build the person back up at the physical level and make them feel stronger mentally and physically.

There are people who get depression and other troubling emotions from purely biochemical sources, such as Lyme disease, or mercury toxicity. Not everyone who experiences sadness is experiencing it from a psychological or situational source. It can be from pathogens in the environment or in the body. I had crushing depression starting at age 12 that felt like my whole family had died and was unrelenting for 8 years. This depression was actually greater than what people describe feeling from events, unless those events were especially tragic and severe.

I heard a testimony of a woman who had a hysterectomy at a young age, and when this surgery is done a woman goes very quickly from having normal hormone levels to having almost no estrogen or progesterone. Estrogen is involved in a happy mood, and if it plummets some women can become extremely depressed. The woman described a depression that was so severe she struggled not to commit suicide and battled constantly at an emotional level to stay alive.

Several years later she was finally put on estrogen hormones and her depression lifted and she was no longer depressed. Tragically her husband a child were killed in a car accident. She explained that the depression she feels now from the death of her husband and child, while obviously terribly painful, is not as severe as the depression she experienced from low estrogen.

That’s how much our biochemistry is involved in our feelings and emotions. And some people experiencing biochemical depression definitely do suffer terribly, and as Christians we ought to care about their mental health and inform them about treatments that can reduce or alleviate their suffering.

But in a brain hijacked by inflammation and suffering from illness, the natural emotions that follow a person’s delight or attitude, do not always exist. The person can be flat. Or they can have completely opposite emotions or feelings from their chosen attitude. For instance, you may really think it’s a tragedy that a friend passed away, and understand their value to you and to God, and yet find yourself smiling or laughing because you have a psychotic disorder and your brain gets flooded with dopamine when you’re under high levels of stress. A lot of emotions being dysregulated happens from involuntary protective measures and responses the body puts you into when it’s been under very high levels of stress for a very long time.

These protective measures actually protect your cells. It’s doing things at a cellular level that brace them against cell death, which can result from infections and stressors, and cell death is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to your body. You can handle some cells dying, but too many dying and you will break down and become severely disabled. For instance, late stage dementia involves lots of neuronal cell death, and people completely lose mental capacity and physical capacity also and have to have help even to do basic things like go to the bathroom. Thus your body must guard against cell death at all costs. Your body is trying to keep you alive at the cellular level; it’s not focused on whether you’re acting in socially appropriate ways. Involuntary processes and mechanisms don’t have that kind of intelligence.

The Conscience

What is our conscience? The conscience isn’t actually a single entity; it’s actually a union of two things. It’s us in our understanding grasping the concepts of right and wrong, and it’s the Spirit testifying to us and convicting us of right and wrong, and the deep truths in God’s Word.

Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, with integrity and godly sincerity. We have done so, relying not on worldly wisdom but on God’s grace.

1 Corinthians 1:12

“The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:”

Romans 8:16

“Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, with integrity and godly sincerity. We have done so, relying not on worldly wisdom but on God’s grace.”

1 Corinthians 1:12

If someone doesn’t have the ability to understand right and wrong they are said to be without a conscience. The Holy Spirit cannot convict someone whose mind is so damaged or compromised that it’s fully malfunctioning when it comes to the concept of right and wrong. The Spirit can convict someone who has partial or full understanding of right and wrong.

There are a number of mental health conditions that can cause a blunted or absent conscience. Some of the most dangerous people in the world are people who have absent consciences but their brain is able to function in other ways effectively, so they can plan and execute, they just can’t tell right from wrong.

“Pray for us; we are convinced that we have a clear conscience and desire to live honorably in every way.”

Hebrews 13:18

“Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.”

1 Timothy 4:2

“I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit—”

Romans 9:1

“Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)”

Romans 2:15

“The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:”

Romans 8:16

“For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.”

2 Corinthians 1:12

“Do not boast so proudly, or let arrogance come from your mouth, for the LORD is a God who knows, and by Him actions are weighed.”

1 Samuel 2:3

“But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or height, for I have rejected him; the LORD does not see as man does. For man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart.”

1 Samuel 16:7

“If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?”

Proverbs 24:12

“All a man’s ways seem right to him, but the LORD weighs the heart.”

Proverbs 21:2

“There is a generation of those who are pure in their own eyes and yet unwashed of their filth.”

Proverbs 30:12

“Turn my heart to Your testimonies and not to covetous gain.”

Psalm 119:36

“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

Psalm 139:23-24

“A crucible for silver and a furnace for gold, but the LORD is the tester of hearts.”

Proverbs 17:3

This makes the human brain a wonder in the universe. It is a physical organ, capable of processing and understanding grand moral truths like the character of God, mercy, justice, freedom, truth.

I’m not even sure how it is possible for a physical organ – for a physical being – to understand abstract, eternal moral truths. How do you make a physical brain that can comprehend moral realities? What would be required in the functioning of the brain, and the different parts and how they work together, to be able to make such perception and understanding possible?

In asking these questions we are lead to understand what the brain is, and what it was created for, and to understand its function and design.

Amazingly, we can with our own brain, study our brain. Man is truly a wonder of creation.

When I first stepped foot in a medical library I was overwhelmed with the wealth of information, and very grateful to God. I was disappointed though to learn that there are many treatments for conditions – some of them very well-documented – that are just never used by mainstream medical doctors. Such as antihistamines for depression, or IVIG and peptides for depression, which none of my mainstream doctors had ever even mentioned. They only ever recommended SSRIs and those were completely ineffective for me, an experience that is not uncommon.

Unfortunately, while the information is there in droves, the way medicine is actually practiced is in a cookie-cutter kind of way, rather than utilizing the wealth of health information that exists in the medical literature.

I highly recommend everyone spend some time in a medial library, so you can get an accurate idea of what treatments really are available, and then bring the research to your mainstream or Functional medicine doctor.

Mainstream doctors are much more likely to be willing to give a treatment a try if they can see that it’s shown to be effective in the medical literature, and functional medicine doctors will usually be grateful for the information and willing to work with you on trying it. They already think in an out-of-the-box way that is different from mainstream medicine.

The other thing I found upsetting is that in all the medical literature the brain is described either as an animal brain, no different from a more highly-evolved ape, or a processing machine no different from a supercomputer.

A supercomputer or an animal brain do not accurately convey what the human brain is, and so the way in which the data in the literature is expressed and referenced, paints a distorted picture of what human beings are.

It leaves out the most central and most important function of our brain and aspect of our humanity – our moral judgment and perception.

Reading the medical literature, and all the amazing findings, that should have glorified the Creator, and brought me into a fuller knowledge of Him and the human beings He created and giinstead ade e feel sik to y stoah

This moral perception is often referred to as cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone’s shoes and understand what they are going through, and to identify with their struggle and hopefully choose to treat them with love and dignity.

Cognitive empathy is actually a part of our moral judgment and perception.

Affective empathy is defined in the medical literature as a feeling of empathy. This is categorized and defined in a way that isn’t truthful, and goes against what a human being is and what empathy is according to the Bible.

According to the Bible empathy and love are not feelings. They are principles, and a person can be actuated by these right principles if they have Christ living within, and they choose to surrender selfish attitudes to Him. So love and empathy are chosen attitudes. Thus calling a feeling ’empathy’ is not truthful.

What is truthful is to say empathy is the cognitive ability to put yourself in someone’s situation and understand what they may be going through, and this is often accompanied by feelings. Just as when we perceive and take in any painful, or difficult, or emotionally-stirring experience and we have accompanying feelings that react to what we’re seeing.

Those who are lacking feelings of empathy still have the ability to choose to give empathy and love to someone if they have the cognitive ability to put themselves in another’s shoes.

Due to the fall animals are in their nature inclined to attack one another. The same is true of people. In our nature we’re inclined to be aggressive, depressed, angry, sad, hurt, and all the negative emotions that did not exist before the Fall.

Not everything we feel and do that is negative is a sin. There is what could be called an animal part of us; the involuntary parts of our body and brain, things like the involuntary urge to go to the bathroom, or the involuntary experience of anger if we are exposed to a pathogen in the environment that causes histamine, a neurotransmitter in our brain to dump large amounts of histamine all at once.

Depression, anger, anxiety – all these can be purely biological and not involve sin and the character.

However, doubt, and hate are always sins. These things are not merely biochemical feelings. They are chosen attitudes.

Thus the difference between a feeling and an attitude needs to be understood, in order to determine if your anger is actually hate, or it’s just a feeling of anger caused by faulty biochemistry.

What is Sin, and Why Does an Accurate Definition Matter in Understanding Mental Health Conditions?

Someone with anorexia may feel intense guilt if she eats lunch and conclude she’s sinned. Someone with blunted emotion may feel little or no guilt if they bully a classmate and may conclude what they did wasn’t wrong. Someone with cognitive distortions may really think they’ve lied when they told someone inaccurate information, even though they didn’t know it was inaccurate at the time they told them. I once spoke with someone who would repent to God in prayer if she unexpectedly walked by a group of people who were cussing in conversation, because she believed she’d somehow sinned just by overhearing the cussing. I used to plug my ears on the late bus heading home from school, because the bus driver would play music that glorified sex before marriage, and I believed it was a sin to listen to it, even though there was no way to get away from it and I wasn’t the one choosing to turn on that station.

A woman in psychosis may have cheated on her husband because she really believed she was married to the neighbor and he was her husband, and her current husband was just a friend. She comes out of psychosis at the psychiatric hospital after being put on medication, and is able to now tell the truth, that she is in fact married to her husband. She’s not sure how to make sense of all of this. Did she sin and commit adultery? She had never wanted to cheat. She didn’t even know she was cheating. But her actions really hurt her husband badly. He’s also trying to make sense of all of this. Can he trust his wife and should he stay married to her? Or is she untrustworthy and her actions are grounds for divorce?

How do each of these people determine if what they are doing is actually wrong, or these are just feelings or distorted perceptions they’re experiencing?

We’ve already talked a bit about what sin is, but in this chapter I’d like to go more in-depth on the topic of sin, and bring out some key points that are really vital to the mental illness discussion.

God’s Moral Law the Crux of Everything

What is sin according to the Bible? Sin is how the fall happened, it’s the moral evil that entered the cosmos through Lucifer, and then later through Adam who brought it to this world, resulting in natural evil such as cancer and disease. It’s why Christ had to come and die to redeem us – it’s the crux of everything, or rather God’s law is, and breaking His law is the cause of disorder and destruction. What is it?

The Bible’s definition of sin never changes. It’s a core eternal truth. And the definition of righteousness or goodness (sin’s opposite) never changes either and is also an eternal core Bible truth. Whether you’re someone with depression who is trying to evaluate whether your depression is purely biochemical or whether it’s a sinful attitude of doubting God and choosing to see the glass as half empty on your part, or whether you’re a perfectly healthy person without any mental symptoms, endeavoring to evaluate your thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors to see which are sinful and need to be surrendered to God, the definition of sin never changes. It’s the same for everyone, and God is just and fair, and doesn’t altar His law, or make exceptions, and doesn’t pick favorites.

Once we know the Bible’s definition of sin, then we can plug in our unique situation and state of cognition into the equation, and see if what we’re experiencing is actually sinful in God’s eyes. The person with intrusive sexual thoughts can figure out if those thoughts are sin. The person with intense guilt from eating, can figure out if it’s actually a sin to eat lunch or if their mind and emotions are just playing tricks on them.

Because there’s an objective standard of right and wrong, we can compare ourselves and measure ourselves by that standard to see if we’re committing sin or if our mind and emotions are just out of sync.

Biblical Philosophy of Sin

What we really need is the correct Biblical philosophy of sin. It’s important that we get this right and clear up any misconceptions that we might have that aren’t Biblical.

Before going into sin though – the moral dimension – I want to first explain the connection between scientific laws and moral laws.

I’m doing this for several reasons. One big reason is that it’s important that we understand that not everything is a moral issue, and that we clearly separate the moral from the natural. If we call something a sin problem that really isn’t a sin issue at all, we end up assigning blame to people who are innocent, which is itself a wrong that God in His perfect righteousness hates. Not only this but we will end up trying to overcome something that can’t be overcome and needs to be dealt with on the natural level, as a health issue. We can spend many months or years trying to overcome something that really just needs supplements and natural healing to correct.

But God would of course also be against us calling our sin something neutral and acceptable if it is actually sin though. We should never do this. To do this is to harden one’s heart against God if it is willfully and knowingly done.

Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent— the LORD detests them both.

Proverbs 17:15

So we need to draw a line of clear demarcation between the kinds of things that are sins and the kinds of things aren’t sins, using the Bible definition of each. And see the connection between the moral dimension and the natural dimension.

Let’s talk about the natural world…

The Natural World

The natural world is not as natural as it first appears. It is actually governed by spiritual laws. This is how when Adam sinned – a moral wrong – the physical world experienced a change and began to decay and die – a natural effect. This is also how if a person becomes converted, and God has the legal right to recreate in them a new heart, that He carries this out in the person.

The Bible describes a law of sin and death and a law of the spirit of life.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”

Romans 8:2

Those who are not in Christ are slaves to sin and cannot do good actions of love. There is a spiritual law at work here, where they cannot love. They are actually incapable of it, and it’s an impossibility for them while in a lost state.

Paul speaking of this spiritual law says this:

“I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.”

Romans 7:23

But those who have been forgiven by Christ are set free from sin. Sin no longer has dominion over them, and they are able to love God and their fellow man.

The answer to Paul’s question “Oh wretched man that I am, Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” (verse 24) is “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (verse 25)

Sin does not have dominion over those who are in Christ Jesus. They can choose to think thoughts that are truly loving and carry out actions that are truly benevolent. Because a new law is now at work through the Spirit who creates in them a new heart.

So this premise that those outside of Christ cannot love, and those in Christ can love and change for the better to be more and more loving, is a spiritual law at work.

Spiritual laws are always the foundation that governs the physical world. They do not operate independently from God as some spiritual force depicted in Star Wars and pantheistic religions. God is the Governor of His creation, the Person Lawgiver who is the Source of these laws and personally enacts them.

An error that something known as the Word of Faith movement makes is it teaches that God is bound by His spiritual laws, and basically operates as a subject under them in a way that mimics a scientific process like gravity, so that when we claim something by faith then God must give us the thing we ask for.

This tempts people to pray for their wishes and wants, rather than seeking God’s will, and makes God out to be a genie who is under some kind of spiritual law that causes him to fulfil one’s wishes, a slave of these laws, and just as how a moon cannot resist the power of gravity that makes it orbit the Earth, God cannot resist the spiritual power that forces Him to respond to our faith with a “yes.”

The Bible describes God as being active through His Word, watching over it to perform it.

“And the word of the LORD came to me, asking, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” “I see a branch of an almond tree,” I replied.

You have observed correctly,” said the LORD, “for I am watching over My word to accomplish it.”

Jeremiah 1:11-12 BSB

I checked the original Hebrew and it says in the Hebrew that God is performing His Word.

This shows active agency. Rather than there being spiritual laws that bind God to perform certain actions; it’s the other way around. God performs these actions of His own divine will and volition.

God is not a slave; He is the Supreme authority. He is the Law-Giver; He is not a subject under His laws. What this means is His promises given in His Word are His supreme will for us, and represents His desires and goals. He would not promise something He didn’t want and that didn’t represent His perfect will. And He accomplishes His promises by His own active agency and divine power. The Bible says the Son “Upholds all things by the Word of His power.” (Hebrews 1:3). What this means is God accomplishes in the natural world by His power what He promises in His Word, and that He brings about what He speaks, such as when He created light with a Word. This shows active, personal agency, not a spiritual law that forces and compels Him to act.

God acts not by coercion or force, and not under the authority of these laws, but presiding over them as their King and Source.

This why when Adam sinned, God officiated as the Supreme Authority, and meted out the sentence of curses upon the world. The world didn’t just start displaying signs of decay and death through some spiritual law independent of God. God sentenced it and carried out its sentence with His divine power.

God actively and personally cursed the Earth by His divine authority, as a sentence for Adam’s sin.

Notice in Romans 8:20 how this verse is specific about telling us that God subjected the creation to futility. The curse was given directly by Him – there was a “One” who personally carried it out and subjected it to futility.

“For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it in hope.”

Romans 8:20

God can say no to the whims and wishes of men. Our faith only has power with Him in a subordinate way where we are subject to His higher will and higher authority. If we pray for something He has promised, we are coming into alignment with His higher will and purpose.

God is the Governer over all of creation. If you think of the creation, and what aspects and attributes a Governer of such a universe a Being must have and must be in order to manage it and preside over it, you arrive at many of the attributes that God possesses.

For instance, such a Being would have to be immaterial and a spirit and beyond the physical in order to create the physical. If God were made of created matter then He wouldn’t be over this creation but rather a part of it.

And this Being must be omnipresent in order to give life to all beings across the universe and hold up and keep in working operation every aspect of nature, from the planets and their long orbits, to the laws of physics that govern matter.

God isn’t subject to physical law – He created it. And He’s not under spiritual laws either – They are a reflection of His nature and His will. They are the enacting of His divine power in spiritual ways, His personal working, and the principles by which He makes His decisions and that reveal His values and character.

It was the Word and authority of God that brought the world into existence. He commanded “Let there be light” and light was created out of nothing.

But the natural laws are not exactly the same thing as the moral law. Animals are under natural law, and in a sense they are kind of under spiritual laws too, because the whole created world is under spiritual laws. When Adam sinned animals, along with the whole created world, began to decay and die.

The animals were created by a Word from God calling them into existence. The spiritual laws that rule and govern the creation apply to them too.

Moral Law is Not the Same Thing as Natural Law

But only people of all God’s creation are under moral law.

Only people can understand right and wrong, and choose to sin or choose to obey God (through Christ).

An example of how natural laws are not the same thing as moral law is the case of self-defense vs. murder. In the natural world there is just killing; there is no distinction between self-defense and murder. Naturally, scientifically it’s the same action either way.

It’s only the moral law that makes the distinction between these two things.

Another example is fornication and married sex. In the natural world they are the same act. The only thing that distinguishes between one being impure and unholy and the other being a pure and holy expression of love and sexual union, is the moral law.

There is a moral dimension to reality. It’s very real that murder is wrong and self-defense is right. But this isn’t a scientific truth; it’s a moral truth.

And animals, not being made in God’s image in their nature and not possessing moral understanding or agency, cannot commit murder or fornication.

A lion cannot decide that killing another lion to protect itself is self-defense and is morally right, but killing a gazelle to prey upon it and eat it is an unjust killing and is murderous.

Neither does a lion have intent and motive. It’s an instinctual being. It kills because it is hungry. Or because it feels aggressive. It responds to purely biochemical processes and drives; it doesn’t have the higher dimension of having benevolent motives.

The animals do not participate in the moral dimension of life.

Is Right and Wrong a List?

Unfortunately when many people think of sin they think of it being actions only. They see a list in their mind of actions that should be done and another list of actions that should never be done.

This is of course true, there is a list of actions God says we shouldn’t do, and another list of obligations God requires of us.

But this isn’t the definition of sin. If this were the definition of sin, then lions killing gazelles would be sin, and there would be no distinction between the killing lions do and the killing human beings do. If sin were actions only, this paints a naturalistic world where there is no real moral dimension at all. It would mirror a naturalist evolutionary view where the world operates via natural laws only and there’s no moral reality.

“Thou Shalt” and “Thou Shalt Nots”

On the surface the Commandments may seem to only be about actions. But taking a closer look at the “Thou shalts” and the “Thou shalt nots” we see that actually they do not cover just the actions at all.

As mentioned above adultery is distinctly different from fornication. In the natural world – in the physical actions alone – they are the same act. What makes them different is the moral dimension.

All of the Commandments also imply motive. Every single one of them. And the 10th Commandment – that of coveting – is a whole commandment that only involves the thoughts and intents of the heart. There are no outward actions involved with coveting.

So you can see already from the very definition of the Commandments themselves, outward actions alone do not define right and wrong.

We can see also how by definition the Commandments involve the inner motives of the heart, and thus cannot apply to animals.

Jesus in explaining the law to people, brought out how sin is in the desires and motives. It’s in the intent and heart of the person.

“what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.”

Matthew 15:18

Sin is in the heart and intent. It’s not outward actions devoid of intent and motive.

The Wonder of the Human Brain

The human brain is a wonder of creation. All of these foundational truths – scientific truth, spiritual truth, and moral truth – are understood by the human mind. Our brain, unlike the brain of animals, was created to commune with God and to glorify Him by our love and moral choices.

While this is a wonderful thing, it’s also a serious problem if our brain malfunctions, because then our understanding of moral truth can be skewed or even absent altogether. Because we are physical beings, our moral understanding is dependent on our physical brain, thus it is a sacred duty to preserve the brain in the best health possible.

Health becomes a matter of weighty responsibility as well as a great joy. In caring for and studying our physical organism – especially our brain – we see the genius work of God and come to understand Him in a way the study of no other created thing can do. We learn about the nature of man, the nature of God whom man’s image reflects.

Is it Possible to Do Wrong Outward Actions and Yet Not Be Sinning?

It’s possible for a person in psychosis to do right actions and yet not understand that what they are doing is right. To not understand the underlying principles of what makes an action good and right, and to just go along with what the people around them are telling them to do, or due to a delusion. A person might choose to get baptized during psychosis, because they believe they are Jesus and need to fulfil their mission as the Messiah. And their caretakers may not pick up on this or inquire more deeply to see whether moral understanding is present if they think of right and wrong as actions only.

Believing that outward actions are the definition of sin creates many problems, especially in regard to understanding mental conditions like dementia or psychosis. When a mother has a son who steals a painting from a gallery during psychosis, if she believes sin is the actions alone, she will conclude he has sinned against God, and attribute guilt to him. Without looking into why he stole the painting.

If asked, she may find that he says something like “The painting is possessed by a demon that has been killing people in the town, and the only way to save the town was to destroy the painting.” He may have acted under a delusion caused by his psychotic condition.

Sin and wrong actions aren’t synonymous. While sin always involves either wrong actions or thoughts, there’s more to sin than wrong actions.

If a dog bites your neighbor, we don’t conclude the dog has sinned. The dog is under natural law only, not moral law. The dog didn’t know it was immoral to bite your neighbor. The dog is not a moral agent that can make moral choices. That dimension of understanding is impossible for a dog to grasp.

How the Bible Defines Sin

Sin is anything that goes against God’s perfectly loving character. The Bible tells us “God is love” John 4:8, then it says “The commandments, do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet and any other commandment, are summed up in this one decree: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Romans 13:9-10

God is love and his law is love. Sin is the transgression of the law (1 John 3:4); love is the fulfillment of the law. Sin then is the opposite of love.

Anything that is not Christlike, not loving, not moral and good, is sin.

The 10 commandments contain the inherent rights of God and man. God, being the true God, the Creator who brought all things into being, and who died for man to redeem him to Himself, has a right to our worship for being the Creator, for being a perfect Standard; for having a character of perfect self-sacrificial love for His children, for giving His own life to pay our debt. To worship anyone or anything else denies God the love and worship that is his by right.

People have a right to being treated with dignity because they are beings made in God’s image. It would be wrong to treat a person the way you would treat a dog; it would deny a person their inherent right to dignity. People have a right to sow and to reap what they sow. To engage in work and reap the results of that work, whether it be monetary or otherwise – and not have their work stolen from them by someone who did not do the work and who has no right to the results of their labor. To steal from them is inherently immoral as it denies the rights of an individual.

People have to life – to not be murdered. This is one of the most basic rights. Not only does a murderer violate a person’s right to life when they kill them, but it steals from God who is the Giver of all Life and the Creator of that person.

Fornication is wrong because it takes from someone privileges reserved for marriage without fulfilling the responsibilities of being that person’s husband or wife. It merges two people into one flesh in a union that is designed for marriage alone. It is not merely a physical act but a spiritual union is created when two people have sex.

So you can see how the breaking of the 1st, 8th, 6th, and 7th commandments is a violation of inherent rights of God and man. And the other commandments similarly are inherent rights of God and man, but I won’t go into all of them here.

What this means is that right and wrong exist as principles inherent within the very fabric of moral reality, coming from the character of God Himself.

Some have made the argument that it’s only the heart that matters (what they mean by this is the motive of the person) and whether they keep the letter of the law – whether they do the exact actions depicted in the 10 commandments – isn’t important. It’s common for people to say “Yes, maybe I told a lie, but God knows my heart; He knows I did it for a good reason”, and to believe that it wasn’t really sin for them because their heart was in the right place, or because God understands their predicament and unique situation. Perhaps they were in a really bad situation that was causing them a lot of pain. Lying would get them out of the bad situation. God doesn’t want them to be in pain, thus they conclude that God will make allowance for their lie, and He won’t count it is sin.

Some lovers have argued that they don’t need to be married to sleep together, and that living together for life unmarried is the same thing as getting married, that marriage is just a piece of paper. While this argument may seem to have weight to some people, some men have cheated on their wives and then claimed it didn’t matter or mean anything because their heart wasn’t in it. It was just a physical act, but their affection and their heart was with their wife.

This argument that our actions don’t matter if our heart isn’t in it has been applied to many different sins.

It’s really obvious in this second example that one cannot have love and knowingly break a commandment.

The people making this argument that their heart wasn’t in it, so it’s not sin, aren’t people in psychosis. They reveal they have a knowledge of right and wrong, because they know some kind of justification or argument for their actions is needed, because what they did was wrong. Someone in psychosis would argue something like that it wasn’t wrong to cheat on their spouse (and honestly believe it wasn’t wrong), or that they weren’t cheating by having sex with another woman, and that cheating is something else, usually a nonsensical idea.

This particular argument that it’s not sin for a person to cheat because their heart wasn’t in it, is a very typical argument seen in people who know right from wrong as a way to justify their actions. It shows a clear, logical, traceable motive, something you won’t see in people in full psychosis.

Selfish Motive Always Present When We Sin

Because each commandment has the same underlying principle of love, to break any commandment means the person has to embrace an attitude of selfishness in order to do so. The person committing sin promotes and advantages self at the expense of others, by violating their rights.

Thus motive is always present when we sin. The man who cheated on his wife, and claimed there was no selfish motive, is lying to himself. He may have become calloused, doesn’t feel like he’s done anything that wrong, and doesn’t know his own heart to see clearly the selfish motives there. His motive is clear to his wife though. He is willing to put his selfish desire for variety and pleasure, above his respect and love for his wife. He’s willing to harm her to take something that isn’t his by right. The motive is clear.

If someone steals $200 from you in a very respectful manner and with a kind expression on their face, it’s still stealing. It still wrongs you. Likewise the man who cheats on his wife, claiming to not have any feelings for the person he committed adultery with, he still becomes one flesh with the other woman, severs his union with his wife, and brings great pain and a sense of loss to his wife.

There is objective right and there is objective wrong. They are not subjective ideas and preferences in the minds of individual people – they exist outside of us. Stealing is objectively wrong. Adultery is objectively wrong. These things cause harm to other people and violate their inherent rights.

Selfish Motive Not Present if Knowledge is Not Present

The argument that “my heart was in the right place so the wrong action I did wasn’t sin for me” does apply to one kind of situation. There is a grain of truth in this statement and that is why it’s quite deceptive.

According to the Bible if a person doesn’t know something is a sin they can do that thing and not be sinning. And because they don’t know it’s a sin, their heart is in the right place.

But as soon as they become aware that the thing they’re involved in is wrong to do, their heart can no longer be in the right place for them to continue doing this wrong thing.

For instance there have been Catholics through history who prayed to Mary along with Jesus and did not know this was idolatry. During the Dark Ages the Catholic Church banned the Bible from the common person and kept it in Latin, a language the common person could not read. The person only had access to the scriptures through their priest’s teaching, and the priests taught false doctrine.

It was a time of great spiritual darkness. Such a person who did not know it is a sin to pray to Mary could still be right with God under such a circumstance. It could be said of them that they were doing the wrong thing, but their heart was in the right place. But if a Catholic today comes in contact with Protestantism, and learns this truth that praying to Mary is idolatry, and continues to pray to Mary anyway, then their heart cannot be in the right place while they pray to Mary. Rather they are hardening their heart against the Holy Spirit’s conviction to become a Protestant and to pray to Jesus alone.

Their heart is not in the right place; it is hardened.

Those Who Worship In Spirit and In Truth

Jesus said that the Father seeks those who worship in Spirit and in truth. What He’s referring to are people who know Bible truth and believe it, and allow it to change their character so they have a heart that is in conformity to that truth.

The Father isn’t looking for people who know stealing is wrong intellectually, but don’t conform to this truth, and don’t have His Holy Spirit living within them to actuate them to holy desires, motives, and actions, and steal regularly and have a selfish character.

But neither is the Father looking for people who claim to have a heart of love without truth, without the commandments, like the man who claims he didn’t really cheat on his wife because his heart wasn’t in the act. Or the couple who claim they really love one another, even though they refuse to get married.

God wants people who love His Bible truths – the commandments being one of the central truths in the Bible, the very principles behind His own character – and who live them out because they are filled with His Spirit.

Letter and Spirit both matter. What you do or think, and the spirit you do it in both matter to God. And it’s impossible for someone who knows stealing is wrong, to break the letter of the law and steal, and yet keep the spirit of the law while doing so.

“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”

John 4:24

Jesus explains that the 10 commandments are really 10 categories that encompass far more than just the literal breaking of the written law. For instance, hate is murder, and lust is adultery. (Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28)

The moral law – the 10 commandments – involves all of our thoughts, motives, desires, choices, and actions. This law judges and evaluates every thought and desire, and God categorizes each as either holy or unholy, moral or immoral, good or evil.

Let’s say we make plans to buy our mom a card for mother’s day. That’s a good and right desire that keeps the 5th commandment about the importance of honoring our parents.

Or let’s say we think a mean thought about a school bully and want them to get a bad grade on a test. That’s a thought that breaks the 6th commandment about hate and murder.

So this moral law is very relevant to our lives. By it we have a knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20), and can know when a thought or desire or action is one that God approves of, and is right for a Christian to have, or whether it’s immoral and wrong for a Christian to have.

The Bible says the Word of God, which contains His 10 Commandment law, is – through the power of the Holy Spirit – “alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

Hebrews 4:12

Thus we can use the Word of God to know right from wrong, and depending on God for help, His Spirit whose role it is to teach us all the Words of Christ, will teach us when a thought or attitude, or desire is a moral one or an immoral one.

God has given us a conscience, through the Holy Spirit convicting our hearts.

“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)”

Romans 2:15

Because we have this conscience made possible by God’s Spirit interacting with our mind and consciousness, we can judge our thoughts and motives and actions to know if they are moral or immoral. We have a compass.

“…by the law is the knowledge of sin”

Romans 3:20

“…where there is no law, there is no transgression.”

Romans 4:15

“…I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.”

Romans 7:7

The Bible tells us that everyone has a general knowledge of right and wrong – even those who have never had access to the Bible to know the 10 Commandments or to hear the gospel. These people have a conscience in a primitive, general sense, and can be saved by responding to the Holy Spirit’s convicting voice.

(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.

They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)

Romans 2:14-15

Thus even pagans in ancient China had access to salvation, and some of them will be in heaven.

But those of us who know the 10 Commandments have a fuller knowledge of right and wrong, and our conscience is thus more accurate, and the Holy Spirit can more accurately convict us of sin, and help us gauge whether our thoughts, actions, and attitudes are moral or immoral.

The same way that a baby Christian may know certain things are wrong, and not know other things are wrong, because they don’t yet have a solid enough knowledge of the scriptures, or the same way that people growing up in pagan societies such as ancient China can be saved if they follow all the truth they do know, even while ignorantly engaging in error, because what they don’t know isn’t sin for them, only going against what they do know would be sin, the psychotic person who loses their judgment and doesn’t know right from wrong, cannot be said to be sinning either when they do something the Bible says is wrong, if they’ve lost the capacity to understand God’s moral law.

“Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”

James 4:17

To know whether a thought or attitude you’re having is in fact a sin or not, measure it against the 10 commandments.

First Commandment: Would this attitude or action place yourself, another person, or another thing before God? For instance, let’s say you really want to play hockey, but it will be time-consuming. You’ll end up spending all your energy and attention and time getting in shape and practicing hockey so you can win games. You come to the conclusion that you should only be putting that much attention, time, effort, and planning into God’s work, and recognize that playing on a hockey league would be having an idol.

You decide to skate for recreational purposes and for health reasons, on your own time, and not join a league.

2nd Commandment: Would this thought or action involve bowing down or serving someone who claims to stand in God’s place? For instance, bowing before a statue of Jesus, or confessing sins to a priest.

3rd Commandment: Would this thought or action involve doing or thinking something that would be disrespectful to God, portray Him falsely in a bad light, or result in living a hypocritical light?

4 Commandment: Would this thought or action go against God’s Sabbath and the purpose of His Sabbath? For instance, working on Sabbath or thinking thoughts about work on the Sabbath.

5 Commandment: Would this thought or action disrespect my parents and their authority? Would it fail to give them the love and attention that is theirs by right because they are my parents? Authority figures are also involved in this commandment.

Commandment 6: Would this thought or action harm someone either physically, spiritually, or mentally?

Commandment 7: Would this thought or action involve giving sexual attention to someone who is not my spouse?

Commandment 8: Would this thought or action involve taking from someone something that is theirs by right, or failing to give them something that I owe them?

Commandment 9: Would this thought or action involve distorting information, either by exaggeration, or omitting something that is central and important, or failing to give the truth in some other way?

Commandment 10: Would this thought and desire involve wanting or fantasizing about something that belongs to someone else and isn’t mine by right?

Our Conscience Not Infallible

However our conscience isn’t always perfect. One of the most important spiritual lessons I learned from psychosis and cognitive distortions, is that I could really sincerely believe something to be true, and experience what I thought was conviction, and yet be totally wrong. I really thought when I had cognitive distortions from anorexia that I was sinning by eating too much, and yet I wasn’t; I was actually under-weight.

I really thought I was not psychotic when I actually was.

I learned just how fallible our perception and judgment are as human beings. And that God’s truth is not in us; it transcends us. The whole time I was going through various cognitive distortions and delusions, God’s truth remained the same and never changed. It was my judgment and brain that changed.

I learned from this experience that while God does give us a conscience, our conscience while it is created from reading and studying God’s Word, it isn’t the same thing as the infallible Word of God. Truth is outside of us and so it is good and right to question our conscience.

I’ve heard people make the argument that they don’t need to keep a Commandment because their conscience is not convicting them that they need to keep it. In reality, if they would endeavor to search the scriptures for truth, they would most likely be convicted in their conscience to keep that commandment. If they would understand that their conscience comes about by study of the Word and The Spirit convincing them of truth through that Word, they would see the need to study before their conscience could be activated.

Our conscience is a tool God gives us and the way He makes for us to come to a knowledge of the truth. But our conscience isn’t actually truth itself, and so it’s right for us to question it, to recognize its limitations, and to seek a deeper study of the Word as the basis for truth, rather than looking to our conscience as the truth.

Inaccurate Conscience

If we have incomplete knowledge of right and wrong, our conscience will reflect our knowledge and understanding. It’s possible for a more mature Christian to have a better grasp of right and wrong than a baby Christian, for instance, and learning and growing in the Word of God is crucial for the Christian. And while our conscience is subject to error because we are fallible human beings who do not always have a perfect knowledge of God’s Word (and some people do not have access to the Bible), and only God’s judgment is infallible and perfect (1 Corinthians 4:4), God does give us guidance and knowledge to live a godly life in this world. To follow Him and obey Him and to be a faithful Christian. He gives us enough knowledge of moral truth to do that.

Recognizing the limitations of his conscience and the infallible judgment of God’s mind, Paul says:

“My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.”

1 Corinthians 4:4

With the knowledge He gives us from His Word and the help of His Spirit teaching us His Word and giving us a conscience that aligns with His law…we can then surrender wrong attitudes, desires, thoughts to God, and repent of wrong actions and choices, and our High Priest will forgive us and change those immoral things about us.

While God’s moral law is an objective standard of right actions and thoughts, for a person to be said to be sinning, there are a couple other dimensions to this that the Bible specifies.

It’s a Sin to Suspect Something is Wrong, But Not Know for Sure, and Go Forward and Do it Anyway, Without Checking God’s Word

In Romans 14, Paul speaks of how we should not eat or drink something that could cause a brother to stumble. This can be something that is ok and not a violation of a commandment, but because it would cause confusion and doubt to the new believer and your brother in Christ, it becomes wrong to engage in it around that person. He explains that whatever we do that is not of faith is sin.

21 It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.

22 Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God. Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.

23 And he that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith: for whatsoever is not of faith is sin.

What does this mean that whatsoever is not of faith is sin? Even though objective right and wrong exists and everything is either right or wrong (there are a lot of things that are right so we have a lot of moral options as we engage in life in this world), as human beings we don’t always have perfect knowledge of the scriptures or of right and wrong, and we may not completely understand what is right or wrong. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, only that we understand it imperfectly. We may for instance disagree with a brother about what is right and wrong. This scripture tells us that if there is any doubt that an action is wrong, doing it would be a sin. It’s also a sin to do something completely innocent around a brother who himself has doubts as this could cause him to engage in it before he has adequate Bible knowledge on the subject and could cause him to be tempted to go against his conscience and do something he has doubts about.

This adds another dimension to sin. It’s not merely the actions that are sinful, but also if one in their limited human knowledge isn’t sure but suspects something is sinful, then they sin by engaging in it. Tempting or encouraging someone to engage in something they have doubts about is also sin. We are each stewards of ourselves under God and we have a one-on-one relationship with Him, and an individual conscience. Therefore no person should ever assume the role of conscience for another person. To do this is to make oneself a god and to violate the human rights of another person, treating them as less than human.

It’s also true that if someone does not have enough knowledge to know something is sinful, or they are lied to, that it’s not a sin for someone to do something they really don’t think is a sin.

Mothers for instance from other time periods were told by doctors of their day that medical practices were safe that we now know to be very unsafe, such as taking mercury for colds and flues. These mothers weren’t sinning who gave their children these treatments because they didn’t know they were harmful and thought they were giving their children the best that medicine had to offer.

Now, for a mother to know mercury is a poison and hire a physician to give it to her child – would be a sin, because she knows it’s harmful and she’s giving it anyway.

It would also be a sin for a mother to worship the doctor and blindly do whatever he suggests, without doing her own research and praying to God for wisdom. Her child has been entrusted to her by God and she’s responsible for its well-being, not the doctor. Doctors are helpers not dictators. Therefore she goes against her responsibility of stewardship if she blindly listens to a doctor and obeys him like a robot.

There have doubtless then been many cases through history of people not sinning and yet causing harm without realizing it. Human knowledge is limited and we’re not omniscient. It’s also possible to do an inherently good thing with a selfish motive and sin. Giving money to help the poor so that people will praise you and like you, for instance, rather than doing it to actually alleviate suffering and caring about the sufferers. Paul talks about this when he says “if I give my body to be burned but have not love, what does it profit me?” showing that one can do inherently good acts from a selfish motive and it’s therefore not love.

So to not be sinning it’s not enough that we do inherently good things. Knowledge is also part of this, and motive is as well.

James 4:17 speaks again about this other dimension: “He who knows the good he ought to do and does it not, to him it is sin.”

The person must have knowledge that an action is wrong, or they aren’t sinning by doing that action. They also must have the ability to know and to reason, so someone who has lost the ability to reason due to a stroke or due to severe mental illness cannot choose to sin.

Jesus speaks about this concept:

“If you were blind,” Jesus replied, “you would not be guilty of sin. But since you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”

John 9:41

One must be able to “see” to do the right thing, in order for it to be a sin for them to fail to do the right thing.

Notice also in James 4:17 that the person must be able to choose to do or not to do, in order to sin.

There is not an instance in scripture where someone is declared guilty by God for something they didn’t do.

Fornication for instance is a sin, and rape is a sin, but being raped is not a sin. In the case of being raped fornication is happening and it is very sexual and it can certainly feel “wrong”, but the victim is innocent. It is only the rapist who is guilty.

25 But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.

26 But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:

27 For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.

Deuteronomy 22

Like murder which is certainly not the fault of the one who is murdered, so rape is not the fault of the one who is raped, and the guilt and sin lies only with the rapist. So you can see how something sexual and even violent and impure doesn’t make it a sin. It’s only if the person does that thing. If that thing is done TO that person against their will, as in the case of rape, the victim is innocent.

The Bible definitely tells us that a person can sin in their thoughts.

Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near.

Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

Isaiah 55:6-7

We can sin even in our attitudes and intents of our heart, our motives.

Repent, therefore, of your wickedness, and pray to the Lord. Perhaps He will forgive you for the intent of your heart.

Acts 8:22

21 Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:

22 But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Matthew 5:

Someone who desires to murder another – even if they never act on it – is sinning in the intents of their heart.

Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

1 John 3:15

So, it is not just our outward actions that we can sin with, but also our attitudes and intents and motives in our heart. Our thoughts.

However, even in our thoughts they must be chosen in order for them to be sin. There is not a place in scripture where someone is pronounced guilty by God for something they did not choose to think or to do.

Explain how we are born with a fallen nature and so we inevitably will sin, yet sin is active.

As in the rape example, things done to you aren’t sin on your part. Biological processes happening to you also aren’t sin.

This is the Bible criteria for sin. If you know it’s wrong, and you’re choosing to do it, it’s sin. Knowing it’s wrong, doesn’t mean that you recognize that the action or thought is on a checklist of things people consider wrong. It doesn’t mean that you’re aware society doesn’t approve of a certain action, or that you’ll go to jail if you do that action. I remember being in psychosis and thinking that lying was on this arbitrary checklist determined by society for no reason. They just decided not to condone it. No, to know something is wrong means you understand the underlying selfish principle of the action or thought. You can see that stealing from someone takes something that is theirs by right because they worked for it. You didn’t work for it; it’s not yours by right, and you’re wronging them by taking it from them when you never earned it or have any right to it.

When someone knows something is wrong and can see the underlying selfish principles inherent in that action, for them to go forward and do that action or think that wrong thought always involves a selfish motive.

If you don’t know it’s wrong and don’t suspect it’s wrong and you choose to do it it’s not sin. If you aren’t doing it and it’s something that’s happening to you, then it’s not sin.

This means there’s lots of things that can go on in your brain and body that aren’t sin. Biological sexual feelings and urges, that feel very sexual, aren’t lust and aren’t sin, for instance. If they were then every kid going through puberty would be sinning merely by developing as a sexual being and having sexual urges and feelings. This of course is not the case. God would never design us with a biological process that would cause us to sin by its very nature.

However, lust is a sin. So while it’s actually not a sin for a man to become sexually aroused if a woman in scantily clad attire walks past him, because getting physically aroused is an involuntary process of his body that occurs when he sees a woman with a lot of skin showing, and this is how God created and designed men, it is a sin if he then engages in active fantasy in his mind about the woman, imaging himself having sex with her. Both of these experiences may feel just as sexual as each other. Getting aroused is a sexual experience, and yet if he’s being aroused by something involuntary and not something voluntary, then it’s not a sin.

Similarly pastors don’t tell someone with a gay attraction that they are sinning by simply being tempted by that desire. It’s only if they think gay thoughts or act on those thoughts that they have sinned. It’s also not a sin to be tempted to be violent or to be jealous. It’s only a sin if you deliberately think a jealous or violent thought.

Very sexual or violent dreams can’t be a sin because the frontal lobe – the part of the brain involved in choice – is dialed down when we sleep. The emotional centers of the brain are kicked into high gear and this is why dreams are very emotional. And because the frontal lobe is dialed down the person will dream random, nonsensical, things without a moral filter. You may dream about having sex with someone you’re not even attracted to in real life, or someone violently attacking you, or other immoral themes, that are connected with emotions you felt that day or week in your real life, and magnified and exaggerated. The emotional parts of the brain do not filter and evaluate ideas based on their morality; they are incapable of doing that. It’s not a sin to have unconscious thoughts race through your mind.

It’s not a sin for someone in psychosis to hear voices that cuss at them or shout mean things. These voices are not under their control and they happen due to stimulatory neurotransmitters and inflammation causing overactivation of the auditory centers of the brain. The thoughts are part of the unconscious processes of the brain and aren’t controlled by the frontal lobe, thus they will be about both moral and immoral things and there will be no filter. It’s only the frontal lobe that distinguishes between moral and immoral things. The other parts of the brain do not discriminate. Thus if you were to overhear someone cussing, it gets stored as a memory and processed by the unconscious parts of the brain without discrimination. These parts of the brain do not tell you cussing is wrong. They just process memories, store information, and these memories and information can be activated when there’s inflammation present, as is the case in people in psychosis.

Sin is always deliberate and chosen, even in cases where it’s a sin of omission (meaning something that you should have done that you neglected), it’s deliberately neglected.

Sin Not Exactly the Same Thing as Character

Sin is different from having a fallen character. While having a fallen character is what causes us to sin, and it makes sin inevitable for us, one has not actually sinned until they deliberately think a selfish thought or do a selfish action.

Due to the fall we’re all born with a fallen, sinful character. But a zygote in the womb hasn’t sinned, because its brain hasn’t developed enough mental functioning to have will and choice, and to choose to think a selfish immoral thought. I’m not exactly sure the point at which a person’s brain is developed enough to choose to think a selfish thought, but at whatever stage of development that becomes possible, it’s after that that each of us deliberately think our first selfish thought, and incur guilt before God, and then the only way to wash away that guilt is through Christ at that point. There’s no other solution. And then we go on to think many other selfish thoughts where that one came from.

It’s true that as long as our character is imperfect, that it will cause us to sin. But sin is still deliberate because we’re the ones doing it, and we’re choosing in what ways we sin. There’s agency going on.

For instance, you can have a selfish character that wants to steal something, and yet choose not to steal. Or you can choose to steal. There’s agency there, and the act to steal is a willful act. Unconverted people often bite their tongue and choose not to sin. I’ve noticed it’s often the case that when they go against these sinful inclinations that they consider themselves to be good people for doing so, and this is where a lot of humanists err and think they are good people. Not doing bad things isn’t all that’s entailed in goodness. They are a far cry from actively working to promote good on the earth, selflessly laying down their lives for others, but they don’t realize all that is involved in true goodness. They aren’t looking to Jesus as the Standard of love and good.

Before conversion the current and general direction of our heart is one of selfishness. We might choose to respond to the Holy Spirit in some ways, and some atheists can do some nice things for example (every time anyone does something benevolent it’s due to the influence of God, whether they realize it or not), but the general nature of the heart is bent towards selfishness.

After conversion we get a brand new character that can love. We can not only refuse to steal when we feel like stealing, but we can actively care for others, and put the glory of God first in our lives. While we still have some selfish desires and inclinations – a lot of them – left in our character, the general direction our character goes is in the direction of unselfish love.

Character is not something we form with unconscious processes, but with conscious ones. To choose to repent of sin, to resist sin, and believe and follow Christ, is done consciously. To choose to sin is also a conscious process. While our fallen nature is what predisposes us to a life of sin until we find Christ, each of our sins are consciously chosen and done using our agency. It’s not possible without Christ to choose not to sin, and yet when we sin it is consciously chosen and done. An unconverted person can often bite their tongue, or control their actions and choose not to do certain sins, but they don’t have the option of living a godly life except through Christ, and in their own power it’s not possible to be truly benevolent. Their desires and thoughts run in the channel of selfishness.

But while their thoughts and chosen desires – the ones we ruminate on and pine after and consciously think – are sin according to the Bible, desire is not sin according to the Bible.

Character Not Exactly the Same Thing as Sin

Character is not quite the same thing as sin. We form character by choosing to sin, and then we have a selfish one, but fallen people do not always choose to think the thoughts they desire to think or carry out the selfish actions their character is bent towards. They have some regulatory power over it, and some people choose to indulge in sin more than others, rapidly descending into a life of great evil, while others do not choose to go that far into evil.

The Bible says “after desire has conceived it gives birth to sin.”

James 1:15

So desire – or the fallen things our character is bent towards – is not sin. This is just the state of our character, it’s not active sin. However, if we allow desire to become pregnant – if we actively think about and lust and pine after our fallen desires – sin is birthed by this process. So what we are called to do as Christians is to put to death the desires of the flesh. Do not act on them, do not pine after them and cherish them, resist them, until our character is changed so that we are no longer tempted by them and desire holy things instead, more and more as we do this process more and more through life.

If we had perfect characters, then we would not have any fallen desires that could lead us into sinful thoughts and actions.

The Bible says temptation is not sin.

“each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their evil desires and enticed.”

verse 14

However, if our character was perfect, there would be nothing in us that was bent towards sin or enticed by it. So character plays an important role in all this, though distinctly different from sin itself.

Now that we know what sin is, we can take this knowledge of what sin is, and apply it to various mental states that individuals are in. People we are counseling with and helping, or to ourselves if our judgment is good enough to self-evaluate. This must be done on a case-by-case basis.

The five main questions to ask are:

1. Was the thought, action, or motive actually something that breaks God’s law? Compare it with the 10 Commandments to be sure.

2. Did they know it was wrong?

3. Was there a motive (there will always be a motive if they knew it was wrong and could see the way in which it violated the inherent rights of people or God, so #3 always follows if #2 is answered in the affirmative)

4. Did they do it or was it done to them?

Was it an involuntary, biological process, or a chosen thought or action?

5. Did they have the ability to control their impulses or compulsions, or were they out-of-control at the time the action was committed?

Forensic psychiatrists do this line of work, and their writings can be very helpful. If an older man does a violent crime, for instance, assault, they have to evaluate him and determine whether he has dementia, and if he has dementia, they must also evaluate what stage it’s in. Has it advanced to the point where he completely lost agency, and it was impossible for him to control his violent outburst? Or, was he in the beginning stages of dementia, and still had the ability to control himself, and just chose not to, and gave way to his anger during a heated argument?

Similarly in a young person with psychosis who say committed a murder, it has to be determined if their psychosis was severe enough that they were in complete delusion and thus not guilty by reason of insanity, or whether their psychosis was mild enough that they knew what they were doing at the time the crime was committed.

Let’s take a girl with anorexia who passes away due to starvation. Anorexia can cause cognitive distortions, and can re-wire the brain’s motivational centers and reward centers so the person doesn’t get any enjoyment from anything in life except starving themselves, and they get reward from that, but there’s also a lot of false feelings of guilt and shame and fear that they feel daily, especially centered around food. Because even anorectics eat, they just eat less than the rest of us.

So there’s certainly compelling emotions of both reward and fear giving her motivation to starve, and there’s also confusing cognitive distortions where she may actually believe if she eats she’s sinned, and that not eating is being virtuous and living a godly life.

It has to be evaluated how severe the cognitive distortions were and also how severe the compulsions were for her to starve herself. Perhaps the compulsions were so strong to starve, that she entered into a state where she wasn’t actively in control. Or perhaps it’s discovered that she had more than just cognitive distortions and had full-on delusions that if she ate she wouldn’t go to heaven because she’d be committing the unpardonable sin.

It’s not uncommon for someone to have both psychosis and anorexia. So if the girl with anorexia was starving herself due to a psychotic delusion, it may not have actually been a sin for her to starve herself to death. If she had been a Christian walking with God in obedience before developing the delusion she may go to heaven.

Others with anorexia may have cognitive distortions and not full delusions, and if they starve themselves to death it would be sin for them and they would not go to heaven.

It doesn’t matter the mental condition, or the situation, sin is always defined the same way in the scriptures. So whether the person has dementia or psychosis, the same criteria will determine whether an assault a person did is sin for them or they are innocent.

Only God fully knows the heart of a person and their mental state at the time the wrong thought or action was done, but there are questions we can ask the person to help get closer to the truth, and make a good assessment.

One of the key things you’ll want to ask the person is what is the gospel? If they have heard of it, but can’t accurately define sin, the nature of man, the need for a Savior, and the way in which sins are atoned for by His blood, this can be a really good way to figure out if they’ve lost their moral perception.

My aunt, for instance, who had schizophrenia, went to the zoo and preached to the animals because the Bible says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. She tried to teach pets to pray. It was clear she didn’t know what sin and wrongdoing were, because she couldn’t see clearly that animals do not sin, and thus have no need of a Savior, and human beings alone can sin because we’re moral agents made in God’s image. We need to be washed clean by Christ’s blood because we are capable of making moral choices, and we’ve all made sinful ones and incurred very real guilt.

My aunt never committed a violent crime or anything like that, and she was always very good-natured and kind, but she did break laws involving trespassing, and she would leave food and drinks for people she believed were trapped in storage bins.

She wanted to help these people whom she believed were suffering, and she couldn’t understand the Bible concept of respecting the law and the governing authorities, and doing things in a way that is alignment with the law. She wasn’t connected with reality, including the moral law.

I was similar when I went into full psychosis. I remember caring whether people felt pain and suffered, and wanted to take people’s pain away, but I lost the ability to understand the inherent rights people possessed, and how lying was wrong. So I would lie to people, and at one point I stole money from my dad and didn’t think it was wrong. But I would also go online and try to encourage people with mental illnesses and lots of depression not to commit suicide.

My knowledge of right and wrong was becoming more primitive, more like a golden retriever than a person. I wanted to protect people and reduce their suffering, but I didn’t understand the importance of being honest and upfront with them and not lying to them or stealing from them.