Renewed Hope

Our Animalistic Nature and Temptation  Part 1




I started this post after getting a phone call from my dear friend Diane telling me of the death of her oldest daughter Annette last night. Annette has battled alcoholism and other addiction for many years.

 Many of you who read this  have probably come to the same conclusion that I and many of those I work with and know,  which is, that we hate alcohol and drug addiction!! We hate what it does to people and how it gets them stuck, known to many of us as bondage!!  My heart has gone out to Diane and Annette the last two years since Annette has been back in her active alcoholism,  cleaning up for a week or two and then unable for some reason to get into a program of recovery, of going back to her drinking. The back and forth of drinking and not drinking completely screws the brain up. It acclimates to the drinking, then the drinking is withheld and it tries to acclimate to no alcohol and it isn't unusual that in one of the cycles, the brain forgets how to tell the heart to beat or the lungs to breathe!   Likewise the heart muscle full of alcohol for two or three days gets used to functioning with it, and then it is gone,  works to adjust to no alcohol and it wears on the heart muscle until sometimes it just doesn't function at all.   In either of these cases, CPR often doesn't work  because the brain or the heart just isn't in the condition to work.

Even for those who know Jesus, learning to draw from His Life revealed in us by Holy Spirit, recovery from such bondage  is a learning/growing  process and  journeyg that often gets totally screwed up by the "bondage" issues we have found ourselves in.  Oh how we wish that suddenly we were all different!! Even for those of us who have been "delivered" out of bondage, it takes the process of learning to walk and exercise faith to grow in the security of His love so we don't go back again into the bondage from which we were freed!! 

 I think of a dear friend who was dealing with some serious issues in her life and she went to see a deliverance minister who gave her very wise advise.  This isn't fitting for all people but was seemingly appropriate in this situation.  The minister told her something like "I could cast out those forces that are coming against you, but because you do not have the security with which to stand against them and secure the ground so they don't come back in, the end result would probably be worse than where you are now."  She therefore recommended that the woman go home and sink her roots deep into the love of God in Christ Jesus and gave her some specific suggestions saying that as she grew on the foundational level those forces that were harassing her would increasingly lose their power.  In her situation they were not forces that kept her from her drawing out of the life of Christ but were just harassing her walk and circumstances.

I had a client just last week tell me that he had prayed what some call a first step prayer, .asking God to take away his cravings so he could move on through the learning growing process of recovery without that constant demand. He reported that they were removed to the point his brain didn't automatically tell  him to go take a drink or a drug without him having the opportunity to make a decision about it. That demand is a function of the dopamine pathway of the brain which when it is overstimulated as it often in with drugs and alcohol and other addictive behaviors such as pornography, gambling, eating disorders and sexual behaviors, it overpowers our frontal lobe inhibiting our ability to make a rational choice or judgement, but calling forth our animalistic survival mechanisms into place which we act on apart from conscious choice.

Recently I heard someone talk about the temptation of Adam and woman in the garden.  Who was the tool by which Satan deceived woman?  It was the serpent which is what???  An animal!!!  And what does the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil activate in the human being? What did it activate in woman?  Her animalistic desire, lust, need, whatever you want to call it.  If you look at the language of the serpent animal's proposition, so to speak, to woman, was that it will "make you beautiful, make you wise, and it will be good to taste."  These things like ANYTHING that we rely on to "make us feel good" activate our dopamine pathways which come out of our "survival" or "old brain" which is the same portion of brain every creature in the animal kingdom has.  The different between the human being and the rest of the animal kingdom is that our frontal lobe is more highly developed so that we have been given the "freedom" to make free choices between our thoughts, our feelings and chose our actions apart from "instinct" or programmed DNA responses.   We can choose who we have sex with while those in the animal kingdom are programmed by their DNA what choices. Maybe we'd be better off being like the geese who are programmed to mate with one mate for a life time (just joking).  Most of us can readily admit we have engaged in sex "to make ourselves feel good" and even prompted by the "desire" or "lust" or "feeling horney". To relate on such a base is to engage on the same basis as the animals engage in sexual activity. And we often hear ourselves and  other human beings say things such as "Well, I have needs."  Or "I am just doing what comes naturally."

 Love, on the other hand,  by it's  very nature as we understand our God, our creator, our Lord and our Saviour who Is Love provides choice....free choice.  He created us with the freedom to choose to be in relationship with Him and other people by choice not by animalistic drive and/or satisfaction.

 In the Garden, the serpent (an animal) was used by Satan/Devil to stir up that instinctual part of woman to invite her to respond to that animal, lower nature of desire rather than choose to continue in total fellowship with the Lord God and Adam.  I  have wondered for years how woman was "deceived." And it was only this past week after hearing Joseph Prince preach and refer to Satan as using an "animal" to tempt woman, that some of what I am sharing here was illuminated in my understanding. This post is an effort to share with you some of what I am seeing and learning as the Lord shows me some of these things.

Most  of us can say we understand that wonderful feeling called "lust."  At least we used to call it wonderful. That warm feeling that goes all over our body when we are stirred by something or someone or when "desire" is stirred up?  It is always a desire "for something to make us feel some way."  Sounds just about the language we see in Genesis that was used with woman.  And the Lord God had said, that in the day that you partake of the "fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" you will die.   Whenever I, by choice, whether knowingly or unknowingly, follow desire or lust I have chosen to respond to something external based on how it will "make me feel, make me wise., etc.  rather than  to choose to drink of the internal life of God which fills me by Holy Spirit.  I cannot use my will to "make myself feel good" and drink of the water of Life in Christ Jesus at the same time. 

Our language of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil comes in many expressions.  And when we understand this we will understand Genesis 3:16 more fully.  And I will save this for yet another time of musing. 

Meri