Evil oppresses people. Some of it is the consequence of our own personal choices—of course! But a lot of evil enters people’s lives because they have been injured by others. If you think about it, healthy civilizations of all cultures are based on laws which prevent people from hurting one another. The Ten Commandments, as an example, are all about protecting people. Jesus said the law can be summarized into loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. How simple. And yet how quickly we forget to do the simple things—even five minutes after we hear the words. How quickly a society that turns from God’s law turns into “the law of the jungle.”
Where do we find healing in a post-modern era, whose lack of belief in right or wrong leads to ongoing lawlessness and suffering? We find it by going back to the first principles of scripture! And how do we apply this practically when we seem to be so far removed from the ideal?
As a counselor who daily works with both Christians and non-Christians, I’ve noticed a trend. People tend to blame themselves for things that are not their fault and blame others for things that may be their own fault. In other words, our perception is distorted because of our thinking; that’s the way the human brain works. But Proverb 17:15 says, God detests acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent; it is a distortion of the truth to blame others for our mistakes, or to receive the blame for wrongs done to us by other. [This distortion is easier to notice when people are blaming others. And you tend not to have as much sympathy for people who claim to be victimized by others, especially if you haven’t heard the other side of the story.]
For people who blame themselves, the problem tends to be subtle and somehow “personal” rather than apparent. There is a famous scene in the movie Good Will Hunting where the young man who is the sullen, bright, rebellious hero of the story is confronted by his therapist with the trauma that was perpetrated against him by his father. In this very emotional scene, the therapist had to say to the young man “it’s not your fault” over and over again so that he could rid himself of the self-blame that he had been carrying around for so many years. When you are young and have been traumatized, the only way you can make sense of the world, and of the hurt, is to perceive that somehow you were the person responsible for the terrible things that happened to you. It is a big lie of Satan, and one that even a secular therapist in a movie like Good Will Hunting could see through.
As strange as it may sound, there are many of us that protect ourselves by blaming ourselves. This leads to self-hatred and self-invalidation. There are many of you reading this who were traumatized as children or young adults. Your brain told you then—and you believed it—that you deserved the trauma or that it was your fault. Even today you continue to treat yourself with contempt or with feelings of unworthiness. This is largely a result of your past.
There is also a part of you that knows this is a lie—so you become defensive. This defensiveness leads to a constant battle between the “bad” part of you and the “good” part of you. These “good” and “bad” parts of you are both false mental constructs of yourself. Much of people’s guilt is self-imposed. It is a trick of Satan, our enemy. He wants you to beat yourself up, talk negatively to yourself, or believe that the negative feelings in your head about yourself are real. You walk in shame. Your shame, in turn, causes you to harbor resentments and build up what Brene Brown calls “shame shields” of anger, isolation and taking care of others more than you take care of yourself. But God made you to be saved and redeemed, not to retreat behind shields of shame.
Forgiving yourself, both for things that you have and haven’t done, is an important way to open the door to allow Jesus to come in and clean house and give you his eternal forgiveness. That forgiveness is God’s free gift to you, but you actually have to accept it through Christ. Please consider forgiving yourself today. If you are a Christian, God has already forgiven you. If you are not a Christian, please do not deprive yourself of this free gift. He stands at the door and knocks. You have to open the door. You would do it for someone else. Why not yourself?
Tags: evil, forgiveness, suffering, shame, blame, postmodern, shields, lawlessness, self-forgiveness
