By Not Known
Our Sunshine fellowship recently had a talk on Dementia – a degeneration of brain function due to damage or disease with numerous symptoms. ‘Do you remember locking your car dȯor just now?‘ It is easy for younger folks to simply dismiss the topic as one for the aged and to worry about it at later times. But this illness creeps silently and unnoticed into anyone even in the adult stage of life.
Many people fear physical dementia because it creates disconnections between persons and reality. In its worst stage, it leaves one living like a hung- up computer with a malfunctioning RAM to a damaged hard-disk. This often poses severe threats to the quality of life and relationships.
The Bible speaks in many places of a different kind of dementia amongst God’s people. It is no respecter of generation or age. It strikes at Israel in the Desert of Sin (Ex 16:1- 3) and even in the Promised Land (1 Sam 8:7-8). It eats away their spiritual nerves leaving a spiritual disconnection with God and with reality (1 Sam 12:12). Fear and restlessness plague their way. The symptom – ‘Do you remember whom you belong to?‘ Putting it negatively – ‘Why do you keep forgetting your God?‘
This spiritual dementia that the Bible talks about poses an even more fearsome and severe threat. Think about those words, …consider what great things he has done for you. Yet if you persist in doing evil both you and your king will be swept away. (1 Sam 12:24-25)
In the light of the Gospel and Christ’s Second Coming, that ‘swept away‘ language is one of judgement and eternal destruction of the soul (Rev 20: 15). One who keeps forgetting God as his father may well have never been a true child of God in Christ. But let us not waste energy over questions of God’s sovereignty and choice to the neglect of what is our responsibility to him who has revealed himself to us in Christ. Instead of endlessly asking, ‘Am I chosen?‘ we ought to be asking, ‘Have I trusted and keep trusting and honouring God who has already opened up the way to life through his Son on the Cross?‘
Faithlessness and unfaithfulness are the twofold disease causing spiritual dementia. Deal with them early and seriously before they rob your soul into eternal destruction.