Healthy Influence – GodsPsych Blog

But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly.  Luke 21:34

In Hemingway’s Lost Generation novel, The Sun Also Rises, he describes Mike Campbell, a man of wealth, now broke and alcoholic.  Campbell is asked how he lost his fortune and he replies, “Two ways.  Gradually, then suddenly.”

Then they journeyed from Mount Hor by the Way of the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; and the soul of the people became very discouraged on the way.  And the people spoke against God and against Moses: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and our soul loathes this worthless bread.”  So the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died.  Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD that He take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.  Then the LORD said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.”  So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.  Numbers 21:4-9

You must see past the repetition – the complaining, the carping, the moaning and the groaning of the Israelites as if they are on the worst vacation cruise in human history.  And we realize again this is not simply complaining, but evidence of a discouraged soul, a faithless soul.  God sends the fiery serpents not as a reinforcing consequence for sending the soup back to the kitchen, but as failed faith, a broken Covenant.

Now notice the communication system at work here.  God provides consequences based upon the Covenant and the people clearly recognize it because they appeal to Moses and ask for his intercession with the Lord.  They do not ask for a secular intervention such as a Committee To Study Fiery Serpents, but rather they know they failed God and that God will listen to Moses.  People know how to communicate with God when they fail.

As see then how God responds to the prayers of Moses answering the prayers of the Israelites.  He instructs Moses to build a concrete and visible symbol of a fiery serpent and place it on a post so that anyone afflicted may merely look upon the symbol and find relief.  God does not simply wipe away the affliction and suddenly leave everyone healthy, but rather He has Moses build the symbol and have each sufferer face the symbol, then find restoration.

Please see the psychology at work here.  Each Israelite has to perform a specific action of going to that post with the fiery serpent, standing before it, then looking upon an image of the very thing that afflicted him – the serpent as both cause and cure.  Imagine the attributional search each person would conduct in that instance.  Each person beseeched Moses to intervene and they saw Moses pray to God, asking for help.  Then Moses builds that display, individuals go before it, and are restored.

God’s actions here are both obvious and subtle.  “Look upon the serpent!” is the simple one.  “Think about it!” is the nuance.  As always in their Wanderings, the Israelites are given many different opportunities to think about God.  The interesting lesson is to realize that all of that first generation failed to think or act themselves into faith that made the Promised Land.

Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,   “Take the rod; you and your brother Aaron gather the congregation together. Speak to the rock before their eyes, and it will yield its water; thus you shall bring water for them out of the rock, and give drink to the congregation and their animals.”  So Moses took the rod from before the LORD as He commanded him.  And Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock; and he said to them, “Hear now, you rebels! Must we bring water for you out of this rock?”  Then Moses lifted his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod; and water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their animals drank.  Then the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not believe Me, to hallow Me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them.” Numbers 20:7-12

This is a hard example of faith, faithlessness, and reinforcement.  Many people speak of Job’s patience, but for me Moses leaves him in the shade.  Exodus and Numbers is nothing but constant insult, travail, and tragedy for Moses as the Israelites destroy themselves and their Covenant over the most common of commonplaces.  They don’t like the food.  They don’t like the drink.  They want to party.  They want the New New Thing even if That means False Idols.  And through all this, Moses maintains his faith and humility.

Until now.

The text provides no reason why this provocation snapped Moses, but it clearly did.  Moses receives clear, simple, and direct instruction from God and then goes completely off course with it.  God said nothing about calling out the rebels or dramatizing the action through striking a rock with a stick.  God heard the complaint and told Moses how to handle it.  But Moses desired to punish his problem and, for the first time, Moses wanted a special unique relationship with God over everyone else.  He said,

Must we bring water for you . . .

We?  Who’s we?  God needs somebody else for this task?  Yeah, the new leadership team of Moses and this Other Guy.  The exterior behavior of Moses demonstrates an interior belief that conceives of God as something considerably less than He is.  The action shows the faithlessness.

God’s response is yet another great illustration of Reinforcement Theory and its effective application.  God immediately speaks to Moses and Aaron and delivers the consequence for faithlessness.  God does not strike them dead with a fiery meteor in a showy display of a Nervous God.  He just tells them and them alone the consequence.  He does not humiliate Moses and Aaron in front of the Israelites.  But He does teach them through consequences the nature of faith and commitment.

Now there was no water for the congregation; so they gathered together against Moses and Aaron.  And the people contended with Moses and spoke, saying: “If only we had died when our brethren died before the LORD!  Why have you brought up the assembly of the LORD into this wilderness, that we and our animals should die here?  And why have you made us come up out of Egypt, to bring us to this evil place? It is not a place of grain or figs or vines or pomegranates; nor is there any water to drink.”  Numbers 20:2-5

When people confront an aversive consequence as a result of their efforts, they often engage counterfactual thinking as evidenced in this text.  The Israelites chose to leave Egypt for the Promised Land knowing that it would be a long and difficult journey, but when they actually confronted the difficulty, they often lapsed into counterfactuals.  They recall Egypt as the good times with figs and vines and pomegranates thoughtlessly forgetting the bad times with the Pharaoh and much more importantly forgetting their Covenant with God.  Counterfactual thinking – inventing a past to relieve the present – is human nature and not necessarily sinful.  The error here is the Israelites inability to recognize the difference between a difficult moment and a commitment to God.

I emerged in the Christian tradition.  My family lived in small town, rural Missouri, so as a child I attended Baptist services and marched with banners singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Then, when my family moved to suburban Chicago, I took confirmation classes as a mainline Methodist, leaving the hot tents of my Baptist childhood as a memory while I sat in air-conditioned Methodist classes.  Then onto college where my poor education in theology ran into the maw of relentless rational investigation, repeated empirical testing, and refined mathematical verification.  My faith had no chance against my intellect largely because I had learned faith from the outside in and I am an inside out person – I think to do.  Thus, I thought myself out of faith.

The following thirty years passed with variations between hot skepticism and blazing atheism depending on what I’d been reading most recently.  Plato gave me a soul and rational ethics without God.  Then even walking out of the cave and into the bright light of truth became an illusion and faithlessness became my faith.  I did what was right in my mind.  Darwin,  Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx.  As an university professor this posed little problem and indeed the greater my doubt in God, the more comfortable my intellectual life and career.

Then in my fiftieth year, three born-again experiences, and now, nearing sixty, I am a happy, thoughtful, and fearful Christian.

Of course, you might think, this had to happen.  My arrow of life was launched from the bow of belief in my family.  Is it any wonder that as my arrow responds to the laws of gravity and it falls to earth, it falls into faith?  But, consider that virtually every atheist starts in belief.  Or so says most of the ones that confess.  Read them.  Consider their circumstances.  Almost all cite chapter and verse of their emerging consciousness decorated with religious signs and symbols.  Then their revelation, like mine, into skepticism.  I’m an odd duck to have followed the same migration as so many doubters, but then turn to faith.

Of course, my faith today is nothing like my faith as either a child or a young adult.  My faith then was largely thoughtless, the faith of observing, imitating, obtaining consequences and moving along.  I did not think past a Catechism, a ritual, a memorized prayer filed away with other required memorizations like lines from the Gettysburg Address, a doggerel poem from Kipling, and my home address and phone number.  My faith then was the faith of doing what others were doing when they did it.  I was faithful about the performance, but it would be incorrect to conclude I had much faith.

My born-again experiences delivered me into faith, felt and known, not just performed.  I realize now that I’d had several prior experiences that were from the Holy Spirit, but at the time had just seemed unusually unusual.  And if you’ve had born-again experiences, you probably know what I mean.  And if you haven’t, you think I’m confused about experience and how to describe it.

I am riding time’s arrow, but it is not gravity that pulls me.