…the number of people who suffer
from such newly identified "sicknesses" is increasing even
faster. The therapy industry is clearly
not solving the problem of what Scripture calls sin. Instead it merely convinces
multitudes that they are desperately sick and therefore not really responsible
for their wrong behavior. It gives them
permission to think of themselves as patients, not malefactors. And it encourages them to undergo extensive -
and expensive- treatment that lasts for years, or better yet, for a
lifetime. These new diseases, it seems,
are ailments from which no one is ever expected to recover
completely……Recovery, the code word for programs modeled after Alcoholics
Anonymous, is explicitly marketed as a lifelong program. We've grown accustomed to the image of a
person who has been sober for forty years standing up in an A A meeting and
saying, "I'm Bill, and I'm an alcoholic." Now all "addicts" are using the
same approach - including sex addicts, gambling addicts, nicotine addicts,
anger addicts, wife-beating addicts, child-molesting addicts, debt addicts, eat addicts, or whatever. People suffering from such maladies are
taught to speak of themselves as "recovering" never
"recovered." Those who dare to
think of themselves as delivered from their affliction are told they are living
in denial….. Disease model therapy therefore feeds the very problem it is
supposed to treat. It alleviates any sense of guilt, while making people feel
they are victims helplessly bound for life to their affliction….(it)is
disastrously counterproductive. By
casting the sinner in the role of a victim, it ignores or minimizes the
personal guilt inherent in misbehavior.
"I am sick" is much easier to say than, "I have
sinned." But it doesn't deal with
the fact that one's transgression is a serious offense against a holy,
omniscient, omnipotent God. Personal
guilt is for that very reason at the heart of what must be confronted when
dealing with one's sin. But the
disease-model remedy cannot address the problem of guilt without explaining it
away. And by explaining guilt away,
disease-model therapy does untold violence to the human conscience. It is therefore no remedy at all, but a
disastrous prescription for escalating wickedness and eternal damnation.
John Macarthur
