A. Introduction.
1. The failure of one generation of believers does not necessarily extend to the next generation. This was true of both Moses’ and Jeremiah’s ministry. The adults rejected the message but the children, the young people, the teenagers were positive to the teaching of the word of God.
2. How do children handle pressure and adversity? Depending on the age, growth, and maturity of the child, adversity, stress, and circumstances can be all one and the same. Therefore, the parents should be the child’s FLOT line of the soul (the forward defensive line of troops). They should be there to prevent the development of stress in the life of a child. Parents have been entrusted to care for and protect the soul of their children. What happens to the FLOT line protection, if: the parents are not there, the parents are hearers of the Word and abuse their authority, the parents are totally inflexible with the “I am right” syndrome (authority with no leadership), the parents are fighting all the time, the parents do things in front of their kids that they should not do, or they tell their children doctrine is number one in their life and then they divorce. Now the child has no FLOT line but only stress from the parents who are suppose to be protecting him or her.
a. Stress in a child’s life is directly proportional to the stability of the parents or parent.
b. Incest and child abuse are sickening, but if one in three children are sexually abused (and they are), then probably eighty percent are mentally abused and deprived of their parental FLOT line. Therefore, defense mechanisms, habits, patterns, and comfort zones to avoid fear and cope with life are developed if they are to survive.
3. We do not need teenage programs. We need parental application. Many parents expect different results in their life when they do the same thing. We need changes in our application to get different results. We need more application in the area of marriage and the family. Parents need to know how to use their tools, how to use their influence. Children begin life with blind faith and trust. If the parents destroy their children’s trust, what does the child substitute and how difficult is it going to be for him to trust God and metabolize doctrine because of garbage he developed in childhood? Parents have the most influence in a child’s life.
4. God goes out of His way to do anything He can to save the soul of the abused child. He will judge those who have abused children. The believer victim must not have any mental attitude sins toward those who abused them. The greatest and highest function of your spiritual life is to win a complete victory over any traumatic experience of your life.
B. Matt 18:1-14.
1. All of these verses are part of one subject—young people and child abuse. The outline of the passage:
a. Verses 1-4 are the background analogies.
(1) The question of the disciples, verse 1.
(2) The illustration of the child, verse 2.
(3) The analogy to conversion, verse 3.
(4) A second child analogy, verse 4.
b. Verses 5-10 are the realities.
(1) Parents are the guardians of the child’s soul, verse 5.
(2) Soul murder of the child, verse 6.
(3) The first guardian of the abused child, verse 7.
(4) The warning to the unbeliever child abuser, verses 8-9.
(5) The second guardian of the abused child, verse 10.
c. Verses 11-14 are the recovery from child abuse.
(1) The non-canonical verse, verse 11.
(2) The analogy to the abused child, verses 12-13.
(a) The analogy to the straying sheep, verse 12.
(b) The analogy to the recovered sheep, verse 13.
(3) Recovery from child abuse is the will of God, verse 14.
2. Mt 18:1, “At that hour the disciples came to Jesus and said, `Who then is the greater in the kingdom of heaven?’”
a. The disciples have gathered for a party in honor of the Lord at the home of Peter, Mk 9:33-34. All day they have been arguing about which one is the greater.
(1) Self-consciousness is a part of soul life which God created for each one of us. Self-consciousness is a perfectly normal function of the soul until, through self-absorption which creates an outside pressure, the person becomes preoccupied with self. You can create your own outside pressure by the thoughts in your own soul. Stress is what we do to ourselves. We do not need any outside help to create stress in our lives. We often deal with this stress by using a defense mechanism, which creates unconscious garbage in our souls. Then, we do something later that shocks us and do not know why we did it.
(2) The disciples manifest stress in the soul. They were completely absorbed in themselves. Many believers are so completely absorbed in themselves, they never come close to living the Christian life. They are so preoccupied with themselves, they are arguing about who among them is the greatest. The greatest among them, Paul, was not even a believer yet. Arrogant preoccupation with self excludes reality by adopting defense mechanisms and accumulating garbage in the subconscious instead of using the problem solving devices to prevent the outside pressure of adversity from becoming the inside pressure of stress in the soul. They are acting like children.
b. They had learned doctrine but had great gaps in the FLOT line of their soul. They were so absorbed with self in subjective arrogance, so involved in inordinate ambition and competition, that the arrogance complex of sins distracted them from their spiritual life.
3. Mt 18:2, “Then He called a child to Himself and had him stand before them.” The party has come to a halt now. The Lord did not answer the question immediately. The child was Peter’s son and a believer according to Mt 18:6. Jesus will use this young child as an illustration of the importance of humility as a virtue of the spiritual life.
a. Humility is authority orientation which must first be taught in the home. None of the apostles will accept the authority of the others.
b. Humility is grace orientation which reflects metabolized doctrine circulating in the soul of the child-believer. This must be taught by the parents and cannot be left up to the church, the school, or any other organization.
c. Humility is objectivity, and therefore, teachability.
d. Humility is doctrinal orientation, which is the basic value and function of the spiritual life, and therefore, a combination of parental and pastoral teaching, resulting in the parents acting as the FLOT line of the soul of their children.
4. Mt 18:3, “Then He said, `Truly I say to you, unless you turn around in your soul [salvation] and become like children, you shall never enter the kingdom of heaven.’”
a. “Truly I say to you” means “This is a most solemn declaration which I say to you.” “To you” is a dative of advantage in the Greek which means it is to your advantage to hear this doctrine.
b. The aorist passive subjunctive from the verb STREPHO has the active meaning “to turn, to change something into something else,” and in the passive “to turn or change inwardly.” Plato [Republic, chapter 7, lines 518c-519b] gave us the true meaning of STREPHO, “a turning of the soul to the brightest being.” Therefore, in our passage it means the turning of the soul or turn around in the soul, a reference to our spiritual birth through faith in Christ. Matthew is using STREPHO as a metaphor for faith in Christ. There are several biblical metaphors for faith in Christ.
(1) Receiving a gift, Jn 1:12.
(2) Walking through a door, Jn 10:9.
(3) Drinking water, Jn 4:14.
(4) Eating bread, Jn 6:35.
(5) Coming to Christ, Jn 6:36-7; Mt 11:28.
(6) Embracing, obeying, accepting the invitation of the gospel, Rom 10:16.
(7) Calling on the name of the Lord, Rom 10:10-13.
(8) Turning around or toward Christ, Mt 18:3.
c. There is no greatness in the kingdom of heaven unless, like Peter’s young son, a person is converted by turning to Christ through faith alone in Christ alone. Judas Iscariot is at the party and will never do it.
d. The first system of knowledge and reality is faith perception. Just as the child recognizes the authority of parents and learns from them by faith, so all human beings in the status of spiritual death must use this same non-meritorious system of perception for eternal salvation. The only hope for the abused child is to place their faith in the One who will never betray that trust—our Lord Jesus Christ. The abused child has been betrayed by the parent, which is the destruction of the faith function of the soul. The young son of Peter was well known to the disciples, hence, the perfect illustration of regeneration through faith in Christ. “Becoming like children” does not mean to start acting like a child again but to believe in Christ as this child had done.
e. The lesson from the first illustration is very simple:
(1) If children can believe in Christ for eternal salvation, so can adults.
(2) Therefore, the sooner you believe in Christ the better opportunity you have for spiritual dynamics and fulfilling the protocol plan of God for the Church.
(3) However, a spiritually dead unbeliever must be born again through faith alone in Christ alone before he can live the spiritual life on earth.
(4) At the moment of salvation through faith in Christ, every believer receives forty things from God, among them, your very own spiritual life.
(5) After you believe, you and you alone are the only one who can live your spiritual life. Only those who have eternal life can have their spiritual life, but it is optional.
f. The child has no FLOT line of doctrine in their soul. The parent must be the FLOT line. When parents abuse their children, they are committing soul murder of their child. The child has faith in their parent and has now been betrayed. The soul of the child is destroyed. The child grows up being terribly cruel to their own children. The system is self- perpetuating. Parenthood is a privilege and honor and should not be passed on to others (school, church, etc.) to do.
g. The apodosis of the sentence is “you shall never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Rejection of Christ as savior means you will spend eternity in the Lake of Fire, Jn 3:18. Immortal soul plus eternal life equals salvation. Immortal soul minus eternal life means condemnation and eternal judgment. Faith is not a commitment; you believe as a little child believes. Salvation by faith alone in Christ alone is the prerequisite for your spiritual life, and living the spiritual life is how you become great in the kingdom of heaven.
h. The analogy to the child indicates two important doctrines.
(1) No regeneration or spiritual birth means no eternal life.
(2) No regeneration or spiritual birth means no spiritual life in time, therefore, no greater or lesser rating in the kingdom of heaven.
5. Mt 18:4, “Therefore, whoever will humble himself as a child, this person is the greater in the kingdom of heaven.”
a. Arrogance destroys the spiritual life; humility facilitates the spiritual life. Arrogance is the inevitable result of the outside pressures of adversity, prosperity, or dying breaking through the FLOT line to become stress in the soul.
b. As long as you are arrogantly preoccupied with self and absorbed with self instead of doctrine, you will use defense mechanisms to blame others for your failures. Arrogant preoccupation with self excludes reality by adopting defense mechanisms instead of learning and using the ten problem solving devices of the protocol plan of God. Arrogant absorption with self accumulates garbage in the soul and garbage in the soul excludes the utilization of the problem solving devices.
c. When a believer lives and advances in his own spiritual life, he will humble himself. Humility is authority orientation, grace orientation, doctrinal orientation, personal love for God, impersonal love for all mankind, a personal sense of destiny, and the function of the problem solving devices in place. The humble believer is the greater believer; for the humble believer is grace oriented. There is no spiritual life without humility.
d. The kingdom of heaven refers to any type of rulership God may assert on earth at any given time in human history. Prophetically it is the millennium. However, the parables in Matthew 13 represent the kingdom of heaven in its mystery form, which is the dynamic power of God’s rule on earth during the Hypostatic Union and Second Advent. In the Church Age, the kingdom of heaven is the impact of the believers who execute the protocol plan of God. The kingdom of heaven is functioning among Church Age believers in its mystery form during the Church Age.
e. Childlike faith in parents is natural on the part of a child and part of the divine institution of marriage and the family. Marriage is the state in which one should have children. The child is dependent on the parents. Consequently, any form of child abuse is betrayal and instant shock for the child. The child has a faith directed toward his parents that he will never have again. Therefore, the most important learning period in the life of a child is between ages one through six. This is when the personality is formed. In child abuse, this faith can be destroyed and puts scar tissue on the child’s soul and destroys faith as a system of perception. Child abuse also destroys humility because the child becomes preoccupied with self.
(1) For example, the child victim of incest is isolated from society and from the protection of the home without help or assistance, left alone to cope with this trauma by use of his or her own resources, and the resources (faith and humility) have just been destroyed. The parents have become the monsters. Almost permanent flaws are developed at that time and can only be erased from life through two factors: regeneration through faith in Christ and living your very own spiritual life after regeneration. Bible doctrine helps to restore your faith and humility.
(2) As an adult, the victim of child abuse has a chip on their shoulder and anyone who wrongs them can become the same object of rage, hatred, and trauma that their parent or parents were in childhood.
f. There are degrees of child abuse.
(1) Traumatic abuse, which includes incest, torture, and being sold into slavery.
(2) Less traumatic abuse, which includes neglect, indifference, unjust punishment, controlling by guilt (which is very common among legalistic believers).
g. While the family should be the place of security, there exists the nightmare of family entrapment, depression and hysteria, anxiety, and other forms of subjective problems.
h. Principles of Humility.
(1) Num 12:3 teaches the importance of humility. Spiritual greatness is related to humility in every dispensation of human history. “Now the man Moses was very humble, more than any man who was on the face of the earth.” Even though he had to be abandoned by his mother, he did not lose his childlike faith or his humility. This should be an encouragement to anyone who has ever been under any abuse.
(2) Humility is often related to the dynamics of the spiritual life in any dispensation as noted by the pivot in the time of Solomon, 2 Chr 7:14, “And My people, over whom My name is called, if they will humble themselves and pray and seek My face [perception of doctrine] and turn from their evil ways, then I will hear from heaven, I will forgive their sin, I will heal their land.”
(3) Prov 15:33, “Wisdom teaches the fear (or reverence) of the Lord and humility comes before honor.” Honor is the attainment of spiritual greatness, but humility comes first.
(4) 1 Pet 5:5-6, “Likewise you young men be subject to your elders and all of you clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, `For God makes war against the arrogant believer but He gives grace to the humble believer.’ Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God that He may promote you at the proper time.” Jam 4:6, “But He gives greater grace. Therefore, it says, `God makes war against the arrogant believer but He gives grace to the humble believer.’”
(5) Prov 29:23, “A person’s arrogance will bring him down but a spirit of humility will attain honor.”
(6) Humility is not acquired genetically. It is the status of being humble and being humble is the antithesis of arrogance. It is acquired first through authority orientation. For the child, this begins with the parents. Humility must be attained through the teaching and the just and loving function of the authority of the parents. Humility as teachability recognizes two authorities: the authority of the parents and the content of their teaching and the authority of the pastor and the content of his teaching. The greatest humility function of the child is what he learns in the home. Child abuse destroys teachability at the most critical point in life and substitutes arrogant preoccupation with self, a lifetime habit which is almost impossible to break apart from Bible doctrine.
i. There are at least five categories of child abuse.
(1) Incest or sexual abuse. This includes exposing yourself to your children. Parents, siblings, relatives, or others are victimizing and traumatizing a child through various categories of sexual activity.
(2) Physical abuse. This includes torture, burning of children, bashings, beatings, physical injury, and even murder.
(3) Soul abuse. This is destruction of the child’s faith and humility. This is also failure to function as the FLOT of the soul for your children during their formative years (ages one through six) as per Mt 18:5; Eph 6:4; and Col 3:21. This is also failure of Christian parents to evangelize their children and failure to teach your child basic doctrine. Failure to teach your child’s conscience the difference between right and wrong. Failure to render just punishment when a child is wrong or has violated establishment principles. When people do not punish their children when there children are wrong, the children will accumulate and perpetuate guilt, which is a guarantee of emotional revolt of the soul. Teaching your child to hate the other parent in a divorce is soul abuse. Children should never be involved or take sides in the problems and antagonisms that occur in marriage. Differences should be solved away from the children. Failure to teach the principle of authority in the home is soul abuse.
(4) Emotional abuse. This includes parents seeking to control their children through the emotional complex of sins. This includes belittling, bullying, isolation, arousing fear by threatening, rage, fear, shame, guilt, defense mechanisms, sleep disturbances, loss of faith and humility necessary for learning, threatening to take away their toys or do harm to a pet dog or cat. Never make a child feel guilty; to make a child do things because you have instilled guilt in them is not a true sense of responsibility but a neurotic approach. Parents should never motivate their children through anger, hatred, malice, tantrums, or violence. Parents must never encourage either insensitivity or hypersensitivity. Children should never be permitted to sulk in self-pity, or to whine or snivel, which is arrogant preoccupation with self. Parents should never encourage jealousy, bitterness, slander, judging, lying, or any form of vilification of other children. Spanking removes guilt. If the child is not spanked justly, then guilt builds up and results in neurosis.
(5) Neglect and Deprivation. This includes failure to provide the necessities of life (food, shelter, clothing), failure to teach the basic concepts of life (like good hygiene, vocabulary, how to think), failure to provide protection from abuse (medical care), and failure of Christian parents to evangelize their own children and teach them basic doctrine. There are five thinking skills which a child must learn before they leave the home and go to school: perception, memory, problem solving, decision making, and creativity. Most things we learn in life, we learn at a very early age. Social skills, spiritual skills, thinking skills, must be taught by parents in the home before the child learns competitive skills in school. Child abuse destroys both social and thinking skills, leaving the child to struggle with the maladaptive defense mechanisms and the competitive skills which handicap their start in life. Competitive skills minus thinking and social skills result in general maladaptation and unsuitable behavior. When the spiritual skills are missing, it is an even greater disaster. Competitive skills come naturally. All categories of child abuse result in some form of traumatic stress disorder.
j. While all training must begin in the home, transition must be made to both spiritual and academic life. At some point, spiritual training is related to the function of the spiritual gift of pastor-teacher. As child maturation occurs, there must be a direct or indirect means of making the transition from teaching by the parents in the home to teaching the children by the pastor-teacher or those who have been delegated that responsibility.
k. Two valuable possessions of the child are destroyed by child abuse.
(1) Child abuse destroys the childlike faith as a system of perception. This creates a vacuum in the soul. Everything that is false and wrong will be picked up by this vacuum.
(2) Child abuse destroys humility and replaces it with arrogance (preoccupation with self) and the emotional complex of sins. The defense mechanism used for survival by abused children (like suppression, dissociation, denial) results in garbage in the subconscious plus deep seated flaws used as weapons in projection.
6. Mt 18:5, “Moreover whoever receives one child such as this one because of My person receives Me.”
a. Parents receive the primary responsibility for guarding the child’s soul. Parents receive the greatest responsibility in life when they bring children into the home. They function as the defense line of the child’s soul to prevent outside pressures from penetrating the soul.
(1) Parents are the FLOT line of their child’s soul. If parents do not have their own FLOT line of the soul, then they cannot be the FLOT line of their child’s soul. When Christian parents fail to establish a FLOT line for the souls of their children, that child loses their childlike faith in the parents and humility and becomes totally preoccupied with self.
(2) Parents have the responsibility for all categories of child care, including mental, physical, spiritual care.
(3) Spiritual care means both evangelizing and teaching Bible doctrine consistently in the home.
(4) No outside teaching of children is as valuable as the teaching they should and must receive in the home. This teaching must never be disturbed by bad language, by anger, by shouting, by screaming, by yelling, which things also become a part of child abuse. Fighting in front of your child is a traumatic experience for the child and is child abuse.
(5) After salvation and faithful teaching of doctrine to the children, they will eventually develop their own FLOT line.
b. Prov 22:5-6, “The wise sees the evil and hides himself. He who guards himself will be far from them. Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Guarding self is the function of the FLOT line of the soul and the child must depend on the parents for this protection. Children should learn in the home long before they go to school.
c. Some parents abuse their children through neglect, manipulation by guilt, unrelenting criticism, hostility toward the children and hostility between the parents, non-protection from abuse from outside the home. The child gets into a perpetual rage, fear, hysteria, guilt. Much abuse comes from parents who are alcoholics or drug abusers. Child abuse is an abuse of power. It is the function of power lust on the part of the parents.
d. Eph 6:4, “You parents, stop provoking your children to anger but always rear them in the training and instruction about the Lord.” This is a mandate to avoid child abuse. Anger is an emotional sin representing the entire emotional complex of sins. Child react to unfairness, injustice, abuse, legalism. These things become soul murder as much as other things such as incest.
e. Col 3:21, “You fathers [parents], stop embittering your children that they may become discouraged.” A child neglected by a parent can become bitter in the formative years and that bitterness leaves them but surfaces every time there is any problem with any person in the human race. Their reaction is bitterness plus self-righteousness. The child who is rejected must very carefully build a defense mechanism of self-righteousness and self-justification, which becomes preoccupation with self.
7. Mt 18:6, “But whoever causes one of these little ones who have believe in Me to be trapped by child abuse, it would be better for him [the one guilty of child abuse] that a millstone turned by an ass were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the deepest part of the sea.”
a. If you do not solve a problem immediately, you create new problems. The time to solve a problem is when it occurs. If you postpone solving problems, you create out of that postponement more and more problems. Therefore, you become self-destructive.
b. The volition of the child cannot exceed the volition of the parents during the child’s formative years. Therefore, the importance of the inculcation of spiritual values in both the parents and the children. If the volition of the parents is going in the wrong direction, this affects the volition of the child. The child will only find solutions to their problems of abuse when they have learned doctrine and put the ten problem solving devices on their own soul.
c. The child in view in this example is a believer. Children that are victims of child abuse are sometimes believers as are their abusing parents. Abused children are often evangelized outside of the home by other organizations designed to help abused children. These organizations take up the slack where parents fail. d. Those who are victims of child abuse frequently become abusers themselves because they have certain factors which make it impossible for them to understand reality and they have developed a tremendous defense system of reaction to anything they do not agree with in terms of self- righteousness. An abused child acts in a certain way from their old sin nature because defense mechanisms build flaws. The child has never really resolved the problem of being abused. Some of their sins and failures are a habit from reacting to abuse. If you are around parents who are constantly complaining, then this attitude rubs off on you and you will do the same thing. Advance into the future after you have dealt with the traumatic past. Children learn to abuse loved ones from their parents and perpetuate it to their children. After three generations of perpetuated child abuse, God disciplines the nation.
e. Through cognition, inculcation, and metabolization, your past, including child abuse can be drowned with the abuser. It requires many decisions to reverse all the problems created by child abuse. Garbage in the soul from dwelling in the past and still reacting to unjust and traumatic experiences of the past destroy the potential for your spiritual life in the present.
(1) The evil child abuser should not have a decent burial but an unmarked grave. These people should be erased from the earth with no reminder of them. Child abuse should never be encouraged in any way by society. Some people are just too evil to live. Even the memory of such a person should be removed forever by the problem solving devices. Phil 3:13 says we are to “forget those things which are behind.” This is especially important for those who have been abused as children.
(a) Using childhood defense mechanisms (such as denial, repression, projection) as an adult make it impossible for you to execute the protocol plan of God. You will spend your entire life maligning, judging, gossiping, creating a public lie about someone else to destroy them, and seek revenge against others.
(b) If you use the past to create present garbage in your soul to be bitter, to blame others for all your problems, to complain throughout your life, to be vindictive, to be motivated by guilt, to be angry at life, you will never execute the protocol plan of God for your life.
© You cannot change the past. You are still alive. Sprint forward to those things which are ahead in your life. You will either use the problem solving devices in your soul or the defense mechanisms in your soul. There is not enough room for both. There is no place for defense mechanisms in the function of the spiritual life.
(2) The child abuser should end up far out to sea with a giant milestone around his neck. When the problem solving devices take over your soul through the metabolization of doctrine, your past, including child abuse, is over the horizon of the sea and buried in the depths of the sea.
(3) Garbage in the soul from dwelling in the past hinders, frustrates, and even destroys the spiritual life of the present. Regardless of how bad the childhood environment may have been, to dwell on it in adulthood causes the believer to be preoccupied with self, which means the accumulation of garbage in the soul. Arrogant preoccupation with self excludes reality by adopting defense mechanisms instead of problem solving devices on the FLOT line of your soul.
(a) It is the Lord’s desire, above all else, that the abused child recover and be restored to spiritual health.
(b) The sins of the arrogance complex combine with the sins of the emotional complex to trash your soul and add to the garbage of your subconscious from childhood abuse. Your garbage has never been taken out to sea and buried. It is not necessary for you to react to child abuse.
© Running down your parents or marital partner is no solution to the problem. Child abuse in the past is no excuse for marital failure in the present.
(4) Abused children who do not replace the defense mechanisms with problem solving devices from metabolized doctrine in the soul make very cruel parents. Victims of child abuse who do not recover through the problem solving devices are very cruel. Cruelty begets cruelty without some sort of problem solving device.
(a) Believers, reacting to their childhood and presently absorbed with themselves to the exclusion of present reality (like God’s grace and present provision for their life), are daily creating more and more garbage in the soul. Once the subconscious of the soul begins to leak this garbage into the stream of consciousness and once the person rejects any form of truth, eventually there is scar tissue in the soul which makes the person cruel, abusive, and bitter.
(b) Cruelty is one of the things that an abused child uses as a defense mechanism. If they find one thing wrong with someone else, they consider that person to be all wrong. This is called “splitting” by psychology.
© Many believers who were abused as children develop bitterness and a very strong self-righteous attitude which leads to a lot of emotional trauma. The solution is not found in short term emotional speeches by pastors. It takes consistent, faithful teaching of the word of God.
(5) You cannot move ahead in your spiritual life when you are constantly fighting the battle of defense mechanisms versus the problem solving devices in your soul. As long as there are defense mechanisms in the soul of any adult, there is the potential for becoming neurotic or psychotic. The issue is not in the past but in the future. The issue is not the cause (child abuse), the issue is the solution (Bible doctrine circulating in the stream of consciousness from which you extrapolate your very own problem solving devices). We use our volition to provide the cause, but God uses His sovereignty and grace to provide the solution. The past deals with causes, the future deals with solutions. It is time to dump the causes and start the solutions.
f. The Doctrine of the Millstone Transfer.
(1) The millstone judgment belongs to the abuser, to those guilty of child abuse. The judgment does not belong to the victim.
(2) But when the victim reacts through defense mechanisms, there are inevitable repercussions: garbage in the subconscious, the function of the arrogance and emotional complex of sins. The victim of child abuse often shares the millstone with the evil person who initiates such abuse. Never share the millstone with your abuser.
(3) Defense mechanisms that delivered the abused child destroy the adult. For example, dissociation results in multiple personality disorders; denial results in projection. Psychotherapy is helpful in bringing the trauma out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind where it can be dwelt with. But once you deal with it, you must move on in your spiritual life. You cannot look back or go back for justification of the actions of your old sin nature.
(4) Millstones of your life must be removed by the function of the ten problem solving devices. The combination of the faith-rest drill and doctrinal orientation is necessary to remove the millstone of guilt from around your own neck. Never share a millstone with your abuser; it will drown you in self-pity.
(a) When the victim reacts, the victim gets a piece of the millstone. You will be off balance all of your life until you learn how to take it out of your life and throw it away, and this requires spiritual strength from Bible doctrine and the problem solving devices on the FLOT line of your soul.
(b) God has provided for every millstone in life. Through the function of the problem solving devices, the millstone you share with guilty persons can be buried forever with the abuser.
© Move on with your life and let the supreme court of heaven deal with the guilty. Forget those things which are behind and reach out toward those things which are in front of you, and press toward the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
(d) You and you alone are the only one who can live your own spiritual life. No one else can live it for you. Therefore, move on with your life and let God deal with the guilty. Do not react to injustice. Never allow child abuse in your past to drag you down to the level of the abuser who has the giant millstone around his neck.
(e) The reaction to child abuse has an overpowering sin nature implication in the life of the innocent victim.
g. The solution to child abuse is regeneration followed by postsalvation spiritual dynamics. The survivors of child abuse come in two categories.
(1) Those who survive without God’s help. They destroy their lives by use of the defense mechanisms (dissociation, repression, denial, projection).
(2) Those who survive with God’s help. They are believers who use spiritual dynamics. They use divine power available in the spiritual life—the power of God the Holy Spirit and the word of God. They utilize metabolized doctrine circulating in the stream of consciousness to form and use the ten problem solving devices.
8. Mt 18:7.
a. Introductory Principles.
(1) Child abuse is the abuse of power. Child abuse is power lust of the old sin nature.
(2) Parents have power over helpless children and can easily get away with misrule and tyranny.
(3) Child abusers have a powerful compulsion in the lust pattern of the sin nature. A powerful lust opens the door for the entire lust pattern.
(4) The powerful compulsion in child abusers is to repeat the circumstances of their own childhood. There is a strong cruelty factor where there should be love, thoughtfulness, and a sense of responsibility.
(5) Abusers of children have been abused themselves in many cases by their own parents.
(6) There is no heredity in child abuse. It is a function of the sin nature. It is passing on trauma from one generation to the next.
(7) Child abuse is the passing down of a traumatic past from one generation to the next generation.
b. Mt 18:7, “Woe to the world because of child abuse! For it is inevitable that child abuse cases occur; but woe to that person through whom the child abuse comes!”
(1) The first sentence in this verse deals with the evil of child abuse. The second sentence is the condemnation of child abusers.
(2) The Greek word SKANDALON means to trap someone who is innocent. The innocent child is trapped by the evil lust of parents or siblings in child abuse, by those responsible for protecting the child. The bait stick of the trap in this metaphor is a person who abuses the child.
(3) There are certain judgments that occur in human history that apparently have no explanation. The judgment can come from natural disaster or military defeat, anything that brings people into great shock as they are destroyed. The supreme court of heaven never lets a child abuser get away with the abuse.
(a) As long a person reacts to child abuse, the defense mechanics will replace any possibility of having the ten problem solving devices in the soul. The problem solving devices never function where defense mechanisms are operational.
(b) The judgment of child abusers extends throughout society in general and is one of the major contributing factors to the destruction of a nation.
© The same scar tissue of the soul that rejects the gospel also rejects any restraint with regard to child abuse. It is better to cut off your hand and be saved than to be a child abuser and not be saved. Most child abusers do so from maximum scar tissue in the stream of consciousness. Better to suffer trauma without scar tissue than to face trauma with scar tissue and you cannot be saved. In the verses which follow, the hand represents physical abuse. The eye represents the lust pattern of the old sin nature. Child abuse builds up so much scar tissue that even when you want to be saved, you cannot do it.
(4) No child abuser ever gets away from himself. The law of volitional responsibility is sowing to the wind and reaping the whirlwind, as per Hos 8:7. No victim of child abuse could ever punish a parent or child abuser as well as God. The child must learn and use the faith-rest drill, in order to put matters in the hands of the supreme court of heaven. The worse thing you could do is try to get even. All of us suffer injustice; so what? You do not need to justify self or defend yourself. The dynamics of the spiritual life is to have the faith-rest drill on the FLOT line of your soul. This is the only thing that drives out defense mechanisms. It is a tragedy for you to react to the injustice of child abuse and end up with a piece of the millstone around your own neck. When you go back to any environment of injustice in your life, you have allowed the outside pressures of adversity to break through the FLOT line and become stress in your soul. Stress in the soul and the spiritual life are mutually exclusive. We can destroy ourselves and the injustices of life by reacting to people.
(5) The person who causes trauma will be judged by trauma. If you sow in trauma, you reap in trauma. Gal 6:7, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.” A child abuser who produces the traumatic response in the child will suffer a far, far greater trauma as a part of the law of volitional responsibility. To this is added the judgment of the supreme court of heaven. The greatest tragedy is when the child becomes so reactionary to the abuse that they enter into denial and projection, which destroys their own life. Denial and projection destroys capacity for life, love, and happiness.
(6) The survivor of child abuse exists in two categories. Those who survive child abuse without God’s help and those who survive with God’s help. This survival includes the function of defense mechanisms.
(a) Defense mechanisms are defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd Ed (Revised), pp 393-4, “Defense mechanisms
are patterns of feelings, thoughts, or behaviors that are relatively involuntary and arise in response to perceptions of psychic danger. They are designed to hide or alleviate the conflicts or stressors that give rise to anxiety.”
(b) Dissociation is the perfect illustration of this. When the customary feelings of one’s own reality is lost, the person replaces these feelings with feelings of unreality. This is also called depersonalization disorder. You stop feeling those feelings which hurt you. You have lost touch with the rest of the human race and you really do not care how other people feel. In denial, you fail to acknowledge some aspects of external reality which would be very apparent to others. Your perception of reality is gone and is replaced with things that have happened to you. Denial plus depersonalization means you will never have an extensive, intimate relationship with anyone in friendship or in marriage. Because you have lost the very feelings and sensitivity you had when you were under abuse, and you have replaced those feelings and sensitivity with things that produce scar tissue of the soul.
(c) You are extremely sensitive to the flaws and failures of others in personal relationships (like marriage), but totally insensitive to your own flaws and failures. You see your very own flaws and failures in the other person, but you do not see them in yourself. You must use the problem solving devices to remove the garbage from your own soul to break this denial. Impersonal love is the only thing that is going to clean out that garbage. You have the same inward rage toward other loved ones as you had toward the parent who abused you. Under these conditions, you can never come to the point of personal love for God the Father.
(d) Those who survive, both believers and unbelievers, without God’s help accumulate problems throughout life with devastating results. The unbeliever builds up so much scar tissue in the soul that he cannot believe in Christ. The faith was destroyed in child abuse. The believer who survives rejects Bible doctrine and the spiritual dynamics which clear the soul of garbage. Unbelievers who live their live through the use of defense mechanisms never have any true happiness in life. All they can do is accept the cheap substitutes of life. Without eternal life through faith in Christ there is no solution to the tragedies and great sorrows that overtake the human race in this veil of tears. No problem of life has a permanent solution apart from regeneration followed by postsalvation spiritual dynamics. The unbeliever is doing nothing more than putting bandaids on the problems of life. Life becomes a matter of the accumulation of more and more problems which create more and more problems.
(e) Those who survive with God’s help have temporal solutions to the tragedies of life which are linked to regeneration and postsalvation spiritual dynamics of the believer. They have a thirst and love for doctrine. Three of the spiritual dynamics used in permanent solutions to life’s problems include: maximum metabolized doctrine in the stream of consciousness, cognition and inculcation of your very own portfolio of invisible assets, cognition and inculcation of the problem solving devices of the protocol plan of God. They are never handicapped by the past and have the glorious future that God intended for every believer both in time and in eternity. 9. Mt 18:8-9.
a. Introduction.
(1) Mt 18:8-9 is a warning to the unbeliever child abuser.
(a) Child abuse is always a sin of degeneracy involving the volition of an evil person but not the volition of the innocent child. Child abuse is also an abuse of power.
(b) The victim suffers terribly but the abuser never gets away with it. The sexually abused child suffers inescapable trauma, shock, destruction of normal maturation, and therefore, entering into a self- defeating and self-destructive life.
© Child abuse is a betrayal from the very person who is responsible for being the guardian of the soul of the child. The abused child finally comes to deny their own reality. All trusted relationships are severed. The innocent victim is dependent on the abuser and powerless to do anything. Emotional reaction on the part of the victim includes fear, anger, anxiety, guilt, depression.
(d) Both believers and unbelievers are child abusers. Believers are ignorant of Bible doctrine or fail to metabolize it and have converted adversity into stress in the soul. The abuser is loaded with stress in the soul and produces stress in the soul of the child they abuse. The abuser has no problem solving devices on the FLOT line of the soul.
(e) The unbeliever child abuser has accumulated maximum scar tissue in the stream of consciousness from constant negative volition to all kinds of truth. This scar tissue dominates the sin nature. He is preoccupied with the lust pattern of his sin nature, especially power lust, approbation lust, and sexual lust. This scar tissue makes salvation by faith alone in Christ alone virtually impossible. He follows the pattern of Esau found in Heb 12:16-17. This scar tissue of the soul destroys any sensitivity or normal love for the abusers own children. The abuser is totally indifferent to the needs of the child.
(2) The abuser produces shock and trauma in the innocent child. When the abuser sows trauma, he or she reaps trauma. Those who produce trauma in others enter into the first law of judgment—the law of volitional responsibility. No one in life gets away with anything. The abuser is traumatizing himself or herself at the same time he or she is abusing the child. Divorce is one of the areas where child abuse is prevalent. One of the parents often tries to brain wash the child to hate the ex-partner. This is child abuse. The parent who does this will be miserable for the rest of their life. The only hope for this kind of a parent is regeneration and learning doctrine.
(3) The child abuse victim suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder. They experience fear, terror, helplessness, along with loss of their childlike faith. They have experienced an event which is out of the normal range of childhood experience. There is the persistent experience of this trauma in different ways.
(a) Distressing recall of the event, recurring dreams of the abuse, a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, flashbacks, hallucinations.
(b) Intense distressful exposure to events that symbolize or resemble some aspect of a traumatic event. This is where the child picks up the defense mechanisms that save them as a child but destroy them as an adult.
© Posttraumatic stress disorder in young children causes loss of recently acquired skills, such as toilet training, language skills. They become very estranged from others, unable to have any feelings related to love. They have depression, guilt, lack of concentration.
(4) Divine judgment from the supreme court of heaven against the abuser often includes some form of posttraumatic stress disorder. All the outside pressures of adversity may be included in divine punishment of the abuser. The abuser is facing two terrible things: eternity in hell and hell on earth from sowing trauma and reaping maximum trauma.
(5) So great is the scar tissue of the soul in the parent- abuser that his or her entire lust pattern is unleashed against the children. One day it may be sex, the next day it may be bashing, and another day neglect.
(6) Summary.
(a) The child abuser is also judged by the supreme court of heaven. Every child has a guardian angel that presents evidence on behalf of the child before the supreme court of heaven.
(b) Traumatic judgment of the child abuser is also God’s last call for salvation to a person who has developed maximum scar tissue of the soul. A traumatic person is guaranteed a miserable life.
© If the abuser believes in Christ, cursing is turned into blessing.
(d) All too often the scar tissue of the soul is so great that the scar tissue has squeezed out of the soul the last bit of faith as a system of perception.
(7) In Mt 18:8-9 we have the grammatical concept of comparatives of exclusion. The exclusion factor is a hand, a foot, and an eye. The message is that it is better to have no hand, foot, or eye than to abuse children. The principle is that it is better to exclude those members of the body involved in child abuse than to spend eternity in the Lake of Fire. The hand represents the function of sexual abuse and physical abuse. The foot represents the decision involved, moving in the direction of child abuse. The eye represents the lust pattern of the sin nature. This passage is not saying that self-mutilation is the solution to child abuse.
b. Mt 18:8, “Moreover, if your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away from you; it is better for you to enter [eternal] life crippled or lame, than having two hands or two feet, to be cast into the eternal fire.”
(1) These two verses are addressed as a warning to the unbeliever involved in child abuse. Those who cause trauma are judged by trauma, and then, the trauma is extended into all of eternity. This is encouragement to the victim to avoid any mental attitude sins or judgment. They are not even required to forgive, just forget the child abuse and move on.
(2) The hand represents the instrument or organ used in child abuse. The foot represents the decision to move in the direction of the victim in child abuse. The eye represents the lust pattern of the old sin nature in child abuse.
(3) To cut off the hand and throw it away is the drastic, traumatic action necessary to stop the child abuse. It is not a command for self-mutilation. The Bible does not advocate self-mutilation. This is a Greek idiom called a comparison of exclusion which always uses a real thing in the sense of an analogy—better one thing than another thing. This means to stop using your hands or any other part of your body to abuse your children. This means to stop using your volition to abuse your children. Self-mutilation is never of any significance spiritually. “Cut it off and throw it from you” means to stop performing the abuse immediately before saturation of scar tissue of the soul makes it impossible for you, as an unbeliever child abuser, to believe in Christ.
(4) Scar tissue of the soul destroys the ability of the soul to use faith as a system of perception. This happened to the Pharaoh of Exodus and to Esau. The child abuser is described in 2 Cor 4:3-4, “Moreover, even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the God of this world [Satan] has blinded the thinking of the unbelieving.” There is one case where the spiritually dead person cannot believe—because they have accumulated maximum scar tissue of the soul. Satan blinds the thinking of the unbeliever through scar tissue of the soul. It becomes so great that the unbeliever cannot believe in Christ. The same scar tissue of the soul that motivates child abuse is the same scar tissue of the soul that rejects the gospel.
(5) The traumatic judgments of time are continued forever in the Lake of Fire for the unbeliever. All unbelievers will be resurrected in their physical bodies and stand before the Great White Throne for judgment of their good works. It is better for the unbeliever to stop child abuse before the scar tissue builds up, so that they can still believe in Christ. The unbeliever child abuser will suffer forever in the Lake of Fire, not for child abuse, but because he rejected Christ as savior. Persistence in child abuse develops scar tissue that was so calloused that the unbeliever could not believe in Christ even when wanting to. Child abuse is a system of degeneracy of horrendous proportions which creates blackout of the soul and scar tissue of the soul. The unbeliever who practices sexual abuse and torture of children has maximum scar tissue of the soul that blinds him to the gospel. The hands and feet that sow trauma reap trauma under the law of volitional responsibility. The supreme court of heaven judges with even greater trauma to the guilty abuser. The traumatic judgment is God’s last call in grace to the child abuser.
(6) Scar tissue of the soul is totally insensitive to human suffering of others. Abusers are indifferent to the suffering of those they abuse. Every time the abuser enters into some abusive or criminal act, they build up scar tissue in the soul and trauma in the soul. He will live under the lust of the sin nature and never know any happiness. He will suffer from unfulfilled lust which makes him more and more miserable. Scar tissue of the soul creates a veil over the soul which makes faith in Christ extremely difficult. Therefore, better the trauma represented here by self-mutilation than eternal trauma in the Lake of Fire.
c. Mt 18:9, “And if your eye causes you to sin by trapping someone [causing trauma in another person—child abuse], pluck it out, and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter [eternal] life with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into the lake of fire.”
(1) The eye represents the lust pattern that motivates child abuse. The eye becomes the instrument of the lust pattern of the sin nature. The unbeliever under the control of the sin nature is vulnerable to power lust, sexual lust, chemical lust, criminal lust (the desire to torture), monetary lust, pleasure lust (neglect of child).
(2) The gouging out of an eye represents a traumatic experience of the abuser. Trauma begins to build up in the soul so that the abuser can never be happy in anything in life. The abuse will be judged by trauma in time and the lake of fire in eternity. There will be a period when the trauma is great and the person has just enough faith left to believe in Christ. This is God’s last call to believe in Christ. If the unbeliever rejects Christ at this point, it seals his fate and he can never believe in Christ thereafter. The unbeliever condemns his own soul to the lake of fire by rejecting Christ, not by child abuse or causing trauma in others.
(3) Better to have no hands, feet, or eyes than be a child abuser. Self-mutilation is not the solution to the problem of child abuse. The solution is spiritual.
10. Mt 18:10, “See to it that you do not despise [treat with contempt, torture] one of these little ones. For I say to you, that their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven.”
a. All children have two sets of guardians: their parents and their guardian angel. Parents are prohibited from entering into child abuse by this verse. God can provide invisible protection to children.
b. This verse is a warning against child abusers from the supreme court of heaven. God the Father is the presiding judge of all cases of child abuse. The guardian angel of the victim-child is often God’s messenger of judgment. The victim of child abuse is never judged.
c. Parents are the FLOT line for the soul of their children. This reinforces what a terrible thing it is when parents abuse their children. If the child reacts as an adult with bitterness, guilt, shame, and so on, many problems arise regarding their spiritual life. In reaction to these things, it is extremely rare for the abused child, apart from spiritual dynamics, to not be preoccupied with self. That child has a serious problem in reality and objectivity. When reality and objectivity are gone, there is a strong predilection for the arrogance complex of sins.
d. Victims of child abuse can and do survive, especially those who are or will become believers. Major reasons for survival include guardian angel deliverance and defense mechanisms which assign the nightmare of child abuse to the subconscious. In adulthood, the guardian angel deliverance preserves the volition of the child, so that, in exposure to the gospel message, the victim of child abuse is free to believe in Christ for salvation.
e. The defense mechanisms preserve the sanity of the victim of abuse, but develop problems which must be dwelt with in adulthood. The defense mechanism that saves the child destroys the adult. The believer who was abused as a child must deal with the problem of garbage in the subconscious. The solution to the problem is in dealing with the problem after remembering the abuse by the maximum use of the problem solving devices. When the believer reaches the point of occupation with Christ, sharing the happiness of God, having a personal sense of destiny, impersonal love for all mankind, personal love for God, doctrinal orientation, grace orientation, the three stages of the faith-rest drill, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the rebound technique, the solution is complete. Forgive as Christ forgave—forgive automatically and forget it. The believer may or may not be aware of the problem of garbage in the subconscious, but the problem solving devices can still overcome the sin nature without ever understanding the garbage in the subconscious. The problem is the old sin nature and giving in to it. The solution is maximum metabolized doctrine in the stream of consciousness and the problem solving devices on the FLOT line of the soul. You have to motivate yourself to overcome the sin nature, but you cannot motivate yourself without a scale of values, and you must learn this scale of values from the teaching of doctrine.
f. Summary Principles.
(1) All child abuse is related to hatred of the child from total preoccupation with self on the part of the abuser.
(2) The guardian angel protects the child and is often the agent for the administration of discipline from the supreme court of heaven.
(3) The sovereignty of God wills the recovery of all cases of child abuse. Some children, as they move from childhood to puberty to adulthood, are not delivered from abuse because they reject God’s system of handling the injustice (regeneration and postsalvation spiritual dynamics) and continue to function in maladaptive defense mechanisms. How you handle injustice is one of the keys to what kind of a person you really are. If you can handle injustice, you are on your way to being a great person. The victim of child abuse has two volitional opportunities for solution: regeneration through faith in Christ and postsalvation spiritual dynamics.
(4) Guardian angels were assigned to a number of children in the sequence of history in eternity past. The guardian angel is required to protect the volition of the child, so that it is not destroyed by child abuse. Without the volition intact, it is impossible for anyone to recover from child abuse or other early injustices in life. When the child has been abused to the point that their mentality and volition have been affected in its ability to function normally, or they will live a life of maximum pain, then God takes them to heaven early to stop the pain and suffering. The guardian angel delivers the abused child with the capabilities of recovery intact, so that the child can accept or reject the gospel and Bible doctrine. Even though the volition is protected by the guardian angel, there is no guarantee that the volition will be positive to the gospel. The only guarantee is freedom to recover from the injustices of life, including child abuse.
(5) Another factor in survival is the victim failing to win the soul battle of defense mechanisms versus the problem solving devices.
(a) The volition of the child has locked into maladaptive defense mechanisms. Survival is not solution. It is only an option. Survival means you are free to solve the problem. It does not mean you will solve the problem. When you do not want to solve the problem, you become more and more preoccupied with self.
(b) The maladaptive defense mechanisms that deliver the child destroy the adult. You have not yet solved the problem, you have only compounded the problems. Defense mechanisms preserve the sanity of the child but must be delt with sooner or later. Awareness of the problem may occur in a number of ways in which the victim may have recall or may not have recall. However, we act the way we do, not because of former child abuse, but because of the sin nature. Even if you are unaware of the problem, you can still use doctrine and your volition to control the sin nature. The sin nature does not have its own solutions except to multiply the problems. When the child reacts to injustice, it is inevitable they will have rage. All of the child’s reactions will be unknown sins.
(6) The real problem is sin nature reaction to child abuse. The sin nature reacts with every mental and verbal sin. The believer must be careful to avoid sinful involvement with the past. Never use your past as an excuse for your present sins. The believer who reacts to the past is a loser in the present and fails to glorify God in the future.
(a) Heb 12:15, “Take care, therefore, that no one come short of the grace of God, that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble and by it many are defiled.” No sin is justified, not even the bitterness of the child who is being abused or the present reaction to the past. Your bitter reaction to the past covers everyone in the present with excrement. Some people cannot get along with others in the present because they are still reacting to abuse in childhood.
(b) Jam 3:14, “If you have bitter jealousy and strife in your heart, do not be arrogant and lie against the truth.” In digging up the past, the victim of child abuse may react with bitterness. All too often, victims of injustice remember the past for the purpose of self-justification and blaming others under the principle of self-absorption.
© Survivors of child abuse should only recall the past to understand and overcome, as per Rom 12:21, “Stop being conquered by evil, but conquer evil by means of the absolute good [divine solutions].” This is why Paul said, Phil 3:13-14, “One thing I do, on the one hand, forgetting those things which are behind, and on the other hand driving hard toward what is ahead. I keep advancing toward the objective for the reward of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus [escrow blessings].”
11. Mt 18:11, “[For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.]”
a. This verse is an accurate statement and is found in Lk 19:10, but does not belong in this passage. Lk 15:3-4 is the parable of the lost sheep. In our context (Mt 18:12-13) we have a straying sheep, not a lost sheep. In Luke, Jesus is talking to the Scribes and Pharisees. In Matthew, Jesus is talking to His disciples.
b. This verse does not occur here according to the best manuscripts. This is called the concept of assimilation. Some copyist thought it was necessary to make a parable out of Mt 18:12-13. Therefore, he adapted Lk 19:10 erroneously into Mt 18:11. But we have thousands of older manuscripts which show this verse is not found in Matthew.
c. The other problem is the context of Mt 18:12-13 is not salvation but the reaction of the believer who is a victim of child abuse. The recovery from child abuse is the subject of Mt 18:12-14. The reaction to child abuse is the analogy to the straying sheep. This is not a parable, but an analogy.
12. Mt 18:12, “For your own benefit, what do you think? If any man owns a hundred sheep, and one out from among them has gone astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go and search for the one who has gone astray? Of course He will.”
a. If you are going to solve the problem of injustices in your life, you must do so from your thinking. You do not fulfill God’s plan for your life in solving your problems until you have established a defense line in your soul composed of the ten problem solving devices extrapolated from maximum Bible doctrine circulating in your stream of consciousness. Divine solutions come through divine viewpoint. Divine viewpoint comes through what you believe. Divine viewpoint occurs when you convert Bible doctrine into metabolized doctrine. Without the problem solving devices you cannot handle any problems in life, including the problems of child abuse. “What do you think?” is a challenge to the believer who has wandered away from the plan of God and divine solutions.
b. The hundred sheep in this context are all believers. The shepherd is the Lord Jesus Christ (Jn 10:11). The hundred sheep in Luke 15 refer to unbelievers. The sheep that has gone astray refers to the believer who has reacted to child abuse and wandered off from the function of metabolized doctrine in the soul. This is not the lamb (the child) that is straying but the sheep (an adult believer).
c. God has provided for every believer a solution to every problem in life. There is no such thing as a unique problem for which the grace of God has not provided. Reaction to child abuse is the responsibility of the individual. Many believers wander off from God’s plan simply because they do not take the divine solution. The entertainment of stress in the soul for any period of time sets aside any divine solution as far as the believer is concerned. Many human solutions reinforce the wandering away.
d. After salvation, there are many decisions that have to be made daily. These decisions are related to your values in life. If your values are in any way distorted, then you are going to react to any form of injustice.
(1) This person in denial develops a great self- righteousness. They must be right and the other person must be wrong. To make them wrong, you must say things about them. When you say them long enough, you believe them yourself. They become full of malice to hurt and destroy others. Denial moves farther and farther from reality.
(2) This becomes the fourth and most subtle battle of the soul—the maladaptive defense mechanisms versus the problem solving devices. This is where the straying begins. Dissociation, posttraumatic stress syndrome, and splitting are other forms of straying. If they blame their sin nature function on their past trauma and adverse circumstances, that is the end of any spiritual growth for that person. Their subconscious garbage always thinks “I have to be right; I am right; the other person is wrong.” They fight to maintain a pseudo righteousness. It is total preoccupation with self. They cannot settle down to learn doctrine. They are not motivated to learn doctrine. They find explanations which are not the reality of the situation. They do not even have the faith to metabolize doctrine.
e. The believer reacts to child abuse under two circumstances.
(1) The circumstance where the believer never lost cognizance of child abuse as a traumatic and hysterical experience in life and reacted to it all through the years of awareness. This becomes arrogant preoccupation with self. The believer reacts and uses defense mechanisms. This failure results in failure to use spiritual dynamics of postsalvation experience because suppression and denial have produced an unreality base of operation for the function of projection. This is one of the biblical explanations for legalism.
(2) The circumstance where the believer used maladaptive defense mechanisms to store the traumatic experience in the subconscious, and therefore, lost cognition of the event in the stream of consciousness. Recall of child abuse as an adult creates an instant self-justification for carnal or psychopathic behavior or both. The believer uses their past experience as justification for allowing the sin nature to now control their lives.
(3) In both cases, the believer becomes involved in arrogant preoccupation with self to the exclusion of the divine solution on the one hand and self-absorption with complete overtones of locked in arrogance which create a stone wall between the believer’s motivation and volition and God’s grace solutions on the other hand. The garbage in the subconscious combines with the scar tissue in the stream of consciousness to build that stone wall by saying, “Bible doctrine does not work. I’ve tried it.”
f. The view of psychology is that it is absolutely necessary for recall in order to deal with the problem. This is where Christianity and the word of God does not agree with psychology; for Christianity says that the sin nature control of the soul is the issue and it is not necessary to recall it. It is necessary to get under the principles of solution whereby the sin nature is brought under control. Scripture commands the believer to forget those things which are behind and reach forward to those things which are in front of you. The garbage is not emptied from the subconscious by remembering traumatic experiences of the past. Garbage is removed from the subconscious and scar tissue in the stream of consciousness is healed through dealing with the sin nature by the use of divine solutions.
g. One important factor missing in the life of such a person in these circumstances is failure to be filled with the Spirit or motivated by love for God to concentrate or communication of the word of God goes in one ear and out the other because the sin nature is in control because there is arrogant preoccupation with self. You cannot have application of doctrine without having the basics and the whole realm of theology in the soul. he believer uses his own volition under the influence of the old sin nature to go astray. The victim reaction to child abuse is a continual problem in life until the victim uses his or her volition in a double sequence.
(1) The volition establishes a system of spiritual values, which begins with the doctrine of the essence of God and goes to the portfolio of invisible assets. Spiritual values come from the overall perception, metabolization, and function of Bible doctrine. Inculcated doctrine establishes spiritual values.God does not provide solutions as problems occur in time. God provided all the solutions in eternity past. People want too much application without doctrine, and application without doctrine is to continue straying from the flock. If you have not built up a tremendous inventory of doctrines and how they relate, you are not going to solve anything. There are times when going to anyone is going to the wrong person.
(2) Volition must be consistently positive from motivation related to spiritual values not human values. Motivation is not the idea that God is going to bless you if you sit in Bible class long enough. Motivation comes from recognizing who and what God is and then recognizing what He has done for us through grace in eternity past. You do not need attention from people; you need attention from God.
h. Divine solutions to problems are progressive rather than instantaneous.Most people want instantaneous solutions to problems, but that is not the way the plan of God works. Instant solutions are rarely found in the resolution of the angelic conflict. Instant solutions usually deal with some form of discipline or judgment, but progressive solutions demand your involvement on a day-by-day basis with Bible doctrine. Divine solutions are progressive because they require thought in the stream of consciousness.
(1) Victim reaction to child abuse is a continual, retrogressive problem of life until the problem is recognized as a spiritual one and resolved by the progressive function of positive volition, building doctrine on doctrine in the stream of consciousness.
(2) The doctrinal buildup must not only deal with the issue of the sin nature but must progressively clean out the garbage in the subconscious plus the trash in the stream of consciousness which includes the subjective arrogance of self-absorption, emotional revolt of the soul, blackout of the soul, scar tissue of the soul, accompanied by an accumulation of a false scale of values related to human viewpoint.
(a) Very few abused people ever destroy the scale of values they learned in the circumstances of child abuse. That is why their thinking is so distorted and subject to various emotional sins.
(b) The Exodus generation is an excellent illustration to why a change of circumstances is not the solution to the problems. They were negative to doctrine while in slavery and after coming out of slavery.
(3) God has provided the solution but the victim must respond with positive volition and complete reversal of volitional reaction to the original problem or the original problem plus the accumulated problems.
(4) Whether the child abuse experience is stuffed into the subconscious and forgotten or the traumatized child is totally aware through puberty and early adulthood, reaction to the problem is related to sin nature function even though the child was innocent and a victim of child abuse.
(5) Injustice to the individual is the most difficult problem in life. But God has provided the solution to injustices as well as every other problem in life. Every time we get into human solutions we postpone the divine solution. The life of Joseph is one of the greatest examples of God handling the problems of injustice. You wait on the Lord for divine solutions.
(a) Satan and the fallen angels have brought certain injustices into human history from the angelic conflict. All injustice starts with volition based on thought which is based on scar tissue in the soul and garbage in the subconscious. A trashed soul is going to be an abusive person. An abusive person is going to be unjust and unfair. Child abuse reaction produces cruelty. Cruelty begets cruelty under injustice.
(b) Injustices are the greatest challenge to spiritual dynamics. These injustices are going to occur and you must put them in the hands of the Lord, turning them over to the supreme court of heaven and not try to solve the problem yourself by trying to hurt someone else. God is perfect, His solutions are perfect. Perfect God can only have perfect solutions. Our solutions can only be classified as compound sinning. Nothing is worse for the spiritual life than self-absorption. It increases through each stage of reversionism. You lose any concept of spiritual values.
(6) From the reaction of self-absorption and arrogant preoccupation with self comes more and more sin nature function. You do not need to defend yourself. If people want to think ill of you, so be it.
(7) Even in the highest I.Q., the spiritual skills, the thinking skills, and the social skills are neglected. So this is not a matter of human I.Q. but of spiritual dynamics. Parents are responsible to develop spiritual, thinking, and social skills in the children. The straying sheep is a victim of betrayal of trust. Parents are designed to be the guardian of the souls of their children and are responsible for the early training and orientation of the child to life. Parents are responsible for teaching their children the importance of family values.
i. While parents may fail in their responsibility, our Lord Jesus Christ as “the True Shepherd of the sheep” (1 Pet 5:4) never fails a straying member of the flock of God.
(1) We fail Him, He does not fail us. We constantly blame others for our own failures, and this is the beginning of psychosis. The Lord will always come and search for us when we stray. It is not God’s will that a believer who is a victim of child abuse be ruined.
(2) The faithfulness of the Lord as the shepherd of the flock of God is first seen in providing eternal life for the sheep, Jn 10:27-28, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give to them eternal life and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand.” No matter how bad we stray, we cannot lose our eternal life, our eternal security. The Shepherd gave us His eternal life.
(3) To come back with the Lord to the flock you have to want to recover. Some believers do not want to recover. The only hindrance to recovery is the volition of the straying believer. It is the will of God for full recovery. Full recovery demands God’s plan and God’s solution. Full recovery demands the utilization of the believer’s portfolio of invisible assets, provided by God in eternity past. In that portfolio, God has provided the spiritual life function as the basis for recovery.
(4) You and you alone are the only one who can live your spiritual life; no one else can live it for you. God assigned to you your very own spiritual life. All the counseling in the world will not live your spiritual life for you. People cannot tell you how to live your spiritual life. The spiritual life is using divine resources in your own soul, not someone else’s.
13. Mt 18:13-14, “And if it turns out that he finds it, truly I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine which have not gone astray. So, that one of these children should be ruined is not the will of your Father who is in the heavens.”
a. It is not the will of God that any believer should ever be ruined by any act of injustice, especially child abuse. You are ruined from the time of the first reaction to abuse and injustice and it goes on until the problem is solved. With some believers the problem is never solved. The problem is never solved until God’s solution is applied, which takes time. It is the sovereign will of God that all victims of child abuse be spared ruin or destruction from such injustice. To be spared from ruin and injustice God takes some children in death before they reach accountability. For the others, God has provided perfect solutions.
b. God the Father will judge those who are involved in child abuse. God is omnipresent in the universe, and so, is a witness to it all. The fact that each person of the Trinity is immanent and transcendent means that God knows all the facts about every act of child abuse and injustice. Hence, all three persons of the Trinity are qualified to function as judges of the supreme court of heaven.
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