Audio Transcript

We serve an international audience on APJ. Listeners join us from across the globe, whether through our English episodes or in the dozen or so languages that this podcast gets translated into. Some of our questions might not make sense to our listeners in the States. That’s likely true today. Here’s our email.

“Hello, Pastor John and Tony. This is Thokozani from the Gauteng region of South Africa. I have listened to Ask Pastor John for two years and grown a lot spiritually over that time. My question stems from a popular belief that we have here in South Africa. People believe in ancestral consultation. When a person dies, their spirit or soul doesn’t go to God immediately; it roams around where they died. The family must go to that spot and fetch the spirit using a tree.

This is a popular belief, and several Christians here hold to these superstitions. Once the spirit is fetched, the body can be buried, and only then does the spirit go to God and can the person finally ‘rest in peace.’ Later, relatives will visit the grave, or set up a shrine in their home, where they consult with these dead parents or grandparents — not to worship them, but to periodically establish communication to receive from them messages through dreams or visions. Pastor John, what does the Bible say about communicating with ancestors?”

What the Bible says may be summed up like this: Don’t pursue communication with the dead, because pursuing messages from the dead is evidence that biblical truth about God is either not understood or not believed. And in either case, God is dishonored by the practice of seeking messages from the dead. Therefore, Christians should not do it, and they should be taught from the Bible why this practice dishonors God, and they should be encouraged to believe what the Bible teaches about God so that their practices honor him, glorify him.

So, what’s the biblical teaching about God that I have in mind when I say that if you seek these messages from the dead, you either don’t know those teachings or you don’t believe them? Here are four things about God that need to be taught and known.

When a person dies, God takes his soul out of the world immediately, either to himself or to a place of torment. No soul separated from the body is allowed to remain on earth and roam about after death. Jesus said to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43) — no intermediate state, no roaming around Jerusalem. Luke 16 describes the death of the poor man Lazarus and the rich man. Immediately, one goes to Abraham’s presence in heaven and the other to a place of torment, and a great gulf is fixed between them. Their souls are not left on earth.

In Philippians 1, Paul says that his death puts him in the presence of Christ. In 2 Corinthians 5, perhaps the clearest text of all, he says, “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8) — no gap. It does not say, “apart from the body at home in the neighborhood for a few days.” So, that part of the practice in South Africa is based on a misunderstanding of God’s action in dealing with the dead.

2. God forbids us to consult with the dead.

God explicitly forbids consulting with the dead. “When they say to you, ‘Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,’ should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?” (Isaiah 8:19). And the answer is clearly no. So, we don’t need to wonder what God thinks of this practice. He says, “Don’t do it.”

And behind the prohibition is the rationale about God’s sufficiency and his honor in communicating to us what we need. “Should not a people inquire of their God?” That’s the second point about God that is misunderstood or disbelieved by those who seek messages from the dead. So, let’s go to number three. Number two was just an explicit prohibition.

3. God has already spoken lavishly.

God has shown that he himself — not ancestors, not angels, not mediums, but he himself — is the one who provides us with what we need to know in order to live a fruitful, God-honoring, Christian life. That’s the point when the prophet says, “Should not a people inquire of their God?” (Isaiah 8:19). He knows that he’s enough; he’s wise; he’s willing.

You can hear in that question that it’s unthinkable that you would treat your living God as somehow unwilling to tell you what you need to know in order to live for his glory — that God would be so unable or unwilling to give his people what they need that they are forced to communicate with the dead, as if dead, sinful, finite, fallible creatures could be more useful than God who made heaven and earth and knows all things and is all-wise and rules all things and loves his children.

The New Testament tells us at least three things about the generosity of God’s communication with his children:

1. “[God] has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:2). Jesus Christ is the decisive word of God. “All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are in him (Colossians 2:3), and he is gloriously portrayed in the New Testament for our understanding and our enjoyment and our following.

2. God told the apostles that he would guide them into all truth when they taught the church what to believe and how to live (John 16:13). And then he called their teaching “the foundation” of the church (Ephesians 2:20), and he called their faith “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). We have the fullness of the apostolic teaching in the New Testament.

3. God told us that all the Scriptures are his inspired word and that they are profitable to equip the man of God “for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). Through the Scriptures, God has given us the revelation we need to do the good works he calls us to do.

So, seeking messages from ancestors, the Bible teaches, is a dishonor to God, who has communicated so lavishly with us about all the things we need to live the way he wants us to live.

4. God’s providence governs all for our good.

Seeking messages from ancestors implies an unbelief in the glorious implications for God’s children that God’s providence is all-controlling and all-pervasive — namely, that he works all things by that providence for our good as we trust him.

The apostle Paul taught us that since God “did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all,” he will certainly “give us all things” with him (Romans 8:32) — all the things we need to know, all the things we need to have in order to honor God and do his will. And the whole Bible teaches us that God is absolutely in control of all demons and all spirits and all locusts and worms and viruses and bacteria and plants and fish and lions and witch doctors and drought and famine and rain and floods and wind and earthquakes and diseases and life and death.

God’s providence, his purposeful sovereignty, is absolutely, pervasively in control of all things. So, there’s nothing that messages from the ancestors can do that would make it safer or better than what our heavenly Father is pledged to do for us because Jesus died for us.

So, the biblical position is this: Don’t pursue communication with the dead, because pursuing messages from the dead is evidence that biblical truth about God is either not understood or not believed. And in either case, God is dishonored. And here are four truths we need to know:

God takes the dead immediately out of the world.
God explicitly forbids communication with the dead.
God has shown that he himself is the one who provides us what we need to know.
God’s providence governs everything for our good.

Audio Transcript

In the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John, we read a remarkable story of a man born blind who was made to see by the miraculous healing power of Christ. It was the kind of miracle, like so many of them, that could not be kept a secret. Word spread far and wide of what Jesus had done to this young man. But the power players of the day rejected the news. And so we read that

the Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. But how he now sees we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age [that is, he’s at least 13 years old]. He will speak for himself.” (His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.)

So there’s a power move here, an intimidation factor at play. John continues,

Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.” So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” He [the healed man] answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” (John 9:18–25)

“Was blind, but now I see” — a famous line, worked into John Newton’s famous hymn “Amazing Grace.” John 9 is a key chapter in explaining God’s plan for physical disability. But it’s also a key chapter for understanding how we as Christians, changed by the grace of God, can testify of Christ before the world’s most powerful and educated people. Here’s Pastor John to explain.

Here we see the full-blown courage of a beggar — a mere beggar standing up to the most religious, most educated people of the land. And we see here full-blown blasphemy in response to that kind of courage.

Testifying Power

Verse 24: “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” In other words, “Join us in blasphemy, or we’ll excommunicate you out of the synagogue.” That’s not like being excommunicated out of Bethlehem, because do you know what happens if we do discipline on an unrepentant person? They go join another church. In spite of any letter we might send, there are churches of all kinds, and people just move on.

That can’t happen here. When you get kicked out of a synagogue, you get kicked out of Judaism. This is life. This is like being in a Muslim-dominated context. You can’t be there as a Christian. It won’t work. This is huge. Don’t just hear, “We’ll kick you out.” Getting rid of you from the synagogue means you’re out of the community. This is huge, what this man was standing up against.

“A personal testimony trumps arguments when they’re bad arguments — and they’re all bad when they’re against Jesus.”

Verse 25 is his most famous sentence. People all over the world know this sentence, even if they don’t know the Bible: “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” I hope you feel something here. You don’t think of yourself as a theologian and you don’t think of yourself as a scientist, but you’ve got people coming against your faith with every manner of argument — historically, scientifically, experientially. They’re coming against you if you try to be a bold, regular witness.

And I want you to feel the power of this: a personal testimony trumps arguments when they’re bad arguments — and they’re all bad arguments when they’re against Jesus. Don’t be intimidated. This man was way less educated than everybody in all these rooms, and he’d been blind all of his life. And he just simply said with all boldness, “Look, you may know some things I don’t know, but I can see.”

Doctrines of Courage

One of the reasons I teach and preach on the doctrines of grace is because there are so many Christians who don’t know how they got saved, so that they don’t know they have a stunning testimony that they sheer believe. Your belief is a miracle; you didn’t choose it.

Of course, if you have a theology that says, “I did it,” then you’ve got no testimony to the power of God in your life. But at age 6 or 16 or 36, when you saw Jesus as needed and beautiful and sufficient, and you confessed, “I’m a sinner, I need you, I receive you,” a miracle happened. A miracle happened. That’s why these theological things matter.

You can stand up in front of the Senate and say, “I don’t know much about what you guys deal with here. I just know one thing: I was blind once, and now I see the glory of Christ as self-evidencing and compelling, and I will die for him. I’ll stake my life on the truth of what I’ve seen in Jesus.” That’s what you can say. That’s very powerful. It is here. It will come to a point where they can’t handle him anymore. That’s what he said. I hope you’re willing to say it. I hope you have enough understanding to say it, and if you don’t, I hope you study about how you got saved, so that you will know that if you’re saved, you can say it.

Blind Hearts

His courage becomes scorn. Verse 27: “Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” Whoa, what are you doing, man? You’re going to get yourself killed. They’re very hostile, of course. Verses 28–29: “They reviled him, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.’”

Now the controversy has revealed another deceit: They’re not disciples of Moses. They think they are. They’re not, because Jesus said in John 5:46, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.” “You don’t know Moses, and you don’t know God. You talk about Moses. You read Moses. You talk about God. You read God’s word. And you don’t know God, because if you knew God and you knew Moses, you’d know me.”

Again, the controversy is revealing what’s really going on in the Jewish leaders’ hearts. Now we are seeing who’s really blind here. They take the first five books of their Bible, and they read them, and they don’t see anything. They’re blind. We’re watching a man whose sight is becoming clearer and clearer and clearer, and whose courage is becoming stronger and stronger, and we’re watching these Pharisees reveal more and more blindness. You don’t want to be a part of that.

Jesus in Pursuit

Jesus and the beggar have a conversation in verses 35–38, after the Jewish leaders cast the beggar out. What makes this conversation so amazingly significant is that Jesus sought him out and found him. Verse 34: “‘You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?’ And they cast him out.” Now, that’s really serious. To whom will he turn when he’s just been cast out of the community? To whom will he turn?

He doesn’t have to turn anywhere. Jesus turns to him. We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Jesus found him. Jesus seeks him. It is no accident that the next chapter is about the Good Shepherd who gathers his sheep. It’s no accident. John knows what he’s doing. He found him. “That’s one of mine. Nobody else wants him right now. I want him.” That’s what I’m praying he’ll do to you in the next five minutes of this sermon. He is after you. He is going to find you. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re there.

Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. (John 9:35–38)

“Do you confess Christ openly and defend him with your simple testimony, ‘I was blind, and now I see’?”

Then the beggar is gone out of this story. He never says another word. We never see him again. The last thing he does is worship Jesus. I pray that’s the last thing I do. Jesus does the works of God. Jesus is the glory of God. Jesus is to be worshiped. That’s the point of the story. The beggar is blind. He calls Jesus a man. Then he calls Jesus a prophet. Then he defends him at huge risk to his life. And then he worships him after he is found by Jesus.

‘Finally, I Saw’

Jesus came into the world to seek worshipers. That’s why he’s here. Do you confess him openly and defend him with your simple testimony? No big apologetic reasoning. Some of you are called to that, but most of you aren’t. You’re just called to be witnesses. If you see a car hit a person, you can be a witness. You don’t need any education at all.

“I saw” — 95 percent of Christians are saved that way. No big argument — just, “I saw. Finally, I saw. I was reading the Gospels, and I couldn’t resist this man anymore. He was real. He’s real. He’s true. He’s exactly what I need. He’s what the world needs. He’s real. This is not made up. I saw.”

I simply ask, Do you confess him openly and defend him with your simple testimony, “I was blind, and now I see”?

I love being a Christian.

I mean, I love Jesus, but I love all the rest of it too: brunch after church with friends and hylomorphism and late-night Eucharist on Christmas Eve and C.S. Lewis and John Donne and Charles De Koninck. I love Durham Cathedral and the Aksum Empire and Neoplatonism and canon law and candles and martyrs who chose death over denial and countless little communes of monks and Anabaptists and Puritans and Methodists and charismatics who read Acts 2 and 4 and decided to just go ahead and do it.

I love knowing that nothing good will be lost and there are no ordinary people and death has been killed. I love sacred Scripture mysteriously breathed by God through the words of men and that our God and King gave us his body to eat and his blood to drink.

And I also think it’s true, so there’s that.

But there have been times I have found belief to be almost unbearable. And I’ve met enough people who have shared this particular difficulty that my story might be worth sharing.

Walk Away, or Pray for Faith

I was baptized at 16, but didn’t become serious about following Jesus until grad school. And then for the next decade or so, I went through . . . call them “crises.” Times I couldn’t stop thinking, obsessively ruminating on certain things — two in particular.

First: If Calvinism was right, as I then understood it, how could I understand that God is good? Second: How can I live in a world where people I love may be going to hell?

These circling thoughts left me exhausted over my own attempts to make sense of everything, and with a grief-fueled nostalgia for the time when, as a secular person, I didn’t worry about any of this stuff. I felt alienated from non-Christians and even from Christians who didn’t share my intensity and anguish.

During some of my worst moments, I felt like I was presented with a choice: you can cease believing, or you can pray for faith. Ceasing to believe didn’t feel like a choice that would change reality. It felt like choosing to somehow sit on the sidelines, to become a non-player character. Yet apostasy did seem to offer me the psychological comfort of escape.

I prayed for faith.

Obsessive Moral Threats

I’m not sure when I first heard the word scrupulosity. At some point, I probably googled “religious OCD,” which is more or less what it is. And I was very familiar with OCD.

Around age 12, I was diagnosed with “obsessive-compulsive disorder.” If you’re unfamiliar with OCD, it makes threats that feel moral. You feel like you’re both morally wrong and physically unsafe, and what will put you morally and physically right again is obsessively performing various rituals (you’ve heard them: handwashing, not stepping on cracks, etc.). Often, what you care about most is what the disorder “chooses” to threaten you about: “wash your hands just right or your child will die, and it will be your fault.” That kind of thing.

Most people with this disorder are not delusional. They know the threat isn’t real, that it’s irrational, which often makes the disorder profoundly embarrassing. “Don’t mind me, just going to, um . . . wash my hands seven times and then turn off the tap with the backs of my hands, because . . . well, you go ahead and start dinner.”

I ended up receiving various kinds of treatments (medication, cognitive behavioral therapy), which helped enormously. And by the time I was out of high school, my OCD was pretty much dealt with. It proved to be a weird blessing in my life to have experienced this before my adult conversion, unrelated to Christianity.

After college, I started spending time with people who actually believed that Jesus was not at all dead. And then I found that I actually believed that too. And the stakes in life suddenly became much higher.

Enter Scrupulosity

Conversion is always disorienting. But God gave me time to work through the normal confusions of new Christianity: the sense that there is nothing one can hold back; the realization that God makes no guarantees that you won’t, for example, eventually be martyred; all the normal pricks of an awakened conscience; all the joy and amazement that first Christmas when the carols you’ve sung your whole life suddenly come alive and blaze with glory.

Then, sometime within the first two years, I had my first major bout of scrupulosity.

Like OCD, scrupulosity produces an irrational sense that one is in profound danger and has a bad conscience. It’s confusing because it can overlap with one’s “real conscience” and real fear of hell, but it’s distinct enough to recognize once you get to know it. I could discern something “off” about it. It wasn’t “what reality is like,” “what being a sinner and having a bad conscience is like,” or “what Christianity is like.”

Being curious by nature, and also a nerd when it comes to history and historical theology, I started digging and discovered that scrupulosity is a spiritual malady that has caused pastors to say, “Oy, not this again,” for about two thousand years. It’s also a neurological, OCD-related condition that can be treated on that basis. In fact, confessors, spiritual directors, and pastors have been using tools similar to cognitive behavioral therapy for a good portion of church history — long before medications provided additional treatment options.

Christians’ Doubting Disease

There are two pretty distinct versions of scrupulosity. There’s the one that resembles “classic” OCD, which leads sufferers to obsessively perform rituals, like prayer (“If I don’t say these exact words with exactly the right feelings, they won’t count”) or confession (Luther’s poor confessor!) in order to feel like they’ve gotten it “right.” And then there’s the delightful experience of repetitive, racing thoughts, obsessively ruminating over theological questions, which one feels like one must resolve in order to be at peace. Neither makes for a particularly good time. But in my experience, the ruminations are the real bear.

OCD has been called the “doubting disease.” Did I really lock the door? I think I did. I remember doing it. But if I did, why do I doubt so profoundly that I did? Why do I feel in danger? Better check. In other words, subjective uncertainty presents itself as something to pay attention to, something that gives good information.

Now imagine how difficult it might be for those dealing with this disorder to evaluate their subjective assurance of salvation, which in some Christian traditions has been viewed as a necessary mark of true salvation. If one must sit on the “anxious bench” until one receives assurance, a person with an unaddressed scrupulosity disorder can sit there for a long, long time.

As I said earlier, questions I found myself obsessively ruminating over included “Does God want everyone to be saved?” “How can I trust that he wants me to be saved?” The questions can get very refined indeed: “If Calvinistic monergism is true, is God good? Is ‘good’ meant equivocally or analogically when we predicate it of God? Are you sure? But are you sure? How about ‘love’? Better think about this for five hours in the middle of the night to try to solve it.” My scrupulosity demanded that I give attention to these subjective uncertainties until I had subjective certainty, the kind that doesn’t come like that. And during the darkest seasons of such ruminating, I was tempted with apostasy as a palliative for my psychological pain.

But I prayed for faith.

Living with a Trustworthy God

I know this might sound simplistic at first, but one of the most helpful things for me has been simply learning to trust God more. I don’t mean “trusting God” as some immediate mental choice in moments of struggle, though it is that too. Rather, I just mean living with him as my King for longer, and learning that he is trustworthy and that I don’t need to get answers to all my theological questions before I am able to rest in that.

“God’s character is one thing we do not need to doubt.”

In non-religious OCD, one learns to talk back to one’s mind: “Yes, I know you are subjectively uncertain, but that has nothing to do with reality.” As a Christian with religious scrupulosity, I do the same. And more, I’ve learned to get out of my own head. I have a kind of mental box, Susannah’s Big Box of Unanswered Theological Questions. I’ve found it incredibly helpful to realize it’s okay to have such a box, and that there will be items in it until I see God face to face, and probably afterward. The fact that we don’t see how all the data points of Scripture and experience and tradition fit rationally together should not for a moment cause us to discount the data points we do have about God’s character. His character is one thing we do not need to doubt.

In my worst episodes, I didn’t really doubt the truth of the Scriptures. In a sense, that was part of the problem: scary passages felt like chains binding me, guns pointed at my head. But it also meant I could hang on to the passages of God’s unequivocal grace. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (Psalm 145:9). There is nothing original that I can offer here: these are uncompromising promises about God’s character and his love of each of us, and of those we love. I held on to these white-knuckled. And then, gradually, I realized that I didn’t need to hold on that tightly, because I was being held.

Out of the Pit

If you’re wondering whether you or someone you know might be suffering with scrupulosity, it can really help, first, to know that it is a thing. It’s a real neurological disorder, and there are many online resources available from credible medical and Christian ministry sources to begin understanding how it works and how to pursue diagnosis and treatment. It’s also an old thing. I found help reading memoirs and anecdotes of saints from the past who have suffered very similar experiences, like St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Ignatius, or John Bunyan.

“When your own thoughts are a trap, you cannot just think your way out of it. You need the help of others.”

It’s also important that you don’t attempt to figure it out alone. Doubt, anxiety, and fear are common human maladies (Philippians 4:6–7; Hebrews 13:6; James 1:5–8). And of course, some anxiety is good (2 Corinthians 11:28), and some fears are real (Luke 12:5). We all fall somewhere on a spectrum with many kinds of mental distress, so discerning what’s “normal” and “abnormal” can be tricky. A good place to start is talking with your pastor, if possible, and/or trusted, wise counselors (particularly those with some familiarity with scrupulosity). When your own thoughts are a trap, you cannot just think your way out of it. You need the help of others, ideally professionals.

And if you feel tormented by scrupulosity’s obsessive ruminations, and tempted by the psychological comfort that apostasy seems to offer: take the leap. In the face of that choice, pray for the grace of faith to be given to you in abundance. And then throw the whole kit and caboodle, every means of grace, at this thing: prayer, Scripture, saints around you, ancient saints, SSRIs, cognitive behavioral therapy, all of it.

I also say this: dare to hope that you will be okay again one day, that you will again find “joy and peace in believing” (Romans 15:13). God, as it happens, is patient. He is also analogically, though not univocally, good and loving. And the ways in which his patience and goodness and love are not univocally identical to ours, his are more so. Always more, not less.