Episode 119: Pharmakeia in Context/Mental Illness, Suicide, and the Church

The son of a social media friend committed suicide back in February and while talking about it, I realized how shamefully the believing community fails to serve those who are suicidal, clinically depressed, and mentally ill. Part of the problem is a terrible misunderstanding of what the word Pharmakeia meant in the ancient world and the tendency for modern people to look at a word and judge the ancient context by what related terms mean today. As this misunderstanding adversely affects those who need our help the most, we’ll be looking at Pharmakeia in the Greco-Roman world and also at what it is actually most like today—and the results may shock you.

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Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

This broadcast is going to be a bit different and the reason is because I am finally having to address an abuse of a certain Greek word that is really harming people. That word is Pharmakeia and the reason for the abuse is a lack of understanding of what the word meant in the ancient world, which would have been the context of Scripture, and how it is unevenly and even conveniently applied in modern times. The reason I am addressing this is because the son of a friend of mine committed suicide back in February. And we just commit this terrible sin against people who commit suicide and their families, in the Body of Messiah, when we are just quick to jump to conclusions. When we use words like cowardice, weakness, selfishness, and the like, to describe that person and their struggles when in truth we are really just making guesses that make us feel superior and allow us to not have to enter into the tragedy and just grieve the loss.

There is this horrible tendency, within the believing community, one that we do not see in secular circles—this belief that although the body can be ill–that any part of the body can be legitimately sick and damaged and even defective from birth, except the reproductive system and the brain. And not only is that unreasonable and illogical, because the brain and the uterus are organs no different from any other and therefore subject to breakdown and malfunctions, but it is also cruel. And it leads to damaging doctrines. And damaging doctrines can lead to hopelessness, despair, breakdown, and even suicide. A lack of understanding of how the brain works, as though it is simple, has led to a great many ignorant snap judgments of some very complex problems—problems so complex that we are only in the infancy of understanding them. The truth is that when people commit suicide, it is for a whole host of issues—some of which will always remain a mystery—and we need to draw back from the assumption that we can know all the why’s. We like to imagine that we have a pretty good bead on the whys, because then we can judge and elevate ourselves over all that and pretend like it couldn’t possibly happen to anyone we love, or to anyone who loves and is devoted to God. It’s just our own desperate grasping for control over a situation where we have no control. We want someone to blame. We want to be able to point to a moral weakness. We don’t like unanswered questions. And I admit that I don’t have answers. All I have is an admission that the human brain and the human experience are both too complex for me to offer easy or satisfying answers when the unthinkable happens—when two people are faced with identical circumstances and one thrives and the other kills themself. We want to chalk it up to some sort of virtue but I don’t think that is the right answer—that just appeals, again, to our desire for control and blame. I think we gravitate toward the easy answers when sometimes there aren’t any.

I am going to come right out and say this—that it is my absolute belief that mental illness is rarely demonic in origins. We have to just strip that out of the picture as an easy answer. The brain is insanely complex, and things go wrong. A lot of things can go wrong, really. The more complex an organ is, the more things have the capacity to malfunction and break down. Just think of the difference between a simple tool like a screwdriver and an automobile. You actually have to abuse a screwdriver pretty badly for it to finally be nonfunctional, but a car can break down fairly easily. An abacus can work for centuries, a calculator for far less time and computers break down so often that there are repair shops in every town. Electronic devices break down when simple tools don’t. The neurologic system is very fragile compared to the rest of the body, and so we shouldn’t be shocked that more can go wrong with it than, say, toenails—and yet we don’t tell people that an ingrown toenail is due to sin in their lives. We just need to demystify and despiritualize the brain and start seeing it as an organ that we barely understand.

I am going to come right out and say something else—some people absolutely need psychiatric drugs in order to deal with chemical imbalances. I don’t see it as any different than the fact that my body has a genetic inability to flush salt and so no matter how little of it I eat, I still need to take meds for my high blood pressure. And all those people telling me to take cayenne—they aren’t educated in all the various causes for high blood pressure. They don’t know that only some forms can be fixed through diet and exercise. They don’t know about the different diseases of the body that can cause the heart to overwork itself. They think there is one easy fix. And there are a lot of people out there who are not educated in the complexities of the human body who think everything has a quick fix. But I know way too many people who eat nothing but organic and who use essential oils for everything and who “do everything right” and are suffering with MS and such things. Again, we want easy answers because—well sometimes because it is easier to just think people have earned their problems than to recognize tragedy. I had a gal on my social media wall the other day, well, back in May, actually, and she was determined that people who live right almost never have anything wrong with them. But that just isn’t reasonable. Our bodies break down over time. Birth defects happen. And it’s because of our complexity. Yes, people abuse themselves but just making the assumption that everything stems from that is a total cop out. It also just isn’t true. It’s actually the reason why I am so open about my health struggles on social media. I like to dismantle the shame. No, I am not on psychiatric drugs, but after my stroke in 1997 my brain went haywire for a while and they put me on a drug to control my paranoia and mild OCD. My brain was broken, and until it repaired itself enough, I needed help to function.

Which brings us to the word Pharmakeia in Scripture. And there are a lot of folks who will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that you are sinning for taking any meds whatsoever and especially psychiatric meds. They make this claim because of assumptions about the word Pharmacy, which is related by root to Pharmakeia—and yet there are a lot of words related to ancient Greek words because of similarities and yet, also profound differences. And Scripture does condemn Pharmakeia without saying why—because the why was known to every reader. Pharmakeia was a criminal offense, as we know from ancient authors and law codes (see the bibliography). Let’s look at the verses about Pharmakeia really quick here and then apply context, because no matter what a word sounds like in our 20^th century world, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what that word meant to the original audience.

Gal 5:19-21 Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Rev 18: 21-24 “Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, “So will Babylon the great city be thrown down with violence, and will be found no more; and the sound of harpists and musicians, of flute players and trumpeters, will be heard in you no more, and a craftsman of any craft will be found in you no more, and the sound of the mill will be heard in you no more, and the light of a lamp will shine in you no more, and the voice of bridegroom and bride will be heard in you no more, for your merchants were the great ones of the earth, and all nations were deceived by your sorcery. And in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slain on earth.”

In both of these, the word pharmakeia is translated as sorcery. We also see it popping up six times in the Septuagint.

Ex 7:11 Then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers, and they, the magicians of Egypt, also did the same by their secret arts.

What did they do? They made their staffs into serpents. Next, they will turn water into blood.

Ex 7:22But the magicians of Egypt did the same by their secret arts. So, Pharaoh’s heart remained hardened, and he would not listen to them, as the Lord had said.

Ex 8:7 But the magicians did the same by their secret arts and made frogs come up on the land of Egypt.

Ex 8:18 The magicians tried by their secret arts to produce gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on man and beast.

We also see it show up twice in Isaiah 47, in talking about judgment on Babylon:

These two things shall come to you in a moment, in one day; the loss of children and widowhood shall come upon you in full measure, in spite of your many sorceries and the great power of your enchantments. You felt secure in your wickedness; you said, “No one sees me”; your wisdom and your knowledge led you astray, and you said in your heart, “I am, and there is no one besides me.” But evil shall come upon you, which you will not know how to charm away; disaster shall fall upon you, for which you will not be able to atone; and ruin shall come upon you suddenly, of which you know nothing.Stand fast in your enchantments and your many sorceries, with which you have labored from your youth; perhaps you may be able to succeed; perhaps you may inspire terror.You are wearied with your many counsels; let them stand forth and save you, those who divide the heavens, who gaze at the stars, who at the new moons make known what shall come upon you.

In context, this is clearly not about medication. Clearly. And in fact, you will not find a Biblical scholar who actually studies the ancient world who will make the claim that this is talking about medicine—the medical system of modern times has nothing to do with how they practiced medicine in the ancient world anyway, as it was a combination of methods and usually involved not only something legitimate but also something accompanying it that was occult. Like the ancient Egyptians, they would set a broken bone and they had amazing medical technology—they could even fix cataracts (maybe you saw the conspiracy theories last summer about the COVID test draining the pineal gland and they used pictures of Egyptians removing cataracts to “prove” it—and after I pointed out the source of the picture along with documentation, they said the Egyptians just used that as a cover story so they could drain people dry). But, they would do these legit procedures but didn’t think it would work unless they also performed magic. Like, so close and yet so far! But still very impressive.

Why do scholars translate Pharmakeia as sorcery instead of medicine, even though a Pharmacy is where we go to get meds? Because Pharmakeia was an actual crime in the ancient world, one that involved either poisoning with intent to kill, or the production of things like love potions, which were meant to bring one person under the control of another person. And we know this because we have law codes and court documents from those times. So, there is no guesswork involved here—no reading what we want to see into the text. It is only when we look at the word Pharmacy and work backwards from our own understanding that we get into trouble. We cannot do that—it’s called an anachronism. It’s like reading Christmas trees into ancient Babylon by selectively quoting only enough of Jeremiah 10 to make it sound legit while ignoring the parts that make it obvious it isn’t about that at all—plus ignoring archaeology in general and the wealth of knowledge we actually do possess about Babylonian religion and all we know about Ishtar and Tammuz, none of which lines up with all the memes out there, which I know because I have a lot of scholarly materials on them and their worship.

What we do have here is an agenda, albeit a well-intentioned agenda. I have no doubt that the people who teach this believe it with all their hearts but there is still this problem that it doesn’t match up with the historical meaning of Pharmakeia, which is why scholars and translators use sorcery to translate it. And sorcery focused on the use of the mystical arts in order to manipulate creation via the assistance of the gods, who were seen as part of nature and therefore part of the process. They saw a partnership between themselves and the gods in what they were doing. It was an idolatrous activity designed to do harm to another person, not to heal them. Not to help out. And I know there are a lot of people who just flat out say that the scientists who do this for a living, who strive and sacrifice their lives to come up with treatments and cures, that they are evil but man, it’s pretty horrible to condemn people like that when all you have to go on is a hunch—and a pretty ungracious and unloving one at that. Truth is that nothing on the face of the earth can be derived from anything that is unnatural. Everyone starts out with what God has created.

People say that drugs are toxic, and yet so are many essential oils. And we currently use them in concentrations unheard of in the ancient world—not to mention the fact that we turn things into oils that were only ever used in resin form in ancient times. What exactly do we think those love potions and poisons in the ancient world were made of? All natural materials. The Pharmakeia spoken of in Scripture has more in common with essential oils than with antibiotics. And so, if we are going to remove Pharmakeia from the context of intention and sorcery, then we are going to have to outlaw the usage of essential oils and essential oil blends for believers—because it’s all they had to use in modern times. They used natural plants and resins and the like to make things that would serve their purposes—be it to poison or to heal or to create ecstatic trances in order to commune with their gods. It is only context that changes how we should look at it. Modern medicine? Never existed in the ancient world. They were mixing natural ingredients and casting spells and performing silly rituals because they didn’t believe that anything could work without the manipulation of the divine.

This blind spot is dangerous to a great many people. People are getting told they are sinning by other people who don’t understand that naturopathic medicine is closer to ancient Pharmakeia than what they will find behind the counter at their local drug store. The difference is in what the intention is. Clearly, the translators of the Septuagint didn’t think medicine was Pharmakeia and they were eye-witnesses to the actual meaning of the word. We aren’t. Just like we can’t say that people eating their Corn Flakes are worshiping the goddess Ceres. And it is why the only people you will see promoting such ideas are not scholars but modern people looking backward and applying unequal weights and measures and not considering the fact that such a wide definition of Pharmakeia would destroy naturopathic medicine along with modern medicine. And as much as people are complaining about Big Pharma and the money, the people making these claims are often selling a product as well and financially benefit from what they are promoting. Just saying.

One of my favorite YouTube channels is this one that graphs out statistics over time. It’s called Animated Stats and I will link it in the transcript. It had this really cool one that I watched a while back that showed the difference in life expectancy over like the last 200 years and unless you saw it you would never believe it. Two hundred years ago, worldwide, the life expectancy was no different than it was at the time of Yeshua/Jesus—it was roughly 30-35 years. With, you know, staggering infant mortality rates. And it shows over time who has the highest life expectancy, like the top seventeen countries I think. And the difference over the last like hundred and twenty years, with the advent of modern medicine, it’s crazy. Of course, in America, that is offset by over-consumption and obesity but I am talking worldwide—some countries the life expectancy is now 85 years! And when people romanticize like ancient medicine, they aren’t showing you what things were actually like then when that was all anyone had and people were dying of what we consider to be minor problems and easily curable infections. And the people stuck in sanitoriums and insane asylums who can be treated now and, even if not cured, can have a semblance of life and if people want to go back to before that—I don’t see that as compassionate or representing Biblical values. I think people really just don’t have any idea what life used to be like, as a normative thing.

I teach on this quite a bit but life expectancy in the time of Yeshua was horrifying. Thirty percent of infants died in their first year. Sixty percent of those who survived their first year were dead by the age of sixteen. People with skin diseases were forced to the outskirts of society, where they often died from exposure and neglect. People who were mentally ill suffered even worse. Modern medicine changed that. My own son is only alive because of medical advances. Imagine children dying and suffering permanent disability because of simple ear and eye infections. If you weren’t wealthy, you had little chance of recovery from so many things that are easily cured now. If you were wealthy, you still usually had no chance of recovery. Survival of the fittest wasn’t a Darwinist theory but a reality and a nightmare—and even the fittest could be taken down unless they also got very lucky not to be hit by multiple issues at once. And the wealthy—they often had blood drained from them in an attempt to let out sickness. Modern medicine as an act of justice and righteousness has evened the playing field.

Despite some problems which no one will deny, rich and poor alike have a chance to live healthy lives as long as they take care of themselves. Medicine makes it possible for people who are born with defects, or whose bodies suffer breakdown often through no fault of their own, to go on living healthy and happy lives. Medicine means that those who would have been deemed insane not so long ago can function in society. I can walk because of modern medicine. I had an undiagnosed case of rheumatic fever in college, and because of it I began to lose the ability to walk. Antibiotics cured me and today I regularly go jogging on the treadmill. My strokes came under control only after I began taking a medication that opens up the blood vessels in my brain, allowing the clots that I make naturally because of estrogen cascading to pass through safely. The estrogen cascading happens because of birth defects to my reproductive system that kept me from carrying a baby to term. Man, if I had been born a hundred years earlier, I’d be dead or too brain damaged to function. And maybe that is okay with some folks who feel that my life would be a whole lot more righteous if I had died back in my twenties, crippled and brain damaged but at least living out “God’s will” by not taking medication when necessary.

Is that the sort of thing that we really believe makes God happy? Suffering and death instead of using science to try and make people’s lives last longer? Does God only love the people born with perfect bodies? To me, that sure sounds like the opposite of Yeshua’s warning that those who neglect the least of these are the goats instead of the sheep. Medicine is a way of caring for the least of these. Sometimes people with expendable income don’t really understand what life is really like for those who don’t.

People who are pushing to get rid of medicine are, not intentionally I am sure, saying that people who don’t have access to a cabinet full of essential oils or the money to buy them or access to proper nutrition—that they are expendable. That people who can’t afford to turn food into oil, because of the enormous waste involved in resources, that they are living outside of God’s will. People need to look at life expectancy historically to get the real picture of what the real consequences are when people have no access to modern medicine. Does God love the poor? Yes, absolutely. He even demands that we care for them. And we do that through a lot of things that people rail against. Vaccinations, whether you like them or not, have been a godsend in third world countries. I am not anti-vax, I think everyone should have that choice. Yes, there can be side effects in rare cases, and people need to make choices accordingly. Malaria meds, again—just ask anyone who has lived in Africa where it is epidemic. Antibiotics revolutionized the world. It is part of how we are caring for the sick, for those who cannot care for themselves and who die in droves without it.

There is nothing romantic about the state of the world before the advent of modern medicine. There was nothing fair about it. There were no guarantees that living right meant not dying very young and tragically. God allows sickness, just like He allows a whole host of other evils, in order to see what we will do with it. He allowed slavery, and changed us and the way we feel about human beings so that we would fix it. He allows evil and expects us to do something about it and not just smugly act as though evil only happens to people through His will. There is a big difference between His will and what happens down here on earth. His will, as Yeshua pronounced in no uncertain terms in Matthew 25, is that we must do everything we can to help the poor, widowed, orphaned, oppressed, foreign and yes, the sick. A failure to do so, a failure to use modern innovations to help them—that’s to be counted among the goats. We must use every option at our disposal to make things better for those who are trapped in terrible circumstances. Do we use witchcraft? Ancient pharmakeia? No. Do we pray? Do we use legitimate medicines, pharmaceutical and naturopathic, absolutely. We do whatever we can to extend life to those who are in need of it. And we don’t ignore the evidence of the past in an attempt to romanticize it.

Look, if you believe that we are better off with a life expectancy of 30-35 years then by all means get rid of the pharmaceuticals but please be consistent and lay off what the sorcerers would have been using in their pharmakeia—the resins and the plants and the oils. As for me and my house, we are going to pay attention to what the sorcerers were doing and why and how they were doing it. We’re going to pay close attention to the context, and we are not going to tell people who are being kept alive that they should stop taking their meds. We’re not going to tell people that if they just had faith, that God would heal them—because God isn’t our personal valet or a magician just waiting for the right combination of this and that in our lives before He is triggered and obligated to do what we want. Now, you want magic and sorcery? That’s exactly how it worked in the ancient world. Do this or that and say your god’s name just so and he has to give you what you want. That’s pharmakeia. Not science. Science says, when you mix this and that together, it combines to create something with these specific properties which will react in a certain way. No magic involved. Just cause and effect. And I can say this as not only a scientist but a chemist. This isn’t me speaking about something I am uneducated about. This is me telling you how science works, at a very basic level, of course.

Magic, as opposed to science, relies on more than A+B=C. It relies on A+B+divine intervention=C and it is called sorcery because there is this expectation that something in the spiritual realm is being manipulated by humans in order to achieve a desired effect. To a scientist, combining chemicals and getting a result is no different, functionally, than a farmer applying a plow to a field and the soil being churned up. Cause and effect. Scientists use the natural in order to discover new end uses. Sorcerers combine the natural and the supernatural in order to achieve a desired manipulation of the natural world. You cannot separate pharmakeia in Scripture from that sort of understanding—whether it was Livia poisoning her political enemies, or pagan priests using ecstatic drugs to induce trances, or the production of love potions designed to subvert a person’s natural inclinations. Science is the opposite of magic because it cannot explain any results that will not occur through a simple cause and effect. Magic subverts cause and effect. It cannot be depended on for results.

And the whole reason I am even bringing this up is because of two friends of mine. Both believers. Both faithful. One of them, her son committed suicide in February. The other, after years of suffering clinical depression, finally began taking antidepressants. The only reason she didn’t do it earlier was because of the really terrible stigma against it within the believing community. But, I will tell you what I told her. “Honey, your brain is sick. It isn’t doing what it needs to do for whatever reason. If you need medicine to fix the problem, then take it if you want to. But don’t let anyone talk you into treating this as if it is any different from treating an ulcer or high blood pressure or taking insulin. Because it isn’t different. The brain is an organ just like any other. Things can go wrong. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. And when people tell you that it is either sin or demons, then they are just lacking understanding that the brain is just another part of our bodies, like any other.”

And those shouldn’t have been controversial words, but I know they are. As believers, we have some messed up ideas about the brain and about the reproductive systems—like they aren’t really able to be defective or sick. Like God just runs both of those from a massive control panel in Heaven and if you are good then He gives you a house full of kids and a sane brain and if you aren’t then He doesn’t but anyone can look around and see that neither of those positions is realistic—or even Biblical. But religious paradigms often have nothing in common with reality. Or basic logic. Or compassion. And prosperity Gospel has it’s tentacles into more mainstream theology than we would like to believe. The idea that a righteous person can never be barren or become mentally ill is ridiculous, it’s wishful thinking. It’s elitist thinking. It’s prosperity Gospel.

And in the case of mental illness and chemical imbalances, our prosperity Gospel focus and our lack of care for the least of these is killing people. Our refusal to see this as a legitimate case of “something is going organically wrong with this organ of the body” is a form of oppression that is keeping people from getting the help they need. And when we do that for long enough, can we even feign surprise when people commit suicide? When we give them no comfort, no answers other than “you’re demon possessed” or “You don’t have enough faith” or “you’re obviously sinning in some way?” Is that the best we can do? Aren’t we supposed to be there for people? Aren’t we supposed to be better than the world? In this case, the world is better than we are because someone who has a mental illness can go to them and have their disability be immediately taken seriously and not written off as sin or demons. Think about what kind of despair we are foisting onto people whose only crime is to be inconvenient and an embarrassment to the false image of believers that we want to be out there where we are all healthy and happy and well-adjusted and not just as messed up as anyone else in the world. The difference in our lives is supposed to be love and hope and that we are not alone—and we should be that for others so that they have love and hope and they aren’t alone either but this stuff that we do makes them more alone than they were before they made the mistake of telling us.

Look, I know what it is like to spend every single day wanting to be dead. For me, that was every day between the ages of twelve and sixteen and although it got better after that, I can’t say that I was ever really a happy person until just like the last few years and I can admit that without shame. And it wasn’t demons. I had a lot of trauma to work through, things that just absolutely crushed my spirit that didn’t go away when I became a believer at the age of twenty-nine. God has healed me, slowly but surely but it took decades and there are people who have been through unbelievable trauma that makes mine look like nothing. So, there’s that—mental anguish that needs to be dealt with by God and/or a professional. No shame in that. I probably would have benefitted from a counselor but I am too independent and introspective.

Then, after my first stroke, my brain was seriously malfunctioning. Clots do that—they damage stuff. I became a paranoid obsessive-compulsive. I couldn’t function. Again, not demons. Brain-damage. Some of it lasts even today, over 24 years later. I used to be a calligrapher and now my handwriting is just atrocious and for the first twenty years, my hand would stop writing long words about halfway through and wouldn’t obey my own brain. I still have bruises on my upper arm because I run into walls because my body isn’t exactly sure where I am when I am walking too quickly. This happened because my brain doesn’t work the way it should. My IQ is much lower than it was in college. I am still way above normal, but I can tell the difference. Because brains get damaged, they malfunction, they can develop chemical imbalances—just like hearts and kidneys and livers and stomachs and every other part of our bodies. Like eyes needing glasses and ears needing hearing aids. These aren’t moral issues and no one ever suggests that they are. And yet we shame people over their brains. We shame trauma survivors if they don’t “get it together” fast enough.

And then we are stunned when people don’t show any external signs of trauma and then end up dead by their own hands. We are not a safe sort of society to be truly and honestly vulnerable in. And even if a person has their family there for support, they still have the weight of the world pressing down on them, telling them that they are hopeless if they can’t just think their way out of it. If only we just allowed people to be depressed without all of the value judgments, without trying to artificially cheer them up or offer them platitudes about positive thinking and exercise and eating correctly when something deeper is wrong but we don’t know what it is because we are forever forcing easy answers on people. But hey, easier to call people snowflakes when they are struggling, right?

Oh man, I saw this meme today. It was one of those things shaming a person who says something just revolting. A politician was asking publicly on social media if maybe perhaps we should have classes about mental health in high school, in order to begin the dialogue for people who are seriously struggling. The response? Oh yeah, just have Bible classes instead because ALL MENTAL ILLNESS is actually demonic and the entire mental health industry is just one huge conspiratorial cover-up. Oh man, you want someone who is going through a mental crisis to kill themselves? Just tell them they are possessed—that’ll do it. I thank God for the Christian counselors out there actually helping people and trying to circumvent the horrible damage being done by armchair quarterbacks who are not there for people in their need. The types of people who, instead of listening and hugging and crying and being there, just try to do an on the spot exorcism and then blame the person when it doesn’t work. “Oh, you obviously aren’t repentant for the sins that got you here in the first place. No, couldn’t be that I was totally off base.” A little compassion goes a long way and so think about where a lot of compassion would take us. You know, mental illness is scary from the outside, just think of what it is like from the inside. As a former paranoid OCD, even for just that year while my brain was recovering functionality, I can tell you it is terrifying. I needed medication. I needed time to heal. I didn’t need to be fed ridiculous nonsense about somehow it all actually being demons. And the people who are suffering today in whatever way—from trauma or disease or mental illness? They seriously need for you to help them out or get out of their way. But never forget that they are the exact people that Yeshua spoke about in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. We just have to decide which of those we are going to be in response to their needs.