A significant portion of my studies has exposed me to the field of Mental Health. Aside from some very well crafted notions on self-help, virtually the entire field is littered with mines.
Make no mistake: God holds us accountable under the standards of His Laws, which were reduced in modern terms to (1) remain unquestioningly loyal to God as Creator and Lord, and (2) treat all other humans with proper respect. Vast tracts of academic real estate are built on the presumption there is no God and rejects the notion humans are actually people. That is, given some folks don’t quite measure up to some arbitrary standard, they aren’t considered fully human.
It’s one thing when God grants you a child to raise. Therein are you fully required by Him to make some effort to shape their behavior patterns. Indeed, this is at the root of Noah’s Covenant. We might debate forever how much freedom to self-raise is appropriate, and under what conditions, but the principle remains a parent is somewhat responsible for cleaning up the messes their children make, particularly the messes they make in the lives of those outside the home.
But it ends at some point, and herein is the sin of almost all modern cultures. We have rejected God’s guidance on the matter of what constitutes legal adulthood. For females, it’s whenever the family deems her ready for marriage, often shortly after menarche. For men, upon whom the burden falls more heavily for social stability, there is an initial step of grasping the structure of that burden, typically before physical growth is finished. Then there is a period of apprenticeship until they are deemed stable enough to manage their own household. Frankly, the meant most men didn’t get married before age 25. Get a clue: Unmarried people are a danger to social stability, unless God has called them to some special task incompatible with married life. The point is, we do have a clear point of departure.
A family can extend certain kinds of support, but cannot be held accountable after that point of departure. That is, they may choose to clean up the mess, but aren’t required. They can allow legal and social consequences to follow their natural course. The Bible makes it pretty clear what God had in mind on these issues, and there is plenty of room for adjustments without violating the underlying principles. However, what cannot be justified is our current madness of families removing themselves from the clan structure, and outsourcing the entire social fabric to strangers. The parents who bear the child are responsible for the entire gamut — directly and personally responsible. They cannot agree together with strangers for some objectified process of education for some material convenience.
Nor can they contract out expertise in deciding when someone in their family needs help after reaching adulthood. You are not permitted to appeal to “authorities” as the grounds for forcing anyone to submit to parental controls after they reach adulthood. Just because someone in your family does things inconvenient for you, there is no justification for taking over their lives, in particular their material assets. God does not approve of the legal fiction of incompetence before the court. If they are a danger to themselves, stand back and let them choose. If they are a danger to anyone else, restrain them. Not some policeman, but you yourself. If you don’t have time and energy for the big boys in your clan to do it, then you aren’t responsible enough yourself.
As repeatedly stated on this blog in the past, if your social structure is anything other than clan-tribal, you are wrong already. After that, nothing you do will be right — nothing. You have no righteous leverage for getting involved in the lives of your kin without it. So if you can’t negotiate with a difficult family member, shut up and put up with their antics. Provided their material goods did not come from crime (as God defines crime), you have no claim on their property so as to tell them how to use it. As far as God is concerned, the Ten Commandments make it painfully clear He regards the spouse and children of a man a sacred trust from Him, and no one on this earth is authorized to get involved unless they have already been living in a clan-tribal social structure. The freedom of a man to choose is a grant from God, and almost no modern nation, state, society or civilization is doing this right.
That’s what God says.
