Mythology of Self-control

Nothing is more comical than someone singing the praises of Western Civilization, when they evaluate it wholly from within Western values.
Who would be surprised that Western Civilization is good at giving us what Western Civilization wants in the first place? The critical error here is having so thoroughly internalized Western values as to be utterly incapable of recognizing any other value system at all. Brothers and Sisters, the Bible does not promote Western values. Westerners who read the Bible typically get just about everything in the Bible wrong. Jesus saves their souls and takes them to Heaven despite their lifelong battle to avoid obeying the Spirit.
More spiritual is not the same as more cerebral. Failure to grasp the difference is the very nature of the Fall. At the same time, spiritual need not be anti-cerebral, nor mysterious and impractical.
The Fall did not change the nature of mankind. It did not darken the intellect; it placed the intellect in charge where it was never competent in the first place. Adam and Eve before the Fall suffered the same physical appetites and emotions, and had the same grade of intellect everyone has today. But they had living spirits.
Eden was not and is not somewhere on this plane of existence, either. Scripture offers parabolic language when description is not possible. Above this realm are multiple layers of higher existence. They are all on the other side of the boundary of time and space, but the difference is impossible to describe. The Fall drove us out of whatever place Adam and Eve occupied into a far lower place, because they were not fit to live where they had been. Eden as a private garden is parable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real; it just can’t be explained in human terms. God could not allow humanity to occupy that higher realm if they were going to forsake the necessary submission to His Spirit rule.
The Fall was disconnecting from the Spirit Realm, and killing the human spirit. It created a barrier between our minds and God. To choose logic as your rule, your executive function, is to shut out the Spirit-spirit communion for which we were designed. God never intended for us to make those life and death decisions without His direct leading input. He created us to be ruled by the Spirit-spirit communion. The intellect was granted as the practical means of implementing the executive decisions in spirit. It was never designed to rule.
This altered situation called for a merciful means to re-enter Heaven on any of the various levels there. Children are unable to choose placing their logic on the throne of the soul because their logic is not fully developed until somewhere around age eight or nine. Such children who die end up on some level of Heaven for something only God understands, but rather like a return to Eden, the place of innocence and innocents. So much is deduction because Scripture never says directly what’s going on with that. Those who do reach the capability for logic invariably place it upon the throne, however much the logic may be muddled with appetite.
Paul warns in Romans 5 the issue is not a formal declaration of Law Covenants. He notes people suffered from sin between Adam and Moses without the Law of Moses. That’s because while human failures are defined by transgression against revealed moral law, the problem is death was welcomed regardless of Adam’s and Eve’s failure to comprehend the consequences of their choice. The Law does define sin, but that wasn’t the purpose of the Law. God gave the Law to define the recovery process, to explain how one could begin receiving the Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden, to kill the sinful flesh and get it off the throne.
God giving His Laws was mercy. Later in that same Roman letter, Paul bluntly says the flesh, which includes the intellect, is incapable of obeying the Laws. The mind is utterly convinced it can handle the job, but even if you teach the mind all it can possibly know about God’s moral Law, even by making the mind adopt the Hebrew intellectual outlook and mysticism, it still lacks the power to act on what it knows. That’s because, in clinical terms, the human will is actually stronger than the intellect. The human will was meant to tie itself directly in faith to the spirit alive with God’s Spirit. Because it is by default dead, the will is unable to act in the soul’s best interest. It has no real power, because the intellect is not enough.
You cannot make the flesh obey the mind. A precious few exceptional individuals may somehow overpower the flesh in some ways, but the vast majority of humanity is simply unable to come even close. It’s not a failure of logic or self-control; self-control does not exist. It’s a myth. We use it as a figure of speech for something we wish we had, but in terms of clinical reality, there is no self-control without the power of the Spirit.
We are fallen. God revealed how to deal with this, and His revelation provides a broad safety net for all of humanity. If you have monumental self-control, good for you. If your spirit is alive and you use His power, great! Stop trying to run your life and simply obey by His power. But for the mass of humanity, all the blessings in this world God could possibly offer, including the necessity of repentance, are tied up in the Laws He designed for the bulk of humanity. One of the blessings He offered to His people, those who are now Spirit-born, is the faint hope of a decent life here while we await His hand taking us home. It is not available within Western Civilization because it requires a lifestyle of supporting each other in very close proximity as an extended family household. We don’t pretend to stand alone.
Our Western culture holds forth this grand vision of logic-based self-control. It’s a lie. All the knowledge and intellect in the world won’t do a damned bit of good if you don’t have power from somewhere. For most people, their entire range of self-control is a mere construct of the culture in which they live. They think they have self-control when it’s nothing more than conformance to environmental pressures. They see a profit and loss proposition and buy into it.
And it’s not according to God’s Word.
So in the end, we have precious few with any significant level of self-control and a whole host of folks with lesser amounts, tapering off toward the bottom with those who profess none. While our culture proclaims the greatness of self-control, it promotes in the very same instant all the wallowing weaknesses of the flesh.
I’m going to pick on the bugbear so popular in our world today: child sexual molestation. It’s built into our culture. Our fear of death and idolizing of youth mixed with “get it while you can” creates a tinderbox of sexual desire for children. It’s not abnormal in our Western society. It’s the paradox that the one thing parents fear most is the one thing that fear is most likely to produce. The more frantic your fear, the more likely it is to happen. It’s simply not openly admitted that we promote it. Ever notice how we sexualize our little girls with flirty clothing and cosmetics? What we consider today “cute” and minimal is shockingly risque compared to just a few years ago. So the child molester is simply being honest and giving in to what the whole world tells him he wants.
And do you imagine the primary consumers of child sexual abuse are not those in the very centers of political power? The only people who get put in jail are those who haven’t been given permission to do the molesting our national leaders get away with. Every “criminal vice” is just the same.
The means to prevention is not crazier laws and heavier penalties that will never be applied to the biggest criminals who commit these awful acts. The means to protecting your little girl from seduction and rape is to create a society consistent with God’s Laws. Our current open democratic social structure is not in accordance with our human potential. It is based on a mythology of self-control that does not exist, cannot exist and never will (among other flaws). The single most effective means of leveraging restraint is not to be found anywhere in Western Civilization, which has proven itself implacably hostile to God’s revelation. The only means for leveraging appropriate restraint, the only hope we have of keeping the wolf from our door on vice, is the rather closed tribal society of the Ancient Near East.
The church was meant to rekindle and recreate that very social structure as much as possible. It won’t matter much what your grand logic says are inherent weaknesses in that ancient system. What you have today is significantly worse and cannot possibly ever work.
Western Civilization cannot last much longer, not because it hasn’t been tried, but because it never could have worked in the first place.