#self-accusation

Devotional for April 10

"Hold fast the confidence" - Hebrews 3:6

Seldom will we see a sadder wreck of even the highest, noblest Christian character than when the enemy has succeeded in undermining the simple trust of a child of God and lured him into self-accusation and condemnation. it is a fearful place when the believer allows Satan to take the throne and act as God, sitting in judgment oil his every thought and act and keeping him in the darkness of ceaseless condemnation. Well indeed has the Apostle told us to hold firmly the shield of faith!

This is Satan's objective point in all hi upon us, to destroy Our trust. if he can get us to lose our simple confidence in God, he knows that he will soon have us at his feet.

For the Christian who has known the sweetness of God's love to lose his perfect trust in God is enough to wreck both reason and life. Let us hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of [our] hope firm unto the end.

Understanding might not be the solution to your anger.

The appeal in Baruch Spinoza is very precise, if you understand the causes of your affects, you stop misreading them as personal failures or moral defects. Anger becomes intelligible, this is what happens when my power to act is reduced by external causes. That shift can genuinely lower the secondary load so you end up with less self-accusation, less confusion, less “why am I like this?”

But the psychologists or spiritual helpers forget to say that it is only one layer of the system. Spinoza distinguishes between adequate ideas (clear grasp of causes) and passive affects (states produced when external forces determine you). The uncomfortable point is that you can have a fairly adequate idea while still being dominated by passive affects. Knowing the mechanism does not automatically give you the power to alter it.

Why?

Because the causes that generate the state are not primarily in the level where the understanding sits. They are in the body, the learned predictions, the environment’s constraints. So you get a split. You understand that “this anger is a decrease in my power caused by obstruction” and your nervous system still runs spike, shutdown, pressure, repetition, No contradiction. Just two layers operating on different time scales and with different leverage.