Emotional God

Everyone connects with God on different levels, but bipolar disorder has caused me to question His goodness on a deeper and more soul-wrestling level at some times and stand in awe of how infinitely greater He is than me at others.  It has also helped me to read Scripture with a different set of eyes.  I know this is going to sound heretical to many of my readers, as I seem to be doing more and more lately as a side note.  However, I am almost thoroughly convinced that good old King David was bipolar and just undiagnosed.  Have you read the Psalms lately?  I mean, he goes from one extreme to the other, some might say from one pole to the other, in a few short chapters, right?  In one chapter he’s talking about how crazy good God is and in the next he’s obviously depressed and asking God to remember him.

There’s other examples of amazing and godly men who God chose to work through who definitely went through some serious bouts of depression.  Elijah took on how many prophets of Baal only when you turn a few short pages in your Bible later and he suddenly is asking God to take his life?  Even Paul, the hero of the New Testament in modern-day evangelicalism (as opposed even to Christ Himself mind you in extreme cases) despaired of life itself at one point. 

Furthermore, how many cases of great and godly men who have suffered from mental illness have there been since then?  I was highly offended when I heard Mark Driscoll give a sermon on leadership and say if someone was bipolar they shouldn’t be an elder in a local church.  Ironically, he has also said one of his favorite modern-era preachers was Charles Spurgeon.  Well, Mark, if someone had followed your advice good old Chuck would never have become an elder.  He may have not been bipolar but he was undoubtedly depressed at times, even to his own admission.

We do ourselves, our neighbors, and God Himself a great disservice if we focus on loving God with all our minds at the expense and replacement of loving God with all our hearts too, not to mention strength and soul too of course.  I’m not saying we should trust our emotions by any means, believe me; that would be a complete disaster if we truly lived that way in spite of late teenage and early 20 something girls in particular who assure us to just follow our hearts and everything will work out alright.  Are you completely insane?  Surely you’ve lived long enough to realize the heart is fickle, right? 

That being laid aside for a moment, how do we love God with not just our whole minds but also with our whole hearts?  Maybe we let loose in worship and act like the little kids in their worship song service.  When did we lose the ability to lose ourselves in worship just because we cared too greatly about what others might think of us?  I can still remember commenting to a friend how I loved watching his kids worship at camp when they came to visit him.  They were young at the time, probably 2 and 4 maybe.  They just let loose and danced man.  And why not??  Why don’t we do the exact same thing??

Perhaps God is just as emotional as He is intelligent?  Again, here I go into heresy, but allow me to explain myself.  God is infinitely wise; we are rest assured of this.  However, doesn’t the person of Christ show a God who embraced every type of emotion, albeit without sinning?   Jesus wept, he got so incredibly and righteously angry He overthrew tables in His Father’s house and drove the moneychangers out.  He faced temptation like we will never know.  He cried in his mom’s arms as a baby, contrary to what some renditions of the first Christmas might inform you.  He loved incredibly deeply and perfectly.  He felt everything that we feel, that’s pretty much the definition of empathy right?  I mean, we do serve a God who is able to empathize with our problems because of the temptation He faced, right?

Please don’t mishear me here.  I am not advocating for some semi-spiritual good feeling salvation nonsense.  What I am saying though is that God is a God of emotion just as much as He is a God of wisdom.  We do Him a great disservice when we spend all our time reading theologians and endless theologies and neglect to love Him with all our hearts and encourage others to do the same.