Before the Rationalizations

I recently had a long, serious conversation with a lovely woman who is spending far too much time contemplating a possible course of action she knows unequivocally is destructive and displeasing to the God she claims to love and serve.

My reaction: This will not end well. It never does.

The thought life is a huge theme in the scriptures. References to the faulty thought lives of Adam, Eve and Cain show up as early as Genesis 3 and 4. By Genesis 6, God saw that every intention of the thoughts of men’s hearts were “only evil continually”. Evil thinking led to the behavior that resulted in the Flood.

That widespread wickedness God saw in his creation didn’t sprout out of nowhere. It was the direct and inevitable consequence of wrong thinking.

The Magnitude of the Problem

It is tempting to consider evil thinking less dangerous than evil behavior even though it is far more common. After all, it should be obvious that not every evil thought produces a corresponding evil action. Many things may operate on the human will to restrain it, including conscience, shame or, most often, fear of getting caught. We may add love and the work of the Holy Spirit in the regenerate heart.

But what happens when these “containment buffers” cease to operate, as they will one day when that which restrains the man of lawlessness is taken out of this world? Cellphone cameras trained on inner city rioters over the last few years captured huge numbers of “upstanding citizens” with no previous criminal records in the act of looting, damaging property and engaging in violence right alongside the usual suspects, often outnumbering the career criminals ten to one. The reason? “Everyone was doing it”, so the chances of negative consequences dropped astronomically. Take away the deterrent effect of properly enforced law, and you quickly get an idea of how much evil thinking is really out there in the hearts and minds of men.

Seen from God’s perspective, then, evil thoughts are a major issue, the fountainhead and energizer of all other evils. God, who knows the heart, sees not just everything we do, but everything we would do if we thought we could get away with it. No wonder he was grieved to the heart and regretted he had made man on the earth. The utter worthlessness of the human condition was readily evident to the Creator at a level and to an extent we can only imagine. He is just as aware of it today.

Dialoguing with Evil

The word used in the New Testament to describe the thought life is dialogismos. It refers not to the innumerable silly notions that sometimes flash through our minds, and which we instantly dismiss as inappropriate or unworthy, but to the conscious deliberations of the heart, the choices to meditate on things not worthy of meditation, and the reasoning processes by which men and women will later attempt to justify their actions. These are where the human race gets into major trouble.

A quick scan of the way the word is used throughout the New Testament shows the sort of wrong thinking we are prone to excuse in ourselves: an accusatory spirit, delusions of grandeur, groundless fears, ungratefulness, vanity, disagreeability and partiality. None of these may be obvious to those around us, who may think us just wonderful, but they are readily apparent to the Lord.

For the Christian then, the real task of becoming more like Christ starts not with managing behavior, but with what we allow to fester in our hearts and heads. It’s not so much about preventing the consequences of the undesirable traffic in our craniums, but about obediently shutting down the mental conversation before the rationalizations start.