“Behold, all you who kindle a fire, who equip yourselves with burning torches! Walk by the light of your fire, and by the torches that you have kindled! This you have from my hand: you shall lie down in torment.” –Isaiah 50:11
I don’t want to overstate my case here, but I’ll confess that one of the greatest challenges in doing biblical counseling is the necessary step of snuffing out man-made torches. I’m convinced that part of the reason we find it so hard to see the Lord at times is because we’ve created fires for ourselves. And rather than helping in counseling all of these other options actually distract from true help.
I’m not attempting here to say that in biblical counseling only the Bible will help. I think God’s grace is massive and he’ll reach us where we are—bad theology and practices and all. And he will often use broken means to provide substantial healing to broken minds. That’s the kind of loving God we serve. But I also believe that we’re often harmed by an insufficient view of the Bible. Our help is stunted because of our reliance on our torches.
Though one might be tempted to bristle at the way David Powlison describes this, I think his words here are helpful. He says that some have a “thin Bible”. He asks a pretty searching question of our view of the Bible:
What do you see when you look at your Bible? Do you see a book crammed with relevance? Do you see a book out of which God bursts as He speaks to what matters in daily life? Is your Bible packed with application to the real problems of real people in the real world: inexhaustible, immediate, diverse, flexible? Or is the Bible relatively thin when it comes to addressing human struggles?
We’re not born with hearts and minds that have a disposition to “trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God” (Isaiah 50:10). In the darkness our gut response isn’t to quietly wait until we hear the voice of the Servant. Instead, our fallen inclination leads us to fire up the torches so we can see.
Idols die hard. And so we’re hesitant to say that our torches actually blind us. We want to rescue our efforts instead of crucify them. And what we end up with is a thin Bible instead of a crammed one. Powlison continues:
When people with thin Bibles hear people with crammed Bibles talk about the sufficiency of Scripture for counseling, they hear, “Something thin and incomplete is sufficient for a very complex job.” That sounds ridiculous. Biblical counseling sounds absurd, doctrinaire, obscurantist, the rantings of small-minded know-nothings who glory in their ignorance. But when people with crammed Bibles speak of Scripture’s sufficiency they mean—or ought to mean—“Something living and active, inexhaustibly rich, comprehensive and relevant, is sufficient for a very complex job.” That sounds reasonable. And when in the trenches of face-to-face ministry the Lord Himself speaks to people, that profession of vision is vindicated.
Powlison, D. (1993). Do You See? The Journal of Biblical Counseling, Number 3, Spring 1993, 11, 4.
I’m one of those who believes that the Bible is sufficient for biblical counseling. But in saying that I’m not saying that our issues aren’t really all that difficult and you can just throw a Bible verse or two at it. Instead what I mean is that we are complex and our problems are usually a twisted mess. And we compound it by all the torches we’ve got glowing in our lives as well. And so part of the task of biblical counseling is showing the fullness of God and his answer to our greatest problems and doing this at the expense of all the matches we’ve struck.
Our issues are complex. But the Bible is more inexhaustible than we are. That’s good news.
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