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What the Bible says about Thoughts, Retaining God in
(From Forerunner Commentary)

Psalm 10:13

It is not a matter of them thinking God does not exist, but that they are denying Him. They do not want to believe that He is there. He has denied God by denying or renouncing what God says about Himself.

God says plainly in many scriptures that He will judge for sin. This is what the Ten Commandments are about: They define sin for us. By them, we know what is good and what is not good, so we can come into judgment before Him without excuse. A reason Christ came was to qualify to be that Judge, to judge all at the last day. We, however, are going through our judgment right now.

The wicked man has fooled himself into believing that God will not require an accounting for sin. He thinks God will not pass judgment on him; He will just let his sins slide.

It sounds much like modern, antinomian Protestantism. It is, in effect, what the psalmist is talking about. He speaks of a normal, everyday Israelite who would supposedly know God. He had entered into the covenant by circumcision, and so he should know better. However, he has decided to ignore what God has said and lives his life as a practicing atheist. He is not really an atheist, because he believes there is a God, but he lives his life as if God did not exist.

The wicked man here, then, could be somebody who professes Christ—a professing Christian—but his lifestyle betrays his real, inner conclusion that there is no God.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Is God in All Our Thoughts?

Matthew 6:21-24

This passage contains metaphorical usages of the heart, the eyes, and light and darkness, teaching us about spiritual blindness. Jesus' basic theme is our focus—the things we set our eyes or hearts on or the thoughts to which our minds continually return.

We should understand the word “mammon” broadly and not limit it just to money. Because Jesus presents only two options here, we can define mammon as “anything other than God”! Mammon can be anything “under the sun” and thus include countless things that we cannot necessarily hold in our hands yet are still of the flesh. We may feel good about ourselves for being content with a middle-class lifestyle and not pursuing wealth. However, if our hearts pursue praise, popularity, position, power, or prestige, we are still serving mammon. These are still cares of the physical life rather than the conduct of the new life.

Jesus teaches that our clarity of vision depends on our focus—on what gets our attention. Whether healthy or diseased, our spiritual eyesight is directly related to what we treasure and whom or what we serve. Having the wrong treasure or serving the wrong master equates to having a bad eye and walking in darkness. His illustrations mean that blinding ourselves can be as simple as letting God slip from our view or not retaining God in our knowledge, as Romans 1 mentions.

We stumble and sin when we lose our focus on God and what matters to Him. Then, our understanding begins to regress, if only a little. We may start down that pervasive path of sinning, further damaging our understanding, and sinning again.

Perhaps this scenario seems overblown or excessively dire. However, it seems so only because we think of it like a sped-up, time-lapse video of a seed that germinates, grows, blossoms, and fades in a matter of seconds. In real life, this process of darkening our own eyes may take substantially longer, during which time we face many opportunities to choose differently.

Jesus' brother, the apostle James, also describes this process quite simply, beginning with an enticement or desire (James 1:13-15). The temptation is the equivalent of the earthly treasure, the mammon, taking one's eyes off God. He writes, when “desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death” (verse 15).

This process sounds like it progresses rapidly, and in some relatively rare instances, like with Ananias and Sapphira, death can result in a matter of hours. In other cases, as with Judas, that wrong focus—a form of blindness—may persist for years before the internal suppression of truth breaks out in an act that God may allow to happen as a judgment. That does not mean we are lost, unlike Judas. It means we could have taken a better road and kept ourselves—and maybe others—from extra grief and regret.

David C. Grabbe
Spiritual Blindness (Part Three): Choosing a Curse

Matthew 7:21-23

These people profess Christ's name. They take it for themselves and do these so-called works, in which they seem to preach, prophesy, do good works like casting out demons, and perform wonders. Yet, what does Jesus say? "I never knew you."

What did they profess? They professed to know God and have a relationship with Him, but He says, "I never knew you, because really you never knew Me." How does He know that? They were practicing lawlessness!

What is lawlessness? Sin! These people lack obedience. They may have the knowledge, but they lack putting this knowledge into godly practice. They believe that they know God's will, but they do not do it. Failing to practice God's will, Jesus says, is sin. Why is failing to practice God's law sin? Because, if we are not doing God's will, we are certainly doing something else!

What is not of God is sin (compare Romans 14:23)!

They have not hit the mark, which is one of the definitions of sin. Obviously, their problems originate in the way they think. If their thoughts were godly, they would behave in a godly manner. However, since they do not behave in a godly manner, their thoughts must not really be godly.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Is God in All Our Thoughts?

Ephesians 2:1-3

We cannot think with what we do not have. If we do not have the right material upon which to base our thoughts, how can we possibly produce the right things? We are always, whether pauper or king, limited by what is in our mind. Paul shows this in Ephesians 2:1-3:

This reveals to us that every human being who has ever lived (except Jesus) has been enslaved to a way of thinking generated by the prince of the power of the air, Satan. Because of this, we fulfilled the desires of our flesh and mind. Indeed, because our minds had little else with which to work, we could not produce anything else! We produced the fruits of a spirit but not the Spirit of God.

John W. Ritenbaugh
The Fruit of the Spirit


 




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