Heath Lambert: This week on the podcast, we want to answer one of the questions that we have received from some of you who listen to the podcast. And the question that we’re talking about this week goes along the lines of, “I believe in biblical counseling, I believe that the Bible is sufficient for biblical counseling, and I believe that what people really need when they need help is Jesus and the Word, and yet I’m aware of these stories…” and then you could fill in the blank with the story where secular counseling has succeeded. And what do we do when we see people who are committed to secular therapy and their counselees get better? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about this week. And first of all, as I answer the question, I think we need to describe the dilemma. On the one hand, we must acknowledge as Christians that God gave us His Word and His Son to address our problems. That’s the reason that we have the Bible. That’s the reason that we know of the grace in Jesus is to address our problems. And the fact of the matter is that as human beings we were not created to solve our problems in any other way apart from the Bible and apart from the grace of Jesus. And so, that is the fact that every Christian must confess.
On the other hand, we are aware that secular therapeutic techniques that do not depend on Jesus and do not depend on the Bible often help people improve with a specific problem and we could multiply examples here. I have shared on this podcast the story of my mother who came to quit drinking through the intervention of Alcoholics Anonymous. We could talk about the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy, which has been verified both anecdotally and empirically across all kinds of studies. And so, if we want to find evidence that secular therapy works to improve some problems, we won’t have to look very far and that creates an issue. If God made us to be helped through His Word and through His Son, how do we make sense of the fact that secular therapy often succeeds in seeing the problems of people be ameliorated? I think by way of response to that dilemma there’s a few things that we can say.
First, you should not be surprised that secular therapies often work. In fact, what I say when I’m talking about this is I would actually be more surprised to find out that secular therapy always failed, that it never worked. It actually encourages me to hear that there are times and instances, many of them, where secular therapy works. And the reason that encourages me is because of the doctrine of common grace. And the doctrine of common grace teaches that in God’s good providence, in His kindness, He makes gifts available, grace available, to the entirety of the human race regardless of whether they are saved or not. Common grace is the goodness of God to have the crops of unbelievers grow, to have the illnesses of unbelievers get better, and to have all people have access to true information. And so, because of God’s common grace, even unbelievers are enabled to observe and understand true things about the human condition and to apply some of those observations to counseling. So actually, the reality of common grace, the reality of God’s goodness to everybody even those who don’t believe, makes us thankful. And what common grace means is that secular therapeutic techniques will work when they are the most biblical. The reason actually we’ll know what elements of a secular therapy are working and which ones are not working is as we study the Bible. And as we study the Bible, we’ll be able to hold that up to the secular therapy that worked and we’ll be able to say, “Well, hey, here’s where they were biblical.” and so we’ll have confidence that that is where they were the most effective. And so, our first response is to acknowledge that the doctrine of common grace, God’s goodness to all people, will mean that secular therapy often is successful as they piggyback off biblical truth without even understanding what they’re doing. They’re just unknowing recipients of God’s goodness to them.
But there’s a second thing that we need to say. And that is that even when secular therapy works, as it rides in on the coattails of common grace, we should be very concerned. And that is because there is a theological reality that is in tension with the doctrine of God’s common grace and that is the doctrine of the noetic effects of sin. The noetic effects of sin refers to the biblical teaching that sin damages our mind, that we cannot think properly, we cannot think as we should because of the corrosive effects of sin in our soul. And so, one well-worn passage that points to this is in Romans 1 where in verse 18 it says, “…the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness…” That’s a text about the noetic effects of sin. It says that unbelievers suppress the truth. We do not acknowledge that which is true and the reason we don’t do that is because of our unrighteousness. So, our sin leads us to reject what is true. And as you go on to read in the rest of Romans 1, you’re going to find out that the noetic effects of sin have their most corrosive impact when it comes to understanding issues of God and the human condition, which are the same exact issues on the table in counseling. So, we want to be thankful for common grace. Common grace is going to help us understand why secular therapists often get it wrong, but the noetic effects of sin also help us understand that even when secular therapy gets things right, they’re going to get a lot of other things wrong. In fact, they’re going to get the most central realities wrong. The realities of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, the realities of the necessity of faith, the reality of a need that we have to be guided by the Word of God as we chart our life and deal with the difficulties that we face.
And so, even as secular therapy will work best when they are most biblical, secular therapy will work least and be least effective when they are least biblical and what you can be sure of is that the biblical realities that secular therapy leaves out will be the more important realities than the ones that they leave in. So, for example, in cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy works by stealing the behavioral truth from the Bible that you change by putting off bad things and putting on good things. What they leave off is the central reality of Jesus in making that happen. So, when the Bible talks about putting off bad behavior and putting on good behavior, that’s not a legalistic, behavioristic exhortation, but it always comes in the Scripture packaged in the truth of Jesus Christ. That Jesus Christ makes it possible for you to do this by His life and death and by the grace that He dispenses. And so, even though cognitive behavioral therapy, which experiences a lot of effectiveness in their counseling, it works by stripping a biblical reality away from a larger biblical reality, namely the glory of God in Jesus Christ.
And so, those two realities, common grace and noetic effects of sin, actually work to explain that even when secular therapy works, you still don’t need it because what we need now and what we’ve always needed is the truth of God that’s revealed in the Scripture. We need to be biblical. When you’re biblical, you don’t have to sit here and figure out on your own what might work. You don’t have to sit here and figure out what essential realities might not work. You just do what the Bible tells you to do and cut out the middleman. And what you’ll find when you do biblical counseling is that you get the whole package in there. And when you get the whole package in there, you can do more than what secular therapy can do which is give you some changes that can work for a little while that can help you get to Hell more comfortably. When you put the whole package together and do all of the counseling work biblically, you can have changes that matter for this life and that matter on into eternity.
