CHAPTER 4
The Resolution of Depression
and Overwhelming Grief through Faith
When Is Sorrow Excessive?
A. Sorrow is excessive when it arises from false premises. Any sorrow is excessive if none at all is appropriate, and a great sorrow is excessive if it is disproportionate to the actual cause. If one believes it to be a matter of duty to accomplish what is no duty at all, but feels guilty for having left the matter undone, this is guilt caused by error.
Many have felt very guilty because they found themselves unable to pray with sufficient fervor or for what they deemed a sufficient duration, for which they possessed neither the ability nor the time. Others have felt guilty for not pointing out sin in another, when the actual need was for wise instruction and carefully worded intimation rather than formal rebuke. More become obsessed with a sense of sin when, during their workday, they think of “unspiritual” things necessary to their business rather than about God.
These guilty sensations follow from superstition, when individuals have placed upon themselves religious duties that God never required of them, and they have fallen short in performing these self-imposed obligations.
Others have, falsely, become convinced that what they once held as true doctrine might be false, and then are confused and imagine that they are obligated to renounce as false what they have long held to be true.
Some become preoccupied with every bit of food they eat, what they wear, and what they say. Accordingly, they develop an inverted sense of good and evil, think the good they do is sinful, and exaggerate unavoidable minor imperfections as heinous crimes. These represent examples of pain and guilt that have no valid cause and are therefore exaggerated.
B. Guilt is excessive when it is self-destructive in either a physical or an intellectual sense. Nature requires being taken seriously, and its enjoyment requires a proper exercise of duties attached to healthy living. But clearly, such gravity and associated duties must not alone or together be understood or implemented in a way that is harmful to one’s own well-being.
Just as civil, church, and family laws are intended in each realm for building up and not for their destruction, so also personal discipline is for one’s good, not harm. As God has stated his preference for mercy over sacrifice, it is clear that we are not to use religion as a pretense to do harm to ourselves or our neighbors. We are told to love our neighbors as we do ourselves.
Fasting, for example, may be considered a duty only so far as it advances a specified good (such as expressing humility or gaining control of a particular temptation). Likewise, sorrow is excessive when it does more harm than good. But more on this specific matter later.
How Excessive Sorrow Overcomes a Person
When sorrow overwhelms someone who is aware of being a sinner, it is overdone and needs to be subdued, as in the following examples.
A. A person’s mental faculties may be diminished because of grief and trouble, so that judgment is corrupted and perverted, and therefore not to be trusted. Similarly, like someone in a rage, one in great fear and perplexity thinks of things not as they actually are but as his distraught emotional state presents them to him.
In matters of God and religion, the state of his own soul and his behavior, or his own friends or enemies, his judgment is untrustworthy because it is impaired. If it can be trusted at all, it can be trusted to be more likely false than accurate.
It is rather like having seriously inflamed eyes and yet thinking that what is seen through those eyes represents the true state of things. So when reason is overcome by sorrow, then sorrow itself is overdone.
B. Excessive grief prevents one from being able to govern his own thoughts. Such thoughts are guaranteed to be both sinful and distressing. Grief carries such thoughts along as if in a torrent. It would be easier to keep leaves on a tree motionless during a windstorm than to bring about calm thoughts in those who are so disturbed.
If one employs reason in an effort to keep them away from agonizing subjects or to direct them to more pleasant matters, it proves fruitless. Reason alone is powerless against such a stream of violent emotions.
C. Such overwhelming sorrow would engulf faith itself and strongly prevents its exercise. The gospel asks us to believe things that consist of unspeakable joy; it is with great difficulty that a heart overwhelmed by sorrow could believe that anything joyful is true, much less to believe things as truly joyful as pardon and salvation.
While not quite daring to call God a liar, the person so overwhelmed has a hard time believing God’s promises to be freely given and abundant, or that God is ready to receive all sinners who repent and return to him. Such grief, therefore, causes feelings that are at odds to the grace and promises of the gospel, and these feelings in and of themselves interfere with faith.
D. Excessive sorrow interferes with hope even more than with faith. This happens when those who consider themselves believers perceive God’s Word and promises to be true and applicable to everyone but themselves. Hope is that grace by which one not only believes the claims of the gospel but also rests in the comfort that those same gospel promises will be his own specifically, and not just generally. It is an act of application.
The first action of faith is to acknowledge that the gospel is true and promises grace and future glory through Christ.
The second action is when that faith says, as it were, “I will trust my soul and my all upon that gospel and take Christ to be my Savior and my help.” Hope then looks with anticipation to that salvation from him. Melancholy, excessive sorrow, and dismay, however, quench such hope, as water quenches fire or ice heat. Despair is the essence of such opposition to hope.
The depressed desperately would hope for themselves but find themselves unable to do so. Their thoughts about such matters are filled with suspicion and misgivings, and so they see a future of danger and misery, and feel helpless. In the absence of hope—which we are assured is the very anchor of the soul—it is no wonder that these are continually tossed about by the storms of life.
E. Such an exaggerated sense of grief consumes any comfort one might otherwise find in the goodness and love of God, and interferes with love toward God. Such interference is an enemy to living a holy life. It is nearly impossible for someone so troubled to grasp the general goodness of God at all, and even more so to experience him as good and friendly in a personal and intimate sense.
Such a soul finds himself, as it were, like a man in a Saharan desert, blistered by the intense sun, about to die from dehydration and exhaustion. While he can admit that the sun is the source of life on earth and a general blessing to mankind, he is only aware of it bringing him misery and death.
Those overwhelmed with sorrow and guilt will admit to God’s goodness toward others but experience him as an enemy set upon their destruction. They think God hates them, has forsaken them, is resolved to finally reject them, has made up his mind to do so from before time, and has specifically created them for the express purpose of damnation.
They would find it nearly impossible to love a human who slandered, oppressed, or otherwise wronged them; they find it even more difficult to love a God who, they believe, intends to damn them, and who has cut off all means of their escape.