Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike: "The relationship between mental illness and evil," Edmund asks. That is a good question. I think we dealt with that a little bit yesterday, and I do think the problem often is that we cannot always tell. One of the things I said when pressed yesterday, having experienced a lot of mental illness in a ministry I was a part of, is to look at the fruit.

When the fruit of it—you will know them by their fruits—is always destructive, evil, or self-destructive, it tells you something. If you think about how demonism is described in the New Testament, which I think is a specially concentrated kind of attack upon Christ and the apostles, you can list the ways there was a kind of morbidity, nakedness, self-harm, and cutting.

The fruit of mental illness is not just sitting around babbling or saying things that are odd or inappropriate, which I see all the time. It is when those behaviors are dark, self-destructive, or destructive to other people. I gave the example of going every week to a south side nursing home. I would take the subway to get there and try to lead worship services.

It was great to watch people who were cogent engage in worship. It was also interesting to watch people with mental illness, as you might put it in modern vocabulary. They would just sit, and the music would be something calming to them. They were fine. They might not be able to cogently respond to anything I was saying as I was teaching or singing, but then there were those that once we got there, they just saw us and would break out in horrific profanity and screaming.

As I gave an example of my experience, seeing that some people had that negative response only when we as Christians showed up, I think you can start to tell that there were people in that room who had mental disorders of various kinds. Their brains did not work right. Certainly, in today's parlance, we would talk about Alzheimer's and dementia.

There were people that could not think straight and had all kinds of strange proclivities and tics. We might say this person is not thinking straight, they have a mental illness, or they have deterioration in their brains, but you do not have the kinds of horrific evil things being said when a bunch of Christians show up.

I think we can start to see the fruit of it. "You will know them by their fruit" is obviously a discussion about false teachers and real Christians, but I think we have to understand the distinction. Is the fruit of this abnormality negative, self-destructive, evil, or violent? Even the nudity of the man who would not wear clothes, the demoniac of the Gerasenes, is another good example.

Clothes were given as a covering to cover our shame. When things are done with a mental illness where people want to be without clothing, you can try and find a clinical discussion of all of that. I have the DSM-5 laying right over here, and it has all kinds of things it can label you if you do certain things. However, if those things are evil, destructive, and categorically sinful as the Bible would define it, then I think we have something going on that is more than just having a mental illness.