The First Lesson

This lesson comes from a drug abuser in the throes of heavy addiction. He arrived early to one of my favourite recovery meetings. Clearly this was his first venture into a room full of clean ex-addicts and he was jumping about like a grasshopper. His nervousness and machine-gun speech spelled amphetamines to me. He appeared to be in his early twenties and I think he wanted to speak to the boss of the meeting (a mistake: there is no boss of that meeting). On the other hand, he might have wanted a tolerant grandfatherly type to hear him out. In any case, he soon landed in front of the oldest-looking person in the room, me.

“I can’t believe it,” he said in rapid-fire. “This can’t happen. I can’t have a habit. I’m not addicted. I only started months ago! Why can’t I quit? I’m a musician, a composer not an addict.” His heels shot up off the floor with nearly every word.

“Rap music?” I asked.

“How did you know?” he asked. Up and down.

“You talk like Eminem.”

“Not that good,” he replied, vibrating, jiggling. “But why? How? So soon? A habit in months! What happened?” He was close to me but staring over my shoulder as he bounced, never looking at me. His words seemed to explode somewhere behind my back.

I said, “It’s the oldest story in the book.”[1]

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the book, the first book. The problem is old as mankind. God said don’t but they did.” Habits and fleas: Adam had ’em.

Now he quit jumping, stood perfectly still and looked me straight in the eye steadily, derisively, “Do you actually believe in Adam and Eve?”

I paused to frame my answer (and that was my mistake, but the question is more difficult than it appears). “There had to be a first person…”

He never let me finish. “Fundamentalist!” It’s an indictment. Motionless, scorn frozen on his face, he glued his eyes on me, uttering the one word that most expressed his contempt. “Fundamentalist!” Then he started bouncing again, surveying the calm people taking seats to begin their meeting. Assuming them to be fundamentalists as well (his mistake), he bolted from the room, out the door into the city night, back to his world of uppers and downers where no one believes in silly things like Adam and Eve.

This is certainly not the only time I’ve been cut off like that: anyone who associates with drug addicts gets accustomed to not being heard out. And non-addicts can be just as restless. That’s one good reason for writing, having something important to say and being able to say it, start to finish, without a watch getting fingered or the doorway eyed.

I begin with the jumping-man story to illustrate this: my message needs time to sink in. Please don’t make too many final judgements early on. I can promise that, if you are patient with me, rewards will come in the finish. You will not be disappointed. I speak from experience here.

So for starters, what I wanted to tell the jumping man before he split was, yes, I suppose you could call me a fundamentalist in that I assume the book of Genesis is divinely inspired and generally historically accurate. If I did not assume this, I would not have persisted for twenty years to understand its message for him, you and me today. However (and this is a big “However”), it is far from necessary to assume this in order to benefit from the message. Even if the story of Adam and Eve were nothing but an allegory, an old legend with little basis in historical fact, it still might speak wisely to our current condition. After all, it is the “oldest story in the book.”

What I thought the Bible didn’t say

I became a Christian on the first Sunday in November 1980 at about eleven o’clock in the morning but I had been freed from addiction to alcohol and drugs nearly four years earlier in March of 1976. I did not attend Church at first. Some people give their lives to Jesus before they get healed but I got healed first and remained abstinent from alcohol and drugs merely by attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.

AA and NA meetings take place all the time in the basements and back-sheds of church buildings when there’s nothing else doing except maybe a choir rehearsal. In these modest venues, addicts and alcoholics who want to stay clean and sober sit at tables and talk about God as they understand Him, not necessarily as He is portrayed in the Bible. When the room gets crowded, you sit on the floor or on kindergarten chairs (I am two meters tall) – not totally inappropriate for the spiritually immature. They strongly suggest you admit that you are powerless but that God can restore you to sanity if you ask Him. Honesty, openness and willingness are essential. Somehow I found it easier to admit powerlessness while sitting on a kindergarten chair. A slow learner, I required nearly four years in the cellar, symbolically speaking, to grow up enough to go upstairs on Sunday and sit in a pew. I was fifty years old before I finally got baptized, received the Holy Spirit and began to fellowship with the saints in a main hall.

One of the first things I did with the first Bible I bought – a King James Version with gold edging and a short Concordance in the back – was to look up anything I could find related to alcoholism and addiction. I wanted see what the Bible had to say about these afflictions that had ruined thirty-five years of my life. When I failed to find what I was looking for, I bought a “Strong’s Exhaustive” and searched harder.

I didn’t find much of interest to me: it seems Noah had a drinking problem[2]; some people called Rechabites didn’t drink at all[3]; you could say, albeit a big stretch, that Jesus got diagnosed as an alcoholic (the Pharisees called him a “wine-bibber”[4]) but he never got drunk so the diagnosis was faulty; getting drunk was strongly discouraged[5] and carousing drunks could not enter the Kingdom[6]; on the day of Pentecost they acted drunk but were really dry as a bone[7]; being sober (meaning sharp and alert) was definitely encouraged[8] – and so it went.

Basically the Bible seemed to be saying getting drunk was bad and sometimes abominable but moderate drinking was OK if not good. I found nothing about how to quit or about who should quit. I found nothing about knowing when to quit and nothing about the intractable problem of how to stay stopped when the urge got too great. Worst of all, I found nothing about how to get others, say loved ones, to quit when you saw them ruining their lives on alcohol.

The Bible verses on alcohol seemed inconsequential to me then. I had spent the night in a drunk-tank, lost a wife and family and seen my promising career go into reverse. I didn’t need the Bible to tell me getting drunk was wrong. My problem was how to stop and remain abstinent and how to help others to do the same. I knew there must be something in the Bible about these vital issues but for the life of me I couldn’t find it. Not the way I was looking.

To say I was disappointed is an understatement. Still, I would have been even more disappointed if I hadn’t known at some level that I must have been making some mistake – not looking in the right places or not asking the right questions.

Yet things got worse before they got better. Regarding the abuse of drugs, quitting drugs, the consequences of not quitting drugs, how to stay off drugs and how to help my friends who were still on drugs, I found nothing in the Bible whatsoever. No matter how I searched, zero. The Bible said even less to me about drugs than about alcoholism.

What it did say seemed irrelevant. A brother in the Lord, an amateur Bible scholar who had been a Christian for years, approached me after a house meeting with “something of interest for you.” He went on to relate, in measured tones, that the Greek word for witchcraft was pharmacopoeia, meaning “drugs”. I couldn’t tell him how ‘underwhelmed’ I was by this bit of arcanum, no doubt a fascinating footnote for scholars to ponder. Exactly how was this going to help someone like me keep out of jail or rehabs and stay alive?

Worst of all was what the Bible said and did not say about a certain vital word in my vocabulary. This little noun had been a turning point in my life. When I avoided the word, I used drugs of one kind or another every day. After I spoke it out loud, applying it to myself, I stayed completely clean and sober – for over four years at that point. The word was “addict”.

The most difficult thing I ever did before becoming a Christian was admit I had a drug problem. I went to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and said, “My name is Charles and I am an addict.” Man, was that ever a tough stretch for me with all my education. I wanted to say I was a “writer”. Or perhaps a “psychologist”: having studied psychology, maybe I could help them with their problems. Nevertheless, by the grace of God, I said, “I am an addict.” and became willing to accept help. It marked the beginning of my recovery. I have not had a drink or a drug since that day. The word “addict” spoke so much to my state of mind in those days that I sometimes went to meetings and joked, “My name is Addict and I suffer from Charles.” It was not really a joke: admitting my problem was the most important thing I was doing.

So what did the Bible have to say? “Addicted”, the epithet I’d so reluctantly confessed in order to sit all those years in those basements to stay clean a day at a time, was used once in the ancient King James Version (1 Cor. 15:16), where it was defined – hello! – as “consecrated and devoted”! No other translation even contained the word.

Not only the Bible but also the entire English language had let me down. The meaning had completely reversed from good to bad since KJV was translated. There was no ancient wisdom regarding my problem with drug addiction, the scourge of life, as I knew it. Actually, I could not have been more wrong but the conclusion seemed inescapable. The Bible was worse than erroneous: it was immaterial!

When all else fails, take it to the Lord

I began pacing the deck outside the apartment at night when I couldn’t sleep, asking the Lord questions like, “What am I doing wrong?” “What’s it all about?” “Where am I going?” The answers I got were not ones I wanted but they calmed me nonetheless. The Lord was saying, “Settle down. Trust! More will be revealed!”

No matter what the Bible seemed not to say about addiction, the Church I attended didn’t allow drinking or smoking. Other drugs were unthinkable. Before my time they’d tried to lead some heroin addicts to the Lord but the results were fruitless so they never tried again. As far as they were concerned, I’d come in from the blue. Surprisingly, I felt comfortable in there, reassured to know that at least I was not alone in abstaining. The “saints” (that’s what we called ourselves) accepted me without question as “a new creature in Christ” unless and until I might prove otherwise. They were marvellously scriptural in not condemning me for my past. And they were doggedly sticky-beak in making me accountable for my actions in the present. They hid little from each other. Life in Christ was supposed to be an open book and they had the right to peek into my copy any time they wanted. This didn’t bother me much. Actually I liked their concern. They cared! I wasn’t drinking or taking drugs so I felt I had little to hide. And I probably benefited from the enforced accountability.

But I remained unenlightened about what the Bible says to addicts. They preached about other things, the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Spirit, what it means to be Saved and Born Again, how the Old Testament relates to the New, Bible Prophecy, and the Fundamentals of Faith. They regularly asserted, in passing, that their strong stand against drinking was scriptural but I never felt they really proved the point: the Bible seemed to me to promote moderate drinking. Nevertheless I was just as inflexible as they were about all “regulations”. And just as suspicious! (Recovering alcoholics can be a real pain in the church: I could spot hypocrisy behind any pew.)

Revelation!

In a year or so of quite solid teaching, I matured sufficiently to be able to receive one giant insight. I must warn the reader that my insight may not impress you like it did me. It hit me like the proverbial lightning bolt.

I was praying hard and searching carefully yet the Lord now answered, as He sometimes does, unexpectedly and in a strange way. It happened as a result of my Church’s somewhat unusual practices. Because they had a fixed idea about how one got saved and became a Christian, every Sunday the elders set up a big old bathtub full of warm water behind a curtain. At the end of every service they made an altar call for baptism. The actual formula was derived from Acts 2:37 where people asked, “what shall we do?” In 2:38 Peter answers, “Repent and be baptised, all of you, in the name of Jesus Christ…”

My Church’s teaching on baptism was very detailed (no infants, full soaking, symbolic death and resurrection) but they never said much about repentance. I assumed it meant, “don’t be proud”. If you were willing to walk up that aisle in full view, don a pair of used bathers backstage, climb into a slippery old iron bathtub and get dunked while a thousand people clapped on the beat and sang hallelujah, you were probably fairly humble. Plus in this Church they expected you to speak in tongues as you came up for breath! I certainly felt humble when I did it!

But of course repentance means much more than humility. I recall one young addict who humbled himself, got baptised, cleaned up, married his girlfriend and fellow-shipped regularly. Then one weekday I saw him on a city footpath looking dazed. I was sure he was using. On Sunday I was doorkeeper for the morning meeting. When I opened the door for this man, I glimpsed black pupils like bullet holes. He was high all right: once inside he began waving his arms and shouting “warnings to the House of Israel!” It was quite a performance, up and down the aisles, frightening the more timid of the brethren. I phoned the police from the church office although it was too late to stop his wild tirade. The Pastor’s son strongly rebuked me for not doing more to protect his father and the flock. But I said I really thought the man was not dangerous, just a crazy addict who picked up a drug. If I ever took what he took, I might well do the same or worse. When I explained this, they became frightened of me. “But haven’t you repented?” somebody asked. That was my moment of insight.

Nearly every Bible explains it in footnotes. But you can’t read until you can see! Now I saw and understood the fine print. Repent meant turn completely away from your old self, change your views, renounce evil, accept the will of God, and don’t relapse on drugs or booze ever again!

A light bulb went on in my head: I made an accurate generalisation, one of the most important discoveries of my life. Repentance for me meant, the first drink or drug must be avoided no matter what! I had found the right word for it – in the Bible!

I’ve attended thousands of AA and NA meetings. I’m sure “repentance” was never mentioned at any time. But the exact word for what they were doing in AA and NA is right there in the Bible. So AA and NA are repentance programs! The “Twelve Steps” of AA[9] spell it out in detail: turn your will and life over to God, make a moral inventory, admit your wrongs, make amends to those you harmed, try to help others, etc. According to Peter in the beginning of the Book of Acts, this is what everyone was supposed to do first even before becoming a Christian. And wasn’t this exactly what I’d been doing in AA for nearly four years?

When I declared my great discovery to a pastor at lunch in the food hall, I was dismayed to find him less than enthusiastic. “That is a very long time to repent,” he said between bites. All I could do was mumble something about being a heavy drug user who had much to repent from.

But at home, at night, in my bedroom and out in front of the Lord on the deck, I knew I had done something very right, something powerfully scriptural, something necessary to see the Kingdom and enter the presence of God. Like Jonah, David, Moses, and nearly every righteous person in the Bible, like all the disciples and the three thousand on the Day of Pentecost, I had repented of my sins, at least the two big ones, and was ready for what came next.