24. God Audits Every Unpublished Draft

Saying Twenty-Four

Proverbs 24:8-9

He who plots to do evil will be called a schemer. The devising of foolishness is sin, and the scoffer is an abomination to men.

God audits every unpublished draft.

The world is revealed to us in a nearly infinite stream of sensory information. At any given moment, the mind is processing spectrums of colour, varieties of sound, eddies of olfactory stimuli. But if the amount of data is large, the number of possible interpretations is larger. A single sound, for example, might be parsed as music, noise, or language, depending on the mouth from which it emerges and the context in which it is heard. In some cultures, it can be all three at once. A dark shape on the horizon could be a rock, a hill, or perhaps a rock dressed up as a hill.

It is almost as though the brain is tasked with sorting billions of data points into a variety of excel spreadsheets, often with dire consequences for miscategorisation. Ominous growls at 3 am could be a bear lurking in the shadows; it could also be your stomach if you missed dinner. The difference matters.

To derive any meaningful ‘story’ from the sheer sandpit of cold facts that enter our minds, therefore, it is necessary to observe the world through a narrative lens. When arriving at an intersection, for example, there are oodles of non-essential details that your brain must filter out so that you are not overwhelmed. The colour of the traffic light is crucial; the colour of the jogger’s socks, less so. Over the course of many years, passing through thousands of intersections, the brain develops a hierarchy of values enabling it to immediately focus on what matters about the scene. This hierarchy of values is essentially a narrative framework. When you pull up at the lights, your brain tells you the ‘Intersection’ story, and everything makes sense.

Now, to those of my readers who have not skipped in disgust to the next chapter, shaking their heads sadly with a murmured “He’s really lost the plot now,” I will explain how this batch of Jordan-Peterson-esque philosophy relates to Saying Twenty-Four.

The hypothetical man of this saying only “plots” to do evil. He only “schemes” and “scoffs” within his own heart. Never, he tells himself, would he allow these thoughts to manifest themselves in action. They are, after all, mere thoughts. The purpose of Saying Twenty-Four is to wreck the idea that such ‘mere thoughts’ exist. As we have already established, the thoughts we think spring from, and inform, the story we are telling. That story may be fictional, but it is, in some ways, more real than reality itself, because it is the aggregate of many realities told in a single representative image. It is your meta-reality. It says more about what you really think the world is like than any number of facts and opinions you could express.

When a man, angry with his brother, contemplates how refreshing it might feel to crush the latter’s head — never, you understand, intending to actually do it — it is as though he has committed the sin. When a woman, drunk on emotion, imagines how exhilarating it would be to seduce a powerful man into adultery, before God she might as well have done it. This is not a radical notion. I am not pushing God’s law beyond where he himself was willing to take it:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

(Matthew 5:27-28)

The universe of the mind is fictional, yes, but it represents the reality we wish could be. It tells the story we wish was told. Seen in this light, your thoughts and fantasies are, morally, more real to you than the world in which acting on them would earn you excommunication or imprisonment.

Note this theme in Thomas Goodwin’s brief work, The Vanity of Thoughts:

Men feign and contrive to themselves, and make a supposition to themselves in their own thoughts, first of what they would be, and then what they would do. Men create fool’s paradises to themselves, and then walk up and down in them: as, if they had money enough, what pleasures they would have! If they were in such places of preferment, how they would carry themselves!

(p. 26-27)

A man in love, in his fancy he will court his paramour though absent, he will by his imagination make her present, and so frame solemn set speeches to her.

(p. 27)

Our inner worlds are not harmless playgrounds, but the seedbed from which our true character grows. Without submission to God in our hearts, our mind becomes the theatre in which we practice what we would do if circumstances allowed.

The God of the Bible is Lord of heaven and earth, reality and unreality, thought and action. He judges hearts, not just hands and feet. And if he is to genuinely “dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph 3:17, see Col 3:15), he must be the main character of every narrative structure that informs your view of the world.

For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

(Colossians 1:16-17)

If Christ is the integration point of all things — the one who keeps the world spinning; the one without whom everything would be chaos (Heb 1:2-3, 1 Cor 8:6, Jn 1:3-4) — then every data point that passes the front desk of your senses should be filtered through the story that he is telling. You must not allow your mind to dwell on anti-creational narratives that tell lies about his world. The sitcom that glamorises homosexuality is rehearsing you into finding joy in one of the Devil’s favourite storylines. On the other hand, the novel that depicts a courageous young man fighting dragons, though it makes no explicit reference to Christ, is telling a true meta-narrative about him.

Just as the mind can weave tales of vanity, lust and violence, it can also be renewed (Rom 12:2). Christ, who holds all things together, can also hold your thought-life together. He can reframe your inner narratives so that the stories of your imagination correspond to the story of his creation and kingdom.

Scriptures for Comparison

Proverbs 6:16,18

Jeremiah 17:9-10

Matthew 15:18-19

Genesis 6:5

Romans 1:21

Psalm 10:4

Matthew 5:28

1 John 3:15

Proverbs 23:7

2 Corinthians 10:5