OUR EMOTIONS AND THE WILL OF GOD

 

OUR FEELINGS AND THE WILL OF GOD

Being of Latin background, I tend to be emotional in everything I do. Mediterranean people are known for their passion in everything they do. We love with a passion, we pursuit our interests with passion, and we also hate and fight with passion. Passion that at times can blind our logic and pushes us to act on pure emotion, celebrating our crazy triumphs or lamenting our silly decisions afterwards.

Dark parts of our history are based on that.

Physiologist and Sociologist have concluded that our societies are based on honor. But that is the conclusion of Nordic cold men that are not inside our minds and souls. It goes deeper than honor. All men strive to be honorable, but Latins strive for honor based on their passions. It is the passionate hate of shame and the passionate love of recognition, what really gave birth to the Montagues and the Capulets of Romeo and Juliet. It for passion that Juliet and Romeo killed each other. It is passion, not greed, what initiated the Mafia and the drug cartels in Latin America, and passion also is what drives the population to protect them despite government threats.

Sadly, for myself, I also have Hispanic-Arab blood in me; and that adds to my sexual drive, where at 50 makes me perform like 20; and also provokes in me passionate eastern possessiveness and jealousy for the women I love, and all my family in general, parents and children all alike. I was born not with the idea, but the feeling, that my family and everything I have, belongs only to me and nobody else, and that I should protect them with my life, if necessary, in anyway possible.

And in this set of mind and soul, I also like music, driven by beats of drums and rhythm, to the point of day dreaming.

Many people may have listened the famous song of George Harrison, the ex-Beatle, “My Sweet Lord”; I did since I was in the primary school and I loved it. Or maybe listened to the Tunisian song “Sidi Mansour” sang by Saber El-Rubai, with a very catchy rhythm. I did, but something stopped me.

OUR FEELINGS

When I was sick with Delta Covid, I experienced some super natural experiences that I should not have. But I did. One of them, was an intense feeling of peace and happiness, while spoken by two demons, telling me to let myself die, and that they would take me to the true god, who was impossible to get to know from this world.

I overcame the elusive feeling of ‘peace’ when I heard that ‘Christ is just one of many good human teachers’.

By the Grace of God, I know the Scriptures well enough to detect error quickly. It may be for the fact that I have read the NT non stop since I was 14 years of age, again and again, until now, for 40 years exactly.

I quickly dismissed that elusive feeling of ‘peace’ in the Name of Jesus, and told the demons, that there was no way to any god, except Hell for anyone who considers the Son of God, as ‘one among many’ of anything. ONLY HE IS THE SAVIOR and order them in His Name to leave me alone, which they did without delay.

At the end, the song “My Sweet Lord” of Harrison, is not a happy tune, but a blasphemy against Jesus, where Harrison praises Krishna, the black Hindu god, and then puts Jesus on the same level as him.

The song “Sidi Mansour” is an idolatrous, magical song dedicated to a Muslim Shia holy man called Mansour, to whom a broken-hearted man commends his spirit before committing suicide, asking him to allow him to see his dead girlfriend again in paradise.

And so was the feeling of ‘peace’ the demons communicated me, to deceive me into betraying Christ, which would end up being my condemnation after all, despite the false felling of ‘peace’.

GUIDED NOT BY FEELINGS

The Bible is full of warnings against relying only on our feelings.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked”

Jeremiah 7:9

“He that trusts in his own heart is a fool”

Proverbs 28:26

“There is a way which seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death”

Proverbs 14:12-13.

And many others, stating clearly that our feelings are corrupted when born from a corrupted soul or spirit.

Demons can manipulate these emotions to high levels, even to the point of enervating your perception of reality, and drive you to do things otherwise you won’t do. They can also instigate a fake sense of peace and wellbeing in order to keep you in error and chained to idolatry or magic.

Captives falling in love with their captors or pimps.

Children justifying child abuse.

Women justifying rape or physical mistreatment.

People justifying abortion and genocide.

These are only some of the samples how the devil can manipulate our emotions, to the point of feeling ‘blessed’ for doing evil.

GUIDED BY THE WORD OF GOD

Lord JESUS warned us that there will be people who will slaughter the saints of God, thinking they are serving God by doing so:

“In fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.”

John 16:2

That was also the case of St Paul before his conversion, totally convinced that the persecution and execution of Christians he instigated, was a service to God, totally free of guilt or remorse.

So, if we cannot trust our feelings, who or what can we trust?

The Bible itself says it: GOD, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as it is expressed in the Bible:

“I gain understanding from Your precepts; therefore, I hate every false way. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

Psalm 119:104-105

“For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.”

1John 3:20

In his profound Wisdom, God the Father has provided humans, and specially his Church on Earth, with the compilation of all his work on this planet, through his Servants and Prophets, in the compendium called “Bible”. It is only through knowing the expressed and direct word of God written in the Scripture, where we can have assured guidance, in knowing what is correct from incorrect; truth from error; sin and not sin, crime and not crime.

God gave us emotions to also get to know Him, but proven that previously to that, we have a clear knowledge of his will, as told in the Scripture.

Only then we will have ‘Peace’, but a true peace, knowing clearly what God wants from us, and not guided by our emotions.

It is the written word of God in the Bible, that has been given to us, to serve us as sure guidance. It is through the knowledge of his will as expressed in the Scripture, that we judge revelations, prophecies and feelings of any kind. They are there to confirm the righteous path, but not to determine it.

CONCLUSION

The Author of humanity, who knows us better than ourselves, gave us an impartial source of guidance, in written form, because He knew that left his will to our feelings will be useless.

God and the devil can interact with our emotions, but we must before give in to any feeling or thought, be aware of the will of God in Scripture, to be able to choose correctly the path of holiness.

Omar Flores.