The choice to mistrust God
"… What does the trauma of abuse do to the human heart? What is the damage of abuse?
Simply, abuse provides the raw data that seems to prove that God is not good.
The victim reasons that God is like her abusive father or her preoccupied mothers (since children are designed to learn their earliest lessons about God from their parents). Or, the victim determines that God is someone who looked the other way while a cousin molested her.
The conclusion: Trust is foolish; therefore I am compelled to live my life independent of God’s will. My experiences seems directly to contract God’s promise to provide for and protect my soul, so I am excused from the weighty demands of holiness and justified in failing to reflect God’s glory in my life.
The tragedy of abuse is manifold, but one singular tragedy is that abuse victims so often find themselves repeating patterns and reentering relationship where they are violated in ways that replay dimensions of the past abuse.
The new harm only intensifies their resolve to flee to their own sources of strength and defense. The consequence is loss and sorrow for them and others. But even worse, they have cut off their heart from a passion for God’s glory.
This lack of passion for God may not be obvious. They may be militantly atheistic or coolly agnostic, or equally, they may be devout in practicing Christian duties and promoting Christian doctrine. They may even desperately want to believe in a God who is trustworthy. But until they confront the choices they have made in response to their abuse, neither duty nor their desperation will lead them to genuine passion for the God who actually exists.
Their passion (if they have any passion at all) will be for a distorted god, a god who is largely an idol of their own imagination.
When we fail to trust the real God, we do not escape trusting someone or something.
Trust, like breathing, and indeed, like worship, is inevitable. It is not that some people trust, some worship, some breathe, and others do not. We cannot fail to trust God without turning our trust to something that becomes a new god for us.
When an abuse experience cuts to the core of the heart, the victim more easily turns away from God, or trivializes the abuse and reduces trust to manageable, dutiful levels. Either way, she turns to gods that are not God.
The core problem, then, is not abuse itself, but the sinful energy to trust what is not worthy of her heart.
Is that true for only the abuse victim? Of course not; the proclivity to turn from God to trust idols is deeply embedded in the human condition from birth. Consequently, the root problem and cure for an abuse victim is essentially no different for any other sinner.
Some readers will be appalled by the suggestion that the five-year-old raped by her father is sinful for concluding that God is untrustworthy. Understand: I do not think that any five-year-old other than the sinless Jesus could be so abused and continue to trust God fully. The abused, wounded, victimized child makes the same choice any child would make in the same situation. I made the same choice, many times over, as a child. But it is a choice colored by sin, and as the child grows into adulthood, that tragic choice will continue to haunt her.
Though every human heart is included to idolatry (to trust other gods to provide us with life), the abuse victim will struggle more deeply to trust God with her life and relationships.
No victim is responsible for having been abused. But abuse does provide strong reasons, potent stories, to ask “Where was God? Does He love me? Can I trust Him? If I can, what am I to trust Him for?” The devilishness of abuse is that it does Satan’s work of deceiving children about God’s true nature and encouraging them to mistrust Him. Fearing to trust God, the abuse victim will naturally choose other gods to provide her with life, whether alcohol, promiscuity, or approval seeking.
The abuse victim’s fundamental enemy, then, is sin: the fearful refusal to trust a God about whom she is deceived. The Spirit of God is hard at work in her to reveal God’s true nature and confront her fear and mistrust, but His work is a battle that requires her cooperation."
- Excerpt from The Wounded Heart, Dr. Dan Allender (MDiv, PhD) serves as a professor of counseling psychology and president at Mars Hill Graduate School. He travels and speaks extensively to present his unique perspective on sexual abuse recovery, love and forgiveness, worship, and other related topics.
He went up on a mountainside by himself. (Matthew 14:23)
