Josh Leim\’s blog

Here are some thoughts on addiction.   

First, one of the best and simplest ways I’ve heard addiction described is by Sharon Hersch, who simply says, “all addictions are our attempts to re-create a more palatable world for ourselves.” This statement has stuck with me.  Addiction, at its core, is the ultimate expression of man’s God-given vocation gone awry.  In the garden, man was made to image God, that is, to be one who seeks to bring order out of chaos, light out of darkness, just as God did in the act of creation.  Man, as God’s image, was to go forth from the haven of the garden-sanctuary and bring God’s glory to the rest of creation, to reproduce and multiply and have dominion over the earth in a God-honoring, self-sacrificing way.  Addiction, at its heart, is the expression of this very commission, yet completely run amuck.  Instead of bringing true order out of chaos, we create illusory order and further chaos.  Instead of demonstrating a self-sacrificing, other-centered dominion over creation, we dominate our bodies, minds, lives, and relationships with self-serving, self-centered methods that incite our own and other’s further willful rebellion.  We don’t image God, we image his enemy.             

Secondly, it has been said that “addiction is not so much an attempt to fill emptiness as it is an attempt to suppress passion.”  The reality is that sober, passionate, surrendered living in this broken world inevitably means walking through painful experiences, suffering, and trials.  Intentional living in this world is ripe with unfulfilled longings and broken dreams – the death of a spouse, the rebellion of children, the loss of a job, the injustice of third world debt, the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  Addiction, however, provides a way out, a way to say, “No thanks, I think I’ll pass,” even when that isn’t an option!  It is cheating in its most insidious form. Addiction is the refusal to live in the already/not-yet state of the coming Kingdom of God.  It refuses simply to be in the tension of a world where the kingdom of God has broken in through Christ’s death and resurrection, but still groans as a woman in the pains of childbirth, longing for that redemption, that new creation, to be consummated.  Addiction exchanges the long-suffering, painful hope of the coming reign of the Righteous King for the immediate, enslaving gratification offered by a usurping tyrant.  And that is what addiction is, a usurping tyrant that will not, indeed cannot, deliver on his promises, but who will willingly drain every last drop of life out of his subjects.            

The verses that comes to my mind when thinking of addiction are Hebrews 2.8-9, which say, “In putting everything under him, God left nothing that is not subject to him. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him. ⁹ But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”  We as addicts get stuck in verse 8 – stuck in the world where we see a world not yet fully in submission to Jesus (much less us), riddled with our own sin and the sin of others.  We want a way out, and so we attach our hearts to little gods that blind our hearts even further.  But Christ calls us to verse 9-living, to seeing Jesus, who tasted death for us all, that, in hope, we might one day not find a way out, but the way back in to the life for which we were made.