When Jesus made his first public announcement about his mission, he did not speak of dying for our sins. He spoke of healing “brokenhearted” people who are “captive” and cannot find what they need for personal freedom (Isaiah 61:1). The prophets who spoke about the heart of God and the mission of the coming Messiah continually focused on God’s concern for the broken, his desire that the downtrodden be cared for, that the hungry were fed, and the sick were cared for. (See Isaiah Chapter 58 and Ezekiel Chapter 34.)
If God’s first priority is healing the wounded, and those who are wounded deeply enough to be called broken are at the top of his list, how do we understand the mission of Jesus and the cross? Did he come to address only sin or the entirety of the human condition and our well-being in both this world and the next? How do we understand God’s heart, how he views us, and what he wants to do in our lives in light of the heavy focus on atoning for our sin and failure that we are so commonly told was Jesus’s primary reason for coming to earth? What does it mean for the cross to reach the depth of a person’s brokenness or personal trauma? Before we answer that question, let me give you three real-world examples of deeply traumatized people and how their wounds impacted their ability to relate to the one they had been taught is God.
I am choosing to use these types of examples because if the God we present to the world and the gospel we preach does not “work” for the most difficult cases, we have reason to ask whether we have the right message, the right concept of God, and a proper understanding of a mission that is for all of his children. If Jesus made such a point as to personally state that he came for deeply broken people, we must assume that a correct understanding of the gospel will draw these people toward God.
Note, these cases are all at the high, if not extreme, end of abuse. Be forewarned. Proceed only if you feel you are able to read these types of personal stories.
Charlotte
Charlotte grew up on a farm in a family that wanted a boy but got a girl. Her family was abusive, violent, and let her know she was unacceptable every day of her childhood. Since being a girl was unacceptable, she had to perform on the farm with the same physical strength as her brothers. When her father punished her, he beat her with bricks instead of swatting her with his hand or a switch. On top of everything else, she was sexually abused by her family. Charlotte was committed to a mental institution and received electric shock treatment before she was 14 years old. (And this is only half of her story.)
In Charlotte’s ministry, we came across an inner child who was about kindergarten or first grade in age. When we wanted to introduce her to Jesus, something very quickly became clear. A God who would have inflicted violent physical punishment on Charlotte if he had not done so to his own son in her place would scare the inner child away. After experiencing such torture from her earthly father, she would never feel safe with this kind of authority figure. No matter how much she is told he loves her, if her relationship with God would be based on her deserving his wrath, she would remain in her trauma, separate from God, for the rest of her life. She had no capacity to process a relationship with a God that included wrath against her failures as part of the relationship.
Beverly
Beverly told me a story of her father doubling up his fists and beating her in a manner too graphic to describe in this article. He did so because his 12-year-old daughter had resisted him taking her to their basement to sexually abuse her. When she ran to her mother for help, she refused to protect Beverly, throwing her back to her father because she had sassed her mother just a little while earlier.
Many people (incorrectly) interpret the beginning of the book of Job as teaching that Satan cannot do anything to a person without first getting God’s permission. Is God truly a God who would use a faithful, loving child and take the lives of his wife and children just to settle a bet with the most evil creature in existence?
If that is true, as Beverly had been taught, why would God give Satan permission to do these things to her? Beverly grew up wondering how God could put her in this family, knowing these things would happen. Before any of Beverly’s traumatized inner children could come to God for healing, they had a completely justifiable reason to ask the question, Who is God? How could they trust a God and a Messiah who would knowingly allow these kinds of things?
Sherry
Sherry also grew up with a physically and sexually abusive father. She has memories lasting all through elementary and middle school of trying to pull herself together in the middle of the night so that she could, somehow, appear to be like the other little girls in school who did not yet know such things exist. As Sherry grew older, she learned to fight. How else would she fend off boys who wanted to take advantage of her body? She developed a temper and learned to use anger to keep herself safe from any and every threat in her life. She knew she needed forgiveness and felt guilty about her anger, but she could not relinquish her need to protect herself.
Sherry’s inner children were fearful of Jesus because of his biological anatomy. If her father, who was supposed to love her could be so dangerous, how could this other male authority figure named Jesus be safe? Wounds this deep are not healed through facts and logic. They are healed by finding the heart of a God who is infinitely safe, trustworthy, accepting, and loving.
Sherry was aware of the sin in her life. But if the only way Sherry could be acceptable to God is to be “covered in blood” from a violent execution initiated by men, how could she ever feel he is safe enough to allow him near the wounds she carried in her heart?
A Serious Question
Charlotte, Beverly, and Sherry illustrate why answering the question Who is God? must be taken seriously, for wounded people are all around us and are in our churches.
We know Jesus atoned for sin, and that is part of the gospel. But I must ask the question: Did he do all of this because we are worthless people, only deserving of rejection, or because we are infinitely valuable to him, and he never wants us far from his heart?
If God’s first revealed purpose is to heal the broken, many of those broken look like Charlotte, Beverly, and Sherry. If the God we preach causes instinctive and involuntary pushback from a traumatized heart, do we have the right concept of God? Assuming we find the right understanding of God, how does that translate into healing for people like these? Answering these questions well is not the beginning point in healing ministry. It is the beginning point for Christianity.
A Christianity that is measured by changes in people’s lives rather than other common success measurements, such as church growth, requires us to ask deeper questions. If a tree is known by its fruit (Matthew 12:33-37), the fruit I want is a complete Christianity, one that works for everyone, the Charlottes, Beverlys, and Sherrys of the world as well as everyone else whose wounds and traumas are less severe.
How Do We Find the Right Answers?
For us to understand God and his gospel, we cannot cherry-pick verses from various places in Scripture and throw them on the table as if they represent complete truth. Scripture begins with Bronze Age people who did not know how to separate their understanding of God from their history with primitive idol worship. God recognizes this, and from the Exodus onward, he cultivates an upward trajectory of revelation of the heart and knowledge of God. This trajectory takes people from a left-hemisphere understanding of God, one which deals only with facts, performance, accomplishments, and abstractions of truth, to the right hemisphere where we connect with life itself and a person who is truth.
A full treatment of this subject is far too expansive to cover in one article. For our purposes this article, we want to point out the importance of this issue and say that we often spend a significant amount of time on this topic in personal ministry.