I am the LORD who sanctifies you, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I am the LORD. Leviticus 22:32-33
If you’ve ever tried and failed repeatedly to change your eating habits, you know something about the hopelessness of drug addiction. In my own addiction, I vowed a thousand times to stop using, failing a thousand times to keep that vow. Because I’d repeated my self-destructive behavior so many times, it became a compulsion – I couldn’t not act that way. In my utter hopelessness, I was told I had a disease and couldn’t be blamed for that disease. I found some comfort in this idea, blaming my bad behavior on an illness over which I had no control. Hey, you can’t fault me for my hurtful behavior. I have a disease.
I’ve done something similar in my faith – blaming God for my condition. In the worst of my addiction, I begged God to remove it. There are passages, like today’s passage, that would seem to suggest that our transformation lies completely in his hands. In it, God proclaimed that it is he who sanctifies us. One could easily take this to mean that God changes us and if we’ve not been changed, that he just hasn’t done it yet. Hey, I’m not responsible. I’m broken and God hasn’t fixed me yet. This is his fault, not mine. I’m simply stuck here until God does something.
I do believe that God transforms us, and I do see addiction as a disease. I also believe that I can’t be faulted for the disease of addiction. I didn’t choose to have an unhealthy appetite for opioids, and I didn’t choose to have the cancer that required the surgery that first exposed me to opioids. None of this though, excuses me from responsibility for my behavior. If our predispositions for self-destructive behavior excused us for bad behavior, then no one would ever possibly be responsible for anything. We all have self-destructive natures which we didn’t choose. We are all however, responsible for our response to our self-destructive predispositions.
In my diseased condition, I still had a choice – to get help or not. My addiction taught me that I have a pathologic nature, but it also taught me that my daily responsibility is to do whatever it takes to turn to God, following him. For me, that meant going to treatment and radically changing my life. Did God do that, or did I do it? Yes, to both. Did I have a disease or was I responsible? Again, yes to both. God directed my path, but I had to cooperate, following his will to find transformation. I had a disease for which I was responsible to seek treatment. Having a disease doesn’t excuse me from the responsibility of seeking God, who daily transforms me as I daily make the choice to follow him.