I Wasn’t Thinking of the Consequences

And the rest shall hear and fear, and shall never again commit any such evil among you. Your eye shall not pity. It shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. Deuteronomy 19:20-21

I recently read about a distant country where the government routinely hangs drug dealers and gives lengthy prison sentences to those caught with simple possession of drugs. These severe punishments are intended to discourage would-be drug dealers and users, yet the state-run prison has 10,000 inmates, most of whom are incarcerated for drug offenses. Deterrence – fear of consequence – wasn’t enough to keep these inmates from the drug life.

I get it. I’ve been there. Maybe when I started using drugs, if I’d have known the consequences 15 years later, I’d have been dissuaded. Maybe. Once I surrendered to the drug though, the fear of consequence was enough to make me anxious, but not enough to stop me from using. By the end, I knew I was going to lose everything, still, I couldn’t stop. There was something wrong with my brain at that point that rendered me incapable of weighing the consequences.

In a healthy, mature brain, the frontal lobe is supposed to consider the repercussions of an act. The primitive midbrain may want junk food, illicit sex, and drugs right now, but the frontal lobe acts as the brakes, saying, Stop, that’s not healthy. That will result in pain and misery. Functional MRI scans, however, show us that as a drug user engages in repeated drug use, the brain is damaged and that inhibitory frontal lobe is silenced. Science explains what Paul described 2,000 years ago. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened (Romans 1:21).

With my last relapse, I knew the potential consequences. I told myself though, that I’d just use once and then turn back to God the next day. I felt God telling me not to do it, but I did it anyway. In that willful act of defiance, I damage my own brain, giving myself over to the drug. The next day, I was incapable of weighing the consequences, which is the only explanation of how I could do such stupid things, despite knowing where it would lead.

We tell ourselves that we can indulge in just a little sin and walk away unscathed. Rarely though, can we eat just one chip. Once we open the bag, something changes in our brains. As we engage repeatedly in any self-destructive behavior, our brains are damaged so that we can no longer consider the outcome. Evil behavior always has some consequence, the first of which is the terrible damage it does to our own minds.