3 Brain Power Gone Bad

if they can appeal to our mind and emotions, then soon our will gives its consenting vote. We then go out and buy whatever they want us to buy.

This is just like how it all started back in the Garden of Eden. Satan came along and he appealed to Eve’s mind, and he said, “You will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). Then he appealed to her emotions and showed her that the fruit was good and desirable. And very quickly, the will capitulated, the couple made a disobedient move, and human sin entered the universe.

Paul calls Satan “the god of this age” in 2 Corinthians 4:4. Jesus called him the “prince of this world” (John 12:31). Satan took Jesus to a high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of this world in Matthew 4:8–9. Satan said, “All this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me.” The only reason that was a temptation was because Satan could have delivered the goods.

We are absolutely living in futility and folly when we think that the world is in God’s corner. We know that it is not. It lies in the hands of the enemy. So, the “god of this age,” Paul said, “has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). There’s the problem. Satan has blinded the eyes of the natural man.

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Let’s pause now and just get a glimpse at the capabilities of the human mind. This is a tremendously fascinating subject. When we really begin to look at the mind, we see something of the wonder of God’s creation. You remember what David said in Psalm 139:14: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

The brain, or what we would call the seat of the mind, weighs about three pounds and is composed of pinkish-gray matter with the consistency of oatmeal. It contains around 86 billion neurons, which are the functional units of the brain. 86 billion! You can lose many thousands of them every day and not be affected at all.

Our brains never turn off. We might think it’s the case when we hear older people say that their mind just doesn’t function like it used to. It just seems to have been unplugged. But nothing could be further from the truth. The only time the brain is “turned off” is when a person has experienced clinical death.

Whether you’re waking or sleeping, the brain is always going, either consciously or subconsciously. There

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are a lot of things that come out of the subconscious dimension that are put there by the conscious dimension. In other words, when you turn off one, the other just picks up. So, when you turn off consciously, your subconscious mind is still going. Your mind is never off duty.

Scientists tell us that the capacity of the human brain is far more than we will ever use. It is capable of storing an estimated two million gigabytes of information (that’s more than 20,000 full-length high-definition movies!). Just think of what capacity you have there! And if we filled that great capacity at a rate of one thought every second during our waking hours, in a normal human lifetime you would have stored over 1.5 billion thoughts!

A Fallen Mindset

The last chapter outlined how God originally created man. Man’s mind would be controlled by God’s Spirit—the Holy Spirit—working through the human spirit and moving out into the soul dimension. It would instruct his mind with everything he needed to know. But then the fall took place. The fall resulted in the death of the spirit, the perversion of the emotions, and the disobedience of the will. Man in this capacity is not capable of thinking right, loving right, or acting right.

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When death entered the universe, it entered in the spiritual dimension first. The human spirit died, and that’s precisely why Jesus said to Nicodemus that he must be born again of the Spirit (John 3:5–8). So, the first death was spiritual death that led to physical death that, if left unaltered, will ultimately lead to what the Bible calls eternal death or the second death (Revelation 20:14).

In this fallen state that the Bible calls death, we are incapable by nature of thinking right, loving right, or acting right. We are incapable of doing anything that would please God. Our thoughts are not capable of pleasing Him. Our emotions are not capable of pleasing Him. Our will is in disobedience. Our will, by doing what is natural to it, lives by the ethic of “my will be done.”

We see this mindset in children. My four children were never taught to be selfish. They came into the world with a natural inclination toward a me-first attitude. This is the problem in the world today. People are totally incapable of pleasing God and are in a position of helplessness and hopelessness. In Romans 5, Paul gives us something of the definition of mankind in this capacity: “At just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly (verse 6) ... But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (verse 8) . . . For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son” (verse 10).

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This is God’s definition of us in our fallen state. Just go through and see the words that Paul uses. Number one, we are helpless. Number two, we are ungodly. Number three, we are called sinners. Number four, we are called the enemies of God. This is the fallen state, a situation of absolute hopelessness and helplessness.

Genesis 6:5 and 8:21, Romans 1:28, and 2 Timothy 3:8 are other places where the Bible says that mankind now has a corrupt, depraved, and perverted mind. Paul also says in Ephesians 4:17 that mankind has a mind that is futile and vain. This is what he says to Christians: “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking.” Gentiles are those who have never adhered to the gospel due to the futility of their minds. Paul continues, “They are darkened in their understanding and alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart” (4:18).

Fantasy and Flesh

To translate this into modern psychological terminology, futile thinking is fantasy. Fantasy is what I would like to believe that I am. Fantasy is where I escape and try to be what I cannot be, or what I wish to be in real life.

It’s a normal thing for a child to have fantasies. As

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