How Can the Bible Answer My Questions?

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.—Hebrews 4:12

I recently was asked by our church’s college group to speak on mental health. To be honest, I was stumped. The Bible doesn’t have anything to say about mental health!

Or does it?

Fortunately for me, I had just listened recently to Dr. Mike Emlet’s excellent talk “Ancient Word, Modern World: How Does Scripture Speak Today?” at CCEF’s 2021 conference on modern problems.

In it, he suggested three strategies: go near (looking at direct passages), go wide, (looking at wider related themes in Scripture) and go long (looking at how this idea unfolds from Genesis to Revelation). Taken together, he suggests that we can find an answer in Scripture on any modern topic today.

All right then, let’s give it a try! Here’s what I discovered.

Go Near: direct

If mental health is defined as our emotional, psychological, and social well-being, then God has a lot to say about what leads to peace, joy, and contentment as well as how to handle our problems. To kick start my list, I looked up some common mental health advice and compared it to Scripture. They suggested practices such as gratitude, working your strengths, cultivating loving relationships, or practicing forgiveness. That wasn’t too hard to find connections! (1 Thess. 5:18, Eph. 2:10, John 13:34, Col. 3:13.)

For this step, a concordance is often helpful to root out more. Much of what I read described mental health as contentment, hope, peace, and joy. This led me to consider the negative as well: fear, anxiety, discontentment, anger, and so forth. I looked up each of these and noted what I discovered.

This led me to wonder—what does God have to say about our thoughts? Back to the concordance I went and noticed that God actually has quite a lot to say about them! (Col. 3:2; Rom. 12:2; Heb. 12:2; 2 Cor. 10:5; Phil. 4:8)

After I finished this section, I summarized what I discovered. I noticed that while the world would tell us to take responsibility for our own mental health, God promises us these things not in these practices but in Himself (1 Peter 5:7, Phil. 4:6-7).

Hmmm…maybe the Bible has more to say about mental health than I thought!

Go Wide: themes

For this, I began thinking about narratives or descriptions that relate to mental health.

A positive example would be the blessed man of Psalm 1. For negative examples, I thought of Elijah who was so exhausted he wanted to die (1 Kings 19) and the depressed psalmist of Psalms 42-43.

From these, I noticed that positive mental health begins with meditating on God’s Word and being firmly planted in Him. In times of distress I see that God offers Himself as our restoration, and that food and rest then become gifts from Him in our hardest moments. Making time to eat well and sleep is a way we accept those gifts, not merely something we do to fend for ourselves.

Go Long: the whole Bible

So how does God look at mental health from Genesis to Revelation? I realized that it all would depend on how you defined “health.” And what I discovered when I looked at the whole Bible is that God is most certainly interested in our health and well-being—but it is defined on His terms.

The Genesis account shows us what perfect health is: fellowship with God. We lost that in Gen. 3 through the fall. The whole Bible is all about how God restores that fellowship so that we might enjoy health again through Christ’s work on the cross—even in the midst of suffering and pain. But it doesn’t end there: it promises complete and full restoration of not just our souls but the world around us (Rev. 21:4).

Conclusion

The truth is, I realized, that what experts define as mental health actually falls far too short. We settle for the world’s solutions and fail to see the real culprit: sin. We can practice everything we are told but fail to deal with the real problem. But when we look at all three of these dimensions, we get a far fuller picture of God’s greater and far better solution. When we address the source of our unhealth—a broken relationship with God—then practicing the suggestions we hear becomes an expression of faith, not our own means of salvation.

God’s word is a powerful, two-edged sword that can get to the heart of our problems (Heb. 4:12). What He says will be far better than what Google suggests. It is living and active—and it has answers for us today that truly satisfy our deepest needs.

At the end, using these strategies, I was able to find plenty from God’s Word to share with our college group. It did take some time, but I was personally blessed through my time in His Word.

I hope you’ll give it a try when you’re stumped!