The Trauma-Informed Gospel, Pt 2

An overview of Biblical proportions

Tl; dr:
We were made to be whole. We were convinced of a lie and robbed of our identity, moving from a state of wholeness to being shattered. This separation from our Divine Parent and from the truth of ourselves is the deep and abiding trauma of humankind from generetion to generation: the original family curse. All sin is misalignment from Love, and sin is how this trauma manifests and how it perpetuates itself. Jesus is born into his creation as a creature, enters the den of the robbers who stole our identities, disempowers them and nullifies the sentence of eternal condemnation they’ve decreed for us. He restores and reinstates us, declaring our true identities and calling us to join him in journeying back into our wholeness.

Find Part 1 here.

The Gospel starts with identity. Who are we, anyway?

Origin story

You, me, and the whole of humankind were thought up by a Creator for the purpose of a relationship of complete communion, and for the freedom of the security of mutual adoration. When he created us, God made us good, good, and very good – the spitting image of himself in a new medium: the third dimension.

Then God said, ‘ let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’”

“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was *very good."
Genesis 1:31 (*after God added the humans he created to take after himself to his creation.)

The Fall

The Tempter, the serpent, came with stories different than the truth our Creator gave us. He attacked our identity – our very state of being and the intrinsic truth of ourselves – and fed us the lie of our separateness from our Creator, of our un-likeness from him, and of our deficiency. In his subtlety he caused Eve to feel that she was lacking, and then sold her the panacea that would fix all the problems he’d convinced her she had.

She believed him. Her action of eating the fruit was itself the fruit (not the seed) of the new belief system that had been successfully installed by someone NOT her creator. Her husband (who seems to have already been vibing with the Deceiver,* and at the very least was strangely chill with this snake telling his wife that God was a liar) joined the forbidden fruit picnic, and their legacy of death was secured. Adam and Eve were ripped away from their Divine Parent, and so the inheritance humanity receives from its earthly parents is a family curse. Even though it’s not true, and it’s not permanent, the curse is persuasive, persistent, and insistent, and superimposed over our legitimate birthright. It constantly distracts us from the truth, and uses guilt, shame, and fear tactics to keep us – the victims of its abuse – under its thumb.

The Fallout

In the acceptance of the Deceiver’s stories, humanity didn’t so much walk into a prison as let a prison take up residence inside our minds and hearts. In the eating of the fruit of the deadly tree the prison door was slammed shut. In our commitment to the standard of the knowledge of good and evil, we locked that door.

In adopting the standard found in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we accepted an alternative paradigm to the paradigm of Life. One of the subliminal tenets of this paradigm humanity chose is “knowledge is power.” By the eating of the fruit we obtained the knowledge of the paradigm of good and evil, and the belief that that knowledge puts us in the seat of power – we are now the judges, deciding what is right and good, or wrong and evil.

We’ve become the prisoners of the lie, and it has taken us – who were originally sculpted in the image and likeness of our Father – and formed us around itself, conditioning us by twisting and squashing and training us into distorted shapes not our own… but that’s not even the full extent of the tragedy. In assuming the role of judge, we have become the unwitting wardens of our own prison, keeping ourselves and others chained to the story that God is holding out on us, and that we can and must attain our own godhood in addition to all the things we desire to make us feel less empty, worthless, and alone (1), through unscrupulous means – whether by overpowering others or by debasing ourselves, or endless combinations of the two – that further compromise and destroy our selves, and keep us all in bondage. (2)

1. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
Genesis 3:6
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”
Matthew 4:8-9
For all that is in the world–the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life–is not from the Father but is from the world.
1 John 2:16

2. “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did what was right in his own eyes.”
Judges 17:6
“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves now allow those who would enter to go in.”
Matthew 23:13

Trauma and Sin

The trauma is that our lifeline to our Source is severed, and we are cut off from the deepest and fullest truth of ourselves: the truth of our wholeness in our Creator, and of our oneness with our Creator, our Divine Parent, Love.

• The resulting sin in our beings is our misalignment from Love, our being twisted, contorted, and out of True. This is death at work in us.

“Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I’m being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.
James 1:13-15

• The resulting sin in our behavior is that we act from our conditioned state. Out of our fear we strive to meet our needs and desires, not able to trust that we’re cared for and will be taken care of. Out of the shame born of believing that we’re unacceptable and always will be, we reject ourselves, and very often others. We act out of our grief for all that we have lost, and even though we’re barely aware of the immensity of what that means, we feel it deeply. In response to all this felt brokenness, we work to acquire, to avoid, and to soothe through a large array of coping mechanisms and addictions.

• The result of this behavior in the world is that as we go on our miserable way, we sin against and hurt those around us, introducing and/or reinforcing the lies that they, too, will never have enough, never be enough, and never be comforted.

“O afflicted one, storm-tossed and not comforted, behold, I will set your stones in antimony, and lay your foundations with sapphires.”
Isaiah 54:11

• The result of our conditioned state of being in our families is that we pass this separation and hurt down to our children not just by our behaviors, but through our very genes, and so the original trauma – the original family curse; “original sin” – is hereditary, perpetuated from generation to generation.

“…For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me…”
Exodus 20:5, and Deuteronomy 5:9

We are prisoners, actively participating, as well as languishing, in our imprisonment through a feedback loop of all the disordered, anxious, small, apathetic, cruel, manipulative, and generally unhealthy patterns of thought and behavior we can’t even see for what they are, because they are normal.
We are tools of the Liar.

But Jesus. But the Truth.

What is the good news? That we are not the lies, we are not the lack, we are not the small, the broken, the unworthy, the insignificant. Jesus comes to declare to us the truth of what has always been, from our start in the mind of God: the truth of who we ARE. We have been smeared over thickly by eons of lies, but even though they covered us, even though their tendrils broke in to our hearts, minds, and bodies, contorting us to fit into the prison and separating us from our selves, they NEVER had the power to change our identity, they only had the power to convince us the truth couldn’t be true… to convince us that the truth, and we, were too good to be true.

According to the lie, the Gospel of Christ is too good to be true. I’m going to say it louder: according to the lie, the Truth of you is too good to be true.

“By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he commanded us.”
1 John 3:19-23

“By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.”
1 John 4:17

But the natural end of the lie and of sin is death, and this is what the Liar counted on: the permanent erasure of our true identities. But when Jesus arrived on earth, God himself created as one of his own creatures, he knew the game the Liar was playing. He was aware of the fine print. The standard that comes from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – which is the law of sin and death, actually – condemns us to death. Death and condemnation were the masters we ignorantly accepted, thinking we were the ones who would get to be – who had to be – in charge. Death and condemnation had power over us and would extort us till the end, but Jesus didn’t condemn us, and he’s the master of death. Jesus held them in his power. Knowing fully and exactly who he was and what he was about, Jesus gave himself over to condemnation and death, and it turns out these baddies were not aware of an even finer print: that when God Almighty submits himself to the most absolute and bitter limit of his own creation by dying – and not just dying, but being put to death in the most hideous and humiliating way devised by the deepest darkness accessible to broken human nature (the pain of which needed a whole new word invented to convey its severity: “excruciating”) – and then comes back from beyond that edge by being resurrected, that both condemnation and death lose their powers of permanence and their claims to our identity.

The slave and the son

But even while Jesus is declaring the truth of our identity, our wholeness, and our oneness with him and the Father (which has and will always remain true in spite of every fact of our lived experience),(1) we, by our self-imposed standard, are confronted with the same choice Eve was given: will we cave to the lie and allow condemnation and death to hold us for as long as they can? Or will we hold tight to the truth of our identity? Will we allow this truth to be true in our lived experience? Will we agree with the word Christ speaks,(2) and accept his claim about our identity, reversing the curse of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and rejecting the false bill of goods sold to us by the Liar at the cost of our knowledge of truth? Will we drop our standard – our imprisonment – and surrender to the freedom of the truth?(3)

1. John 17

2. “For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them… But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.’ This phrase, ‘yet once more,’ indicates the removal of things that are shaken – that is things that have been made – in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and this let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
Hebrews 12:18, 19, 22-29, emphasis mine

3. “For the law of the Spirit of Life has set you freeing Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.”
Romans 8:2

The choice before us is not one that decides how God feels about us, or determines how faithful he’ll be to us. He has never and will never stop loving us, and his faithfulness is not swayed by our faithfulness or lack thereof, or restrained by the confines of time.(1) The decision we get to make, over and over again, is not about escaping an eternity of punishment, but about our embodying the kingdom of God on this earth.

How much of his goodness and healing, and how much of our own wholeness, can we stand?(2, 3)

My first answer to that question is a cringing “I don’t know, not very much.” This isn’t the work of a single moment, it’s the work of a vast amount of moments, but as we become convinced of the truth, and our minds are renewed in it, our capacity for it increases.

1. “The Lord appeared to me from far away. ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.’”
Jeremiah 31:3

2. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:2

3. “The Lord your God is here with you, a victorious warrior who will save you; he will rejoice over you with delight, he will gaze quietly at you in adoration; he will exult over you with loud singing. 
‘I will gather those of you in the congregation who are grieving, so you no longer suffer from shame and reproach. Look! I will put pressure on those who have oppressed you. I will save the hurting, and gather the outcasts, I will transform their shame into glory and adoration and world renown. I will always, ALWAYS welcome you and be with you, and lavish praise and adoration on you in front of the whole world, especially the ones who were against you, when I rescue you from their prisons and restore you to your rightful place, much to their displeasure.’”
Zephaniah 3:17-20 (the Faith version, based on the Hebrew)

* Click here for my extremely controversial hot take on this topic:

@faith.integratesIt’s not what you think. #faithintegrates #originalsin #originaltrauma #judgement #accordingtotheflesh #traumainformedGospel #adamandeve #lies #damnedlies #liesyouweretold #christiantiktok #exvangelicaltiktok #spiritualtiktok

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