Depression Ain’t New.

This post written by Pastor Italiano is part of a series. Click here to read previous posts.

So, I did an informal survey of a bunch of pastors. I asked if they thought anyone in the Bible had depression.

I got a list back! The answers I got included:

• Moses – He fled his nation and stayed away for forty years. While he did marry while he was gone, he named his first child Gershom, “Saying, ‘I have become an alien in a foreign land.’” (Exodus 2:22) Look, you probably won’t get any brownie points from your wife if you name your kid something that shows you’re homesick. At the least, it doesn’t sound like he accepted his situation or lived in it willingly. Think about what happened to Moses after all the big events of leading the Israelites out of Egypt: He was constantly complained against. He watched every person he knew and had led out of Egypt die (except Joshua and Caleb, sure, but really – two out of how many?). And Moses wrote Psalm 90. Go read it on your own. It doesn’t exactly brim over with jubilation, does it?
• Gideon – He bluntly said that God abandoned his nation. (Read it yourself in Judges 6:13, if you’d like.) Oftentimes, a person struggling with depression feels as if God has abandoned him.
• Naomi – You can read her story in the book of Ruth. She changes her name to “bitter” because she’s lost her husband and both sons. At the least, she’s grieving. We might say that she was suffering depression at that time.
• Peter – He had strong emotions, flipping quickly between anger, confidence, and sorrow. Those could be signs of a person struggling with manic depression. At the least we can say he experienced emotions in a loud, deep way.
• Thomas – If you know this guy as “doubting Thomas,” you might guess I would talk about his not trusting Jesus. But look at what Thomas said weeks before Jesus was arrested and put on trial: “Then Thomas (called Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” He resigned himself to death.
• Paul – Paul struggled with melancholy and despaired of his own life. Lots of people argue about what Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was, and at least a few pastors suggested that it could have been depression. (You can read what Paul says about his thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10.)

I don’t know that I agree with all those assessments. Obviously people from the Bible didn’t have modern definitions or ways of looking at depression, and it’s not like they’re still on this earth that we can evaluate them using modern methods. It can be fun to speculate, but we need to remember that this list really is just speculation. It’s guesswork.

That said, it’s also really encouraging. From the outside, no one might guess you have depression. It’s something internal, isn’t it?

Whether or not these people had depression, we know that God loved them. He worked in their lives to rescue them and provide what they needed.

He’ll do the same for you, whether or not you have depression.

There are three people that don’t appear on this list that I want to take a closer look at. Many pastors listed these three men as well when I talked to them. So over the next weeks, we’ll take a closer look at David, Elijah, and Jeremiah and see that depression isn’t new. We’ll also see what God does with depression.

And what he does is pretty cool.