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The worm mentality is a highly addictive mentality because it is driven by a very ego-pleasing assumption that we are supreme at something—in this case, supreme at being hideous. All humans want to think they are good at something. In the worm mentality, we claim to excel in being heinous. Of course having humans reject us is just stage one. The ultimate victory is to believe that we have succeeded in overwhelming God Himself. For the unsaved soul, the ultimate accomplishment is to believe that God has eternally rejected us because even with all of His God powers, He simply can’t bear to be in our ultra-evil presence. For the Christian, the ultimate victory is to believe that we have succeeded in getting God to turn away from us—even to revoke our salvation. Again, the logic stream is that we’re so awesome at being hideous that even God finds Himself hopelessly trumped.

Now in real life, God is never threatened by His own creations, nor is He impressed by our delusions of grandeur. When God does not shut down on us and give us that ultimate form of rejection which our egos are craving, we often try to help Him along by rejecting Him first. We like to go about this in a grand, boastful way, saying things like, “I know that God finds me unbearable, so I’m going to ask Him to please throw me into Hell. After all, I wouldn’t want to corrupt His perfect Heaven with my vile self.” Notice how such thinking exalts you as the ultimate giver—the one who is voluntarily sacrificing yourself in order to protect God from further distress. This is nothing more than ego run amuck. God doesn’t need your protection, and what you’re trying to protect Him from is a threat which only exists in your own mind. You have decided that because you are so supremely vile, even your own Creator feels personally threatened by you. You tell yourself that you actually possess the power to obstruct God’s plans, wreck His Heaven, or halt His universe. My, what a powerful little thing you are. And if you weren’t so altruistic in nature—so willing to crucify yourself in order to save us all from your toxic presence, well, we’d all be lost. Once you set yourself up in this kind of ultimate savior role, you are naturally going to be opposed to truth, because truth is going to be a major pride buster and your pride is out of control.

The worm mentality is a self-destructive mentality in which you are the only one who suffers. By the time you’re done cutting yourself off from other people and from God, you end up alone, bitter, and empty. You see, the truth is that you have deep core needs which only God can satisfy. The whole notion that you can ever cut ties with Him is as absurd as claiming you can get through a day without breathing. You really don’t get to call how the universe runs because you are not in control. You will never be in control, and God will never be impressed with your vileness. To God, you’re not worse than anyone else, you’re just caught up in a superiority complex that is driven by an intense fear of being average and forgettable. Well, God offers you something better than being ultra-vile. He says that you are very special to Him and that you matter to Him. He doesn’t say you’re ultimate—He says that He is ultimate, and you are an insignificant speck by comparison. But you’re His speck, and He made you for the purpose of forming a positive, personal relationship with you. In order for that relationship to get off the ground, you’re going to need to stop trying to dominate Him and you’re going to have to open yourself up to accepting a different value system. Right now you’re defining your worth by how hideous you are. It’s your great vileness that makes you have value in your eyes. When we fear that we don’t have a chance at competing in positive areas, we turn to negative ones. At bottom, we just want to excel at something. Well, God makes succeeding with Him very easy because He isn’t comparing you to other people. You don’t have to be super scum or super good to hold onto His love. He loves you because He wants to—it has nothing to do with you impressing Him. God says that if you will submit to His Authority in your life and ask Him to make you all that He wants you to be, He will break you out of this self-destructive path you’re on and teach you a much better way to live. But first you have to decide that you want to be healed, because it’s not God’s usual style to force cures on people. He gives us the option of wallowing in egotistical delusions and deciding that we are having a far greater impact on Him than we really are. How anticlimactic would it be to live your life thinking you’re ultra evil, only to get to Heaven and have God say, “Why didn’t you ever listen to Me on earth? We could be a lot closer than we are right now.” God doesn’t find you threatening in the slightest. He sees you more like a little child who is refusing to pay attention in school, therefore you’re not learning the basics of reading and writing. Certainly immaturity has its appeal, because growing up requires a lot of work and some pride grinding adjustments. But choosing to grow up is the far more rewarding choice in the long run, and the only one that will truly satisfy your soul.

This is some pretty disturbing stuff, isn’t it? Well, those Holocaust concentration camps were very disturbing as well. When we see millions of people starving to death in a nationwide famine or dropping over with flu-like symptoms, it’s disturbing. When we see whole cities being bombed off the map and men massacring each other on the battlefield, it’s disturbing. In the Bible, God tells us that He’s the One responsible for all of it. So now we get to that million dollar question: What’s His point?

There are two ways that Christians act utterly absurd when it comes to discussing God’s role in mass killings. First, they try to deny that He is even involved—that is the height of lunacy. But once they finally do acknowledge that He’s involved, they act like the whole affair can be simply explained with some trite statement like, “He must have been mad at the people who died.” Here is more lunacy. You can’t be sure of God’s reasons for one soul dying, let alone millions. God has a long list of reasons for why He kills souls when He does. You can be familiar with some of the items on that list, but you can’t ever pinpoint which reason was motivating God’s actions in a specific event unless you receive explicit direction from Him. For the most part, God just isn’t going to tell you why He’s doing what He’s doing with another soul, because He considers it none of your business. God doesn’t even sit down and fully explain why He does what He does with you, so it’s more than a little absurd to stand around declaring that you know exactly why certain souls were gassed to death in Nazi concentration camps while others were not. The reality is that you don’t have the first clue. What you do know is that there is never any “one size fits all” answer in these scenarios. The best we can do is talk about probabilities.

The vast majority of souls in this world will never submit to God’s Authority while they are here, therefore they will end up in Hell. This is a reality that has been true since the very beginning: most humans reject God. Now once we die in a state of spiritual rebellion, God’s feelings towards us become intensely negative. “Unconditional love” is an utter delusion that we’ve invented to please our egos. God has always taught that His love is extremely conditional. We all start off being loved for free—we’ve done nothing to earn it. God chooses to love us just because He wants to. But He then says that this period of generosity will come to an end if we don’t treat Him with a certain level of respect. He also promises that our time on this planet will be extremely brief, yet none of us will know exactly how much time we have. Some of us will only be here a matter of days or hours. Others a few years, others will live to a ripe old age. But from the eternal perspective, even living to be a 110 is a mere flash in the pan. These facts put all of us in a rather urgent situation. If we defy God for too long, we might suddenly find ourselves struck down by Him and out of chances to repent. How does God feel when He is killing off defiant rebels? Angry, disgusted, vengeful—it’s a very negative combination of passions. How does God feel when He is killing off souls who sincerely care about pleasing Him? He’s very delighted with them and eager to bring them to their reward. What are the chances that every soul who got gassed in Nazi concentration camps was sincerely seeking God? Zilch. The far more likely scenario was that there was a blend of defiant rebels, hardcore believers, and carnal slackers. We could say the same for all the casualties of both World Wars and for all of the groups that we listed previously. Once you start dealing in massive casualties, it is quite unrealistic to suggest that everyone had the same spiritual attitude towards God, therefore it is ridiculous to paint God as having one emotion towards the whole group. God never loses track of individuals in a crowd. If you scoop up some sand on a beach, you see a handful of sand, but God sees a mass of uniquely shaped sand crystals which are each interesting in their own way. In the same way, when you read about mass casualties in the news, you start lumping all the souls together under some irrelevant label like “the Jews” or “the plane crash victims” or “the soldiers.” But God sees individual souls and His feelings towards each of those souls vary widely depending on how each soul is currently responding to Him.

Understanding that God always views us as unique individuals helps you to understand how personal His actions in each life are. It simply doesn’t work to say “all the Jews in that town were dragged off to the Holocaust,” because in real life certain Jews were hidden away in basements by people who were trying to take the high moral ground. How do we explain these anomalies? How do we explain why some survived the concentration camps and others did not? How do we explain why some were able to forgive and move on, while others were permanently crippled? The answer is that God’s care of each of us is extremely personal and strategic.