Truth Unseen - Chapter 9 – The Problem with Denial, Part III
The heart is deceitful above all things...who can know it?
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“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)
There’s a strange relief in finding out you were wrong. It means there’s still something to discover. It means the story isn’t finished. It means your worst fear—that things will always stay the same—might not be true after all.
Denial has been defined by science and academics in ways that miss its depth. Manuals and theories reduce it to a stage of recovery, a psychological resistance, or something to be cured by affirmations of the self. They say, “Speak good into yourself, and good will come.” Yet that is not truth. It is another form of denial—a counterfeit hope that puts the cure in the very self that is broken.
Scripture makes it plain: there is none good, not one. No amount of self-talk can erase that reality. Denial is not simply refusing to see your condition, it is the active replacement of truth with a counterfeit. It is building a false foundation on the fragile ground of self-belief. The world praises it as resilience, but Scripture names it as blindness.
Denial is not just refusal—it is survival. It wraps around pain like a splint. For a while, it helps. It numbs. It deflects. It filters. But it is a short-term fix that becomes a long-term trap.