In every family, including my own, there are those struggling with anger, dissociation, and fragmentation that at the least tear the family apart and, at worst, erupt into violent acts like the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, allegedly committed by their son. This sort of tragedy is played out many times a day in our country, but because of the celebrity status of the individuals involved, it has especially pierced the public conscience. Addiction of any kind is the work of evil; it is a tool of the devil, and it weaponizes human weakness against the very bonds meant to protect us.
The closest clear biblical parallel to the Rob and Nick Reiner story is found in the combination of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 and the Old Testament laws and warnings about a chronically rebellious, self‑destructive son. Deuteronomy 21 describes a “stubborn and rebellious son” who will not listen to parental discipline and is known as a glutton and a drunkard, portraying a hardened, dangerous pattern of rebellion that tears a family apart. Exodus 21 treats violence against parents as a capital offense, underscoring how seriously Scripture regards a child turning on father or mother and how destabilizing such rebellion is for an entire community.
Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son pictures a younger son who demands his inheritance, leaves home, and squanders it in debauchery, likely including drunkenness and sexual immorality. The father’s grief, long waiting, and readiness to forgive when the son “comes to himself” resonate deeply with the years of parental anguish in addiction stories, though in the parable the outcome is repentance and reconciliation rather than violence. There is, at least sometimes, a genuine choice between the Prodigal’s return and the hardened path that ends in catastrophe.
The Bible also acknowledges that in periods of deep spiritual and social breakdown “children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death,” recognizing that family bonds can be shattered to the point of lethal betrayal. Narratives like David and Absalom, where a son’s rebellion brings public shame, civil conflict, and death in the royal household, show how unresolved sin within a family can rip through generations and culminate in catastrophic loss. Scripture does not sentimentalize the family; it presents it as a battlefield where sin and grace contend for the human heart.
C. S. Lewis offers striking insight into addiction‑like bondage and the evil it represents. In Mere Christianity (Book III, chapter 2, “The Cardinal Virtues”), he writes: “Good and evil both increase at compound interest… An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy (the devil) may launch an attack otherwise impossible.” This is a clear description of how addictive habits grow: small indulgences compound into entrenched slavery. In The Problem of Pain (chapter 5, “Human Wickedness”), he adds: “The lost enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded and are therefore self‑enslaved,” capturing the paradox of addiction, in which what begins as freedom becomes bondage and the “freedom” to indulge becomes a prison.
Lewis’s imagery in The Great Divorce is even more vivid. In the chapter of the Ghost with the Red Lizard, a ghost clings to a small, whispering lizard that symbolizes lust and compulsion. An angel offers to kill it, but the ghost resists, fearing the pain and cost of surrender. When he finally consents, the lizard dies and is transformed into a radiant stallion on which the restored man rides. Lewis’s point is that addiction must be surrendered, not managed, and that only divine grace can transform it into something life‑giving and noble. He never uses the modern clinical word “addiction,” but his images—compound interest, slavery, clinging to destructive habits—map directly onto what is now called addictive behavior.
The Bible’s vision of evil dovetails with this. It acknowledges that in seasons of deep spiritual decay, children can rise up against parents, family trust can collapse, and the results can be literally deadly. At the same time, Scripture insists that beneath the visible wreckage there is a spiritual battle, not just a psychological or social malfunction. To address the outward symptoms of addiction and violence without acknowledging the underlying spiritual disease is to fight with half the needed weapons laid aside.
Bishop Robert Barron recently argued that a vast proportion of what is called “mental illness and addiction” today is in fact spiritual illness at root. For non‑Christians and those devoted to purely secular psychology, such language may sound meaningless or even offensive. Yet if the human person is more than chemistry and conditioning, then any serious account of addiction must reckon with the soul: with sin, guilt, shame, despair, and the possibility of grace. To treat only the symptoms—substances, acting out, rage, impulsivity—without ministering to the spiritual core is to manage the fire while ignoring the fuel.
Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic apologist, famously wrote that there is a “God‑shaped vacuum” in the human heart that only God can fill. Paraphrased, we might say that we all have “holes in our hearts” that demand to be filled. If they are filled with evil, we will be consumed by that evil; if they are filled with the Holy Spirit, evil will scramble to find a way out. Pascal stands as an example of the great Christian polymath who combined a rigorous left‑brain analysis of reality with a right‑brain openness to mystery and grace, insisting that the heart has reasons that reason itself does not fully comprehend.
In light of the Rob and Nick Reiner story, and of countless nameless families torn by similar dynamics, the call is both sobering and hopeful. Sobering, because until we as a country and a people acknowledge the reality of evil, and recognize the control that evil can exert over every aspect of our lives, we will continue largely to treat symptoms rather than the disease of sin in all its forms. Hopeful, because the very language of disease and bondage implies the possibility of healing and liberation through a power greater than us.
My heart and prayers go out to the Reiner family and to all families, including my own, who are making decisions every day—one moment at a time—about how they will fill “the holes in their hearts.” May those choices, by grace, move away from self‑destruction and toward the God who alone can heal, cleanse, and restore. God bless you all.
