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What Can We Learn From Matthew Perry?

by Ruthie Alekseeva  
1/18/2024 / Book Reviews

A Tough Time

Gisella groans.

“I’m in Hell,” she thinks, weeping into her pillow.

Tossing and turning, she clutches her stomach, rubbing it with her hands.

“So much pain,” she moans. ”This life is Hell. This life is Hell.”

Worse Than This

That’s not an uncommon belief in the world. That, yes, Hell exists but not somewhere out there. Here. Right where we are. This life is Hell. That’s what Matthew Perry, a Hollywood actor on the sitcom TV show Friends, believed but it’s not true. Although this world has many pains, trials, distresses and sorrows, there’s another place completely different from here and it’s much worse than this.

Matthew wrote this erroneous statement about Hell in his memoir Friends, Lovers and The Big Terrible Thing. He continues his error-filled thoughts on the spirit world throughout his book, mentioning God many times, and although he makes positive statements about God, it seems his general view of The Almighty is that God is mean and out to get him. He believes this because he has suffered feelings of abandonment ever since his parents split when he was only about nine months old, and he claims he has found that the only way he can find relief from these painful feelings, is to deaden them with drunkenness, illicit drugs and narcotic pain killers. He states that this self-medicating behaviour has grown into a life-long illness called addiction and this is further evidence that he’s not one of God’s favourites.

God Is Love

But is this way of thinking true? The Bible says God is love and that He longs to be a perfect father to all of us and that if we surrender to Him, He will be a father that never forsakes us. That doesn’t sound like a mean God. That doesn’t sound like a God who’s out to get anyone, let alone Matthew Perry. The Bible also gives us abundant evidence that God has the power to heal and not only heal us but heal us of anything and everything. Not everyone gets healed this side of death. Some of us must wait until we enter Heaven but if we surrender our lives to Jesus, the Bible says every single one of us will find healing in Heaven. I wonder if Matthew Perry ever heard that. He may have because his book shows he has heard of the Bible account of Sodom and Gomorrah and John 8:7 which states, he who is without sin should cast the first stone, and he mentions that at the age of fifteen, he went through a life event that brought him face to face with the reality of death, judgement, Heaven and Hell.

God Heals Those Who Surrender

Matthew doesn’t state in his book who or where he heard these Christian concepts from, and he doesn’t mention if his family gave him any Bible teaching or if he ever attended a Christian school but he does say that he has sought help for his addiction in rehabs and sobriety-living homes. In fact, he says that he has spent seven million dollars trying to quit drinking, has attended six thousand AA meetings, rehab fifteen times, a mental institution at least once and attended therapy twice a week for thirty years. Christian groups often either own or operate health facilities, so perhaps he heard these Bible doctrines there. I know genuine Christian people who still struggle with cravings for nicotine, but I also know Christians who say that although addicted to alcohol and recreational or prescription drugs for years, upon conversion, God took those tastes away, in an instant, without any monetary payment, and they now live drug and alcohol free. Did Matthew ever hear of this phenomenon while seeking treatment? He doesn’t say but it sounds far cheaper and easier than what he did try over his lifetime.

Accept God For Who He Is

He gives a clue that he may have heard this kind of testimony when he mentions an experience he had in his kitchen, while feeling discouraged about his addiction. He states he asked God to reveal himself to him and states he then saw God and felt warm and peaceful during that experience but those feelings didn’t last. But did Matthew really see God, and if so, why did the peaceful feelings he felt that night end? I’ll hazard to say that although he may have seen his version of God, he did not see the one true God. I say this because Matthew mentions, earlier in his book, that he finds it problematic that the Christian God thought it perfectly fine to put His own Son on a cross. This suggests to me that God had already revealed himself to Matthew earlier in his life. God revealed himself to Matthew through the Gospel but he rejected Him, possibly because of his inability to see God as a loving, fatherly God that will never abandon him the way his earthly father did.

Repent of Your Sins

Matthew also calls his addiction an illness and blames it on his genes. I’m not qualified to know if genes and biology contribute to substance abuse, but I  do know that the God of the Bible calls drunkenness a sin and commands us to confess it as such and to repent of it. 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 10 says, Do not be deceived. No drunkard will enter the Kingdom of God. God is love, so God doesn’t punish people in Hell because they’re sick or have defective genes. God punishes people in Hell because they’ve sinned and rejected his offer of forgiveness, and the Bible says we love our sin and although Matthew frequently states how difficult his addiction is and how much it has cost him, he occasionally states that he loves alcohol and the feelings narcotics give him. Whether genes effect alcohol addiction or not, Matthew states he has stolen, lied and broken the law in order to feed his substance addiction. That’s definitely sin. Perhaps, Matthew preferred these sins over confession and repentance of his addiction and the sins that fed it? We can’t ask him anymore, because he passed away in October 2023.

Take A Different Path

Matthew Perry says he has slept with many women, but he always told them upfront that these relationships were only physical and would never end in marriage. If any of those women had fallen pregnant, that means Matthew would have found himself in the same situation his father had all those years ago, where he left instead of staying, abandoning his child. Knowing how much pain that causes children, it makes you wonder why Matthew would follow in those footsteps.

So, what can we learn from Matthew Perry? We can learn that Hell is real. It’s far worse than here, and we should seek God’s forgiveness, so we can avoid it. We can learn that we should be the best parents we can because, sometimes, how we live out those roles affects how our children see God in His role of father. We can learn not to follow the same path our parents took, if that path affected us in painful ways. We can learn that God is a God of love. He’s not out to get anyone and heals everyone that surrenders their life to Him. The healing might not come in this life, but it does come for everyone who enters Heaven, and we can learn that if God has already revealed himself to us, we should accept Him for who He is and confess our sins to Him, rather than making up our own version of Him and clinging to the sins that version of God permits.

John 8:7 NKJV

1 Corinthians 6:9,10 NKJ

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