The Bible has a lot to say about confusion. It is actually a punishment for not listening to the Lord!
That is what He told Moses: “The LORD will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration ... because you have forsaken me." Deuteronomy 28:20. Eight verses later, the curse for disobedience is reiterated: "The LORD will smite you with madness and with blindness and with bewilderment of heart." Deuteronomy 28:28. The blindness here is a blindness of the mind, actually a judicial blindness, meaning that one cannot make good judgments because of the hardened condition of the heart.
David copied God's idea and used the curse of confusion in the lyrics for his psalms. Let them be ashamed and brought to confusion together that rejoice at mine hurt. Psalm 35:26. May all who want to take my life be put to shame and confusion. Psalm 40:14. Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt. Psalm 70:20
Confusion, doubts, misgivings, and such are always identified with evil. Even where the verse from Deuteronomy says that "The Lord will smite..." you will find that by putting it into its larger context, that the Lord smites by removing His protection. It is the devil that fills the void that is left with confusion. God does not have confusion that He can send directly. When a person pushes God away by rejecting Him, God takes His protective hand with Him. Either way, whether God removes His own hand because the evil has grown too great, or because the person made their own decision to shove His hand aside, confusion and perplexity come from the enemy.
This fact is established quite literally in a review of some battle scripture. Here is a "for" example: The LORD threw them into confusion before Israel, so Joshua and the Israelites defeated them completely at Gibeon. Joshua 10:10. Here is an "against" example: Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon has devoured us, he has thrown us into confusion, he has made us an empty jar. Jeremiah 51:34. The confused side was the losing side. When Gwen chose to remain in confusion and to transplant her confusion into her daughter's heart, she made KatieLyn a loser too. Those are the hard ugly facts.
The way to overcome confusion is to get back into obedience; to repent and listen to the Lord again, to make His priorities your own priorities. When God's and KatieLyn's priorities matched, she was happy and focused. Joe was WAAAY focused; he was far more focused than I had ever seen him in his life because he was seeking and listening to the Lord more closely than ever before. It was God's plan for them to be married. The confusion that set in after KatieLyn made her mother's priorities her priorities was a destructive evil that ruined God's plan.
Matthew 6:33 holds a key to ending confusion. Seek ye first the reign of God and His righteousness, and all these shall be added to you. That's Young's literal translation. You may be more familiar with the King James Version: But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. The difficulty with the KJV in this case is that the "kingdom of God" takes on a nebulous connotation; thought of as being "God things." But the kingdom has a King, and Young's emphasizes His reign. Here's the difference: Gwen's concerns could be called "God-related things," but they most certainly were not "reign of God misgivings."
Here is how those differences played out—
Joe was seeing the reign of God in his life. He started with God and looked for His authority in his life. He was confident that this marriage was God's reigning plan.
Gwen was looking at her life experiences and trying to figure out if these were God things. In an approach that is almost exactly backwards, she encouraged her daughter to look at the potential for the devil to reign havoc and asked her if she was willing to live with that. Somehow, KatieLyn convinced herself that since she was looking for God using her mother's approach, her conclusion was the right thing.
When Joe prioritized based on the reign of God in his life, decision making became easy and doubts fled away. When KatieLyn prioritized by trying to arrange worldly issues in a godly fashion, she was overcome by the immensity of the situation. She followed her confused mother.
The way to eliminate confusion is a two-step process. First, listen to the voice of the Lord, and then line up your priorities to match His. This gets rid of all double-mindedness as you think and act on God's thoughts after Him. It takes concentration and practice to hear the voice¹ of the Lord consistently. Good parents teach their children how to do this early in life.
God does not always speak the same way, and only rarely does he shout, but He has promised that His sheep hear His voice. (John 10:27) If we consent and obey, then Isaiah 1:19 promises that we will eat the good of the land.
¹ "Voice of the Lord" is being used broadly to include all means by which God may communicate. At one end of the spectrum, it could means simply that you have and impression in your spirit, but it could mean a voice in your head, or an audible voice in your ears, all the way up to a full-blown vision. In this context, it could also mean a prophesy given to you that you have evaluated against the Bible standards and found to be truthful.
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