(Here’s an old article I wrote that just happens to be timely, given that I just attended and spoke at a Discipleship Training Conference.)
One of the major issues for most human beings is dealing with complexity. Just to get through a single day a person must interact with a bewildering array of things. Think of everything that must go right for you to get to work. If you drive to work all of the hundreds of moving parts in your car must function correctly. And these days a single car can have as much computing power as the entire world had before the mid 1960s, while each computer chip in your car has thousands, or even millions of individual transistors. Recently a chip was made that has over 5.4 billion transistors.
How do we manage all this complexity? How can we produce devices that successfully depend on the proper functioning of millions of individual components? The answer is in the notion of “modularity.” The idea is that you concern yourself with some things and treat other things as a “black box.” Instead of worrying about each of one billion transistors, you worry only that the proper signals appear on the output pins in response to the inputs.
This makes it possible for humans to make incredibly complex assemblies and organizations. But there’s also a danger to it. While it’s great to go through life ignoring the many complexities embodied in the various “black boxes” you encounter, it’s also possible that you might find yourself depending more on more on things you don’t understand. If your car breaks and you pop open the hood (do you know how to pop open the hood on your car?) would you be able to do anything besides point and say, “engine”?
It’s possible to view our own lives as black boxes. We do what we do, and we don’t think about why we do them. We get angry or things go strange in our relationships, and we never ask why, because we are not used to thinking in terms of looking inside the black box. I am what I am; I do what I do. When I receive certain stimuli, I output certain outputs. And if you don’t like it, tough. Because I don’t have the faintest idea why I am the way I am. I’m just a black box.
Now clearly as Christians God does not want us to spend our time focused on ourselves. Nevertheless he does open up the black box for us. The Bible gives us a lot of insight into who we are, how we got where we are, and what we can do about it.
Perhaps the most important glimpse inside the black box of our makeup can be found in Romans 7. In this passage we — those who are following God — are told that we are fundamentally divided. We delight in God’s law in our “inner being” but we find another law in our “members” that wars against “the law of my mind” and makes me captive to sin.
Now on the face of it this would seem to be bad news. I’m divided and sin has gotten in and is kicking my butt. But notice that this is actually good news because it has opened the black box — the mystery of my constant defeat at the hands of sin. It’s not me! It’s an evil parasite living in me that is making me do the thing that I don’t want to do!
Before this insight, there was nothing you could do. You had nothing to get a grip on, no purchase for leverage. But now — you can fight!
Paul talks more about this in Galatians when he says that “the Spirit wars with the flesh.” Again this is great news — before there was the peace of slavery. You couldn’t fight — you were supine beneath the boot of sin. But now — now you’ve gotten up and are punching back through the Spirit. What’s more, you are told that the battle is actually winnable! “If we walk in the Spirit we will not fulfill the desires of the flesh”!
Galatians does a great job describing the inner workings of the black box of our behavior. The works of the flesh are spelled out in detail, encompassing things like sexual immorality, anger, jealousy, and a number of other things. You see, it’s not YOU that gets angry. It is sin dwelling in you. But because you’ve never looked at it closely, you assume that it IS you and you go with it. But now you have God’s Spirit in there fighting with you, and you can find love, and peace, and patience, and kindness as alternatives to anger.
Yes, its a war. Yes, it won’t be complete in this life — only when we see Jesus as he is and become like him will we truly shake off this body of death. But, to echo Paul, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
And remember that every peaceful thought, every kind act, every loving deed, every moment of patient endurance is a victory in the battle with the alien parasite that seeks your destruction. So fight on!