Identifying and Understanding the Default Program

We have carefully sought to establish that all men, as a consequence of the ‘fall’, are born with a ‘sin nature’ that is at work inside their body. The ‘sin nature’ is also identified in the bible as the old self, old man, and the flesh.  The sin nature belongs to the realm of evil and is controlled by Satan.  We defined this realm in prior posts as the ‘dominion of darkness’.   Its purpose is to create a false reality, an illusion, to blind the mind ‘so that’ it cannot ‘see’ the truth and light of God.   Its purpose is to keep men in darkness.

II Corinthians 4:4 NIV   “The god (Satan) of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light..”

1 Corinthians 2:14:   The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.

Romans 8:7-8 NIV   “…because the sinful mind is hostile to God.  It does not submit to God’s law nor can it do so.”

Galatians 5:17-23 NIV “For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature.  They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.”

The sin nature has such ‘influence’ over the mind that it can create the illusion that the truth of God is foolishness.   It seeks to make the mind hostile to the truth of God.  From the time of our birth, the objective of the sin nature is to set the mind on a path of self-gratification as defined by the sin nature that is in contrast to and in opposition to God’s design and intention as to the ‘truth’ of how we are designed to function in life.  From birth, the default program of the sin nature goes to work to ‘blind’ the mind from ‘truth.

The bible divides all men into two classes.   These classes represent the difference between children of God or children of the devil, spiritual or of the flesh, believers or non-believers.  It defines the difference between actions, behavior, and attitude of the old man and the new man and those that are born of the flesh, or born of the Spirit.

The sin nature has a different agenda as relates to its objective for the two classes.   It uses different approaches and techniques to achieve its purpose within each class.   We will simply refer to the two classes as believers and non-believers.  Most of what we have defined heretofore speaks to the effect of the sin nature as relates to non-believers.  Its primary objective is to keep a non-believer as a non-believer.  To keep him ‘blind’ and in darkness to the light of truth about God.  To keep him from ‘divinely knowing’ God.   The default program of the sin nature literally installs a ‘block’ over the light of ‘truth’.  It is not that non-believers are unwilling to see the light of truth, to see ultimate spiritual reality, or to see God’s highest and best for us.  No.  It is that the effect of the operation of the sin nature literally makes a non-believer ‘unable’ to see, to come to, the light of truth.

Once a person comes to ‘divinely know’ God and belongs to the ‘believer’ class, the sin nature’s focus and objective shifts to a secondary agenda.   That agenda is to keep believers from becoming a ‘mature’ and fully functioning believer within God’s design and intention and plan.   The sin nature, the old self/man, the mind of the flesh, continues to work inside of the mind of a believer to keep them from becoming all they can become as a ‘new’ man.   The default program of the sin nature uses schemes and tactics within its ability to install and re-play preconceived and erroneous beliefs and limited or false ideas and works to keep its programming as the minds primary ‘default’ go-to program. The default program’s primary mission is to keep the ‘old’ way of thinking and acting as the default go-to in our thinking and decision making process.

The sin nature’s default program, from our birth, works to define the ideas and thinking that drive our activity and our ideas. As an apostle and a ‘believer’, Paul wrote:

Romans 7: 23 NIV   “..but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members…”

The ‘mind’ of the sin nature, is referred to in the New Testament translations as the ‘sinful nature’ and the ‘flesh’. It is best defined in Romans 8:7-8 NIV  “The sinful mind is hostile to God.  It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.  Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.”

The first question of the Westminster Catechism is:   What is the chief end of man?  The answer given is:  The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30-31, Luke 10:27 NIV “ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

John 10:10 NIV   “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they you may have life, and have it to the full.”

John 14:27 NIV   “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.”

God’s purpose and intention in creating us was ‘so that’ we could enter into a personal relationship with him ‘so that’ we would glorify him and live our life to the ‘full.” God designed us within our three dimensional capacity of mind, body, spirit, to have the ability to experience ‘life’ with a prescribed order of expression that he defines as ‘full’.  Not half-full or partially full, but ‘full’.  God designed for us to have a ‘full’ body/mind/spirit experiential understanding of love, peace, joy, happiness, and understanding.  He designed us to have an internal hierarchy of needs that causes us to ‘seek’ to fully achieve the highest level of satisfaction and gratification related to his design for the fulfillment and expression of those needs.  God designed what our needs would be and he designed the ‘source and supply’ for how we would fully achieve those.  He wired us to fulfill our needs within his design for fulfillment.   God designed that our ‘needs’ can only be fully realized, fully experientially realized, in and through an interactive and dependent relationship with him.   God designed our internal operating system to be connected to his operating system.   God designed that all of our needs to achieve ‘full’ on the satisfaction/gratification reality gauge required our being necessarily dependent on him/God to be source and supply for our needs.   God designed the requirement into our human operating system that we could not achieve ‘full’ status in our joy, peace, love, understanding, without having his provision of source and supply.  God designed our operating software to work in conjunction with his operating software ‘in order’ that the ‘full’ operating objectives and system potential could be realized and achieved.

So here we have a catch 22. A catch–22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules (Wikipediea.org).

The main objective of the sin nature’s default program is to keep believers living in a less-than ‘full’ state. It is to keep the believer blind and deceived and distant from the experience and understanding of Gods design for ‘full.”  It is a default program that provides the ever illusive promise of gratification and satisfaction within a false reality.   It is an alternate reality that is designed to keep the system user from ever realizing or achieving the original designer’s purpose and intention. The default program installs a never ending loop and replay of its basic premise, which in reality is a lie-loop.  The idea of the loop can be likened to a hamster running on a wheel in a cage.  It constantly is moving, but not reaching an intended destination.  The goal of the default program is to keep us content and confined within a false reality so that we can never fully achieve our ultimate God intended destination of ‘full’.  It is a false reality and can never achieve ‘full’ joy, full peace, full love, or full understanding. It uses the same premise that it used with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. (My paraphrase from Genesis account: ‘Surely God did not mean that if you ate this delicious apple that you would die…surely not…what he didn’t want you to know is that if you did eat it..you would will be like God.’)  Lies, more lies, and deception are the core tactics that are used by the sin nature.

The catch 22 is we are born with a capacity to realize God’s design for living life to the full, but we do not have the ability to realize or achieve it ‘without’ God’s source and supply. Without God’s light shining into our darkness and illusion, we have no reference or basis for ‘true full’.  Thus from our birth, we are tricked into thinking that quarter-full, or half-full, is true full.   The default program uses every experience we have within our quest to seek satisfaction for our created needs and seeks to create a false definition of ‘full’.  Its mechanism is to keep us busy in seeking ‘full’ satisfaction for our needs but blinding us and preventing us from seeing that ‘full’ can only truly be realized and achieved by entering into a relationship with God for source and supply of all our needs.   We are stuck in a loop of darkness and deception.  The default program mechanism’s primary objective is to keep the light of God’s truth from entering into the darkness and void of the loop of false reality.

The spirit of man was designed to be ‘full’ of God, with God. It can be likened to a pump.  The pump must receive input from one side to produce output on the other side.  The kind and type of what it takes in as input is what it produces of like and kind in output.  The sin nature seeks to be the source and supply for input into our pump.  It works hard to block us from coming to understand that its like and kind supply can never full fill our spirit and give us ‘full’ joy, peace, love, and understanding.

The most powerful ability of the sin nature is that it works at an invisible level and cloaks its operation under a blindfold of illusion.  It even creates an alternate reality for our mind as to what we define and how we define and determine ‘satisfaction’.   It actually overrides the original designer’s programming and installs its own default program for how we can achieve ultimate satisfaction for all of our desires and needs.  The programming provides distortion, half-truths, lies, dead-ends, road blocks, and detours to steer us away from the pathways of understanding that lead to light and truth.  One of its major tactics is to provide pathways to gratification of our needs.   It provides a false illusion of satisfaction.  Once we taste of the illusion of satisfaction, the default program has the ability to write new code and it imprints the pathway, process, and memory of the illusion of satisfaction into our minds to install a go-to default pathway.  Over time, the effect of the sin nature’s default go-to pathways become a false-natural behavior for us as to what we know and understand or believe about how to fulfill our needs.  Thus we become stuck in the default systems lie-loop.   And the power of the sin nature’s ‘blindfold’ effect over our mind keeps us from seeing that we have been deceived.

The ‘god’ (Satan) of the default program, sits back in the control chair in his dominion of darkness and he laughs at us and delights in our blindness. He watches us run on our wheels in our cages that we build within our illusion of what and how life should operate.  He is thrilled to have us find pleasure and contentment within our false reality of what satisfies us in our pursuit to fill our needs.  He loves that we are ‘comfortable’ and content in our delusion of living life ‘full’ within his prescription for full.  And he is relentless in his objective to insure that the default program is constantly working inside our operating system to keep us comfortable and content at living life less than at ‘full’ as God designed us to live.  He delights in pushing his gotcha-again button on every occasion that his default system steers us back onto the wheel so that we are once again duped by the influence of the default go-to programming.

As ‘believers’, all of us, get stuck in the default programs loop of deception.   We all have our areas of personal struggle.  The sin nature is at war against us.  It jerks us back and forth inside the loop as it provides its half-full doses of joy and happiness and its doses of pain, sorrow, sadness, and failure.  It loves to push the gotcha-again button and cause us to feel the sorrow and guilt of condemnation. It knows when to inject us with some new placebo that gives us a short term dose of joy, love, gratification.   It works in each one of us the same, but differently.   For each, its objective is to create a customized  illusion to create that ‘just-right’ degree of satisfaction and gratification in our pursuit and seeking to fulfill our needs.   Even our blessings, the warmth of our home, our food, our cars, our toys, our pursuits, interest, hobbies…all of these good things…the default system creates a distorted view as to their value to us that is fashioned to appeal to our need for comfort and gratification.

As believers, it is vital that we know that the sin nature’s primary mission is to do everything in its power to keep us from realizing and achieving God’s design and intention for us to be fully functioning. It seeks to damage our internal ability to have faith, to see faith, and to understand how to operate ‘in faith’.  Ultimately it seeks to keep us from glorifying God and achieving his highest and perfect plan for our lives.

There is a war going-on on planet earth.  The bottom line is eternal life and death.   We are in the battle.   There is the side of light and truth, and there is the dark side.   If we are a believer, we are on the side of light and truth.   The rules of war have allowed the dark side to have the ability to interfere with our ability to become a great and powerful warrior on the side of light and truth.  This ability works at an invisible level under a cloak of deception.  It is so powerful that it can keep us from even realizing we are warrior in a battle.   It can keep us from seeing our destiny, our potential, our high calling to engage in battle.  Mostly it seeks to keep us busy, preoccupied, and content and comfortable ‘so that’ we will not come to life in the ‘full‘.

(Next: God’s Light…the ‘way’ out of the darkness)

The Function of ‘spirit’

Genesis 1:26, 27 NIV   Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness”….So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.

Job 32:8 NIV   But it is the spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding.

God created us in ‘his’ image. We are molded in his image.  We have some of what he is inside our being.  We are NOT God.  We cannot become God or a God.   We were designed with a spirit capacity, a spirit system, ‘so that’ we can ‘know’ God at the deepest level of our ability to know.  Humans, within their spirit ability/system, are distinct in all of the created life that lives on planet earth.  We have a spirit.  Animals do not have a spirit.   The primary function of our spirit is to provide ‘awareness’.  I am not speaking about physical/audio/visual awareness in the physical realm dimension.  I am saying ‘awareness’ at the spiritual level.  What is the number one ‘thing’ that you are constantly ‘aware’ of?  What is it?  It is ‘self’.   Self-awareness.  If you are asleep and you wake up, what is the first thing that you are conscious of?  You are ware of ‘you’..that you ‘are’…you are aware of your existence..that you exist.  A monkey is not aware of ‘self’.  It does not contemplate the day of its death.  It does not know its birth date.  It does not know the day of the week.  It does not contemplate its offspring.   It does not plan birthday parties or funerals.  It does not know that it is a monkey.  It has no sense of ‘self’ existence.   It has no sense of objective right and wrong.   It does not have a moral code written in its heart.   Objective self-awareness is a ‘human’ ability.  Objective right and wrong, understanding, reasoning, are abilities/capacities of our spirit function. As humans, we operate our bodies from our control center which is our organic brain.  Our ‘mind’, the area of will, intellect, and emotion, is not simply a brain function.   Your ‘being’ is your body, mind, and spirit.  You, your being, because you are a human, you are immortal.  Your body will die, but your spirit being, which includes you, your self/mind, is eternal.  (I must inject herein that the most important reality within a person’s existence in this body is to understand that eternal bliss, eternal peace, an eternal ‘heaven’, is not an automatic spiritual destination after our body dies.  The major consequence of the ‘fall’ was that we are cut-off from a relationship with God, now, and for eternity.  There is no bliss, or peace, or heaven without God providing access.  In the future posts on ‘light’, we will provide God’s plan for reconciling us ‘back’ into a relationship with Him and entrance into eternal life.)

So, when we are born, we do not have a fully functioning spirit. We have already explained this in the posts related to the consequences of the ‘fall’.  God designed us in his image..gave us some of what he is…spirit… ‘so that’…we could know him.  For us to ‘know’ him…God Spirit has to have contact with, be merged with, our spirit.   His spirit needs to live ‘inside’ our spirit.   When we speak of ‘knowing’ God, we speak of knowing God at the ‘divine’ level of knowing.  Spiritual awareness at the deepest level.  When God Spirit merges with man’s spirit, ‘divine knowing’ takes place.

Romans 1:18-23 NIV   “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.  For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God or gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.”

In the verse above, Paul is telling us that ‘everyone’ knows God at a ‘general revelation’ level of awareness.  He is not saying everyone ‘knows God’ at the divine knowing level.  He is saying that everyone has a general awareness of God.   Every person, inside his spirit capacity, ‘knows’ about/recognizes/is aware of ‘God’.  Every person ‘knows’ there is a God.  But Paul says that men ‘suppress this truth’.  Paul says that even though everyone knows there is a God, (general revelation) they do not translate such knowing (general revelation) into coming to divinely know God.  He says they do not ‘glorify’ him as God or give thanks to him.  Romans 1:18-23 says that everyone knows God, but everyone doesn’t know Him personally.

1 Corinthians 1:21 NIV   For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him..

Galatians 4:8 NIV   Formerly, when you did not know God..

1 Thessalonians 4:5 NIV   not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God;

1 Corinthians 2:14: The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. 

The three verses immediately above all say that there are people who do not know God. Wait, I’m confused.  Romans 1:18-23 says ‘everyone’ knows God.  The 3 verses above say not everyone knows God.  The difference is knowing at a general revelation knowing within spirit function/awareness, and personal revelation at a divine knowing level within spirit function/awareness.

When the ‘sin’ entity, the principle of sin, entered the human body at the ‘fall’, it brought along its nature. Sin installs its own software operating system that becomes the primary default operating system for man in his fallen state.  The purpose of the default system is to ‘blind’ the mind of man to keep him from ‘seeing’ the glory of God.   It is to keep him from coming to a personal level of knowing God.  It is to keep him from coming to a divine level of knowing God.  And it serves to keep him from gaining access to eternal life in God’s presence.

(In the next post we will look at the principles of illusion that the default system uses to blind us to the truth and light of God.)

 

The Old Man (the old self)  – The Flesh (the Sinful Nature)

Romans 7: 23 NIV   “..but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members…”  (Romans 7:7-25, is the larger context related to the ‘internal struggle/war we have with the ‘sin’ entity at work in our body).

Romans 7:5 NIV   “For when we were controlled by the sinful nature…”

Romans 7:18 NIV   “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.”

Romans 7:25 NIV   “…but in the sinful nature (I am) a slave to law of sin.”

Romans 8:7-8 NIV   “…because the sinful mind is hostile to God.  It does not submit to God’s law nor can it do so.”

Ephesians 4:22 NIV   “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;…”

Colossians 3:9 NIV   “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices..”

There is ‘something’ inside us, a law, an entity, a thing with a distinct existence, that is at war against the light and truth of God’s intention and design for how He created us to live/operate. The bible refers to this entity as ‘sin’, the law of sin, the old man, the flesh, and the sinful nature.  Many translations of the New Testament use the ‘sinful nature’ in place of ‘flesh’, and they use the ‘old self’ in place of the ‘old man’.  There are also places in scripture that refer to the old man as the ‘first’ man.  We will reference the understanding of the ‘first’ man in future posts.   I prefer the NIV translation for my personal use and study, thus I will use the NIV translation.

The old self, or the flesh, has a core nature of, or a mind toward, or principle of selfishness.   Its objective is to care for self, even above moral character.   Some translations and teachers in characterizing the essential nature of the old self/flesh/sinful nature use the word ‘carnal’, wherein other translations use the word/term worldly, sinful mind, and sinful nature.  The old self’s primary objective is to achieve and sustain self-gratification.   Its mission is to seek the highest degree of comfort within its hierarchy of felt needs.  It is presented within the context of scripture as being a force and power with intention and purpose to please self above all other things.  It works to influence the mind/will to achieve its ultimate outcome of self-gratification without regard for and in contrast to the existence of God’s intention and design for how we are to think, live, and have our being.

2 Corinthians 4:4 NIV “The god (not God the Creator) of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.”

So the essential function of the sin nature that resides in our flesh is to keep us from ‘seeing’. Seeing what?  It is to keep us from seeing, from coming to a personal revelation of, from coming to a personal knowledge of God and a personal relationship with God.  Let me use my analogy of the default program software.  The default programs’ purpose is to ‘blind’ us, keep us from seeing the light of truth about God.

Let us regress a bit in order to provide further understanding. Let’s reiterate the consequences of the ‘fall’. In Adam, we inherited the sin nature.  It resides in us.   We are born with the default program software installed inside our mind from the time of our birth.   We are also born without a personal knowledge of God, because we were cut-off from God. Post Adam we cannot know God at an intimate personal awareness level.   We can know about Him like we know about all other things, but we are not born with a personal level awareness of Him.   Why can’t we in our fallen state ‘know’ God?  Knowing God is a spirit level ability.  At the ‘fall’ man’s spiritual capacity was greatly diminished.  Man could no longer ‘know’ God because such ‘knowing’ occurs at the spiritual realm level.

Man has a spirit. God is spirit.   Human beings are distinct in all of creation ‘in that’ we were created with a ‘spirit’.  I am not saying we are a spirit.  I am saying we have a spirit inside our being.  We have a spirit capacity.  Think of it as a compartment or think of it as a ‘system’ like the respiratory system, the neuro system, the digestive system.  Our systems have purpose and function.  Think of the spirit as our spiritual system. But the spirit does not belong to our organic realm.  It is of spirit essence and belongs to the invisible realm of the spiritual realm.

Genesis 2:7 NIV   “And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.”    Job 32:8 NIV   “But it is the spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding.”  Proverbs 20:27 NIV   “The lamp of the Lord searches the spirit of a man; it searches out his inmost being.”  Ecclesiastes 12:7 NIV   “and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.”   I Corinthians 2:11 NIV   “For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him?”  2 Corinthians 4:16 NIV   “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”  1 Thessalonians 5:23 NIV  “May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

John 4:24 NIV   Jesus says “God is spirit, and His worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

God is spirit. In John 4:24, there is no article in the Greek text before the word spirit, and such is to emphasize the essential quality or essence of the word.  Note the word spirit occurs first in the sentence to create such essence.  A literal expression of the intent of the verse would be akin to, “In the purest since of His existence as a being..God is spirit.” Jesus had intention in saying…” God is spirit!”

But a spirit is also a person, not an impersonal force which acts without purpose or reason. Only a ‘person’ has awareness, knowledge, beliefs, intents, goals, relationships.  An impersonal force or principle has none of these. God possesses the basic characteristics of personality—intellect, emotions, and will. He thinks, He feels, and He acts. And that is good news. Because He is a living person we can get to know Him personally and communicate with Him freely. If He were an inanimate object or an impersonal force there would be no hope of a personal relationship with Him. (One needs to only do a search engine search of ‘God as a person’ to find reference to the clear biblical evidence).

(Next we will dig deeper into ‘how the default system functions.’)