Recall God’s view of the human heart,
The
heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who
can know it (Jer
17:9)?
Well,
the answer to that question is found in the following verse,
I, the LORD,
search the heart, I test the mind,
even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his
doings (Jer 17:10).
The
heart of man from Adam to Abraham to Jacob to David to Jeremiah to Paul to us
is the same. This is what makes the Bible so relevant today because it is also
a book of the spiritual condition of the human heart. (cf. Rom 5:12). In keeping track of our doggies, you know what
this means to humanity? That the black dog nature is found within every human
being since Adam!
Since
there are only two spiritual types in mankind: regenerate and unregenerate; it
is true today for the natural man (a person without the Holy Spirit in the
heart, Jude 1:19; 1 Cor 2:14; Rom 8:9b; 1 Jn 5:12b) and the supernatural man (a
person with the Holy Spirit within the heart, Rom 5:5; 8:11; 1 Cor 3:16; 6:19;
1 Jn 3:24; 5:12a).1
Let’s
talk about what we feed the white dog (our new nature) to make it bigger and
stronger than the black dog (our old nature). It has to do with good, healthy,
spiritual food.
(2
Tim 3:16) All Scripture is
given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,
(2
Tim 3:17) that the man
of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Since
our thinking has been corrupted by the fall, we do not think in a manner
pleasing to God, bad data in, bad data out. Doctrine is a negative word to the ignorant, but it
provides a spiritual structure for thinking rightly. With our old nature, our
thinking has been severely damaged by sin. Recall that belief precedes behavior.
When we think incorrectly, we are feeding the black dog, we are not living
godly lives.
Scripture
also provides boundaries of reproof. There is not an open border of anything goes in the name
of “love” promoted by Scripture; Love (agape) has standards. Too many
believers today are running on human affection rather than agape. It is
God who determines what is sin and what is not and what He expects from us.
This is a standard based on holiness and love (agape).
What
good are standards without teeth? This is where correction plays a factor. Correction does not
excuse sin but addresses it head-on to bring us in conformity to the will of
God (cf. Rom 8:29). The old man or the black dog doesn’t like any of this!
The
Scripture (Genesis to Malachi, Matthew to Revelation) is profitable for doctrine
(teaching),
for
reproof (rebuke),
for
correction,
for
instruction in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16). In other words, it is our source of positive
guidance in how we should live a life pleasing to God. The white dog or the new
nature is eating this up! The overall purpose of Scripture is that the man of God may
be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Tim 3:17). This the goal of Eph
2:10,
For
we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God
prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
I
am not sure how this works, but the flesh or sin nature or old man or the black
dog is unmoved by the reading, meditating, memorizing and applying of God’s
Word. Flesh is flesh, and it will always be flesh, no less or no more than
that. The black dog feeds on disobedience with the zeal of a piranha, having no
desire or taste for the things of God but only the things of the world that is
passing away.
Have
you ever had a bad thought, say the night before, and during the next day you
commit something related to it? Sure, you have. You have been doing good in
keeping the old man down, then all of a sudden – bam! You beat yourself up with
guilt, feeling like the biggest hypocrite in the universe. Eventually, your
resistance breaks, and you confess to the Lord for the x-number of times over
this troubling thing in your life. And you thought you had a handle on the black
dog!
Whenever
we leave off from being diligent in guarding our heart, the black dog is
waiting in the wings for a feast. It doesn’t care how many cycles of falling,
feeling bad, confessing, obeying God, as long as we return back to falling and
feeling bad after obeying God. It’s a vicious cycle.
Yes,
there is victory in Jesus! But I read nothing about being immune from the old
man. Whenever we feed the black dog, it is the first step in defeat. You can
memorize the entire Bible and as soon as you let up, bam! In Jesus, there is
victory through obedience.
No
matter how much of Scripture you have in your heart tank, it is impervious to
the old man. In the spiritual realm, desire is not a bad thing; it is the
object of the desire that determines whether it spiritually healthy or not.
The
battle is in the mind, my friends. It has always been in the mind. Control the
mind, and you control the body. It is that simple in reality. Feed the black
dog and it controls the body; feed the white dog it controls the body. Read
Paul’s admonition to the believers in Rome,
Paul
in Romans 12:2 urges the brethren not to be conformed or fashioned (cf. 1 Pet 1:14) to this age but
to be transformed (Gk.,metamorphoō,
Eng., metamorphosis). Metamorphoō occurs 4x and translated transformed (Rom 12:2; 2 Cor 3:18)
and transfigured (Mt 17:2; Mk 9:2).
This total change, from within and without, is never-ending. As
believer-priests, we are to keep on being transformed (present passive
imperative) by renewing of our mind (feeding the white dog) in order to test
what is God’s will, that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
The
objective of transformation is the mind (Gk., noos). You have heard the
expression stepping outside the box, this renewing of the mind is about
stepping outside the mold or pattern of this age by experiencing transformation
by the renewing of the mind; there it is! Not the mind of the old man
but of the new man! With salvation comes a new birth, a new life, a new mind.
But
the “butterfly effect” will never happen apart from the will. The changing of
that from within changes from without. The renewing of the mind is the lifelong
process of our fleshly thinking, feeling, and acting becoming less dominant
(keeping in mind that the black dog is within us) and our belief and behavior,
enabled by the Spirit, are being transfigured into the likeness of Christ in
the new man. The black dog is not the least bit interested in walking in the
Spirit! Why is that? Because, if we are walking in the Spirit, we are doing
something the old man really hates! Check out the dogfight,
…and
you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the
Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one
another, so that you do not do the things that you wish (Gal 5:16-17).
We
do not have to put forth any effort in thinking, speaking, or acting like the
world, for it is the default setting of our human nature that was defiled by
sin. You have often heard it said that we are sinners not because we sin but
sin because we are sinners. The old man feeds upon its own natural impulses,
naturally conforming to the image of fallen man. The new man feeds upon the
supernatural impulses of the Holy Spirit along with our will to be holy like
Jesus. Manifesting the new man over the old man is transformative by the
renewing of the mind.
There
are really only two major soteriological systems in the world: one of grace and
one of works. Should anyone buy into a quantitative salvation where it is
believed that if the number of good deeds in life exceeds the amount of bad
works done will achieve a positive afterlife, we can say categorically based on
no greater authority than the Word God, that such a belief will not produce a
positive outcome in eternity, like the Jewish expression of a black dog and a
white dog living within the same heart. Feed the white dog more than the black
dog, and you will produce a greater quantity of good than bad, thus increasing
your chances of going to heaven.
This
is why it is vital for believers not to carelessly be feeding the old man, but
feeding the new man with the Word of God. Willful ignorance and neglect of the
Word feed the old man. And by the way, this has absolutely nothing to do with a
so-called bipolar disorder though we have two spiritual natures within us as
believers.
I
can vividly remember as a kid watching Warner Brothers cartoons on television.
Every so often I would see an angel standing on the right shoulder of this
character and on the left shoulder there would be a devil telling it to do just
the opposite. This was a humorous graphic depiction by the world describing the
flesh, the old man, the sin nature, or the black dog on the good and the bad
side of human nature. Naturally, they avoided the word, “sin,” too!
The
believer’s intellect, emotions, and will (or the thinker, feeler, and chooser)
can be controlled either by the black dog or the white one. If we choose to
walk in the Spirit, we will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the
eyes, and the pride of life (cf. Gal 5:16; 1 Jn 2:16-17). If we choose to walk
in the flesh, we will fulfill the desires of the flesh; it is as certain as
gravity. For the believer, though victory is not automatic, it is achievable
through the Holy Spirit. It just depends on what dog you are feeding, right?
Salvation
is a quantum leap in the spiritual realm.2 Before salvation, there were no options because
the Holy Spirit did not reside within the heart, and the thinker, feeler, and
chooser were driven solely by the old man or flesh. With regeneration, we have
the Holy Spirit to help us to do what we cannot do in the flesh or in our own
strength. With the Scriptures, there is a structure for our hearts to follow
that will not lead us to spiritual disaster (cf. 2 Tim 3:16-17). <><
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1. The Holy Spirit did
not permanently indwell OT believers as He did with NT saints and on up to the
present. For various evangelical views on this, copy/paste this website in your
web browser –
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/were-old-covenant-believers-indwelt-by-the-holy-spirit/.
The gist of it is that God was with the OT saints as He dwelt in the
temple in Jerusalem (1 Kgs 9:3; Psa 132:13-14; cf. Rev 21:1-2). The NT saints
and all saints thereafter are the temple of God, and the Holy Spirit dwells in
God’s people (1 Cor 3:16).
2. When we are born again, we
received a new nature from God. No one knows how the old nature and the new
nature interface and access each other’s data other than being incompatible. We
have been using the black dog and white dog analogy under the premise that the
dominant nature is the one we feed most.
Our
spiritual diet is reflective of our obedience or disobedience to God: good
data in good data out or bad data in bad data out. As I read through my
article, I detected a weakness that may have generated some confusion which
comes from overusing an analogy. It is challenging to meet all the questions
one may have, and the more you try the deeper you get bogged down. Sometimes
illustrations of biblical truth can get pressed too far, and it begins to break
down. What we don’t want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater, yes?
Using the dogs is fine to show the palpable tension between the old man and the
new man, the old creation and the new creation, the black dog and the white
dog, etc.
But what if we also viewed the contrasting
natures as operating systems (OS)? With the old nature, all of our life data is
on that operating system ONOS (old nature operating system). On its hard drive
is every thought, word, and deed in real-time downloaded since salvation. We
may forget what’s on the hard drive, but it will never crash, nor will any data
be lost. We may access it through our fading memory, but it is permanently on
read-only mode; there are no modification opportunities allowed, except for the
future which has yet to be recorded. That will be determined by our faith in
God and downloaded in the present, of course.
When we are born again, we get another operating system, NNOS (new
nature operating system), not to replace the ONOS but fitted within our
framework (located somewhere in the body) alongside ONOS. Imagine as a new
believer, the only data is our thoughts, words, and deeds as a believer in
real-time. Anything and everything related to God is there, but since we are
new in Christ, there is limited data in the NNOS. It is possible the Holy
Spirit lives within this NNOS, not within ONOS, but He is somewhere within us
(cf. 1 Cor 6:19). Perhaps our heart, not the organ, is more expansive than
simply being the seat of our intellect, emotions, and will?
Generally, there is next to nothing concerning the Word of God in the
new operating system at regeneration. It seems logical that the new nature OS
would have access to the old nature OS data? It is going to be up to us to put
data in the NNOS manually (cf. 2 Pet 3:18) while it records automatically all
other sensory experiences of our thoughts, words, and actions in the will of
God. And for argument sake, let’s speculate and say that the ONOS records all
the data that is out of the will of God while the NNOS records all the data of
our life that is in the will of God. The data out of the will of God and the
data in the will of God would automatically be routed to the appropriate OS by
a creative act of God.
We could go on and on with this, and I am not suggesting, dogmatically
or otherwise, that this is the way it is. This is nothing more than the result
of thinking spontaneously and sharing something with you that is not derived
from exegetical evidence, very little theological inference, and more speculation
based on curiosity on how the white dog and black dog might interface and
interact within our body. I could be 100% off the radar, or I could be closer
than I think?
One of the values I take away from this little imaginary journey in
providing a mental picture by the OS comparison with our two natures is a critical spiritual need to download as much biblical knowledge in the NNOS
after spiritual regeneration as possible. I have often said that the Holy
Spirit is not going to pull out of our heart tank what is not there to comfort
and guide us in a crisis, putting the onus back on us to be more like Christ
which demands more knowledge of the Word (Jn 1:1).
Look, we can know the Bible from cover to cover, but that doesn’t mean
we are wise. We can have all the knowledge in the world and still be unwise,
but we cannot be wise without knowledge. Proper application of the Word in life
is wisdom. We have to do more than simply claim to be under the authority of
the Word; we must be in it and learn to be like Jesus, according to His Word!
The knowledge of God and His ways must go through the head to the heart and hit
the highway of life! Is that happening in your life?
Hence, the importance of learning the Word, loving the Word, and living
the Word. All of that enters into the NNOS. This is not about A.I. (artificial
intelligence) by the way. We are referring to the organic Word (Heb 4:12).
Yahweh is alive within us! Do we honestly believe that the black dog in the
ONOS gives a rip about glorifying God in all that we think, say, or do? The
white dog does, and the more we feed the white dog the bigger and stronger He
grows for the glory of God. It goes back to a faith choice. The black dog will
only run under the bad data of the ONOS; the white dog will only run under the
data that glorifies Him in the NNOS. What we put on those two hard drives is
our responsibility. What OS is running your life?
