Recently, we returned from a trip, and I gained a lot of weight. As I have written in the past, I can gain 5 pounds in a week and it will take me a month to lose it! This has happened most of my adult life. However, I find that fact intriguing, I suspect the same is true in other areas like spiritual, mental, or emotional health.
Why is it so easy to put on weight and so difficult to take it off? Why is it so easy to slip into bad physical, spiritual, emotional, or mental habits and so hard to make new ones a daily routine? Why do things seem to naturally get worse if we don’t monitor, manage, or maintain disciplines to keep them? The simple answer is sin, Satan, or entropy, but there seems to be more here than the simple answer.
I would suggest there is an enemy of our soul who does seek to destroy us or draw us away from optimal health and wholeness (1 Peter 5.8-9). It is this personification of evil which often masquerades as fun. Contrary to what some have concluded in the past, this doesn’t mean all fun is bad. We were created with the creative nature for producing enjoyment. God intends us to 1) enjoy this world he created and 2) to steward it. The first produces joy, while the second requires work because the world around us is broken (Genesis 3).
We, and this world, are skewered by this sin. According to Genesis 3, this is what causes things to be difficult work, which was not intended to be this way. The stewarding of ourselves and the world around us was part of our created nature. We were designed to care for and nurture ourselves and the world in a way that both would flourish. However, when sin entered the world, those tasks of stewardship took on a markedly difficult orientation. (Romans 5.18-28) This is now a part of the current order of our world. We can count on it and must accommodate for it.
I suspect the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, is a phenomenological description of what the Bible calls sin. Obviously, the second law of thermodynamics was intended to empirically describe what happens in thermodynamic systems, but the concept of entropy is applicable everywhere. Most of us have seen a glass fall off a counter, shatter, and spill its contents all over the floor. But no one has seen scattered liquid congeal into a shattered glass, and it rise to the top of a counter in perfect shape. Entropy describes why things break down, not up. Entropy states that everything tends to run down or tends in the direction of disorganization rather than toward optimal organization. We see it everywhere in the world around us, from the appliances in our home to the apple on our counter…everything degenerates with time. Entropy looks to the outsider observer like sin in a broken world looks to a theologian.
Things tend to break down with use, not get better and better. This is one of the challenges with the theory of random evolution, which posits that things evolved randomly into greater and greater complexity rather than the reverse, but this is for another discussion.
The question here is, how do we accommodate for either entropy, sin, or the enemy of our soul? In other words, how do we, as followers of Christ, deal with a broken world? This is where the second law of thermodynamics and the scriptures converge. The only way a system can become more complex is if there is energy put into the system. Furthermore the more the energy, the potential complexity increases. The New Testament tells us that if we invest our own energy into our spiritual exercises, mental habits, emotional and physical exercises, the healthier we will be! (1 Corinthians 9.24-27, 1 Peter 4.8, 2 Peter 1.3-9)
In other words, as followers of Christ, when we put effort into these areas, sin’s entropic effect will be overcome. This doesn’t mean we can overcome sin or Satan in the world through our efforts. Nor does it mean we can achieve some state of nirvana or salvation through our own efforts. This chasm could only be bridged through the finished work of Jesus dying on the cross. This gift is complete, and we need only to engage in it through faith (Ephesians 2.8-9).
This is where my faith in God and my habits converge. As I intentionally, through effort, seek to counteract these evil and entropic influences in various areas of my life, I provide energy to counteract sin/entropy. Through my reading, study, thinking, prayer, habits, disciplines, workouts, and exercises of all types, I counteract sin, entropy, and our enemy. Things actually get better because I am pouring effort into the system. This is why I give great time to habits in all areas of my life. I have discovered that I can increase my physical, relational, emotional, mental, financial, and spiritual health through choosing to inject energy into the entropic system.
In other words, I can reverse the effects of sin/entropy in my life and world by doing things (thoughts and behaviors) that increase health in all these areas. I have learned to create habits that reinforce these desired thoughts and behaviors. In so doing, I have been able to experience greater freedom and health as I maintain these habits. It is ironic that the more I create habits of health the more I experience freedom from this deteriorating tendency. In other words, the more disciplined I am, the more freedom I experience to be the person God created me to be.
I am not saying I can forestall age; I am aging and someday will cease to exist as you know me. However, I don’t think any of these efforts are lost. It would only make sense in God’s economy, where mass-energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed, that in eternity, the impact will be felt.
One final thought after watching the debate last night. This is why Christians are needed to interject love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control into our conversations and communities, especially during this election. (Galatians 5.22-26) By doing so, we can change our cultural conversations. In other words, our world won’t change by adding anger, chaos, bitterness, and depravity to the system. Only by adding these fruit of the Spirit will our world be changed through us.
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