Moving from Evil to Good

Ideally, be not evil---be good instead.

But sometimes that is not practical, because it involves too large a change to be acceptable. Hence Jesus' statement in Matthew 19:23--24 (ESV):

²³ And Jesus said to his disciples, ``Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. ²⁴ Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.''

But it is not completely hopeless, as even after that statement, Jesus follows up with pointing out that with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).

But to put things into context, the rich person in the story was seeking for a definite ``almost instant gratification'' type answer after replying to Jesus on how he has been righteous enough thus far to follow the commandments that had been given since Moses' time. Since the question was posed in such a manner, the reply was just as straightforward: the ultimate pathway towards eternal life (or goodness in the face of God) is to walk away from the possessive ties of treasure of this world and follow Him into the next. What isn't obvious then is that the factor of time isn't taken into account, to a certain degree.

We easily interpret it as Jesus asking the rich man to dispose of all his possessions now to follow Jesus (who was then alive) due to the immediacy of the encounter, but as we now have the benefit of hindsight through access to the entirety of the Bible, we find that Jesus' explanation to the rich man is more of an instruction of the end-state while allowing us to be moulded over time by the Holy Spirit towards being more Christ-like in nature. In many ways, there seems to be an implicit acknowledgement that there is some internal personality inertia that needs to be overcome only with time and careful cultivation of the mind/heart that cannot be expedited. It is similar in substance to another non-biblical parable of a man asking a grandmaster how long it would take to master some skill, only to be told that it would take increasing amounts of time with increasing amounts of intensity as proposed by the man.

As a man of faith, I can see intuitively how Jesus' words make sense. As a man of science, I wonder: what is the nature of this internal resistance that can only be overcome through a measured application of effort over time? What are the mechanics that control this? Are these mechanics peculiar only for the mental system, or is it something that is more universally applicable to systems in general?

No answers, just questions for now.

But going back to the initial statement, it is always possible to move from evil to good, but the practicality of it has always been correlated to the amount of time that one puts into it. The longer the time frame, the less per-unit-time effort (or change) required. The total amount of change necessary to steer from evil to good is still the same, but the longer time frame introduces less strain into the behaviour of the system as compared to some kind of crash course. Being saved from God's eternal indifference is a one-time affair through the belief that Jesus is the Christ and is one's personal saviour, but living up to the standards of being God's child is always a work in progress as long as we are still living with our mortal coil.

I don't have anything else that I might want to add for now. So I will end here. Till the next update.