Old Man – Human Development

This is the third article in the recent discussion of  the Old Man – New Man

Biblical Terminology
The terms Old Man (self) and New Man (self) found in the bible refer to the person we were in our old life without Christ and then our new life after salvation. The terms are not actual as if we were a different person before salvation and another after we trusted in Christ. The terms are personifications that describe our personal characteristics, our beliefs, our ideas, our relational strategies and behaviors before Christ and afterward. When Paul, who alone uses the terms, refers to the old self (Rom 6:6, Eph 4:22) he is thinking about our whole lifestyle before salvation. When he talks about the new self, he is thinking about our different lifestyle after salvation. This article will delve deeper into the old and new selves by discussing the beliefs, ideas and emotions we develop and use in our old life. Notice how the different pieces of the human puzzle are presented here and put together to explain why and how we are the way we are.

Sin Nature
As discussed in the previous articles, Adam’s sin has caused all of us to inherit his selfish nature. This selfish, sinful nature causes us to view our self as the center of the universe and our self-interest as the most important issue in life. We naturally put our self first above God, others and any other concern. As we grow up and build our own ideas about life, self-interest is the overriding concern in all of our beliefs. Our thoughts and feelings are controlled by selfishness and our sin nature causes us develop views that promote self above all other concerns.

Human Needs
God created Adam and Eve and in His creation He designed the human soul. We have all inherited the basic design God created in our original parents. By design, He made us all with human needs that we are compelled to have fulfilled. We experience our needs as desires. All of us hunger and long for what we need and we know that we need because all of us have wants. Our God given human needs drive us to seek others that will love us, accept us, approve of us an include us. The human soul is empty by itself and naturally seeks relationships with others to meet our needs. These God designed needs can be observed in the raw by watching young children relate to parents and peers. All human behavior can be understood and motivation traced back to the drive to meet these basic human needs.

Knowing Nothing
We begin life as babies with no knowledge, understanding, ideas or beliefs. We are born only with some basic instincts that guide us. For example, we are born with the instinct to cry when we feel need and the instinct to nurse on our mother’s breast. Almost immediately though we begin to build our own impressions about self, others and life itself. It is these earliest impressions and ideas that form the core of our own views about our self, others and about how life works. As we grow up, we build all of our beliefs on these core ideas. Additionally, our core beliefs determine how we will interpret all further life experiences. Once our core ideas are in place they control how we view life and everything we experience in life.

Stages of Development
As we progress in years, life comes in stages. It is during these stages of human development that our ideas are constructed. These stages correspond roughly to ages 0-2 years, 2-5 years, 5-12years and 12-18 years old. Each stage brings its own developmental challenges that must be mastered for a child to grow properly into the next stage. For example, the earliest stages are focused on developing the motor skills of walking and using our bodies to negotiate our world. The latter stages focus more on our mental development, relationships and the building of a worldview. The most important development in our growth is the way we learn to relate to others. The methods we learn and develop by relating to our parents are termed our relational strategies.

Life Experiences
Beginning early with the most basic issues of life we build our beliefs out of our human experiences. From the toddler stage through our teen years and beyond we form our ideas about self and others based on how we are treated, loved and nurtured. If our parents love us unconditionally, treat us kindly and discipline us fairly we develop the healthy core idea that we have intrinsic worth and expect that others will also care for us. By contrast, if we are treated harshly, loved only when we behave and disciplined with anger, we conclude that we are worth little and expect others to care only when we produce something they want. We learn how to relate by relating to our primary caregivers, developing our relational strategies based on what works with them to gain their love and approval. Whatever works with mom and dad to make them laugh, smile and praise us, we learn to use over and over. We then store these effective approaches in our inventory of ideas where they become our primary methods of relating to our peers and the opposite sex. Because we know nothing and have nothing to think with, we base all of our ideas on our immediate experiences either good or bad.

Development Summary
We are born with a nature to put self first and driven by the need for love, approval, acceptance and inclusion with others. We are born knowing nothing and having no frame of reference on which to draw accurate conclusions about how to meet our needs. We grow and develop in stages building our core beliefs first and then constructing more complex ideas upon this foundation. We build our ideas based on our primary relationships and reach our conclusions purely on the basis of how these significant others relate to us. We learn what works to induce others give us what we need and we use these methods over and over. Based purely on our own experiences with our parents and peers we build our own life views about everything in our world. Your personal opinions and views that you hold in your heart today did not form there by accident or happenstance. Your personal viewpoints were formed by choice as you interpreted your life experiences, reached your own conclusions about these experiences, believed these conclusions you reached and then used these personal conclusions as the basis of your relating and behavior in your life.

Conclusion

We believe, think, feel and behave according to the inner program running in our heart. All of the ideas we have believed and used to live our lives form this self-chosen belief system that controls our life. Driven by our needs that feel like desires within us, we pursue relationships with people using the relational strategies we learned from interacting with our parents. Growing up in stages, we built our own ideas based on what seemed to work, seemed to induce others to care and what we hope will work to get love for ourselves in the future. We are, we think, we feel and we behave the way we have chosen using the freedom of soul designed by God. The good news is that we are what we have chosen to be. It is good because if God has enabled us to choose what we will believe and we have chosen what we are, then we can also choose to change what we are. God has made us so that we can choose making us responsible and He made us so that we can change giving us opportunity.

Stay tuned for the next discussions where we will talk about how and why we feel the way we do and what God has provided so that we can think and feel like Jesus.