Understanding the Basic Conflict

The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could be an allegory for the Christian life. There is a war in our members, a constant conflict between the old and the new, between vice and virtue, sin and obedience. We seem to be moral schizoids. It is a struggle between what the Bible calls the “old man” and the “new man.”

Whenever I hear an evangelist declare, “Come to Jesus and all your problems will be over,” I cringe because I am hearing false advertising. I cringe because this promise conflicts with my experience and my spiritual pilgrimage.

In one sense, my life didn’t become complicated until I became a Christian. Before my conversion, I only had one man with which to contend—the old man. My spiritual life was one-dimensional. I was Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll never showed up to bother me.

Prior to my conversion, I was dead in trespasses and sins. As Paul describes the course of the unregenerate person in Ephesians 2, I “walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience” (v. 2).

But now I am a Christian. I have been made alive to the things of God, being quickened to new life by the regenerating grace of God.