“Because God knows that the day you devour it your eyes will be opened, and you will be as gods, knowing good from ill” (Genesis 3.5).
What does it mean to be a god, or even like one? And why is it so tempting?
Tron, released in July 1982, has at its center this temptation. It’s what drives the antagonist—the powerful Master Control Program or MCP—driving it to pulling a god into its world to protect its hold on power, and its ambition to be god.
The movie tells the story of Kevin Flynn, currently running a video arcade while attempting to hack into the system of its former employer ENCOM. See, all those games kids are shoving thousands of quarters into were conceived of and designed by Flynn. But he was forced out of the company and his creations stolen from him by the company’s CEO and the MCP.
One night, while trying to hack into the system, the MCP uses ENCOM’s newest invention to transport Flynn into the Grid—the digital world that exists behind the computer screen. There he is forced to play the games he designed from the inside, and where Game Over means death.
It’s inside the games that Flynn meets Tron, a security program who, as another program tells us, fights for the Users. The games, we learn, are the MCP’s means of punishment to those who continue to hold that there are Users out there who created the world the Programs know, and with whom they can maintain a relationship. You can’t, after all, be a god as long as people keep believing that there’s someone who may have made you.
Of all the temptations, the desire to be as god is not only the oldest but the most persistent. There seem to be so many drivers behind it. In one sense it delivers carte blanche to do whatever it is you want to do since, as a deity, you make the rules and get to say what’s right and wrong. Certainly, it’s also a temptation of power, of dominion and control. But there’s another aspect.
Flynn triggers a surprising response out of the MCP. Its mechanical voice emanating from the speakers, demanding, even ordering Flynn to stop what he’s doing. And in these protests we hear, for just a moment, “I’m afraid….”
It’s a peculiar and telling phrase, one that resonates uncomfortably with me. It’s the words of being revealed, uncovered, exposed. It’s a fear, not that Flynn may uncover proof to his claims, but that the MCP may not be as complete, as whole as it believes itself to be.
And that, for me is the real temptation—the ability to maintain the fallacy that I’m what my fragile ego believes me to be. It’s the security of never, ever being found out as being less than perfect or whole; because, as a god there is no one who can question nor prove me wrong.
Of course, first I might have to eliminate the real and true god, just as the MCP is attempting to do with the Users. Because as long as They’re around, I’ll know there’s One who is whole and complete even if no one else does.
And, when you least expect it, They’ll come into your world, and remind you of what God is like.
Beloved One, help me, daily, to resist the temptation to be god and the delusion that I am whole without your love.