Forgive the bad pun in the title, I couldn’t resist myself! The following is a brief thought I had after reading a book on World War II code-breaking (the $20 word is cryptanalysis). Allow me to give you a brief history lesson.



In World War II, Nazi Germany used a machine called “Enigma” to encode secret messages from the German High Command to the various Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine divisions in the field. The Enigma was an ingenious device—it replaced a letter with another, different letter based on the path of an electrical current through rotating rotors. It was small and compact—slightly larger than a child’s lunchbox. Output from the Enigma machine would be blocks of five characters, complete and utter gibberish to anyone without another Enigma machine. The book Enigma, by Robert Harris, gives the most chilling description of the Enigma machine I have seen, so permit me to quote it for you here:

To give you a better idea of what that number means—it has eighteen zeros. If all six billion people on Earth had one starting position apiece, and took one day to test, it would take 25 billion days—over 68 thousand years, to try every possibility. Keep in mind, too, that the above figures only correspond to the Enigma machine used in Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe communications. The German navy, the Kriegsmarine, used Enigma with four rotors, instead of three. This increases the total number of possibilities to 8,773,939,200,000,000,000,000, or almost 9 sextillion. In the face of such staggering figures, it would have been all too easy for the Allied powers to simply give up and stop trying to crack the Enigma code. However, they had a secret weapon on their side—the Bombe.



The Bombe was more than the first electrical computer—it was the first machine specifically designed to break a code created by another machine.

The Bombe had 108 drums, each matching one rotor in an Enigma machine. Each drum rotated until a possible match was found, going through every possibility in about 6 hours. This made the Bombe extremely noisy—imagine the sound of 108 drums rotating at 120 RPM, starting and stopping as it found matches.

The Bombe was also quite large to fit all this equipment in—most were about 7 feet by 6½ feet by 2 feet, and weighed about a ton.

The Bombe was dangerous—often, oil would leak and puddle near the floor. If an engineer left the access panel open, it would spark long blue arcs of electricity as it found matches. A constant smell of ozone was in the air in the decryption room.

The Bombe was big, ugly, dangerous, and extremely complicated to use and repair. I’m sure the British would have preferred something smaller and cleaner. However, it played an indispensable role in the course of World War II. If the British had not had use of the Bombe, the outcome of the war would almost certainly be different.

Allow me to draw a parallel here. Sin seems easier to manage. A life in the world is smaller, compact, more convenient; just like the Enigma machine. However, if we fall victim to the temptation, we find that our life becomes a series of meaningless letters—coded to the point where we don’t know what happened or why. We realize that we can no longer take care of our problems on our own.

If we let God take control, though, our lives often become messy, and dangerous, and even ugly from a worldly perspective. However, it works. It works so well that no one could possibly recreate it—even with the entire population of the Earth to help. Let’s take the story of Paul, for example.

Like many Jews with Roman citizenship, Paul had two names—a Jewish name, Saul, and a Latin name, Paul. Paul was a powerful Pharisee in Roman-occupied Israel. The Pharisees were a political and religious movement in Jewish circles who believed that the only way to heaven is to obey the long list of Jewish laws. In fact, Paul calls upon his upbringing and heritage in the book of Philippians:

Paul spent years persecuting Christians, even holding cloaks and congratulating other Pharisees as they stoned Stephen for his belief in Christ. (Acts 7:57-8:3). Paul’s polished image in the Jewish community was about to tarnish, however, during a trip to the city of Damascus. While on the road, Paul saw a blinding light and fell to the ground. He heard a voice asking “Saul, Saul, why are you out to get me?” When Paul asked who was speaking, the voice answered, “I am Jesus, the One you’re hunting down. I want you to get up and enter the city. In the city you’ll be told what to do next.” After this, Paul was blind and did not eat or drink for three days. (Acts 9:3-9)

In the city, God spoke to another man, Ananias. God told Ananias to find Paul in the city, place his hands over Paul’s eyes, and pray to heal him of his blindness. God mentioned that “I have picked him as my personal representative to non-Jews and kings and Jews. And now I’m about to show him what he’s in for—the hard suffering that goes with this job.” (Acts 9:11-16).

Before Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, his life was like the Enigma machine. It was compact and convenient, beautiful in the eyes of his peers and those in the world. However, once he realized that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, his life grew unimaginably more complex. His life was threatened multiple times and he was imprisoned and beaten for his beliefs. However, Paul’s many letters to the various churches in the area constitute the vast majority of the New Testament. God’s choice to use Paul, along with Paul’s involvement with the early Christian church (even working beside his former enemies), strengthened the early church far more than would otherwise have been possible.

Just like the Bombe made it possible for the Allied powers to defeat the Germans in World War II, God used Paul to strengthen the early Christian church so it would be more effective in its outreach to others. Paul’s life was messy, and dangerous, and ugly, but it worked. If we allow God to take full control of our lives, our lives will be messy and dangerous; but they will work.