thoughts prompted by C.S. Lewis

I picked up my copy of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity recently, which I have yet to finish reading. I'm about 1/3 of the way through. I remember getting this book sometime after Creation West '05. Those of us heading back to the east coast had to kill some time before our red-eye flight, and so we were wandering through Borders (I think, or another bookstore). I remember talking to Kurt about this book, and, being the great book promoter that he is, I ended up with my own copy some weeks or so later. That was in July of 2005, almost five years ago, and I have not gotten past reading 1/3 of the book. The same is true of other books. With this one, I think I realize/remember part of the reason I stopped when I did. I had a somewhat difficult time sifting through which of his logic was biblical and which was not. A page before my bookmark, he was writing on free will. He says,

"Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating."

On why God allowed free will, he says that "apparently He thought it worth the risk." Risk? God takes risks? That is scary.

But within the same chapter, and only a 6 page chapter at that, he beautifully writes on some biblical truth:

God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing (page 50).

God is so loving to not let us find happiness and peace in any idols, broken cisterns. He keeps our souls restless until they rest in Him alone.

Starting on page 51, Lewis also writes wonderfully of how Christ could not have been only a great human teacher.

We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself.... But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money?... Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Christ says that He is 'humble and meek' and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Lewis is standing up for the deity of Christ. Bravo! I know that my view of Christ needs to be widened to see more of his majesty. Kevin DeYoung, at NEXT 2009, said that "you may not know who Jesus is if he has never made you feel uncomfortable." There are those just preaching moralism today, and what we need is fear of the Lord. Fear of the Lord positions our hearts to be awed and humbled that he would die for us, call us his own, and love us.

photo: Burano, Italy 2007