Thursday, July 28, 2016
The temptations
in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful.
He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When
you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure.
1 Corinthians 10:13(NLT)
C.S. Lewis may arguably be the 20th
century’s greatest defender of the faith.
His works often make complex theological doctrines somewhat clearer. In The Screwtape Letters Lewis describes
the fight we humans face, and the ways the enemy attempts to trip us up. He tells the story through the eyes of “Screwtape”
(a senior demon), who is mentoring his somewhat less-able nephew,
"Wormwood”.
Senior demon, Screwtape, referring to
God as the enemy reveals
Hell’s intentions for human marriage:
The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a
dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father’s first great victory,
we have rendered the former very difficult to them. The latter, for the last few centuries, we
have been closing up as a way of escape. We have done this through the poets and
novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually shortlived,
experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for
marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent;
and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding.
This idea is our parody of an idea that came from the
Enemy. The whole philosophy of Hell rests
on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and,
specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by
excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does
so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of
eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self
into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘to be in
competition’.[ii]
If C.S. Lewis is right, this explains
much about how our culture arrived at the idea that the sexual aberrations of
fornication, homosexuality, polygamy, adultery and a host of other perversions
of God’s will are not only acceptable, but liberating. If Lewis has nailed it with Screwtape’s
explanation of the “enemy’s” plan, these wanderings-away from God’s will are
not only not liberating, they are downright enslaving.
In short, we are choking ourselves to
death on forbidden fruit!
For You Today
The pictures today’s culture paint of sexual
liberation are as appealing as the fruit Eve determined she just had to have. The problem is that it all appeals to our
lower nature, and not that for which we are created.
Don’t let the tempter suck the life out of your free
will; that free will is a gift placed within you by God to live a life of true
freedom, purity, and grace; it’s a life of obedience to God’s will and God’s Word!
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today…have
a blessed day!
Go to VIDEO
[ii]
From The
Screwtape Letters Compiled in A
Year with C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C.
S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights
reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With
C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C.
S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins
Publishers.
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