Relevancy

In C. S. Lewis’ brilliant book The Screwtape Letters, two devils are exchanging letters on how to win their human “patient” for hell.  This is chapter 8, a letter where the older uncle devil is admonishing his nephew’s current dilemma.

The last two paragraphs are, in particular, spectacular.

CHAPTER 8

So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away”, Have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about The law of Undulation? Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily good; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve.

He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

When I was a youthful 22 my friend was reading a book on Christian Forgiveness to get past her past.  Her mother had abandoned the family when my friend was 12 without even leaving a note of explanation.  This sent my friend through all those tough stages of life – high school, coming of age and more without a woman to guide her.  She took on the pressures of being the mom to her younger brother and emotionally supporting her father.  All these grown up things with a young impressionable soul.

The book was new to both of us and was a simple walk through of Matthew 18:21-35 which I would come to realize is The Great Christian Forgiveness Passage.  This was a new experience for us as my friend and I talked through the basic tenants of the passage – a wealthy King seeks to retrieve an extravagant debt owed by a servant.  The servant cannot pay and as the King would render him and his family sold into slavery for the debt, he pleads for more time to pay back everything.  The magnanimous King decides to give him more mercy than he has asked for and forgives the entire debt.  Later, people witness this forgiven man seeking a day’s wage from another servant who owed it to him.  This debtor too pleads for more time to repay the small sum but, unlike the king, the forgiven man has him thrown in prison.  The king hears about the merciless man who was forgiven a vast sum but would not forgive what comes out to a dinner bill.  Angered the King arrests the forgiven man and throws him into prison while saying “And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?”

What a lovey passage to put perspective into our lives.  It inspires us by God’s example to be merciful to others of both small and large debts.  It reminds us that our debt to God was great and that His forgiveness is beyond what any of us would dream as He is kind to the wicked and takes no pleasure that any would perish but turn from their ways and live (Ezekiel 18:23, Luke 6:35).  And it constrains us to God’s plan, not ours and frankly when practiced it saves us from bitterness.

Yet there are times when this parable on forgiveness makes the journey difficult for those earnestly seeking to forgive.  Mind you, I do not think the parable is out of step.  Hardly!  There is just more on forgiveness than this one sermon and it seems to get all the attention to the edification of most but the difficulty for some.  For one, the person struggling with emotions of forgiveness is asked to self condemn to reach forgiveness.  “Look how much you were forgiven – now if you were appreciative or truly understood this, you would do it also.”  Persons who are abandoned, sexually mistreated or otherwise sinned against already feel “dirty”, “lost”, “vulnerable” and “raw”.  Asking a person to look at their own personal sin in the midst of forgiving someone who was egregious toward them is difficult.  Yes, we must continuously look at ourselves but when meditating on forgiveness, to try to picture one’s sin against God was or is worse than the rape..abuse..affair..or else can push an already low person to the point of being unhuman.  The very thing that person needs is an all loving, compassionate, protective and healing God.

A second issue with this parable being at times the exclusive voice on forgiveness is that it seems as if we can achieve God-like forgiveness in our human strength.  Our human strength and rational may get us through some tough situations but there will come a time when the entire city trash dump has been placed on your head.  Then we are supposed to be able to try harder to achieve forgiveness.  The disciples after hearing Jesus teach on forgiveness replied “Lord!  Give us more Faith!” (Luke 17:1-5).  They too knew their human strength was not enough.

The fact is that we should have a deep perspective on God’s great Mercy toward us, personally and individually, and that conviction should pass through to our actions and our emotions and inform our character.  But I would like to offer that when the circumstances surrounding forgiveness are louder than the parable of forgiveness, there is only one place to go but to the cross.

My journey of forgiveness ended at the cross.  The focus is not on me.  The focus is not on my efforts or my need or my depravity but the loving and wonderful and amazing sacrifice that Jesus provided – first for me but also for all mankind.  And it is in the second part of the statement that I must rest when seeking true and freeing forgiveness that from flows the heart.  Christ provided His death for others too. When I need to forgive, I ask myself this question “Can I look in the eyes of God and point to Jesus on the cross and say “His death is NOT enough for what happened to me?”   Many a day I have stormed into the throne room of heaven, raised my first, cried out for justice because of my suffering then looked off and spied the Lamb looking as though it was slain and it goes no further than that.  It is sufficient.  There is justice.  It is finished.  Christ Himself comforts me as I give Him glory that He would even dream to make provisions for all of us.  The personalization of the damage done to me fades as the sacrifice of Christ comes forward.  That is what it means to take it to the cross.

If you are struggling with forgiveness, pray that God would give you forgiveness from the heart because we can’t conjure that up within ourselves.  It comes from above and wait for Him to provide it.  Focus on His provision more than the evil done.  Feed the tree of live, not death with your time and thoughts.  Don’t let your emotions become your theology.  Keep marching and waiting and when the band begins to play again, you will find that God kept you in perfect step.