Truth Really Matters

incorruptibly “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”

And so C. S. Lewis offers a corollary to ‘Euthyphro’s Dilemma’ to define The Problem of Pain, a short book he published in 1944, a year in which the world suffered far more than its usual measure of pain. Lewis observes that throughout Earth’s ecosystem, life preys upon life relentlessly, but something is different about the higher forms – a consciousness resonant with pain. Man, particularly, is granted reason, by which he can anticipate his own pain and even his own death, talents which come with the burden of mental suffering. Furthermore, man’s reasoning and creative talents enable him to inflict far more pain on other men and on other creatures than he would without such talents.

Considering the rise and fall of civilizations and the degradation of cultures and all the evil we see around us now and into the deep past, Lewis asks how human beings could ever attribute our existence to the actions of a wise and good Creator. “Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that.”

As I read Lewis’ introduction, I wondered whether he would eventually get to the biblical truth of the matter. I was skeptical because, as I’ve written before, although Lewis is revered as perhaps the most beloved Christian writer of the 20th century, his writing reveals much doctrinal confusion and compromise. I find Lewis to be persistently vague on the utterly fundamental question, What must one do to be saved? In God in the Dock he recounts a number of meetings he had with unbelievers where the situation cried out for Lewis to proclaim a simple, bold Gospel witness, but he failed to do so.

The straightforward biblical answer to Lewis’ apparent dilemma is that God created His image-bearers with spectacularly free will. We really do get to choose good or evil in every moment of our lives. Since Adam’s fall, trouble, pain, and death pervade our existence, but our assured hope is that those who repent and trust Christ will enjoy a New Heaven and a New Earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness – and no more pain.

Lewis suggests that it would have been preposterous to infer the goodness and wisdom of the Creator from observations of the meanness of life. Rather, he suggests that across all religions we find three types of indicators – although in Christianity a fourth. First is the numinous – a sense or dread or awe of the spiritually unseen; fear of ghosts or spirits, for example. In the Bible we see Jacob in Genesis 28 expressing it; also Saul and his party’s encounter with the spirit of Samuel in 1 Samuel 28.

The second element is morality, a can’t-get-away-from-it conviction of ‘I ought’ or ‘I ought not.’ “All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.”

The third element is an instinctive identification of the numinous and one’s instrinsic morality with a Person behind it all. Man doesn’t want there to be a spiritual, powerful Person behind it all to whom he is accountable . . . but he can’t get away from it.

The fourth element or strand is unique to Christianity. Buddhism doesn’t have it, nor does Hinduism, neither Islam nor Mormonism. They may have supposed revelations and writings and even prophets, but they don’t have the extended and detailed history that undergirds the Christian faith, not just the Gospel accounts and the New Testament record, but a history of life and God’s purposes on Earth back to Genesis.

Jesus, of course, as Lewis summarizes, was a man born among the Jews who made shocking claims. If he wasn’t a raving lunatic or an abominable deceiver, then he must have been what He claimed – the Son of God, the fulfillment of millennia of prophecies, the only Way to find peace with God.

Lewis, indeed, sees free will as a key explanator. “We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the soundwaves that carry lies or insults.” In such a world evil would be impossible but free will would be voided. I would extend the thought to assert that personhood would also be void. There is neither ‘you’ nor ‘I’ if we cannot freely choose. There is no sense of image-bearing in a man who cannot choose. God – to be God – must have His own will; if He creates any creature who has the quality of made-in-the-image-of-God, that creature must have (not just free, but) spectacularly free will.

Lewis: “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”

Since I became a Christian I have wondered at times how we can maintain a free will in the New Heaven and New Earth, wherein dwelleth only righteousness. Won’t we be free enough to sin? I can’t entirely overcome the mystery, but my best shot is this . . . Our resurrected bodies and minds will be so purified that any sin will be considered so vile as to be unthinkable. There are sins we fall into every day that we don’t grieve over – sins of impatience, selfishness, etc. But there are sins so vile that we would never consider doing. In the New Earth, in our purified bodies, I believe, all sins including impatience and selfishness, will seem as vile as the ones we now see as heinous. Yet I still sense a mystery, but probably because I just can’t imagine living in a mind and body that enjoys such a level of holiness.

Lewis addressed the ‘best of all possible worlds’ idea. Could not God have created a better world in which His image-bearers can attain fellowship with Him without all the pain and suffering? Lewis argues that this reasoning is too anthropomorphic. God need not, must not have struggled with alternatives that might perplex man. God’s intrinsic goodness necessitated the creation of the best possible world, which clearly required suffering . . . into which He entered Himself, for thirty-three years of life, followed by the Cross.

Lewis considers a counter-argument that suggests that if suffering were necessary, it would have been better not to create. “I shall not attempt to prove that to create was better than not to create: I am aware of no human scales in which such a portentous question can be weighed.”

Lewis argues that many people have a simplistic, warped conception of the idea that ‘God is love.’ It’s not that we want a Father in Heaven, but rather a Grandfather, a ‘senile benevolence’ who just wants us to enjoy ourselves. It’s a hypocritical idea in that for the people we actually love on this Earth, like friends, spouses, and children, we don’t want them happy at any cost. We want the ‘best’ for them, even if that entails some hard work or even suffering at times.

As Lewis says, “If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than kindness.” God’s character also necessitates justice, and therefore judgment; even for His born again children there must be correction, reproof, even rebuke. Jesus is the ultimate example, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Heb 12:2)

Lewis offers the metaphor of an artist pouring his soul into a painting, taking endless care and trouble to get it right. Wouldn’t it be easier to just knock off a quick thumbnail sketch and avoid all the bother? “In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love, but for less.”

We resist the efforts of the Artist throughout our lives. The Artist’s love is repelled by stains in our character, and so He labors “to make us lovable.” We truly don’t want Him to be content with our deficiencies. We don’t want a God like that! We are fallen creatures in a fallen world, and so the process will include some pain. Lewis: “I do not think I should value much the love of a friend who cared only for my happiness and did not object to my becoming dishonest.”

Apart from sin, when we simply want for ourselves something other than what God wants for us, what we want is certainly not going to end in satisfaction. How stupid and arrogant is it for us to imagine we know more than the God who designed us and placed us in a world He understands completely, while we would stumble and fumble our way through? Much of the ‘prosperity preaching’ we see in Western Christendom seems to posit that whatever ambitions we have, we can and should enlist God’s favor to help us achieve them. God should jump onboard our train, rather than us humbly and diligently seeking His will – of course, bounded by the brilliance and priorities of Scripture.

Lewis takes a shot at the psychiatry culture of the West, which teaches that shame is dangerous and characteristics like cowardice, lust, deceit, and envy are natural and we should ‘get things out into the open.’ Rather, he affirms, a sense of sin is essential to the Christian faith and must be named as such by believers.

I appreciate the sentiment in Isaiah 58:1, where God exhorts His prophet to get vocal about what’s going on in the country: “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.” In our day who are the prophets? Well, every born again believer is to be a witness to the Gospel. To explain to someone how to be saved (from the judgment on sin), the Christian must explain how we’ve all sinned, using biblical definitions, like the Ten Commandments.

Lewis observes a common human temptation to imagine that the passage of time cancels sin. “Oh, sure, I did that, but that was in the past!” In a rare moment of clarity on the Gospel message, Lewis explains, “But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. . . . All times are eternally present to God.” God is there in the past and there in the future. We have no escape other than to flee to the Cross and ask God for forgiveness, repenting and trusting that He will wash us clean.

Lewis recognizes a common attitude that I have often seen in lost people with whom I’ve shared the Gospel: ‘safety in numbers.’ People will admit they are sinners, but ‘Hey, so is everyone else!’ I must explain that ‘Yes, everyone is in trouble. Everyone needs the Saviour. Many are on the road to destruction, few on the road to life because the road to life is so narrow!’ Repentance, genuine repentance and faith in Christ, a new birth, a transformed life. That’s the only way!

The ‘problem of pain’ is often expressed as or equated to the ‘problem of evil.’ In either case, Lewis makes a point so obvious, so self-evident that it should shut the mouths of those who would blame God for all the trouble in the world. Neglecting natural disasters and man’s basic mortality, it is clear that most of the trouble that troubles men deeply is due to man abusing man. Lewis guesses that perhaps 80 percent of man’s sufferings are due to the willful acts of other men.

Lewis: “It is men, not God, who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs; it is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.”

Lewis states that if just for ten years men and women would act with kindness and virtue, then Earth from pole to pole would be filled with “peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease,” and that nothing else could possibly accomplish this. Namely, if everyone behaved toward one another according to God’s laws (especially to love another as oneself) as, in fact, actual Christians are supposed to act, peace and prosperity would break out worldwide.

Yeah, just do that and most pain disappears. Lewis states that “The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.” He comes close to espousing the truth of Galatians 3:24 – “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith” – when he explains that there is no transcending the moral law until you first admit its claims, try to live it, and then honestly admit failure. Which is why salvation must be a gift from God, contingent on our humility, repentance, and faith in Christ. That last thought – I wish that Lewis expressed that directly, but he often seems to waffle at the point the lost sinner must be challenged directly, clearly, and explicitly.

It is interesting that Lewis recognizes the Fall of man, and his free will to choose, as the source of man’s wickedness throughout history. He struggles through a long chapter trying to make sense of this doctrine, though, because he has bought into the evolutionary fantasy, that man is descended over millions of years from brute ancestors. Accordingly, he admits that he has to allegorize Genesis and cannot make complete sense of it.

Sigh. It’s so simple if you just take God at His word. Death comes after Adam’s sin. And Adam was a real, historical man who lived about 6,000 years ago, created at the end of 6 days of a ‘good’ creation – good, no disease, no trouble, no death.

Lewis’ strongest argument, perhaps, begins with the thought that “We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are rebels who must lay down our arms.” We can all remember how, in childhood, our wills were inflamed with “bitter, prolonged rage at every thwarting, the burst of passionate tears, the black, Satanic wish to kill or die rather than give in.”

Thus, old-fashioned parents talk about the necessity of breaking the child’s will. Now that we are adults, hopefully we do not “howl and stamp quite so much,” but only because our parents were diligent to break our wicked self-will in our youth. In adulthood, though, our rebellion is more subtle and acting out is more clever. And so Paul speaks to the need to ‘die daily’ in 1 Cor 15:31. Lewis: “However often we think we have broken the rebellious self we shall still find it alive.” This lifelong process, even for the best of us, clearly requires pain. God knows this about us.

When life goes well we do little self-examination. “A bad man, happy, is a man without the least inkling that his actions do not ‘answer,’ that they are not in accord with the laws of the universe.” I believe the prosperity of American life for most of us works hard to keep the Gospel at bay. Prosperity generates spiritual apathy; apathy kills. It is no accident that the Gospel propagates more fruitfully in the Third World.

Lewis: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Pain may produce bitterness which leads to a final and unrepented rebellion. But it may lead to seeking and finding the Saviour.

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance. (Romans 2:4)

Many testimonies of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ feature trouble, hitting bottom, and hopelessness as the trigger for repentance and saving faith . . . including my own. Lewis: “The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered . . . If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?”

My free e-book on this site’s ebookstore, One Heartbeat from Hell, plus Eleven other Compelling Reasons to become a Christian, expands on the multiplicity of motivations God is happy to use to entice a heart to turn to Him.

Lewis has an interesting take on Hell, considering those who have objections to its reality. He suggests that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside. It’s not that Hell’s residents don’t want to escape; rather that they would not take the first step toward the self-abandonment required for redemption even if they could. They had an entire lifetime, after all. They are self-enslaved. In contrast, the redeemed, “forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.”

To the objector, What would you have God do? Cancel all their past sins, give them a fresh start while offering miraculous help? But God has done just that, on Calvary. Jesus has offered forgiveness, having paid all penalties Himself. Yet they will not be forgiven. They want God to leave them alone. And so He does.

Lewis closes his book with some suggestions about Heaven . . . really the New Heaven and New Earth. In Rev 2:17, Jesus tells us He will give each of us a white stone; in it a new name written that no one else knows. A secret between God and each man or woman. Perhaps this identifies some one aspect of the Divine beauty that each of us can uniquely appreciate. God loves all infinitely, but differently, according to the uniqueness God gave each of us.

Our love for God, then, is not just one note played simultaneously by billions of believers, but rather we praise Him as an orchestra playing a complex and beautiful symphony. We redeemed will be a society in which each of us has something to tell everyone else.

Oh, I want to have some things to talk about when I get home! I believe God has given us the opportunity to create a portfolio of praise through the Great Commission, whereby we have the privilege to reach out to others, to unbelievers to lead them to the Bread of Life, to other believers to encourage and build them up, to children and family and friends to help and teach and sustain and love, and to our communities and nation to model how Jesus would live if He were among us today. Do we do all this well? No. But we can try. If yesterday was poorly done, we can thank God that He gave us another day to try a little better.

I recommend C. S. Lewis’ book, with the caveats mentioned.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com