Believing that there is a “good” God while acknowledging that this world is a screwed up place is quite a dilemma—how can both be true? The answer, Lewis points out, lies in the free will of human beings. Some people seem to question God’s decision to give us a free will, but Lewis points out that although free will opens up the possibility for us to choose evil, it is also the only thing that makes love or joy worth having.
Think about it—when you were a toddler, perhaps you had one of those talking dolls that said stuff to you when you pulled a string. Your little teddy bear would say, “I love you!” and you as a toddler really thought that bear loved you. But of course it didn’t—it didn’t have a brain, a soul, a conscience. It was programmed to say that. The person who put the doll together could have as easily made the doll say, “I will seek vengeance on you and your family and drag you down to hell!” That would have certainly scared the toddler, but it still would have meant absolutely nothing to the doll.
The same goes for human beings. God wanted to create creatures who were capable of real love, and that meant giving them free will, and that meant allowing the possibility for those creatures to choose not to love, and thus opening the door to things like hatred, badness, and evil. So why did God do it, if he knew we would chose the wrong thing? Lewis gives the best possible answer (although it might not be satisfying): “Apparently He thought it worth the risk.”
The Dark Power and Free Will
Lewis then makes another interesting point: the smarter a creature is, the more danger that creature will be if it goes bad. When you think about it, it’s true. A slacker pothead who sits in his parents’ basement all day smoking pot, as pitiful as that is, is not really going to have it in him to actually go out and cause a lot of damage to society. He’s ultimately going to hurt no one but himself. Take a guy like Ten Bundy, though—a smart, clever and thoroughly depraved man—and he’s going to go out and find ingenious ways of killing innocent people. Ted Bundy is a lot more clever than Seth Rogan—therefore Ted Bundy is a lot more potentially dangerous.
Given that fact, Lewis then considers the age old question, “What made Satan go so bad?” The ultimate answer: he wanted to be like God. He wanted to be the center of all things. This was “the sin he taught the human race.” And indeed, this kind of self-centered, narcisstic mindset that human beings have is the root cause of so much evil in the world, isn’t it? We want the world to revolve around us—and that leads to problems. After all, what do you call a child whose parents gives him everything he wants? That’s right: he’s spoiled. He has gone bad.
The problem with that (and us, for that matter) is that it will never work that way. God didn’t create us to be that way. Lewis uses the analogy of a car engine built to run on gasoline. We are like that car engine, and God’s life is the fuel on which we run. But what happens if we decide, “We don’t want gasoline! We want…pudding (!!!) in our engine!” Well, that engine is going to get gummed up and broken and useless pretty quick, isn’t it? That’s our problem as human beings individually, and as society collectively: we’re trying to run on the wrong fuel.
God’s Plan
Here, finally, is where Lewis starts to get around to taking about Christianity. Given this human predicament, what did God do? Lewis points out that first He has given us a conscience (i.e. the Moral Law he discussed in the first part of the book). Secondly, Lewis says that God sent the human race “good dreams”—what is that? Well, Lewis, being the literature professor that he was, was well aware that throughout all cultures throughout history there have been odd stories and myths about “dying and rising gods.”
Lewis believed that stories like these were more or less put there by God within heathen religions, so that when Christ came, and the apostles began to share the story of Christ’s resurrection, that heathen people would be able to grasp better the significance of Christ’s resurrection. In fact, that was one of the things that turned Lewis on to Christianity. He had used to dismiss Christianity because the story of Christ’s death and resurrection was just like numerous other pagan myths. But then he realized something: those stories of dying and rising gods in pagan myths were myths—they were presented as myths, and were never understood to be literal and historical…not even by pagans. But the story in the Gospels is clearly put forth as history. Lewis came to call the story of the death and resurrection of Christ as a “true myth”—meaning, in Christ, the thing had actually happened in history—and that was the big difference.
The third part of God’s plan, Lewis tells us, is that He seemed to choose a particular people (i.e. the Jews) to try to hammer into their heads just what kind of God He was. The Old Testament, Lewis says, “gives us an account of the hammering process.” Of course, the Old Testament also testifies to the fact that the ancient Israelites had rather hard heads, and never fully “got it.”
But then comes the “shock”: among the Jews appears a man who acted as if he were God. Lewis points to what should be the most shocking of Jesus’ actions. He forgave people’s sins. If you punch me, I can forgive you for that, but it would be very weird for my brother to forgive you for hitting me. He has no right to do that because he wasn’t the one hit. But Jesus forgave all sins, and therefore acted as if he was the one primarily offended. The scribes correctly saw that only God could forgive sins, because ultimately, all sins are an offense against God.
Yet here Jesus was, forgiving people’s sins as if he were the one chiefly offended, as if he was God. That is an astounding claim. And Lewis points this out—he also points out that for some odd reason, people like to say, “Jesus was so humble and meek, and so good…but I just don’t believe his claim to be God.” Lewis points out that is one thing you cannot 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…or the Devil himself.”
Lewis is right. I used to give this illustration to my students. Now, they loved my classes, so I asked them, “What would your reaction be if I came in, taught you all this great stuff about the Bible, and then said, ‘By the way, I know you all think I’m super-awesome…and I am! But just so you know, I’m also God! Billy…I forgive you for stealing Sarah’s lunch money!’” No matter how “cool” they might have thought I was before, as soon as I started proclaiming myself to be God, I’m pretty sure they’d start heading for the door. (Maybe a few would stay, and we could start a cult…but that’s beside the point!).
Lewis ends the chapter with a very stiff challenge: you cannot say, “I believe Jesus was a great man and a great moral teacher, but just not God.” That’s simply not an option. You’re going to either have to completely discount Jesus all together, or else, at the very least, you’re going to have to remain open to the possibility that Jesus might be….gulp…God! And then you’re going to have to take steps to find out more. That’s the challenge; that’s the choice.
Excellent observations.