Part 4 – Trust and Disappointment
Can we really trust God?
C. S. Lewis wrote, “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were mighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”[1]
Lewis was an agnostic professor at Oxford University when he began to ponder the possibility that Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic (on par with a man who imagined himself to be a poached egg), or He was the Lord He claimed to be – the Son of God Himself. Those possibilities served to jump-start his quest for truth … truth that mattered, not just “in the long run,” but in the eternal run. Maybe you’ve read some of Lewis’ findings.
I found the quote above, “If God were good, etc.,” in one of his books, The Problem of Pain. In that book Lewis tackles one of the big “whys.” (You know what the Big Whys are, don’t you? Why am I here? Why do bad things happen to good people? etc.) In The Problem of Pain he’s trying to wrap his mind around this question: “Why is there pain?” He asks it in the context of three theories – that God is good and all powerful, that God is bad, or that God may be good but not all powerful.
Eventually Lewis arrives at a place where he can say that God is both good and all powerful, and because He is, and because there is structure and stability in the Universe, and because He gave Mankind the gifts of choice and freedom … there is pain.
One of the observations Lewis makes along the way is that we live in a material world in which “nature is fixed.”
I understand that to mean that fire is fire, a tree is a tree, etc. That is, the nature of fixed material things doesn’t change from culture to culture, language group to language group. If we were living a world which varied according to our every whim, we would be unable to act in it. There would be no stability. No structure. No predictability. Think of a world where one day, for no reason, the law of gravity takes a holiday and then returns the next – but with no warning, ever.
Lewis makes this point, and I add my comments in parentheses: “The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam (say, for construction of a house) also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbor on the head. The permanent nature of matter in general means that when human beings fight, the victory ordinarily goes to those who have superior weapons, skill, and numbers, even if their cause is unjust.” (my emphasis) (page 24)
I’ve observed, as I’ve lived my life and watched others live theirs, that almost every high has its corresponding low, almost every yes its no. There is black, and there is white, yin and yang, earth and heaven. There is order in the Universe. Tao. There is a balance to and in almost all things that gives our world its stability.
I write and believe “almost” because if life was totally predictable, there would be no mystery, only the unknown. There are some things that defy explanation.
C. S. Lewis goes on: “We can, perhaps, conceive of a world (only in our imaginations) in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became as 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 sound waves (radio, or television broadcasts) that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter in which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted
to frame them. All matter in the neighborhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can, and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare … 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.” (pages 24-25)
For my friend’s, Ellie’s, sake, I wish there was never again the possibility of suffering.
Until the moment time, as we know it, ends, there will be suffering.
We live on a fallen planet, in a world where evil men can fly airliners into buildings in the name of Allah, where people who call themselves “Christians” can demonstrate at the funerals of murdered gay young men and disrupt the funerals of fallen soldiers, where politicians can lie, where policemen can choose to be corrupt, and where people who advocate abortion “choice” stifle free speech of conservatives on liberal college campuses.
I believe, one day, when time as we know it ends, Jesus will set up a Kingdom that will never end … and suffering will end. He will “wipe away all tears.”
That’s a day worth living for.
Think about it.
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain; (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, © 1940; copyright restored in 1996), page 16
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