"The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakes, my desire."
-C.S. Lewis
And thank God for other passages that remind me of the promise of the gospel:
The Promise to Abraham and all His descendants (which are descendants by faith and not the flesh) in Genesis 15. Where the animals were cut in half--symbolizing what would happen to the one who made the covenant if they did not comply with its conditions. Then God walked through the cut pieces which declared to Abraham that "If I fail you in loving you I'll be like these cut animals." Then as we would all expect, Abraham was to walk through, but to his and our surprise he didn't walk through, but God closed the covenant, which meant one thing: "If you fail in loving me, I'll be like these cut up animals as is a must for breaking this covenant." Meaning that Abraham and we reap the promises unconditionally because by the conditions in the covenant, we all failed to love God and Jesus was cut up for us so that we received the unconditional love of God since Jesus met the requirements of when it was broken. He met it, and now we get to enjoy the covenant blessings because of the one condition that Jesus fulfilled.
So when I consider the glory of heaven and how little it really resonates with me, in that it is not yet enough to to motivate me to give up my lesser glories, I feel first ashamed, but humbled to know that my failure to love God wholeheartedly was known and Jesus met the conditions of that failure by being cut up and put to death, so that having finished the punishment I now have the freedom to rest in God's unconditional love for me. The gospel relaxes my fears that threaten to say that the glory of heaven will never be understood by me, or to be more specific that I will never get to enjoy the deep love of God that makes everything else dull. Because it is now not God's love that I am chasing, since it comes without any conditions on my part, but my faith in Jesus again and again to bring me there. I am essentially learning about Jesus everyday, until I get really comfortable with the One who was cut up for me. Until I feel confident enough in His love for me that what I gave Him, the burden of my sins, does not change his love for me. As of now, to give anyone a burden, such as borrowing 2,000 dollars without ever paying it back, might not exactly make me feel confident that the person I borrowed it from is truly fond of me. Or that yelling at my friend (giving them the burden of my anger and deeply hidden insecurities) will make me feel like they will now return the burden with kisses and gifts. It sounds absurd! It sounds....unreal, and to us who have not experienced such a kind of unconditional love it will remain outside of our comfortable bank of what we feel is ours. It will be something new. Foreign.
C.S. Lewis puts it this way,
"If it (heaven's glory) has more to give me, I expect it to be less immediately attractive than “my own stuff.” Sophocles at first seems dull and cold to the boy who has only reached Shelley. If our religion is something objective (meaning it has a fixed meaning that is the same for everyone), then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know."
So I thought about this excerpt from Lewis's book "the weight of glory," and it got me thinking about why it is so hard to want God more than I want other things.
Everyone knows that when you look at a subject, algebra, calculus, Spanish, or any new subject that you have never learned, it is uncomfortable and affronting to you because it reveals a weakness in you. Try it. Just open up a textbook on molecular biology, and then write out what it all means. The task will feel very NOT FUN. UNLESS you actually know and enjoy molecular biology very much. (Contrast this experiment with sitting in front of a meal you were craving like a chipotle burrito bowl, and the task is to eat it. You find this instant very enjoyable and fun, because YOU CAN eat it and it's easy to eat it, and in fact it's enjoyable because you have a mouth and teeth and a stomach. You also probably have eaten this before and remember by experience how good it is. The point is, we enjoy what we can do and what we have confidence to fully master by experience. We enjoy what's easy for us to do more than what is hard for us to do, but we all know that things do not come easy and that it is a part of our enjoyment to struggle and feel the badge of earning our way to making the task easier for us to enjoy.
You don't like to feel unable or failing in a subject and this means that you will either strive to learn it or strive to cope with the fact that you will never learn it. We strive either way. We struggle either way. We bear a yoke of burden either way.
Strive to practice the new material because you want to be able to feel like you've conquered it and can even, by experience, begin to enjoy it since it comes more and more easily to you. As it becomes easier you are more free to set your attention on other benefits that it has to offer such as mastering the language and grammar of Spanish might surprise you with a greater job opportunity for dual speakers, or with a very unexpected new friendship with a Spanish speaking person who cooks up the best Mexican food you've ever had! But of course it all began with your struggle with Spanish class. On the flip side, let's say you decided that Spanish, making you feel pathetic to its superior and unattainable reach of it, you struggled to cope with the bad grade. You got angry, because Spanish made you feel dumb, and consequently you wouldn't stand for that and so rather than struggling to learn Spanish you turned Spanish into a worthless subject. Then what? Aside from a terrible grade, which may impact your overall GPA and affect the college you got into, the job opportunities, and the kinds of friends you later made...would all in effect be the result of the struggle that began in Spanish class. Of course we don't like to think about such far off "maybe's" but the point is that learning new things will always at first appear less attractive to us because we don't know it yet. BUT REMEMBER THE STRUGGLE IS NEVER GONE, but different. So in the case of getting God or understanding the depth of His love for us, initially we will find that it affronts us because of the very fact that we don't fully know it yet...it does not resonate with us, and so it does not come easily for us to feel like we can enjoy it and all of its benefits. So then we who walk by faith strive to be In Relationship with Jesus, or we strive to make such a relationship not worth while. Both have a different struggle and both have a different result.
"The gospel will first chill your desires before it awakens them." -Lewis
Now we have the Word of God as a promise that what we see as chilling and affronting to us, just as Spanish or calculus is to the upcoming freshman, or perhaps even more to the exchange student from Korea, it is meant to be so, because we do not have it down yet, it is not ours confidently and easily. If you had God and His gospel down, then it wouldn't scare you or make you feel incapable. If you believed He truly loved you, and it came easily and confidently, then you would enjoy doing what He asked you to do. (Isn't it easy to do things for people we deeply love?). But as we are getting God, the process is new and different to what we know, and God gives us grace to every so now and again feel the pulse of our desire for the meaning of life beyond our meager 95 years on earth. That pulse for heaven and greatest love.
Of course none of us here can say that they have arrived at the experience of enjoying the perfect glory of heaven, as the student arrives at mastering Spanish and speaking it fluently with his newfound friend or at his job site, which make him all the more immersed in his confidence that he indeed now enjoys speaking Spanish. So what is our motivation to help us essentially stay at our "desks of learning" and be in that place of "struggle for God's love?"
Of course nothing more than that we are promised from long ago, when God Himself walked through the split animals and then by Jesus who met the conditions of the covenant to enjoy knowing God, the Creator and Genius communicator and most genuine lover, and painter of the pink and blue hues in the sky. The One who gives our eyes rest and our bodies good food to taste and feel "that is sooooo good!" The One who every so now and again urges us to keep learning and striving after Him by a song that opens some very deep chamber in the hollows of our chest and weep for the beauty of it that is unexplainable and intangible...the way heaven is. We strive for what is beyond our present ability to fully enjoy Him by faith, but also by grace in those moments of tasting His love like appetizers that grow our anticipation and desire for the immersion in heaven, the feast. Otherwise we strive to be content with what we have here alone, the things that we all know lose existence after death.
Of course experience alone already testifies that this kind of striving to be content with what we have is never actually attained. We are not satisfied with what we have on earth, but not until we are on our death bed will we finally most come to terms with the fact that what we had or ever had in this life was not enough, because at death it all comes to mean absolutely nothing.
Right now, you may not have experienced that...being on your death bed, and so it doesn't even phase you to think of the truth that everything you now want will amount to nothing. But others have gone and died before us, everyday people are dying, and we can observe what their death has consistently meant for all of them...death means that all their lives no longer matter because it's gone forever. By the words "no longer matter" I mean that they don't cling to anything on earth, since they are no longer alive to need them.
We don't like to think about death because death scares us. It means we lose everything: our family, our mornings, our playing, our dancing or being in a sports team, death takes everything away from us.
Deep breath. I have to see this, to look at Death.
So then, I come to a brief close of what I mean by two struggles and two results.
We have Death or we have Life.
But of course there is a mystery to both, meaning that perhaps after death all of us will completely vanish or turn into other spirits that recycle into new bodies. Maybe. And you might want to bank your soul on that "maybe" because it's easier or more compatible with your present disposition. I mean, you will have your reasons for why you would believe that, as I have my reasons for believing in Jesus even if I'm not completely certain that heaven will be what I think it will be. It's mysterious until it's experienced. And I will not experience it until I get there after death.
So by my reasons and motivations I will live either to struggle for knowing Jesus as my way to heaven or struggle against Jesus as the way to heaven. Both ways I struggle, but I know more about life through Jesus because of the bible and by my life's experiences. I know only of death by the funerals I've been to.
Should I live by my experiences of living by faith or by the same outcome of every funeral?
Do I struggle in both, yes! Do I feel a great mystery by both? Yes!
However, Jesus gives us a glimpse of Life, while Death gives us a glimpse of, well, death.
So what am I saying now? I'm saying that we live by faith in Jesus who is our glory and life. Jesus reminds us that God loves us unconditionally because of the conditions met by Jesus. We struggle to believe in Jesus. The struggle is relational. And that's why experiences in loving others on earth bring us closer to believing in our relationship with Jesus.
Otherwise we struggle to prove Jesus wrong. We struggle to prove death to be better. Isn't that crazy? We struggle to bank our souls on so many "maybes," and, yes, following Jesus is also a "maybe" but His is built on the bible that has outlasted thousands of years. His "maybe" is proven by the lives of all the saints, and we are becoming those testimonies to the world ourselves. A testimony that God is the greatest Love of all.
The other "maybe's" of Death somehow being better than Jesus, are many. And some might desire to believe them, but when we think about why we would choose something (Buddhism, Muslim, Taoism, or atheism, etc) outside of Jesus alone, the thoughts will reveal something deeper. The core of our reasons will either be love or fear.
I want love.
Let the struggle for life and love happen is it may.
We are recipients of the promise made long ago by God to Abraham and all of his descendants by faith. The promise that He will love us unconditionally!
Jmegrey
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