Irish-born author and scholar Clive Staples Lewis seriously tried to be an atheist in his early years, but could not “kick against the goads”, as Jesus Christ had flatly told the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus that he could not. . Clive, while on his own road to Damascus, learned and appreciated the fact that God’s will is sacrosanct and can be revealed to a person only through that individual’s faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, God’s will habitually becomes a matter of arbitrary human choice which, according to the free will that the Almighty has given mankind, can lead the living soul to spiritual and mortal perdition.
Lewis wrote some time later, after his conversion: “You must imagine me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, every time my mind wanders, even for a second, from my work, the firm and relentless approach From the One to Whom So Seriously What I Most Dreaded had finally come to me.At the Trinity Term of 1929, I relented and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most despondent and reluctant convert of all of England. “
CS Lewis was a talented man of great intellectual prowess who understood literature and philosophy as tools for understanding God’s will, not as a means of arguing with divinity. For example, Lewis, in response to the atheism and agnosticism associated with Darwinian evolution, allegedly joked in the 1950s: “Does it really matter how God did it, or how long did it take him to do it, as long as he really did? Frail human minds, even that of the great Charles Darwin, are not up to the task of encrypting the power of Almighty God. ” Later, he was supposedly heard saying, “Shouldn’t we rejoice that God did what he did, for all his children, instead of spending our precious time here in life vainly pondering how he did it?”
In his literary works, CS Lewis has often reflected the most important theme of Christianity, that the will of God is not an issue that can be summarily dismissed by political legislation, subjected to human vote, or adjudicated by human judges in judicial robes that represent the highest courts on earth. Because there are many things that are lawful and good in the eyes of God, which have been subdued under eternal moral rules. And, conversely, there are certain things reprehensible to God, which have been prohibited by the Holy Scriptures and by the human mental faculties of wisdom and reason that God has given them. These natural laws have been ordained by God to last until the inevitable judgment of the Creator. Similarly, there are temporary laws created by man that are the product of convenience and pragmatism, which are transiently changing. Lewis, in his writings, endeavored to convey that, what God, in his wisdom, has declared unclean, no man (or woman) can declare clean, and what God has declared clean, no man or woman can declare unclean, That is, unless that individual is willing to accept the eventual consequences.
Lewis wrote that “wise and prudent men through the centuries have put natural law, made by God, in front of human understanding.” John Locke was one of these thinkers who, in the seventeenth century, declared in his “Second Treatise on Government” (for the eventual benefit of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin) that “all men are created equal (before human law) , and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He will try to escape his unjust ties to be free. This natural law is expressed in the Holy Scriptures and cannot be repealed by any parliament or Congress on earth. Along the same lines, there are natural moral proscriptions that have been ordained by God since he created mankind, which cannot be repealed by man-made legislation, a court ruling, a executive order or by popular vote. of these non-morals are, don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t lie, don’t covet, and don’t commit adultery. There are, of course, other moral proscriptions that God saw as so egregious, antin natural and bestial that he deemed unnecessary to be specifically codified in the Ten Commandments, such as drinking human blood, animal cruelty and torture, sacrifice, eating feces, and a few others that, over time, have become deviously popular. Although God, in his wisdom, knew that some of his wayward children would lower themselves to such sinful degradations, he hoped most of them would not.
Along these same lines, it is quite interesting that, along with legislated criminal laws that make the crimes of robbery, murder, and perjury punishable by imprisonment in the original 13 US states, adultery, committed by a husband or wife, it was also on the books, in all of them, as a crime, and was punished with prison and public humiliation. Between 1776 and 1900, however, adultery remained on the books as a common law crime, but it was hardly ever enforced because the horrible act of taunting the wife or husband became a gradually tolerated practice; and due to reformist books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”, adultery, over time, was unfortunately relegated to the status of a “completely understandable” human weakness, which should be tolerated as an uncontrollable act of nature. Although the immoral act of adultery certainly occurs through vile human nature, it is hardly natural and remains a heinous act against the natural order that has caused untold human suffering, divorce, and the emotional alienation of young children from their families. . Wars have been caused by their insidious practice. This is where a crime against nature and the human family is, and has been, equated with permissible sin through faulty human judgment. But, of course, there are other crimes against nature that are certainly as or more heinous than adultery.
Regarding the will of God, CS Lewis also wrote, in his later years, that “all mankind has been endowed with the power to make decisions about what is good and what is bad. It has been that way since Cain chose murder his brother Abel, and certainly God made Cain fully understand the painful consequences of his reckless and sinful choice. And it has been very unfortunate that the majority of the human family, through the ages, have recklessly chosen between options generated by lust and greed. and that of God’s will. God’s sword was swiftly wielded in ancient times to punish those violators of the eternal moral law, but things are very different under the law of Christ. I suppose that will be the reason why so few of us will inherit his glory. “
Perhaps CS Lewis should be better regarded as a man endowed with substantial faith who embodied the precise definition of the word as connoted as given in the New Testament Book of Hebrews 11: 1-3 (RSV), “Now faith It is the substance of things I expected, the conviction of what is not seen. Because by it the men of old received divine approval. By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is see was made of what does not appear. “
Perhaps the last legacy Clive Staples Lewis chose to leave to his reading audience was his eternal witness to the eternal and indestructible will of God and Jesus Christ. Like CS Lewis, perhaps all of God’s children must realize for themselves the futility of kicking against the goads and opening their hearts, minds, and souls to a spiritual epiphany that will instantly elevate the will of God above the whims of life. humanity.