Teague Bible Church

“This World Tries Men’s Souls”    Current trial; Coronavirus                         3/26/2020

One thing that unnecessarily torments our hearts is our assumptions about what life here on earth is supposed to be like. You get that thinking wrong, and you are in for a lot of misery. Life here is hard, but misery is optional.

C.S. Lewis says he thinks of life down here as a prison sentence and is surprised at how nice the accommodations are at times. He said, however, that if you thought life here was supposed to be like staying in the finest hotel,  then you will be continually disappointed. I believe this is the problem of many people, particularly Americans.

Of course, he knew there is more to it than that. He mentioned how important it is to appreciate these taste of future pleasures and glory down here, in this life, but be careful not to make the “taste” a substitute for the fullness to come. Many, many people do that and live miserable lives because of it. There is no utopic kingdom down here in this temporary life. God uses this life to train us for the next, eternal life found in knowing Christ as Savior and Lord.  And once you really know Him he gives a daily joy, from that future kingdom in present time and by so doing makes even this life more enjoyable and most assuredly fulfilling.

I think I found this article in the “International Critical Commentary” at the Dallas Baptist University library years ago. I do not know what the passage is he is commenting on, but this one article has helped me tremendously. I hope it helps you also.

“The skeptic’s assumption is that man is to be viewed as a completed creation and that God’s purpose in making the world was to provide a suitable dwelling place for this fully formed creature. Since God is good and loving, the environment which He has created for human life to inhabit is naturally as pleasant and comfortable as possible. The problem is essentially similar to that of a man who builds a cage for some pet animal. Since our world, in fact, contains sources of hardship, inconvenience, and danger of innumerable kinds, the conclusion follows that this world cannot have been created by a perfectly benevolent and all-powerful  deity.

Christianity, however, has never supposed that God’s purpose in the creation of the world was to construct a paradise whose inhabitants would experience a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of pain. The world is seen, instead, as a place of  ‘soul- making’ in which free beings, grappling with the tasks and challenges of their existence in a common environment may become ‘children of God’ and  ‘heirs of eternal life.”

,,,man has  been made as a person  in the image of God, but has not yet been brought as a free and responsible agent into the finite likeness of God, which is revealed in Christ. Our world, with all its rough edges, is the sphere in which this second and harder stage of the creative process is taking place.

This conception of the world can be supported by the method of negative theodicy. Suppose, contrary to fact, that this world were a paradise from which all possibility of pain and suffering were excluded. The consequences would be far reaching.

For example, no one could ever injure anyone else; the murderer’s knife would turn to paper or his bullets to thin air; the bank safe robbed of a million dollars, would miraculously be filled with another million dollars ( without this device, on however large a scale, proving inflationary) ; fraud, deceit, conspiracy, and treason would somehow always leave the fabric of society undamaged.

Again, no one would ever be injured by accident; the mountain climber, steeplejack, or playing child falling from a height would float unharmed to the ground; the reckless driver would never meet with disaster. There would be no need to work, since no harm could come from avoiding work; there would be no call to be concerned for others in time of need or danger, for in such a world there could be no real needs or dangers.

To make possible this continual series of individual adjustments, nature would have to work by special providences instead of running according to general laws which men must learn to respect on penalty of pain or death. The laws of nature would have to be extremely flexible; sometimes gravity would operate, sometimes not; sometimes an object would be hard and solid, sometimes soft. There could be no sciences, for there would be no enduring world structure to investigate. In eliminating the problems and hardships of an objective environment, with its own laws, life would become like a dream in which, delightfully but aimlessly, we would float and drift at ease.

One can at lease begin to imagine such a world. It is evident that our present ethical concepts would have no meaning in it. If, for example, the notion of harming someone is an essential element in the concept of a wrong action, in our hedonistic paradise there could be no wrong actions, nor any right actions in distinction from the wrong.

Courage and fortitude would have no point in an environment in which there is, by definition, no danger or difficulty. Generosity, kindness, the agape aspect of love, prudence, unselfishness, and all other ethical notions which presuppose life in a stable environment, could not be even be formed .

Consequently, such a world, however well it might promote pleasure, would be ill adapted for the development of the moral qualities of human personality. In relationship to this purpose it would be the worst of all possible worlds.”

Romans 5: 1-8   II Peter  1: 1-10   Hebrews 12: 3-14     JWP