Broken Cisterns
In this episode
Scripture References
Works
Times will appear once this episode's audio is aligned.
Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
We’ve wrapped up Isaiah and are starting Jeremiah. As Greg reminded me just a moment ago, this is the last days of Judah, the end of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. We’re talking about what has been called the God-shaped hole in the human heart. We are made to worship, and when we refuse to worship the true God we have to make up something else, and we keep trying these different things and they lead only to sadness. In the words of Bartok the Bat, “This can only end in tears.”
The passage we’re looking at is one verse from Jeremiah 2. I’m going to start with verse 9 –
Wherefore I will yet plead with you, saith the LORD, and with your children's children will I plead. For pass over the isles of Chittim, and see; and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently, and see if there be such a thing. Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the LORD.
For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
As God looks at Judah in its decline, its last days, he says, “You’ve got two problems going on here. First, you’ve forsaken me who is your light and life, a fountain of living waters, a source of all kinds of life and all kinds of meaning. And if that were not bad enough, rather than just walking off into the void, into oblivion, you then stop along the way and create something to replace me with, but it’s garbage. It’s like you walked into a secondhand store and pulled out something and said, ‘Ooo, look. I must worship this now.’”
This is the first two commandments. The first commandment is to worship God alone, and the second is nothing else. They’re not really two different concepts. It’s interesting to me how God does make this distinction over and over and over, that these are two different things, even though they always go together.
Yes. In case anyone in our culture of the 21st century doesn’t know what a cistern is, in lands where there are no immediate rivers, brooks, and streams, agricultural societies are very dependent upon rainwater, so they build big tubs basically, concrete bowls, or stone bowls before there was concrete, to catch the rainwater. These are huge things oftentimes because they have to store water for a long, long time. They’re called cisterns and they’re great at storing rainwater unless they’re broken, in which case all the water drains out of them.
God here compares himself to a fountain of living water, living in the metaphor of water bubbling up out of the ground freely, plentifully, powerfully, over against a cistern. Yeah, it can have water. There are bugs on it and film on the top, but it’s water, except in this analogy it’s broken and all the water has drained out.
“So you left me and you went after this thing that doesn’t work. It’s adding insult to injury. You’ve rejected me and then you go pick up this thing and say, ‘This will meet all my needs.’ Anyone looking at it with any sense will say, ‘No, it won’t,’ and yet you fall down and worship it, or whatever.”
I appreciate, Emily, that you started with the idea of worship. He doesn’t use the word here but that is what we’re talking about, because with regard to the true God our approach must be one of worship. He is God. He is self-existent. He’s eternal. He is absolute goodness and we are his image, and therefore our proper response is to echo and reflect that back to him and say, “Thank you for being who you are, and thank you for what you’ve done for us, and thank you for making me and being my God.” But we take that and we walk away from God, unthankful.
Here we can look at Romans 1, where the whole series of man’s devolution into moral chaos begins. “Neither were they thankful.” Then we go after idols, which again is tracking with Romans 1. They conceive of God as birds and fish and bugs and whatever, or in our generation usually something more abstract – ideas and concepts and ideologies.
What’s going on here? We have two things that we can talk about, and in one sense we’ve already said everything, but we’ll slow it down and talk through it some more.
Man in rebellion against God is in rebellion against God. He doesn’t want God. He doesn’t want God telling him what to do. He does not want God as his source of meaning. He does not want God as his ultimate definition. He does not want to be in the image of God. He wants God to go away and he wants to be self-defining. At the same time, being in the image of God, he can’t pull it off so he will try to fill the gap that’s left, but he will never try to fill it with God.
There can be the mistake of saying, “Everybody’s looking for God.” No, everybody is trying to get away from God. What they’re looking for is something to replace God that’s not God. That’s the problem. So when we use the argument that there’s this God-shaped hole in your heart, unless God intervenes by his grace and Spirit and gospel, the response will be, “No, there isn’t.”
We can see where this is going real fast. So that being said, I’m going to kind of direct things back to you two for a moment and let you meditate or ruminate on this and share examples or things you’ve read or other parts of scripture that come to mind, and we’ll go from there.
I have a question maybe we can talk about. We’ve established this idea that man in his sinful state is avoiding God, is suppressing the truth of God. How do we then talk about those who seem to be looking for God? We can think of Jordan Peterson or Tom Holland or somebody who’s looking at Christianity and saying, “Wait a second, there is something here and it’s better than everything else.” How can we talk about that situation where we see people in a way that’s faithfully accounting for the natural state?
I think there’s probably a couple different ways you could think of it that both acknowledges shall we say the exterior evidence that we see in the life of those people, and also the biblical witness that tells us what underlies it.
I think one way to look at it is to say that what underlies it has a multitude of forms when it bubbles through to the surface. For instance, with Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson, I think they both suffer from the same issue, which is obviously that they’re not Christian, but in particular it’s the denial of the miraculous. That is, their underlying framework for the world, their schema for existence is that what we call supernatural things are explainable in some sense.
For Jordan Peterson it’s all psychology. It’s all the broad historical consensus of the human subconscious expressing itself over multiple generations in an evolutionary form. And for Tom Holland it’s, “Oh, these people were superstitious and so they wrote down superstitious things when they wrote their histories.”
I feel like they still know in their heart that there is something missing, a God-shaped hole so to speak, and they are able to recognize that. Their philosophy of life, their metaphysical underpinnings aside, they recognize that there’s an emptiness that needs to be filled, so they’re looking for meaning.
They rightfully reject the modernist/post-modernist answer, which is just, “Oh, it’s all materialist. Nothing matters. There’s no meaning or anything.” They still try to find these things, and they even see beauty in the Christian worldview because they have eyes.
Yes, so you can in a very true sense say they are closer than anyone else is, but unless there is faith that is actually wrought by God, the hole will remain empty because they’re still trying to figure out meaning from finite resources, when the hole that they’re looking to fill is infinite.
And that’s really key, isn’t it, that God has to make the change. Speaking theologically, there’s a binary. You’re either oriented in enmity toward God or you are brought into his family and his kingdom and your heart is changed to love him. Experience is messy and we have to recognize that it is God who makes the difference, and not talk about it like there is no way of moving from one to the other, except that God does it.
Right, because the other aspect too is that God does use means. For both of these men that we’ve mentioned by name, in one sense it is a good thing that they’re doing this, because God may use these means to bring them to faith. But on the other hand, if they end up not, it’s a greater burden of proof against them that they saw all these things. That should be sobering to us. It should not be something where we go, “Oh well, they got close.”
Too bad, so sad. No, we would love for them to come into the kingdom of God.
I forget exactly what the context was, but I remember something you said, Greg, in one of your classes, which was basically, “Yes, it matters that we are not Hitler.” There is a true metaphysically real importance to what you have, and that could be temporal. I think it was Luther and somebody said, “What happens if these people do good works and they don’t love Jesus? What happens if they do good stuff for their neighbor?” and he said, “Well, then the neighbor got good works out of it.” It was very Germanically practical of him.
That’s what the Lutherans say. “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.”
Exactly. That’s probably actually another thing. I probably got that from Chris Rosebrough, honestly.
You have said some marvelous things. I thought what you said, Bryan, was very insightful and to the point, and also not just pointed but broad in what it touched on. You mentioned, for instance, beauty, among other things.
These men have a sense that there’s something better out there, and we can guess that it has to do with their upbringing, with their education, with the remnants of Christendom that they’ve been exposed to, the cathedrals and the castles and the gardens and the paintings and the literature or whatever. I don’t know their biographies.
I’ve known a lot of, frankly, role-players who are very honorable men and women who love that kind of culture and enjoy role-playing in it and want to do the right thing and they want to be heroes after almost a biblical pattern, and yet they themselves aren’t Christians, and if you bring too much Christianity into the story line they get nervous.
They’re appreciating the fruit of Christianity, and you can question why that should be, and a lot of it has to be the explanation of, “How did you grow up? Who were your parents? Who were your friends? What books did you read?” Those are real things.
We’re not programmed but we are exposed, and what God has put in our souls and our personalities by common grace and by divine providence is going to respond to that, and some people are going to say, “This is really cool. This is beautiful. This is elegant. This has depth. This has balance that mere materialism or post-modernism doesn’t have. In other words, I like this!”
It’s interesting too, because this past week I saw someone reference a survey that was done. They asked the same question of everyone, but the particular group that was of interest was atheists/agnostics. They were asked, “Do you think that there should be a strong Christian religion in the United States?” and like 40% of them answered yes. And even stranger, 1% of atheists said, “Yes” to the question, “Do you think that if there’s a conflict between written law and a scriptural standard, that scripture should be the superior answer?” 1% of them said yes, which is very interesting. But like you’re saying, it is very much that they still identify as being non-believers.
The entire reason they answer in the affirmative is because of its practicality, not because of its truth or its having affected them. They recognize, “Oh wait, oddly enough this Christian society in the West operates really well when it’s operating in accordance with the heritage of 2,000 years of Western society. Who knew the Western society would do that?”
“Isn’t it amazing we got lucky with this coincidence of superstitions that all merged at one time to give us this worldview, which is utterly superstitious and wrong, but has this wonderful fruit. Huh.”
It’s like, “This water is really great and quenches my thirst, but I hate that it’s coming out of this fountain. I’m going to put it in this pot. The pot has a hole in it, but at least I’ve got the water.”
There’s two opposing ditches as far as Christian response. There’s the Anabaptist way, which is to be like, “Well, we can’t put laws that are Christian in character on the books, because then they wouldn’t be done out of true Christian character.”
“Yeah, Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ so it would be wrong to impose his standard of justice on the world.”
And then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum which is like, “We have to force every iota of Christian character onto the populace, or else Christendom won’t come.”
No, you don’t have to go in either ditch. There’s a wonderful balance beam, and you can have a pole that you hold onto that balances you and it will be great. Honestly, Protestant social theory has been like that, historically speaking anyway.
And at the same time I’m always cautious about the ‘falling off either side of the horse’ or ‘a ditch on each side of the road,’ not to negate anything you said. I think that was spot-on, but there’s the logical fallacy of the Via media.
The middle road, where we’ve set up two alternatives and neither of them is right, but because we’ve framed the issue with those two positions stated as the extremes you think, “Well, the right way has to be in the middle.” How can we reframe the issue such that it becomes clear what the right answer is, not just as some harmonization of two arbitrary endpoints?
You remind me – and this isn’t immediately relevant, but it’s an example. When I’m teaching Government class and we draw the political spectrum, we have Anarchy on one side and Tyranny on the other. I’ve actually seen this in some conservative books.
The idea is, “Well, we don’t want tyranny and we don’t want anarchy, but we want to be closer to anarchy than to tyranny.”
First of all, why? Not only practically but philosophically, why are you choosing that? And do you notice that all of these options are thoroughly humanistic? Do we want a little bit of humanistic tyranny along with a lot of humanistic anarchy? That does not sound like a good idea.
Maybe it’s not a continuum. Maybe that’s the continuum of all the wrong answers, and the right answer is off the chart. Each of those extremes is showing us something in the correct answer, but the correct answer is not simply balancing the two. It’s something that is not naturalistic, not something that arises out of man’s fallen nature, but something supernatural revealed by God.
They certainly can. You drop into a nice community let’s say in America in the late 1880s someplace in Indiana, where everybody gets along. Maybe there’s a town sheriff or something, and he maybe calls in the town drunk every Saturday.
Yeah. I mean such places existed once upon a time, and a Libertarian or an anarchist could come here and say, “There’s no government here.” Well, a couple answers to that. There are the semblances of some kind of government. There are selectmen who run the town officially and vote for little things here and there, and a sheriff, but even more primarily the government is the people. They govern themselves, and in the presence of self-government you don’t need this other stuff.
Is it anarchy? No, there is law and order here, but it’s been internalized. Probably the churches have more to say, and families have more to say, than these few officers who get together now and then and pass some rules.
Again, there are things in American history that can look very Libertarian or even anarchistic if you have a very narrow checklist. But if you went and talked to these people and said, “You believe there should be no government,” they would be horrified.
This idea of self-government – I feel like we can root into that a little further. My college’s honor code went on and on, but the punchline, as it were, is “Through education the student rises to self-government.” Yes, but also no. Self-government for self-government’s sake is a means to an end, and what is that end? You could have a lot of self-governed dictators. They’re self-governing themselves.
No, it’s not. If you’re a slave to your immediate sensual passions you may be in bed with your mistress, drinking yourself drunk, when the Allies are rolling their tanks across your border. It just doesn’t work that well. But that kind of self-discipline in the West traditionally has been the product of Christianity.
You mentioned Lenin, Hitler, and we can add Stalin, Castro – these men grew up in the church. They were sometimes choirboys or theology students, certainly members of the national church. They saw it and they picked some of the good fruit, and then they rebelled against the reality but they took the self-discipline and the vision with them.
“I can change the world. I can be the difference. If I discipline myself enough, I’m smart, I’m educated, then I can give the world what it needs, which just turns out to be me.”
Exactly. It takes somebody touched by that kind of vision usually. We can think of Genghis Khan, and there are a few others, who have had a different sort of vision and were very self-disciplined without the evident presence of Christianity, but the further the world goes the more difficult that is.
This is the parable of the wheat and tares again. The further we go into history, the more unself-disciplined humanism and paganism are, and the harder it is for them to hold things together and make it look good.
We’ve gone way off the reservation here, so let’s pull it back. There is application here because we’ve been talking political systems, but that’s part of the picture. You asked why do Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson appreciate Christian morality. In part, they see it as a basis for civil morality, including politics, but particularly, at least with Tom Holland, for public charity.
He was caught by how kind and generous certain Christian institutions were and assumed that the pagan religions had been the same. It shocked him to go back and find out no they weren’t, nor do they want to be, nor do they intend to be. They’d been hijacked. They didn’t care about people.
My favorite quote from him on that exact point is, “I grew up reading the sanitized versions of pagan cultures like Rome and Greece, and I loved them growing up. I finally got old and I read the primary sources and I was shocked to find none of the things that I loved about Western society there. They were brutal.”
And if I can take us on a tangent on this towards education, we can do our children a great disservice by having them read those sanitized versions and never going to the original sources. We can lead them into that error and let them stay there because it’s fun. I don’t like it.
That’s the sanitized version we use to teach Greek mythology in school, or to not teach it, if you prefer, because at the end I have to go back and explain to them. In fact, I did this little speech today. “When Edith is telling you that Apollo ran after this beautiful girl because he loved her and wanted her, and she was running from him and cried out to the gods to save her and they turned her into a tree, what was going on there?” and the kids said, “He wanted to rape her, so the gods killed her.”
“Ok, thank you, moving on,” and that was pretty well it. But that’s how you sanitize Greek and Roman culture.
Yeah, you add Christian categories. This passionate desire to rape is, “Oh, he loved her.” Not in any kind of Christian sense, and she had every right to be frightened to death, and death is what she got, because being turned into a tree – I thought the kids were really good on this one – amounts to “They killed her. That was their idea of helping her. ‘You’ll never have to be raped. You’re dead now. You’re turned into a non-sentient thing.’”
That reminds me, and I’ve brought it up before, the bits in City of God by Augustine where he confronts them. The pagans accused the women who were nuns basically of some kind, who were sexually assaulted and raped by the pagan invaders in Rome. They basically said, “Oh, they must have wanted it, because otherwise they would have saved their honor by killing themselves.” The pagans say this, and Augustine basically goes, “Life is more important than that.” He even goes further and says, “They didn’t will this, and as a result God holds their virginity whole.”
Their honor is unblemished. Their holiness before the Lord, their virtue that’s a fruit of the Spirit is unblemished. People can’t take that away from you by what they do to you externally. That’s part of Augustine’s argument throughout all that.
Again, our friends Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland – I would like to think if we met them we would be friends.
Gentlemen, if you’re listening by something of God’s providence, give us a call or an email.
We’d love to talk to you and we promise not to be obnoxious and we’d love to hear what you have to say, too. We’d give you plenty of air time, because we see in such men God’s good gifts. Whereas every human is the image of God, we’re weak and sometimes some unbelievers are simply cooler than other unbelievers and we’re drawn them and say, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great for the kingdom of God if you would convert.”
We’re shallow-minded and we do that, but truly here are men who have special gifts who would be a great blessing to God’s kingdom, and already are in some ways, despite themselves, because they see the good fruits and just can’t figure out really why they’re there and they don’t know what to do with it.
Emily, you asked a question a long time ago. I think we’ve kind of worked around to it. Are they seeking God? No, they’re not. Are they appreciating the fruit of what God has done? Oh, yeah, but that’s not unusual.
Every mother who takes her baby in her arms for the first time and smiles big and coos back at the baby is appreciating the good gift of God. The gourmand who has this incredibly detailed meal made by the greatest chef in France and takes a bite and smiles and sighs is appreciating the good gifts of God. Anyone who looks at a painting by Turner or Rembrandt and stares in awe is appreciating the gifts of God. It's not that easy to get away from God.
I remember you saying in Bible class one time, “We’re finite creatures. God’s goodness is infinite. We keep trying to push him out of our box, but he just comes right back in.”
There’s a verse that I keep trying to remember and I do not remember it and I’m going to butcher it because I don’t remember it. I think it’s in Jeremiah. It amounts to the ungodly can taste the bitterness of their own sins. In Deuteronomy in the Song of Moses it says, “Our Rock is not as their rocks, our enemies themselves being witness.”
When we talk about total depravity it does not mean that unbelievers cannot say two things. They can say, “My sin sure stinks.” Yes, they can say that. They can realize full well, “My sin stinks. My lifestyle stinks. My worldview stinks.” That they’re capable of. They are also capable of saying, “And Christianity somehow isn’t like my worldview.”
Now, that’s not the same thing as saying, “Christianity is better,” or “Boy, I want to be a Christian,” but the unbeliever in his unbelief is still capable of seeing those two things – that his sin is self-destructive and leads nowhere and is in many ways horrible. Now, he doesn’t understand it’s rebellion against a holy God who he ought to love. He just knows, “Well, let’s see, my worldview has given me alcoholic addiction, drug addiction, several sexual diseases, a broken family, no money in the bank, and I’m living under a bridge.”
There are some people who are content with that, but most people would say, “That’s horrible. That stinks,” and unbelievers can say that.
They can also say things like, “You know, my brother, that guy who’s all about Jesus, he doesn’t have these problems. I wonder why that is,” because still the rebellion against God takes first place. We can see that there’s something missing, something wrong, and yet when we’re told, “Jesus…”
“No, that’s not it, because that would mean surrendering my heart, surrendering who gets to set my priorities, my values, my perspectives. Someone gets to be the boss of me that’s not me, and that’s bad. That’s tyranny. I believe that all of Western literature, particularly romanticism but also rationalism reinforces that I am autonomous. I do what I do. I do me, you do you. I don’t care about you. My choices are my choices. I’m responsible for them, and nobody ultimately gets to tell me what to do. That’s the way the world is, right? That’s good.”
“Yeah, it’s self-government.” And Christianity comes and says, “No, you have to lay all that at the feet of Jesus. God has to be the one who does that,” and you say, “Well, that’s wrong. There may be a religious solution, but that’s not it. Maybe I just need to realize that I already am God or that I’m in touch with God or that God is already in my soul and that I’m perfectly justified in being in charge of things and making my decisions.”
The one thing he will not do is lay down his rebellion, until the Holy Spirit changes his heart through the gospel.
I mentioned some quotes that we have. I’d like to just throw them out here. I think you’ve already mentioned one. Blaise Pascal said, “There’s a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God, made known through Jesus Christ.”
Pascal rocks. I’m just going to throw that out there. I really enjoy reading Pascal.
This is Pascal of Pascal’s wager, for those of you who might know him that way.
It’s not the greatest argument, but it’s the sort of argument. But this statement is straightforward. Notice what it says and what it doesn’t say. “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person.” In other words, God should have an overflowing presence in the heart of every man, and if man does not have that there is a deficiency, and nothing created can take that. It can only be filled by God in Christ.
What he does not say is, “And you all know that,” because we don’t know that. We feel the lack, but we do not know and will not acknowledge that it’s our rebellion against God that’s created it.
We can talk to people and point out the idols, the broken cisterns, they’ve made. “You fill it with music. You fill it with art. You fill it with your family. You fill it with good food. You fill it with adventure or with travel or with old books or with mathematics, with science or maybe some other religion. You’re very busy trying to fill the hole, and yet what you’re going to find at the end of the day, if we push you and press you…”
And that’s what Christian apologetics in part is about. “We’re going to push you and press you and get you finally to admit that it doesn’t quite make it. You’ve idolized these things, and what you will find is that they are broken cisterns. They don’t fill the hole. That doesn’t mean you’re ready to become a Christian. You will look at Christianity and still say, ‘Well, that sure won’t. That’s even worse,’ but there’s something missing.”
C.S. Lewis in response to this says – and I don’t know if this quote is from The Weight of Glory, the next one is – “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Jack, I’m sorry. That’s not the only logical explanation and most people are not going to buy that.
This next quote is from The Weight of Glory. He says this. “A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread. He may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating, and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it’s a pretty good indication that such things exist and that some men will.”
Sorry, Jack. The Rationalist world and post-modern world will simply say, “You’re having a subjective experience, which proves nothing whatsoever. Maybe that desire you feel is mere superstition. People have been absolutely convinced that ghosts are real, and maybe that’s because they want some excitement in their life, or maybe because they miss their dead Aunt Tessie and they’re hoping she comes back, or a million different reasons. But no matter how sincere that belief is, it doesn’t make ghosts real.
“Then to go even further, the desire may just as easily be evidence of the individual’s lack of internal resources. You’re just the weak kind of person that has to supply things to make yourself strong. I understand that for you, you poor slob, but I don’t need such crutches.
“To take it even further, yeah, the universe is inherently irrational and we don’t fit in it, and that’s all that Lewis has discovered here. Yes, you are in fact in a world feeling hungry where food is not a thing, because that’s just how screwed up the universe is. Welcome to reality.”
He knows there’s something here, but he’s going for a direct proof and it doesn’t work because you can’t get around the inherent self-centeredness of sin. The unbeliever is not going to admit that he’s walked away from the only God who gives meaning and purpose. You can get him to say a lot of things and you might even get something real close to that.
There are some people who will say the words. “Yes, I believe Christianity is true. Yes, I believe Jesus died for sinners. Yes, I believe God created the world and rules it. I just want no part of that.” That’s psychotic. It’s real close to reality, but not at all close to reality, and the problem is still the same.
At this point we have to start worrying about what scripture calls the unpardonable sin or apostasy, where you look God in the face and say, “Oh, you’re God. Well, I hate you, wish you were dead, and I’m walking off and I’m not leaving a forwarding address. Leave me alone.”
As we’ve said before, it’s a problem of ethics, not of information. You’re ethically opposed to God.
Yeah. You look at God and say, “Well, if you’re God then you’re the devil. I don’t want anything to do with this,” or “I’m just going to hang you out the window because it’s irrelevant. You’re irrelevant to me because I’m still the god of my universe.”
It is ultimate insanity and yet that’s where this will go, despite this strong evidence. So we create idols.
There’s a better quote from Lewis that I put here toward the end. “Amiable agnostics talk cheerfully about man’s search for God. To me, as I was then [speaking about the days before his conversion], they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.”
For those of you who don’t know, Lewis was not always a Christian. That came from Surprised by Joy, his spiritual autobiography. There was a time when theism was closing in on him. I don’t remember the exact quote, but it’s very similar to what Tom Holland was saying, that “My materialism led me to despise Christianity and everything in it, but all of the books I loved, all the stories I loved led me right back to Christianity. I was living this schizophrenic or split-personality kind of reality where reason said Christianity is a lie, but all of my aesthetic and emotional senses said, ‘But it produces the things I love,’” so he had to struggle with that.
And although I’ve never seen it from either Lewis or Tolkien in detail, it amounts to Tolkien saying, “You love the myths.”
“It has all the beauty and power of these myths you love, except for one thing – it actually happened.”
So Lewis struggled with that for a while and he was able to begin intellectually to move toward theism, but there was still the intellectual objections and there was still the heart objection of, “But I want to be me. I want to do me. I want to do my own thing.”
It still took some steps to get him there, even the simple transition to theism, as he again records it. “A lot of people have this wonderful ‘heaven opened and light came down and angels played.’ That was not me. I felt sicker than anybody in England that night. I thought I was going to throw up, and climbed into bed. It was just horrible.”
There’s a similar quote from a theologian, James Montgomery. He says, “It’s very simple. We invent religion not because we’re seeking God, but because we’re running away from him.” That’s from his commentary on Romans. This is the kind of thing we’re talking about.
I want to jump back to what you were saying about these men who get so close and miss. What should we say? Of course, you pointed out that they do us a lot of good and we can thank God for these men who have written historical and moral treatises that have shaken up the world and got people to take a second look at Christianity, and thus have done good to their neighbor and to Christ’s church whether they intended it or not, so that’s all good.
But there’s another question and it’s one that only God can sort out. What happens when you come this close to the truth and turn away? There are two possible answers and only God knows. One is, “Well, you are so responsible now because you looked it in the face and you turned your back,” or is it, “Well, at least you’re not Hitler,” because the Bible does make a real distinction of degrees of punishment in hell.
It is God’s goodness to us – common goodness, common grace, whatever you want to call it – that we are not as bad as we could be, and that’s something that is not only for now but resonates through eternity. He who knew his Master’s will and did things worthy of stripes shall be beaten with many stripes, but he who did not know his Master’s will and did things worthy of stripes will be beaten with few. For unto whom much is given, of the same much is required. So what do you do with that?
In some ways, ignorance apparently is bliss. If you’re ignorant and a pretty good guy, hell won’t be as bad…
Yes. And not being as bad being way relative, because it’s still hell where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. Part of the punishment of hell is that you can look back on your earthly life and say, “This really hurts. This is horrible. I’m suffering. I’m tormented. In my earthly life, had I not done this thing…” You remember the rich man in hell wanted just a drop of water on his tongue. It would be the equivalent of a drop of water, just a little not as suffering, whatever that may mean to the lost.
That’s part of the psychological punishment. They can look back on their earthly life and see that their earthly actions have eternal consequences, and they can regret. “Yes, I should not have pushed that old lady into the street and then jumped up and down on her, because it would hurt a little infinitesimally less, but it would be less because this is horrible.”
In case there’s anyone out there who’s thinking, “Wow, you’re making God sound really mean,” no, this is a very just and holy God, against whom we have sinned infinitely and from whom we deserve this. We deserve to be turned over to our own devices and to the wickedness of our own heart.
The flip side is, “But couldn’t these people just come into heaven for a little while?” No, because they don’t want to. That’s the whole point here. They didn’t want God on earth and they don’t want him in hell. There’s no one in hell who would say, “Oh, if I could just be in heaven for a little while,” because in heaven they’re face-to-face with God, who they hate above all else. So as bad as hell is, they don’t want heaven. See C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce here for a fictional play of this.
So we look at men who say true things, and we are thankful for them. We’re thankful that they’re a blessing to their neighbor and to the church of Christ and the kingdom of God, and we hope and pray that having come thus far, God will bring them over the hurdle – the hurdle of their own unbelief and rebellion and into the kingdom of God. But it still will take God’s mercies. It will take the sovereign work of the Spirit.
They’re not going to get there by appreciating beauty, by recognizing the value of love, by rescuing the positive historical contributions of Christianity, the culture. None of those things are saving. We can be thankful for all of them, but they don’t reconcile the fallen human soul to the holy just God who made the world.
That should move us to be human. It should move us to tears and to prayers and to sincerely saying, “Hey guys, come talk to us. You may think we’re just a bunch of kids playing in a giant’s kitchen, but we actually do have something I think you might want to hear, and maybe God’s prepared us to say it.”
So Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland, if you hear this, we’re not full of ourselves but we know the God who made the universe and maybe God will use us to show you the thing you’re missing, because it will take a work of the Spirit of God. It’s going to take a miracle, but hey, we have a God who does miracles every day.
Which would sound absolutely ridiculous to anyone who’s not a Christian. We can’t help that.
We should wrap up with some recommendations. Greg, I think yours was pertinent, so we’ll transition with yours.
One source I didn’t quote from along the way is Francis Schaeffer’s little book Death in the City. It’s a collection of sermons, most of them from Jeremiah and some from Romans 1, and suddenly I realized why he put those two together.
As opposed to his analysis of philosophy and culture, the kind of thing he usually does, it’s more of, “Here’s what it means to be human when the world is falling down around you, when your culture is disintegrating, when everyone is after their broken cisterns. Here’s how you deal with that. Here’s how you try to reach out to people.”
It's not the final word. It’s not exhaustive. As I said, it’s a short book but I think for those of us who are tempted toward a rationalistic approach to Christianity – “Well, teach them the doctrines and they better believe them!” – this is a start. This is, “Wait, that’s not quite how it works.” That’s Death in the City by Francis Schaeffer.
Recommendation: Death in the CityMy recommendation is relevant to recognizing beauty and aesthetics, and that is to sing and dance in your house. Gretchen has started to enjoy both of these things. We were at a hymn sing yesterday and I was playing piano, so our friend Rachel was holding Gretchen. She said afterwards, “She was singing!” Whenever the group was singing, Gretchen was there making noise, too. We’ve started dancing around the house, and if a song comes on that she likes she’ll sit there and bounce and look at me like, “Here I am. Come dance with me!” It’s a great thing and everybody should do it.
Recommendation: Sing and dance in your houseWell, yeah. I mean you don’t have to have a baby before you’re dancing and singing.
Yeah, or even by yourself. Solo Charleston is fun. So is solo blues. Bryan, your turn.
Dog parks. We took both of our dogs to the dog park today and we got very lucky, because there were a lot of dogs there first – it being a dog park – but also one guy had two little Australian Shepherd puppies and they were named Xena and Freya. Xena was very much the social butterfly and Freya was very much, “Don’t look at me. I’m too great for you.” It was really funny. They were very sweet.
So if you’re a dog person, I recommend going to the dog park. If you have a dog, take your dog to the dog park.
Recommendation: Take your dog to the dog parkI would. I don’t think anyone’s going to complain. Of course, if you show up and you’re the only one there, then it looks a little weird because you’re just walking around like, “Hmm. Nice grass.”
“Wish there were some dogs here.” We should talk about dog parks later. For now we’ve got to wrap up the show.
Thank you so much for this conversation, both of you. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion, or our Patreon at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
And as always, the best way to get in touch with us is to send us an email – [email protected].