The man had been a bachelor until late in life; then he met the woman of his dreams. She responded and the two seemed as happy as twenty-year-olds. They were married in a civil ceremony.
Then she came down with cancer. C. S. Lewis was devastated; but then some good news--the cancer went into remission and once again they felt they had discovered Paradise. Now they were married by a Church of England priest. It seemed that God smiled on them; but again the cancer returned and Joy died.
Says one author: "Lewis experienced a devastating sense of distance from God, ... 'the dark night of the soul.' Lewis wrote: 'But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.' ... The danger was not that Lewis would become an atheist. Instead, he wrote: 'The real danger is coming to believe such dreadful things about Him'" (Art Lindsley, Case for Christ, pp. 60, 61).
Before you condemn Lewis, take a good honest look at our own Judeo-Christian Bible: numerous of our Psalms express the same desperate feelings (88, 22, 69, for example; and of course Job). The greatest Psalmist of all eternity once cried out, "My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matt. 27:46). What Lewis could not understand was that Christ endured that soul agony so that we might never have to endure it; but his soul was darkened by the belief he had inherited of the immortality of the soul. That doctrine derived from ancient paganism but taught in the Christian church had darkened his view of the cross of Christ. Hundreds of millions now suffer likewise.
God has called a people to tell the truth about the cross, what happened there. It's what Malachi says "Elijah" will proclaim to our darkened world--reconciliation of soul with God and with one another (4:5, 6).
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: February 28, 2006.Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. Wieland.
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