Screwtape Letters - Week #4

Thanks to Sue for her help this past week and to those of you who have made comments. Grace and peace to you all!

Just a couple of observations on the letters # 9-12 that we read this past week:

1. C.S. Lewis had a clear understanding of joy and pleasure being part of God’s nature. He says through Screwtape in Letter #9: “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.” This reflects the nature of God. He is a joy-filled Person in whose Presence is fullness of joy and at whose right hand there are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16)! The Scriptures tell us in Nehemiah that it’s the Lord’s joy that is our strength, not a joy that we crank up of ourselves. And so we are energized by the presence of a glad God who is full of joy and pleasure.

2. One of the “wiles” or tricks of the devil shows up so clearly again in letter #9 with the following words by Screwtape: “…your job is to make him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with it, persuading himself that it is not so low after all…Talk to him about ‘moderation in all things.’ If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point,’ you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all – and more amusing.” From my observations of my own life and that of many believers around me, this has been one of the more “successful” tactics of the evil one in the western Church over the past decades. The word “balance” has become a popular word; and while there is need for balance in our faith, it must be applied to the right situations, not to passion for God which will often take the form of what the lukewarm/balanced church would label as extremism. And while we will readily permit fanaticism in many other areas of life, we try hard to keep a new believer from being too fanatical about the most fascinating Person of all, and in time they, like Wormwood’s patient, begin to think that their early First Love may have been too extreme and we help make them into the stale and bored believers that we have become, giving the world grounds for rejecting Jesus.

3. If you didn’t have a chance to read Letter #12 thoroughly, I would recommend your going back to it – it is loaded with truth about how important it is to the devil to keep a believer on the surface of faith without dealing rightly and thoroughly with repentance of specific sin but rather keep him/her in a state of “dim uneasiness.” If the evil one can succeed in keeping us in this shadowy state of constant feeling that something isn’t quite right, it will make us reluctant to think much about God and will lead us into a life of wanting to be distracted from God and true prayer and dreading real contact with Him. Finally, as Screwtape says, “…one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’”

4. I can’t end my observations without quoting the end of Letter 12, because it is an eloquent summary statement of what Christianity is all about: knowing God intimately. Knowing this, Screwtape says to Wormwood: “…so remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick…”

Questions on Letters 13-16:

1. In Letter 13 Screwtape refers to God's notion of "losing their selves." How does Lewis' approach to this differ from some interpretations of death to self that border on self-hatred?

2. Two things to note in Letter 14: one is the acknowledgement in the first paragraph of the "danger" to Satan when a believer increasingly realizes that he is dependent on God's grace every moment of his life; the second is Lewis' wonderful teaching on self-acceptance as true humility.

3. What does Lewis mean when he says (Letter 15) that "nearly all vices are rooted in the future"?

4. What insights in Letter 16 strike you related to the believer and his/her relationship with a local congregation?

Have a blessed week! And if you have a moment, share your thoughts with us...