It's More Like God's Search for Man than Man's Search for God

Blog »    IT'S MORE LIKE GOD'S SEARCH FOR MAN
THAN MAN'S SEARCH FOR GOD

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

“If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he do?
Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness and go to search for
the one that is lost until he finds it?
And when he has found it, he will joyfully carry it home on his shoulders.
When he arrives, he will call together his friends and neighbors, saying,
‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’"   Luke 15:4-6 (NLT)

In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis describes how God pursued and surrounded him with Christian friends, inspiring literature, tough logic, and eventually offered him a choice. Lewis writes,   

“The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say "I chose," yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, "I am what I do." Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back - drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.

The fox had been dislodged from Hegelian Wood and was now running in the open, "with all the wo in the world," bedraggled and weary, hounds barely a field behind. And nearly everyone was now (one way or another) in the pack; Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself . . . .

Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. . . . It became patently absurd to go on thinking of "Spirit" as either ignorant of, or passive to, my approaches.

Even if my own philosophy were true, how could the initiative lie on my side? My own analogy, as I now first perceived, suggested the opposite: if Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare's doing. Hamlet could initiate nothing . . . . My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, "I am the Lord"; "I am that I am"; "I am."

People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about "man's search for God." To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse's search for the cat.  

“Lord, so it’s been you all along, You, the “Hound of Heaven” causing me to seek you only to discover that it was a search not to find but to discovered I’ve been found.   Thank you, Lord,  Amen”

 

Comment    

For more:   follow on Twitter @jefflampl