We were left most recently with the alternative of calling Jesus a liar, lunatic, or exactly who He says He is: the Lord and God of Heaven and Earth. We cannot call Him a fiend, for He did nothing but help and love everyone. Why call Him a lunatic? There is not reason to. For the points outlined in my last post on this series, I, and Lewis too agrees, have concluded that I can only call Jesus Lord. This means the view of Christ is that God has landed on enemy-occupied territory in human form. Does that blow any one else's mind? Maybe it's just me.
It is now that Lewis addresses the core of Christianity by saying, 'The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start'. Now, here is where many people get caught up, so to speak. This is one of the moments where humanity becomes arrogant in his own knowledge by attempting to dissect how this happening could be true. Why do we feel the need to understand every single detail of how it all works? Shouldn't we be focusing instead on the happening itself than the theories behind it all? That's not to say that we should be ignorant by any means, but when the how becomes a stumbling block to believing the what, then it seems there is a bigger issue at hand. Lewis also points out that humanity can barely understand our world and what makes it up, so why would we think that we would be able to understand the makings up of an occurrence of something that is bigger than us, that is outside of this world? Again I stress that humanity is not God. One of my favorite passages from Mere Christianity is,
'Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, the very fact would show it was not what it professes to be-the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightening. You may ask what good it will be to us if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works; indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until He has accepted it'.
The Word tells us what happened, and the what is primary (it must be, because any other factors are based upon the what; the how cannot exist without the what), so theories that we formulate on how it happened become secondary.
Now I want to talk about repentance, the process of surrender that Christianity heeds so often. Why does it exist? First, we must understand that repentance is not something God demands before taking us back, but rather it is a description of what going back to Him is like. It is a willing submission after one acknowledges the grace given by God. Why should we repent at all? Each circumstance is different for everyone, of course, but the overall reason is this: man has rebelled and turned selfish. Man has attempted to obtain autonomy, or self rule. Man is not an imperfect creature in need of improvement, but rather man is a fallen rebel who must lay down his arms. There is a difference in the two views. Well, since man is fallen, then man can't expect to repent due his own work. This is where God helps us, and what does this mean? Lewis expresses the most beautiful view of this with the imagery of a child writing; 'When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.'
So there it is then, the perfect penitent, and it would seem that it cannot be possible without God enabling it all in the first place, thus making it perfect. The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, and the perfect death were not only easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He was and is God. This process of humiliation and being redeemed is not in the nature of God because it is not needed as He is perfect, but it is necessary in the action of man because he is not. Therefore, how loving our God has been and is by amalgamating the very nature of man with the nature of God into one person, so then that one person could help all of humanity, by surrendering His will, going through suffering, and dying because He was man-and being able to do it perfectly because He is God. This is how God pays the debt of humanity and suffers for us, because He Himself need not suffer at all. Oh, how He loves.
