* * *
Interlude With Eternity
Brad Blair
Author’s Note:
You don’t get very far in writing a story like this one without acknowledging the debts you owe. So, if you like this story, go find the collected works of C.S. Lewis. Read them all, but start with The Chronicles of Narnia. Then read Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. Most central to this story, however, is The Great Divorce, a charming little novella that makes for interesting reading. My other rather sizable debt is to an author still living and who may end up reading this. I’m talking, of course, about Randy Alcorn. To understand why my heaven looks like it does, read his book Heaven. The image of the library started out as a hall of books in Deadline. I’ve modified the image heavily. Also, I need to mention that the term ‘shadow lands’ is also not mine. While Randy uses it extensively, it dates back, as far as I know, to Lewis’s final Narnia Chronicle, The Last Battle. Lastly, I believe the things my characters say here are biblically true, or at least, there is a great deal of truth in here. If you disagree, that’s fine. I’m not claiming infallibility. But I would ask that your disagreement, should you have any, fulfill two qualifications. It should be polite, and for Christian readers, it should be biblical. Meanwhile, enjoy.
BB
I saw. That's the first thing. I was seeing. Moreover, I understood what I saw. There shouldn't be any doubt of that. On Earth, if you went from lifelong blindness to total sight in a moment, you'd be overwhelmed. You wouldn't know what you were looking at, quite literally, because, well, you'd never have seen. And that's to say nothing about processing the new sensory information. That's a whole other discussion. Then again, aren't people on earth, in the shadow lands, blind as a rule? Another discussion again, I'm afraid. But suffice it to say I saw and I understood.
I stood at, well, call it a portal or a gateway. I was on one side; what I witnessed was through it. Beyond it? On the far side of it if you follow me. I saw what I took for the Earth. What is more, I recognized my home town. I saw people driving, walking, talking, playing, working, sleeping, waking, and so on. I saw at a glance people doing everything that most people in most towns do. But in the air above them I saw something else. It looked like the bloodiest battle of the bloodiest war ever known to men, that times infinity. And the fighters, the soldiers, the warriors, they weren't human. No, that's for sure. They were anything but human. For a moment I wondered why they walked on the air, hovering around and above the humans and why the humans didn't seem to notice the Armageddon raging around them. Then, once more, I understood. And as I understood I began distinguishing the two sides of the battle. One side was composed of companies of warriors, disciplined, determined, their expressions consisting of equal parts sadness and hope. The other side seemed to be composed of beings of the same kind as the first combatants, but they seemed shrunken somehow. Or maybe it was only that they seemed to lack the hopeful determination of the first side. Still, I sensed even from where I stood that these other combatants were malevolent. Maybe it was their expressions. Somehow twisted and gleeful and furious, the way Hitler might have looked when the reports of the first gassings of Jews reached him, I suppose. They fought one another, each side against the other.
Then I watched more carefully and began to realize what was going on. The humans below were influencing the battle. I saw some of the people attacked, struck down, injured, and protected from injury. Yet even as I watched, I could not figure out how the humans below could possibly be influencing the deadly combat above. Just the same, they were. I knew they did.
"Don't they have any idea what's going on," I asked the silence on my side of the gateway? "And if they do know, can they really be said to have any bearing on the outcome? Or are they like pawns in a chess game."
"Both, actually," said a cultured voice from behind my left shoulder.
“What do you mean,” I asked, turning? He was human. Not like the combatants I saw through the gateway. No, this was a fully human man. He looked both middle aged and somehow youthful. Yet, his youth, a product of being in this place I decided, didn’t disguise his authority. I sensed that too. This was someone people had listened to on Earth. Or at least, I amended to myself, if they had not, they should have listened. He took my arm and began walking away from the gateway. We sat under an oak tree, its branches and leaves shading us. Yet, the sun in that place wasn’t the type you wanted to get away from. Still, both shade and sun were equally pleasant. I don’t know how to explain that to you, because on Earth, shade is a refuge from the sun. There, it didn’t need to be a refuge. The man settled on the ground and patted a place next to him. I sat. He seemed to be considering how best to answer my question.
“There are those in the shadow lands who know they are in the midst of battle, to be sure. And there are those who are ignorant of the combat you saw.”
“But how do those who know … actually know?”
“How do you suppose, son? They have taken the trouble of searching out the information.” When I looked puzzled at this, he went on. “Tell me, when a student hands in a composition, how do you decide what sort of mark it deserves?”
Taken aback, I thought.
“Clarity, style, structure. It has to be well-written, of course. Relevant to the topic.”
He nodded, smiling.
“And did you never have to mark a composition or paper that was, shall we say, well-written yet riddled with inaccuracies? Have you seen a paper of that sort?”
“Well, sure.”
“And what mark did you give it?”
“Well, usually a C. That is—“ “I understand. But why a C? Wasn’t it well-written. Was the language not appropriate? The paragraphs quite in order?”
I nodded.
“Yet, you marked it down. Why?”
“Well, often it was because the person did sloppy research. They didn’t check their facts or they’d say things about the material that made it clear they hadn’t read.”
“Just so. No matter how well the words were arranged, if they were falsehoods, you marked them as such.”
I nodded again. He sat there peering off towards the gateway, now some distance from us.
“Now you have your answer.”
“You mean, Sir, that those who are ignorant of that battle are ignorant because they haven’t done their homework?”
His lips turned up in a half smile.
“Partly,” he said.
“What’s the rest?”
He didn’t answer. He just looked at me, one eyebrow raised as though inviting me to think it through.
“Then,” I tried, “then even the ones, the humans out there, the ones who seem most with it. Best informed, they’re as wrong about that as, well, as the lowest graded paper writer I ever saw. Only we’re not really talking about grades, are we?"
He didn't answer. I guess he knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. Finally, remembering what my mother had taught me about manners, I turned to him. "I'm sorry, Sir. I didn't introduce myself. My name is--" "Oh that's quite alright," He said, using my name, "I know who you are. Possibly nearly as well as you do."
I sat there, my mouth agape.
"As for me, you can call me Jack. All my friends do."
"Was that your name on Earth?"
He laughed, a delightful sound. I was beginning to wonder if he could.
"Well, as I said, it's what my friends called me. Joy did too. I do, of course, have a special name here, as you will have. A name known only to me and to one other." Seeing my expression, and possibly taking pity on my utter bewilderment, he went on. "My name upon my birth into the shadow lands was Clive. Clive Staples Lewis, actually."
"Good Lord," I exclaimed!
"In our lexicon," Lewis chided gently, "Lord is a noun, a proper noun, not an interjection."
I flushed with embarrassment.
"Right, sorry about that."
"I am not the one to whom you ought to apologize," he said gently. When I went to answer, though, he waved one hand as though dismissing the matter, as though his point had been made.
"So, you're C.S. Lewis," I asked as though needing confirmation?
"In so far as anyone can be their initials, I may as well have been C.S.L. Still, that would have been an enigma to a publishing house, I suppose."
"But this is wonderful," I said. "You're just the person I've been wanting to talk to. Needing to talk to, even."
Then, figuring he didn't know what I was talking about, I tried to explain myself. I told him how I'd first come across his Narnia Chronicles as a child, and only a few of those at that. I told him how another writer's novels had led me to his Screwtape Letters and then onwards to his other books. I told him of my struggles and how I'd read The Problem of Pain, how it had helped me change my thinking. I tried to tell him this and so much more, but he laid a firm, almost paternal hand on my shoulder. I fell silent.
"Young man, your affections are of the utmost value to me. As is all love. But we'll get on more quickly if I stop you here and tell you that I am already quite aware of all of it."
"Oh."
"In fact, I am aware of more. More, perhaps, than even you recall presently."
I didn't know what to say to this. He smiled, sensing my turmoil.
"We were talking a moment ago of something much more germane to the both of us."
I turned back to the gateway and watched the battle for several long moments. My teacher sat there, content to let me think. Finally, Lewis quoted softly, "Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm."
"I'd heard that. I always thought Paul was being metaphorical."
"You know better than that," Lewis admonished. "Those images aren't written as metaphors. And even if they had been, would that make them untrue? Still, now you understand that he spoke most directly and accurately."
So I did. I saw the cosmic powers, the forces of evil, and they were no metaphor. No inhumanity of man towards his fellow man, as it were. I saw swords, breastplates, helmets, shields, blood, torn flesh, and as though with enhanced ears, I heard shouts, screams, exhortations and commands. Finally, I turned to Lewis and asked, “when I asked if they could affect things, the humans, or if they were just pawns, you said the answer was both. What did you mean? Shouldn’t they be one or the other?”
Lewis thought. When he spoke again, his voice had taken on the cadences of the learned professor he had once been.
“It’s not a question of what they should be. Though, what they ought to be plays into it. It’s a question of what they are presently. Those who know the Lord are not pawns, per se. Some are bishops, some knights, some castles. And they are under the kingship of Christ. Those who, to continue the chess metaphor, are not playing white, they are all pawns. The difference is, they are pawns who think themselves kings and queens, and they will be removed from the game when the Lord wins the match.”
“The ultimate checkmate,” I said, smiling.
“Not only the ultimate checkmate, but the only checkmate. There has never been another game, nor will there ever be.”
More silence past. Though it wasn’t a strained silence. Finally, I turned to my teacher once again. His expression was equal parts patient and expectant. He knew, I thought, knew I would ask something else.
“Sir, not to just change the subject but … about the bible.” He waited. “Not, not the texts themselves. I mean the canon. I know basically how it was assembled. I accept that the men who were included were supposed to be, that they were inspired. But I wonder, do we have it all?”
Lewis looked thoughtful.
“When you say ‘all,’ do you mean to ask whether the terrestrial bible recounts every event of history?”
“No, I know it doesn’t do that. I meant,” and I went on, mentioning counsels and lost gospels and books that had been taken out of the bible and books that had been fought over. Finally, smiling, he stopped me.
“I understand your question. You have wrestled with it and your faith. Not a common question. Very much a scholar’s question. Would you care to accompany me?”
Standing, he gestured that I should walk with him. We traveled away from the gateway and across meadows, through woodlands, across streams and even, I’m sure of it, across a desert. But even the desert wasn’t like deserts on earth. I didn’t feel parched as I would have in the Mohave or the Sahara. I saw red-gold sands mounded into elegant dunes. We covered distances that must have been equivalent to hundreds, possibly thousands of miles. Yet the time we took wasn’t long at all. It could be that my perception of time was altered there or that our movement was somehow enhanced. I know we did not sleep. There was no loss of consciousness. Yet, we rested. As we traveled, we talked about lighter matters. My teacher refused to come back to my question, or indeed, to allow me to go on to other deeper matters until he’d dealt with my question. And he would only deal with it when we arrived at our destination. He was gentle but quite clear on that point.
As we walked, we talked about his writings. I told him my favorite parts of each of the Narnia Chronicles. I quoted the dialog as I was wont to do on Earth. Thinking he might find this odd, I told him that memorizing dialog was something I’d done as a child.
“I know it was,” he said, and went on to correct my quotations at a couple minor points. Then, as though he were as delighted with this as I was, Lewis laughed and told me that my errors in memory were understandable, given the numerous printings of his books and the mistakes made by editors when issuing the various editions.
“Still,” he went on as we neared our destination. “I hope you like my new writings as much.”
“You mean your latest stuff? I do. I—“ “o no, my friend. You misunderstand. No matter, we’ll soon be there and you shall see.”
“That reminds me, if you won’t tell me where we’re going, at least tell me when we’ll get there.”
He smiled.
“I’d say,” he said, pointing off into the middle distance, “we shall be there quite directly.””
It was a library. How could it be anything else? Yet it was greater by far than any earthly library. It held more volumes than any university library, than the Library of Congress or the British Museum or anywhere else on Earth. And yet, I knew without my teacher telling me that it differed in two distinctive ways from any and every library in the shadow lands. Firstly, I had free access to it. There was no volume here I could not read. If you don’t understand, consider that in any given physical library, I was limited to only those materials on cassette or CD. Even electronic libraries like Audible or the E-book repositories I used contained a mere fraction, a vanishingly small percentage of Earth’s written material. The other difference was simply this. There was nothing here that I should not read. No sex magazines, trashy romance novels, no books oozing with blood and gore, no books that challenged or denied God. In short, everything here, every last page in the hundreds of millions of tomes I saw before me, had been deemed by the Lord to be of such value as to be preserved in Heaven. Lewis, obviously intimately familiar with this whole building, directed me to one particular area.
And I saw … bibles. I saw some complete bibles in a form you or I would know them on Earth. Whole books, that is. I also saw scrolls. Picking one up, I saw it was in Hebrew. Yet I understood it. It was a copy of what I knew as the Old Testament. Lewis pointed me silently down the shelf. I saw letters written on a variety of parchments. Picking one up, I saw handwriting. My mind processed it as being Greek. Looking down the parchment, I saw no verse numbers or chapters. Well, of course not, I thought to myself. Then I saw familiar words in Greek that ran: “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
“Wow,” I exclaimed softly. “A copy of Paul’s actual letter to the Ephesians.”
“Not at all,” Lewis corrected. “There are no copies here. Only authentic things.” He added with a wry smile, “We know nothing here of the documentary hypothesis, a masterful bit of fiction. Only the documents are here, all of them.”
“Then this is—“ “Exactly so. You hold in your hand the very letter Paul dispatched to the Ephesian church. And there is more besides.”
I looked at the shelf and sure enough, I saw other letters. Some by Paul, I recognized. Yet, others I didn’t recognize. I picked one up.
“He wrote this one too. It looks like another letter to Corinth.”
“He wrote often to Corinth, young man. Did you suppose he only ever wrote two letters to that church in all his ministry? Did you further suppose,” he continued, “that no one else wrote to that troubled and sinful congregation?”
I stood there in stunned silence. That was exactly what I’d supposed for years. Lewis nodded as though confirming to himself what he already knew of my thoughts. He went on, now instructing. “Corinth was a church in need of admonishment and encouragement. It took a number of missives and several visits by various apostles before they began following the Lord. You’ll find a letter from Barnabus and too, from Timothy among the Corinthian correspondence. Now, your question was about the completeness of scripture.”
I nodded. So far, Lewis had seemed to confirm what I’d asked. There were plenty of letters that should’ve been in the bible but weren’t.
“Tell me,” he said, “what did John write concerning the miracles of Jesus at the end of his gospel?”
“Well, he said …” I faltered. Then, noticing John’s writings on a higher shelf, I took down his gospel and turned to the end. Soon enough, I found what Lewis meant me to find in the narrative’s last line, “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”“Now,” my teacher instructed, “let us make the applications. If all the books necessary to contain Jesus’ miracles could not have been contained within the limits of the Earth, then where must they belong?”
“Here.”
He nodded and fell silent.
“I guess I never thought. Well, I never imagined there would be books in Heaven.”
“But God tells you there will be. Examine this passage.”
He handed me a short scroll. I saw it contained the words of the prophet Malachi. Lewis pointed me to one line of the text, “A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the LORD and honored his name.”
“The scroll,” Lewis went on, “is referred to as being written in the presence of God. And Heaven is the place where God dwells. So my question to you is, how can you have expected there not to be writings in Heaven, or those that would read them?”
In the shadow lands this question would have felt accusatory. I might have felt guilty for thinking such a thing. Here, I simply absorbed the truth my teacher was imparting to me. “So then. At the back of your question about the completeness of the Word of God was an assumption that you had all of it or, lacking that, that you had to have it all and that you were being short changed if you didn’t have it all. Now, what do you say in answer to your question?”
I thought, and as I thought, I browsed the shelves near me. The browsing was a sort of reflection. As I did, I saw letters from James, Thomas, Titus, Matthias, and Mark. I saw more gospels too. One lengthy one caught my eye. Taking it up, I saw that it bore the name Paul. Another bore the name of the disciple Andrew. Finally, I answered Lewis.
“The answer to my question is that, those in the shadow lands have as much of the bible as they need. Then, the extra books of bibles like the Catholic Apocrypha are not necessary to come to know the Lord. But … they’re not wrong either. They don’t fall into what Jesus meant in Revelation about altering the text.”
Lewis nodded. “He was talking about the words of that prophecy in particular. Think also on this. You live in an age when the bible is freely available. Your question, as I said before, is a scholar’s question. Not that that diminishes your question or your need in any way. But consider carefully, in the middle ages, a period I concerned myself with as a scholar, few could read, fewer had bibles, and almost no one asked the questions you do. Yet there are sanctified ones from that time. Ones who, only upon their entry into God’s realm, finally had access to what you or I thought of as the bible.”
My teacher and I spent a great deal of time there in that library. I can’t say how much time. I read diaries in languages I never knew on Earth. I read the written prayer of a Syrian woman in the time of Jonah who’d come to the Lord as a result of his preaching at Nineveh and who, I learned, had been killed for her belief. Lewis showed me the writings of Hosea, a prophet who’d written much more than the one book bearing his name in the bible. I read the diary of a Roman soldier who had participated in the crucifixion of Christ and who had come to faith because of the events of those few days. I eagerly read the writings of Isaiah, and Jeremiah’s poems of Lamentation, poetry that far exceeded the amount contained in the Book of Lamentations. I read psalms and hymns of David that no one on Earth had ever seen.
Yet, there were more modern writings as well. I read through a collection of sermons left by a chaplain in the Union army, a man from Vermont as it happened. Interestingly, right beside it was a prayer jotted down hastily by a Confederate soldier from Tennessee. I came across the journal of a Michigan farmer who’d lived during the Great Depression. He wrote it like any other journal, except that each entry in this one began, “Dear God.” Reaching my own time, I read a transcript of someone’s prayer blog. I read the journal of a teenager from India who’d nearly committed suicide before turning to Christ. I read the final appeal of a Sudanese man executed for preaching the gospel, a man no one on Earth had heard of, but whose writings were preserved here, and I read a girl’s fourth-grade essay, “Why Jesus is Real.”. It was possibly the most moving thing I read there. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to find Lewis’s own works there. And I saw things that bore his name which I’d never heard of. As I examined them, I saw they were things he had written here for the benefit of Heaven’s inhabitants. I looked forward to reading them. Finally, Lewis and I sat ourselves down in the library’s courtyard and resumed our talk. I had countless questions for him. Now, I broached my most difficult question.
“Sir, it’s about Hell.”He said nothing, listening.
“You said in one of your books, ‘In the end there will be only two kinds of people, those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’”
“Well quoted,” he complimented me. “Yes I believe that was it.”
“Sir, what about those who die without having any opportunity to know God? Babies, aborted fetuses. People of the past who died centuries before the gospels reached them. Say, a fifth-century Apache. I mean, when I asked this question in the shadow lands, I got everything from ‘of course, they’re in hell’ to, ‘we don’t know.’ I could never bring myself to accept not knowing. I felt it was a big part of God’s justice, and how do you dare tell someone who’s just lost their child that their child’s in Hell anyway? It’s just—“ He put his hand on my shoulder, stopping me. In his eyes, I saw a look of compassion and understanding such as I’d never known in the shadow lands when asking this question.
“Now that is an extremely difficult question. Let us dissect it one element at a time. Let us start with those adults who never hear the word because of lack of geographical opportunity, your fifth-century Apache, for instance. Yet, I think we may find some answers together. Yu are, of course, familiar with what Paul says in Romans 1 about this?”
I recited dejectedly, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
“Why do you seem so despondent at those words?”
“Because don’t they mean, I mean, they seem to mean that people should figure God out based on the world and that there’s no help for them if they don’t.” Lewis waited. Finally I exclaimed in frustration, “But how can they know, Jack! How is someone ten thousand miles away from the Gospel going to hear it? I mean, we’re not talking about the modern age in my question. And as for babies, how can they respond to it! They can’t perceive God or much of anything else!”
“Son,” Lewis said, and his voice was having a calming effect on me. “One element at a time, as I said. There are three answers to your question. Let us consider them one by one. What do you infer from the text of Paul you just recited to me?”
I slowed down, kicking my scholar’s brain into gear. “Well, that verse explains why every culture throughout history has had a notion of God, no matter how much it deviated from the truth.”
“Correct,” he said. “There are no atheistic cultures. And the Communist experiments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries don’t qualify. Their atheism was imposed, not an outgrowth of their cultural development. So, take it as given, every culture has sought God. Each has asked the questions of life. Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? They’ve all posed the question, quite apart from any answers they arrived at.” I nodded. “Now then, remind me of what our Lord says of himself in John 14 and verse 6.”
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
“Our Lord,” Lewis explained, “is stating a fact about himself. He is not telling us here, ‘if you do this and that, you will come in.’ He is declaring his nature to Thomas, much as you would be if you said, ‘I am a man.’ It is an immutable fact. However, Jesus does not tell Thomas that only those who hear the words of the missionaries are savable. Does he?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t mistake me. I am not saying that anyone may come to God by doing as he wishes, so long as he’s never heard the gospel. That is most deadly fallacy.”
“Oh,” I smiled. “I was afraid that was where you were going.”
“Never think it. Rather, we come to the second part of your answer. The God you and I worship combines justice, love and mercy perfectly. He combines them in equal measure and in ways the most compassionate and fair-minded jurist could not. More to the point, his bible, as we’ve seen, does not contain every jot and tittle of his plans. Can we agree on that?”
I nodded. My questions, after all, had arisen precisely because we didn’t have every jot and tittle.
“Yet,” Lewis went on, “We know that most people will not be redeemed. We know that many more will. We do not know all of God’s criteria for redemption. Is it wholly inconceivable to you, for example, that God, being a God who, remember, combines justice and mercy in equal and exquisite measure, has not already contrived some manner of dealing with those obscure cases like the Apache of which you spoke? Are his grace and his justice so limited that they cannot take a full and perfect account of every Apache, every primitive Britain, every ancient Chinese, and reward them with the punishments or the paradise that they deserve? That they truly deserve?”
I thought. I thought for a long time. As with any other discussion of time, I can’t say how long we sat there. Unbidden, Aslan’s words to the Calormene soldier, Emeth, replayed themselves in my mind: “I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For he and I are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn though he know it not. And it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash, his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, child?” Yes, I thought. I’m beginning to.
It might have been ten minutes or ten days that we sat there. It made no difference to my teacher. Like the best teacher I’d ever had in the shadow lands, he was not willing to hand me every answer. But rather, that I come as far as I could in my own thinking before confirming or correcting my thoughts. Finally, almost as though he knew I was ready for more, Lewis went on. “Now, children. Many western Protestant doctrines have arrived at the notion of an age of accountability. The idea that only when a child is old enough can they be held liable for their sins. And yet, as you are aware, the bible is clear that we are born in sin. You even see it in a baby who will scream and scream if mummy puts him down when he’d rather be held. Is this baby sinning in such a case?” He went on, forestalling my answer, not that I had much of one. “On the other hand, there are our Lord’s many discourses about children. You yourself have told people that you reject the notion of children automatically going to hell before their age of accountability because, as you say, Jesus loves children and said often that one must be ready to enter the kingdom as a child. I believe your favorite illustration of our Lord’s attitude towards children is found in the nineteenth chapter of Matthew’s gospel.”
I nodded.
“Recite it then,” Lewis invited.
I smiled and quoted, “Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people, but Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”
“What do you learn of our Lord from this incident,” Lewis asked?
“He loved children. Especially the children. If he could have a favorite group of people, it would be the children.”
“Very true. Yet, he does not call them sinless children, does he?” I shook my head. “You see, I think you will find that those on both sides of the question are, to an extent, correct. Children are born in sin and need their savior quite as much as you or I do. Nevertheless, He, God, being fully merciful and fully just, is also fully capable of cleansing the young child or the baby of his or her sinful nature quite of his own accord. Look over there, if you would.”
I followed Lewis’s pointing finger and, wandering down an isle filled with colorful books and scrolls, I saw children. Dozens, hundreds, maybe. They appeared to be of every age. Yet, even the youngest of them had a mind that far exceeded the most brilliant prodigy’s capacity to learn in the shadow lands. Lewis smiled broadly as a couple of them--they looked to be about six and eight--spotted us and ran over. They shouted his name as they ran, and I found it endearing that they called him Uncle Jack. Wordlessly, Lewis stood and caught them both in his arms.
"Are you coming to the play tonight, Uncle? Do say you'll come," the boy enthused.
"But naturally."
"I'm going to be Aslan," the boy gushed happily.
"And can you roar like a lion, then?"
Surprisingly, the boy could. I jumped with shock and found myself clapping my hands out of sheer joy.
"You really can," I said, smiling. For some reason the children ignored me.
"And who will you be," my teacher asked the girl?
"Jill Pole, of course," she answered brightly.
"Of course," he agreed affectionately. "But who else would you be. Now, be getting along. Your Uncle Jack has a few things to tend to before tonight."
The boy looked up at Lewis and asked somberly, "Will Jesus be there tonight?"
"Isn't he always?"
"Well, yeah, but you know what I mean." Lewis nodded. I'm glad Lewis knew what he meant, because I wasn't sure I did. "Will you pray to him about it?"
"Of course. But you should too. You never know. He might surprise you."
I waved at the children as they ran off, but again, they didn't take notice. Somehow, I wasn't offended though. Turning back to me, Lewis continued speaking as though there hadn't been any interruption.
“Some of those children died in accidents, some of disease, some were murdered. Yet they are all here. Their destiny, to grow up in Heavenly realms with a heavenly father. Do you begin to understand?”
At long last, I nodded slowly. Lewis went on. “Well enough. We come now to the third and most important portion of the answer to the question you’ve asked.” Standing, he disappeared momentarily into the stacks and returned with a scroll in his hands. As Lewis handed it to me I saw it was the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Opening the parchment roll, Lewis directed my attention to a certain portion of text and told me to read it aloud. And I read: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”
“Now, if you will, tell me, What to you infer concerning God based on this statement, and what application has it to our conversation?”
I spoke slowly, martialing my thoughts.
“It means that our concept of justice is limited by our natures as humans. Our perspective is narrower than God’s.”
“It certainly does mean that,” Lewis confirmed. “But I think you may not be grasping its full implications. Your perspective and my perspective too for that matter differ from God’s perspective not only in scope but in kind.” Seeing that I did not fully understand, he clarified. “You and I are created beings. Only God creates. The difference is not between child and adult or between young and old as regards knowledge and perspective. Rather, we differ in kind from God. Children are of the same kind as their parents, being biological offspring. Yet, we are not of the same kind of thing as God, for God creates all things and is, himself, uncreated. From everlasting to everlasting, as it were.” I nodded, now beginning to see where Lewis was going but wanting him to finish getting there. And he did. “It’s not God being condescending, as some like to think of it, when he says his ways are so much higher above our ways. You hear that sometimes when an arrogant man says, ‘well, that’s rather a stretch for God to presume I simply can’t understand what he’s about. I understand it right enough, thank you.’ Rather, like Jesus’s statement about being the only way to the father, God’s statement here in Isaiah is also mere fact. We cannot grasp the nature of God’s thoughts and ways because we are simply not God. It’s not only more knowledge that the Lord has, but different knowledge. Different in both degree and in type or kind, than from what we can attain either in the shadow lands or here.”
“And that’s where trust and faith come into it,” I said. Lewis raised an eyebrow as though inviting me to go on exploring this idea. “The third part of my answer is that I’m not meant to know, and can’t know, all of God’s plan. But that I should trust in his ability to balance justice and mercy perfectly.”
“Excellent,” Lewis said, smiling. “I know that answer can come across as patronizing at worst or as a fancy ‘I don’t know’ at best. But now you’ve grasped the differences involved here between what we know and what God knows, I think you’ve better understood why that answer is often times the best one, the only one, even. And remember,” he went on a bit more sternly, “the fact that you don’t know how God will account for some person of the past who never had the message doesn’t let you off evangelism today. Your duty on that point is quite clear.”
Seeing his point, I nodded.
The snow was pristine. It piled in fluffy hummocks and massive drifts. The air was sharp and cold. Yet, I didn’t feel the urgency to be indoors that that sort of cold creates on Earth. We had left the library some time ago and traveled into the mountains. I had asked about the climates here, having taken note of everything from the greenbelt to the desert that we’d seen in our travels. I’d supposed that since most people hated the snow, there must not be any here. Lewis just laughed in that way he had and set out to correct my thinking. Now, we talked as we traveled. We traveled up hills taller than anything the Rockies or the Alps can boast of. We crossed flat plains of purest white and ran down slopes I would’ve been deathly afraid of on Earth. And we talked. At one point, somewhere high, high up in the mountain range, I found myself telling him of my student days. I complained of how useless philosophy had become, what with ethical and moral relativism, nihilism and the rejection of the physical universe taking center stage. I lamented that university students and professors these days were so hard to reach because so many of them were convinced of their own intellects.
“Well it certainly isn’t anything new,” he pointed out. We rested on a high peak overlooking a network of valleys far below.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, some of the shadow lands’ most influential writers. Kant, Hegel, Russell, Sartre, Camus, that lot.” I nodded. I knew who they were, of course. I’d even read a good deal of their writings. “They’re not here,” Lewis finished simply.
“Not—“ I stopped, realizing what he was telling me. “You mean they’re in hell.”
“That surprises you? After all you’ve seen here?”
“No, it’s …” I thought for a moment. “They’re such giants on Earth. I guess I’d never given it much thought.”
“Well, you said it. They were giants on Earth. Often in their own eyes. Now, I’m not saying they didn’t have some grand ideas or that their writings were subpar. But as to the most important questions, they were quite mistaken. Woefully so.” I nodded. Lewis sat for a long moment in silence. Finally, he drew in a breath and continued. “At the back of the objections of moral relativists—oh yes, they existed in my time in the shadow lands too. They’re merely a bit more prominent now. Still, at the back of their objections is the desire to be their own gods, as it were.”
“Well, it’s popular to ask how we can judge other cultures or other people.”
“By their actions, of course. Still, recall for me, if you would, what the bible says in the twenty-first chapter of Proverbs and the second verse.”
I thought. Finally, I shook my head.
“It’s not coming to me.”
“And now,” he said, looking somehow both admonishing and amused, “you know which book you ought to be studying more of. Nevertheless, it states, ‘Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.’ Now, what do you gather from that?”
“Well, the most obvious thing is that when people don’t acknowledge God, their morality will be one of their own invention. They’ll make it up as they go.”
“Yes, that is, as you say, the most obvious conclusion. There is a further conclusion, however.”
“That it’s what’s in your heart that matters,” I asked?
“Not precisely. Well,” Lewis interrupted himself. “That does matter. But no one should take this text to mean that their good intent will be their salvation. Many have, as you know. You hear it all the time. ‘Well,’ a chap says, ‘I’ve lived fairly right, done the best I could and I never took what wasn’t mine. So where does God get off saying I don’t deserve to go to heaven?’” I smiled. I’d heard that argument many times. Lewis nodded at my look of recognition and went on. “But as to this business of the heart, what you should take away from this is that God sees the hearts of people who make that claim about themselves. And what is in their hearts, whether they acknowledge it or not, is pride. It’s a desire to be quite their own boss, to do as they like and decide for themselves that they deserve Heaven.”
“I see your point,” I said. “You see it all the time when someone gets upset and yells, ‘my god wouldn’t send anyone to hell,’ that sort of thing.”
“Well, in a sense they’re quite right about that.”
“What do you mean,” I asked.
“People who say that sort of thing often times aren’t thinking of our Lord. They’ve got in mind a construct of him. God made Man in his image, and so Man feels free to do likewise to God.” At my raised eyebrow, he went on, “I don’t mean that they do it maliciously. Often times they’ve simply got some picture of God and they never bother exchanging it for the real thing. Because their own notion of God is comforting to them in their earthly life. Not afterwards, I’m afraid.”
“But how do you convince them of that?”
He smiled sadly. “Strictly speaking, you don’t. God does. That’s not to say you ought not to try. It means that God will do it. He may simply use your efforts as his gateway. SO you see, once again, once more, you don’t get off sharing the gospel.”
“But if it’s something God does, then are you saying it’s all a matter of predestination? God’s got it all planned out, and no one really gets a choice?”
“That,” he said, “is a most unfortunate oversimplification. But it’s held on for centuries. To answer it …” Lewis looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “Remind me what Screwtape wrote to Wormwood concerning the future.”
I thought for several long moments.
“He told Wormwood that the present moment for us is as close as we get to understanding God’s perspective on eternity.”
“Quite so. Remember, God is fundamentally different from us. He is atemporal, quite outside of time. He exists as much in what you call the past and the future as he does in what you and I know as the present. Think of it this way,” he added. “If time is a line, and we progress along that line from birth to death, think of God as seeing not just the single line the time line. Rather, think of God as seeing the whole solid in all of its dimensions.”
“Then,” I said, struggling to process the geometrical metaphor, “you’re saying that to God, there is no past and no future. There is merely what is, and it’s all present to him.”
“It’s quite difficult to imagine,” Lewis conceded. “Don’t vex yourself with it over much. Remember only this. That sin that you committed two decades ago and those that you will commit two decades from now are all the same in God’s economy of time and sin. The fact that you were only eight years old when you told that lie or that you will be seventy-five when you do some other thing, well, it makes no odds to God. They both need repenting. Time does not shield you from the need to come about and ask forgiveness. Does that make it clearer?”
It did. And I understood, finally, about the pre-destination business. God knew our choices before we made them, it seemed. That didn’t mean he forced us to make those choices. Yet in the same token, we couldn’t have made our choices without God. Or rather, those who decided in favor of God did so because of their experience of him. In this place, I understood. Lewis was watching my face, and somehow, I knew that he knew the run of my thoughts, and he smiled as I came to this recognition. Then, some of what he said recurred to me, and he raised an eyebrow at my troubled expression.
“Jack,”
“Yes?”
“What did you mean, the sins I will commit? How can I if I’m here, unless … unless I’m not … if I haven’t.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled sadly.
“Died,” he finished the sentence. “No, I’m afraid you still must die. No one escapes the first death. We all owe a death, and there aren’t any exceptions, I fear.”
“Then, I’m not really here,” I said. A great sadness had settled upon me like a sodden blanket. Now I understood why the children in the library had ignored me. I wasn’t really here at all. “This has all been in my own mind. Unreal.”
“Well, of course it has been inside your own mind, son,” he said. And as he spoke, I saw darkness descending on the land. I saw a swirling montage of demons and angels. And yet as I looked, my vision was fading. The demons and the mountains and the snow and Lewis grew faint and disappeared from my sight as my vision faded. Yet, he continued speaking. And his voice echoed strangely now, growing more distant. “But, if I may quote another novel writer you are quite fond of reading, ‘Why on Earth should that mean that it is not real?”
I opened my eyes. I could see nothing once again. I heard beeping, soft-soled shoes moving rapidly down a tile floor, the soft murmur of voices. I shifted on whatever kind of bed I lay upon and felt IV tubes that ran into my arms. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. My mouth was too dry. A voice I didn’t recognize told someone, “He’s awake. You may see him now for a moment. But he needs his rest. One minute, Mam.”
Softer footsteps. A hand that found mine, and the next voice, hers, I did recognize. It was shaky, as though it’s owner had spent endless hours crying. I found out later that this wasn’t far from the truth.
“Dear,” she said, “You’re going to be ok. They say you’ll make a full recovery.”
I laughed. This seemed to take her aback. As though contradicting herself, she asked in a panicky voice. “Dear? Is something wrong?”
I squeezed her hand.
“I’m just fine, Dear,” I told her. “I have a lot to tell you.”
“What do you mean?”
Slowly, haltingly, I began to tell her my story. And she listened, as she always does.
THE END
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