"A Man, The Man"

"I ended my first book with the words 'no answer'. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. I might - "



Before I comment on the excerpt above, I want to persuade any of you who haven't yet read C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces to do so. I just finished reading it this morning, for the fourth time, and I am beginning to find that I can't go much longer than a year anymore before I am forced to pick it up and read it again. Lewis has such a gift for creating his own worlds (fantasies) in his writings that are intertwined into what we naturally assume to be reality, that we become hard pressed not to become anxious about simply walking out our doors after we have finished reading him. It is like watching a dark malt extract syrup being slowly poured into a pot of boiling water when creating a wort, and the extract swirls in the water, darker, thicker, richer; but as it continues to swirl the distinctions between water and extract begin to disappear and soon you are mixing a dark brown liquid that gives off a sweet, nutty aroma setting off a chain reaction in your stomach and mind, and the excitement builds in anticipation because we know in the end what blessing will come from the mixture that continues to swirl in the pot.

I believe there are things Lewis has seen about our God more clearly than most of us, and therefore, truly has a way of writing the fantastic and unbelievable into a tangible form without putting the fantasy at risk; indeed, I believe it makes it all the more exciting!

Now re-read that passage at the beginning of the post. This is the last paragraph written in the novel. Queen Orual has grown up filtering life through a worldview that is influenced by Greek philosophy and a "barbarian" religious culture. She knows the arguments of Plato and Socrates, and she has been raised in a culture that has created a piest, holy, and law-abiding fear for the religion of the land. In the end, the gods bring her to understand that life is not understood through great knowledge or through a system of sacrifices and religious ceremonies, but it is understood through the Lord. In a Man, the answers are found.

When Charlie was last here, he asked me, "What did Christ mean when He said that He came to fulfill all the Law and the Prophets?" What Charlie was driving at was a need to understand the Gospels better than we do (Which will also demand a need to understand the stories of the Old Testament better too). Christ did not come to begin another Law or to start a new Law, He did not come to bring more prophecy or even to fulfill a prophecy . . . but He came to fulfill all that is written in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and Psalms. This fulfilling can only be done in the form of a Man, who comes to play the roles where all the priests, kings, mediators, prophets, warriors, and husbands of Israel had failed in the Old Testament. It must be done this way because our God is a relational God, He is covenantal God.

As we are sanctified, we are not becoming conformed to the Ten Commandments, we are not being conformed to a set of theological standards, nor even a list of godly characteristics; we are being conformed to a Man, a Man whose life took on many roles in order to achieve our salvation. Our sanctification is preparing us, as a body, not to be the perfect citizen of heaven, not to walk a line words have drawn in the sand, but to be a Bride, the Bride of the One Man, Jesus Christ.