I’ve been enjoying a book of readings based on quotes from some of C.S. Lewis’ best loved writings. While the book has provided many “aha!” moments, I have also had times of something like despair wash over me. That confused me since there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with what I was reading.
Now I think it wasn’t what they wrote that was disturbing, but rather the point of reference from which the authors seemed to write. They seem to hold the belief, and claim Lewis did as well, that our knowledge of God should be constantly in flux. That to hold to any particular “knowledge” of God will inevitably lead to idolatry.
While I believe, as they do, that my knowledge of God is “as through a glass darkly” and that light is a progressive blessing and that I should, like Paul, seek to know Him more and pursue the truth always, I came away from their treatment of the subject with the feeling that I could never know God!
To suggest that I cannot trust in what I know now—what God has revealed through his word and not just what people have thought about him from their own experiences and observations of the world—is to place me on ground that is unsure and leave me subject to a worldview that assumes that darkness, lack of knowledge or hope of knowledge, is somehow light.
I may be over reacting and splitting hairs, but I know how I felt, and it wasn’t hopeful.
Psalm 36:9 says: “In thy light shall we see light.”
It is from a position of focussing on what we know God to be, ie: the light he has already given, that our light increases. If I approach God from the position that he cannot be known, I will never know him. I will never know him because I will never truly seek to know him. Why not? Because there is something in us that makes us shrink from disappointment, so, even though we may perform religious rituals like Bible reading and church attendance, we won’t seek with our whole heart for what we think we may never find.
Here is the “light” from which we will find light. It is full of hope.
“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).
FAY ROWE 