The Wellspring. No.19
“Understanding
is a Wellspring of Life to him that has it.”
(Proverbs.
16:22)
Occasional papers by Arthur & Rosalind Eedle
"The
Intolerable Compliment"
How good it
is to learn from one another! How much we have profited over the years by the
writings of others. Dorothy L. Sayers spent much time lecturing and writing on
the subject of the Trinity, and in her expositions she emphasised that God had
given to us a threefold ability in life, as a reflection of what He is Himself
by nature. In this sense, she said that man was intended to create,
and that he would never be truly satisfied in life unless he could create
something. Some people create with words, others with music, yet others with
oils and canvas, and then again, there are a never-ending variety of creative
abilities in craftsmanship. The mind sees the finished article, the hands
create, and the world enjoys the result. God the Father has the vision, His Son
creates, and the Holy Spirit grants to mankind the ability to share, enjoy, and
appreciate the result. It is an interesting concept.
In our
home, we have bookcases stuffed with all manner of writings, well-worn
treasures, authors ancient and modern, reference works, books that George
MacDonald called his "friends", that one may go to the shelf and pick
out, sit down and thoroughly enjoy the creation of another man's mind. It would
be wrong to make a list of those who come first in our list of authors, simply
because human needs are so varied. What one person needs, enjoys, and profits
from, may not be the need of another. However, having already mentioned Dorothy
L. Sayers and George MacDonald, it is obvious that we treasure their writings.
We'd like to add the names of C.S.Lewis and Kathryn Lindskoog. In all four of
these writers we have witnessed a God-given ability to see through problems and
reach devastatingly simple conclusions that are rich and edifying. All the
garbage is ripped away, and truth is revealed. The result is a good spiritual
meal, continually savoured and capable of being used to help others by
quotation.
Here is
an example from C.S.Lewis on the subject of God's love. His ability to
highlight to essentials in so few words is amazing.
"When
Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man; not
that He has some 'disinterested', because really indifferent, concern for our
welfare, but that in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His
love. You asked for a loving God; you have one.
"The
great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present;
not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way,
not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host
who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire
Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his
work, and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a
father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the
sexes.
"How
this should be I do not know . . . We were made not primarily that we may love
God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may
become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased.'
"To
ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God
should cease to be God; because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature
of things, be impeded and repelled, by certain stains in our present character,
and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable. We cannot
even wish, in our better moments, that He could reconcile Himself to our
present impurities.
"He
has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most
tragic, most inexorable sense."
"Though
our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our
sins, or our indifference; and therefore, it is quite relentless in its
determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at
whatever cost to Him."
(A
compilation from 'The problem of pain' and 'Mere Christianity')