by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

There is a four acre rectangle somewhere in the Ozark foothills where I walked last week with a longtime friend and fellow lover of C.S. Lewis. Just a week before, the weather where my friends Ashok and Neha live had been brutally cold, but this day it was creeping up from cold to cool, and the sun was out. I had had an errand to run near Little Rock, and since I was in Arkansas for a few days, I was able to enjoy a visit with these friends. One day, Neha and I were both working from the house, and she mentioned she and Ashok have gotten in the habit of making several laps around the four-acre fenceline any time the weather allows. So we decided to go for a walk. 

As we walked, we talked about many things. Neha is a lover of stories, myths, and, like me, of the works of Tolkien and Lewis. She had been reading Ralph Wood’s “The Gospel According to Tolkien” and I had just finished listening to the battle between Sam Gamgee and Shelob the Spider at the close of “The Two Towers” on the drive up to Arkansas from Texas. So, that’s where our conversation started, I believe. We talked about how stories and art affect us in very deep and transformative ways—ways that mere information doesn’t.  

I had also just been listening through The Bible Project’s series on Creation, and one thing they discussed was the way that we come to a Biblical text expecting it to answer the kinds of questions we’re interested in, when the original authors were interested in very different kinds of questions. Specifically, the opening chapters of Genesis are addressing Agency not Mechanism. What does that mean? I mean in the modern west we are interested in mechanisms, because we like to know how things work. But the original authors weren’t interested in the science or mechanisms of Creation, they were interested in the Agency. What is agency? It’s the question of who made this world? Why did they do it? What are the relationships between things that clue us into its meaning, regardless of whatever mechanisms may be at work?  

The mechanisms are fascinating, of course, but the meaningful relationships among the significant actors on the scene are what the original authors were really interested in. They write the way they do, because of what they care about, and it seems they care little to nothing about the things modern minds tend to prioritize. 

Somewhere in that conversation, my friend Neha tossed out a little phrase that had stuck with her from having read the middle book in Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy, Perelandra. The phrase was “The sweet poison of a false infinite.” 

That’s a phrase worth lingering over. But, if you haven’t read Perelandra, it needs a little context. Perelandra is an early sci-fi story from C.S. Lewis, the middle book in his Space Trilogy, or as some call it after the main character, The Ransom Trilogy. Edwin Ransom is carried by an angelic courier to Venus, where the first two human-like people have just been placed in a fresh, unfallen world. But he’s not the only person from earth who’s managed to get there. A demon-possessed man has also made the trip with the intent to cause this still-edenic planet to fall just like earth by tempting the first couple to sin. The devil and fallen humanity want to spread fallenness everywhere, if possible. Lewis, in the narrative, says this taste for spreading evil is fueled by “the sweet poison of a false infinite.”  

A false infinite is a life that isn’t really life at all. It’s a false-life whose pursuit tastes sweet in the beginning, but can only ever end in bitterness and death. Lewis goes on to say that the “sweet poison of the false infinite” is born out of the combination of two things, 1) our hatred of death, and, surprisingly, 2) our fear of true immortality.  

That’s interesting, isn’t it? The first one–the hatred of death–is obvious, but the second one did surprise me when I first read it…true immortality is kind of terrifying to us. We don’t really know what it looks like. We don’t know, if God were to have his way with us, how we might be changed from what is familiar to us. And we tend to prefer familiar, even if it’s miserable, since, at least, it’s predictable. The unfamiliarity of true immortality requires us to entrust ourselves to Jesus, whom we can’t control, which is to be vulnerable. 

Okay, so there’s that. 

Then, in my morning reading, I ran across the passage in 2 Corinthians 3:7-4:6. Since it’s long I won’t quote it here, but you can go read it for yourself. The gist of it is that Paul understands his ministry (and that of Christians, in general) to be one of unveiling or exposing any place where we thought there was glory that could give us infinite life, but, in truth, that glory has faded away. But wouldn’t we notice that the glory was gone? Not necessarily. We may not know it’s faded away, since a veil is covering it. In the context, Paul’s example is the Mosaic Covenant, which at one time had real life-giving glory, but was only temporary while we were waiting for “a better word than Sinai” —the enduring glory Jesus would bring through his death and resurrection.

Paul says that, since Jesus has come and removed the veil, we are made able to see what has real glory in it and what doesn’t. The Spirit can teach us to tell the difference between what masquerades as life and the “life that is truly life,” as Paul encouraged Timothy. 

We can sure it’ll be tempting to cling to old familiar things that used to have glory, since the fear of this true immortality that only comes through entrusting ourselves to Jesus, makes us feel so vulnerable. On top of that, there are those things that still do have some participation in real glory but can’t in themselves give life that captivate and distract us. This is a major theme in Lewis’ writings—that good things, if they’re not rightly ordered under Christ’s rule, can poison us. Anything that isn’t God that we treat as if it were, becomes a false infinite poisoning us, no matter how sweet that poison tastes. That’s the message of Psalm 115 where the worshippers of man-made idols with unseeing eyes and unhearing ears become just as blind and deaf as these false infinites to which they’ve devoted themselves. 

To be honest, this idea came in a moment when the Lord was pulling back the veil on my desire for a kind of success that I envied in other writers and musicians. In my own heart, I was grasping at a desire for acknowledgment or affirmation that promised glory, but in reality, had no glory to give. The true immortality Jesus is calling me to, may in fact feel more like failure, foolishness, and obscurity. I have to go on trusting that Jesus knows what makes for life that is truly life. Surely, Jesus himself was in a similar position as he, trusting his Heavenly Father, walked willingly towards the foolishness of his own crucifixion? His death tore through another veil, you’ll remember, and the fading glory of the Old Covenant went to its grave with him, until, being fulfilled, it burst forth in Christ’s resurrected face with a new and everlasting brightness. 

And now, Paul’s work, the freedom-bringing work of the Holy Spirit, and the work of Christians everywhere is to “pull back the veil” on anything that tempts us to sip on the “sweet poison of a false infinite,” and lift up instead the Cup of Salvation. As Jesus said, “…unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is real food, and My blood is real drink.”

The post S6:E9 – The sweet poison of a false infinite appeared first on Matthew Clark.